In Heaven and Earth

In

Heaven

and

Earth

Amy
Rae

Durreson

Copyright © 2015 by Amy Rae Durreson

All rights
reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or
used in any manner whatsoever without the express written
permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations
in a book review.

This is a work
of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and
incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or
used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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About this book

This book was
originally written for the 2015
Love is an
Open Read
challenge hosted by the MM
Romance Group on Goodreads. My gratitude for the story prompt go to
Wintermute, who set up a scenario with a doctor discovering the
lone cyborg survivor of a disaster. This edition has been polished,
and also contains a bibliography giving the sources of the
quotations that Vairya and Reuben trade.

Chapter One

THEY found the cyborg
frozen in the heart of the city, his face turned towards the
uncaring stars. He looked more statue than flesh and steel, poised
in midstep, but even from the end of the street, Reuben could see
the glimmer of light in his eyes that meant he had not been
deactivated.

All around them, the
bodies of the fallen swayed and drifted in the streets, barely
tethered to the station by the remnants of the platform’s gravity.
Many of the city’s lights still shone over the airless streets,
illuminating the bluish tone of the bodies’ skin, the frost that
surrounded their mouths and eyes, and the frozen blood on their
lips.

Only the cyborg still
stood upright. He only wore a thin white chiton, fastened by a
loose gold cord. Pretty but useless, Reuben thought disdainfully,
because it had still exposed his skin to the cold, and frost marked
both steel and flesh.

“
I’m going to
check if he’s responsive,” Chanthavy said, her voice crackling over
the coms. “Start gathering IDs from the dead. We’ve still not
accounted for half the population.”

“
Aye aye,
captain,” Meili responded, her tone light enough to be mocking.
She’d been getting more brittle and sarcastic with every street
full of bodies they traversed. At least this wasn’t another
school.

Quietly, Reuben moved
along the left side of the street. They were all encased in double
layers of ward suits, one to keep them warm and breathing in this
vacuum and another layer below to protect them from disease if they
found any survivors. Even Reuben, who always expected the worst of
any human outpost, had never imagined wearing his emergency gear
here in Caelestia, one of the great space cities.

He bent over the first
corpse, holding his gloved hand out to touch her face. The DNA
reader shivered in the glove, making his palm itch, and a moment
later a reading came up in the corner of his vision:

Ha Nawabi,
citizen code: CL782093HY890, Employment: Records clerk, Taloquan
and Dai, Importers, Estimated Time of Death…

“
Record to
database,” Reuben commanded, blinking the scrolling text off. He
didn’t need to read that. She was dead, like the rest of them. No
data would help her now.

Chanthavy was bounding
closer to the cyborg, her feet leaving the ground with every step.
Reuben watched as he moved towards the next body. She was the
captain, but the still figure of the cyborg was unsettling him. He
was the only one of them who had ever been to war, and old battle
instincts were making his scalp creep with sweat under his helmet.
He didn’t trust the last man standing, whether it was in a battle,
an election, or a massacre.

The cyborg did not react
as Chanthavy sank to a halt in front of him. She reached out
cautiously, the medical scanner in her glove flashing red, and
touched his cheek.

The cyborg reacted so
fast that Reuben barely saw the flash of movement before its
cybernetic hand clasped Chanthavy’s throat and began to lift
her.

Reuben was already
bounding towards them, leaping through the air with all the grace
the Rigel Orbital Fleet had forced into him. He hit the ground just
hard enough to thrust him forwards with the perfect momentum to
slam into the cyborg, grabbing his shoulders to stop himself from
bouncing back. All three of them went sailing backwards across the
street, carried by the force of Reuben’s blow.

They hit the opposite
wall softly, but Reuben had his arm locked around the cyborg’s
throat by then, wrenching his head back hard enough to hurt. He
caught a glimpse of Chanthavy’s shocked face through the screen of
her helmet, but then he brought his suited knee up hard. There were
sexless cyborgs out there, but they were rare, and this one had
looked all male.

And if it was male, human
or machine, a knee to the balls would distract it.

The borg doubled up,
releasing Chanthavy, and its foot caught the wall, pushing them
both back into the street. By now Reuben was convinced that this
borg had no military augmentations. Increased strength, sure, and
greater physical resilience, but none of that mattered if you
didn’t know how to use them.

Reuben, on the other
hand, had survived General Ahrima’s combat medic training. Came top
of his class even, which made him the most dangerous doctor in the
galaxy and a damn sight more lethal than many professional
soldiers. So it didn’t take much to press the flailing cyborg down
to the ground and hold him steady enough that Reuben could press
his hand against the borg’s bare chest.

“
Sedate,” he
told the suit and watched as the borg’s eyes widened and went
hazy.

Reuben held him there
until he was convinced the borg was unconscious. Then he commed
Chanthavy. “You all right, captain?”

“
I’m fine,” she
said, and Reuben managed not to wince at her cool tone. His
crewmates didn’t like to be reminded of his past. “What was he
trying to say?”

“
Say?” Reuben
repeated.

“
He was
mouthing something. Didn’t you notice?”

Reuben hadn’t, and he
felt his heart quicken. He had been trying so hard to just be a
doctor again, but it seemed like his good intentions hadn’t
survived the first brush with violence. He took a moment to steady
himself before saying, “I’d like to get him up to the ship. He’s
the only survivor we’ve found, and even artificial flesh won’t
stand the cold for much longer.”

“
Go ahead. But
remember, Doctor, that the Sirius Conventions grant him the same
rights to care as a genetic human.”

“
I know that!”
Reuben snapped, his stomach clenching. Did she really think he, of
all people, would disregard the law? Could a man ever escape his
past? Biting back everything he wanted to say, he activated his
connection to the ship. “Eskil, I need to bring a survivor on
board.”

“
Someone lived
through it?” Eskil demanded immediately. “Just one or are
there—”

“
One,” Reuben
said. “Cyborg, not military, showing signs of emotional distress,
potentially violent. I need a blue room.”

“
Got one ready
for you. In five, four, three…”

Reuben closed
his eyes so he didn’t have to watch the world go white as the
transporter jerked them onto the
Juniper.
When he opened them, they
were in one of the smaller sickbays. A blue force field separated
it from the rest of the bay, and three gleaming robot aides were
already moving forwards, hovering beside him to await
orders.

“
Lift the
patient onto the bed and commence scan,” Reuben told them,
relinquishing the cyborg and rising to his feet. He let the robots
do their job as he stripped off his outer suit. He padded over to
the bed, and tapped the wall to activate recording. “Commence log.
This is Doctor Reuben Cooper, trauma surgeon, medical licence
number 67249106, currently assigned to
Medical Explorer Juniper
, on the
third circuit. We completed a tour of the Gamma Auriga Sector
approximately thirty-six hours ago and entered hyperspace to
transition to Caelestia for resupply and a rest period. On entering
Caelestia space, we received a mayday message from the city. We
advanced under shields and discovered the city was—”

His voice caught. He
could only be dispassionate for so long, and he had to fight back
the sudden knot of fear, panic, and grief in his throat, swallowing
hard. “On our arrival, the city appeared to have lost atmosphere
and have reduced gravitational capacity. Our instruments indicated
that there was no breathable air left in the city. There was no
evidence that life pods or emergency shelters had been
activated.”

What the hell had
happened down there? How had the entire city died so fast that no
one could get away? There were supposed to be so many fail-safes
built into the orbital platforms that they would maintain
atmosphere under anything but a full military bombardment. Even
then, sectors were supposed to seal off and maintain local
conditions the moment there was an atmospheric breach elsewhere in
the city.

There wasn’t even a
scorch mark on Caelestia.

“
Captain Som,
Lieutenant Peake, and I proceeded to the city surface. As of
fifteen hundred hours, we have located one survivor, currently
under examination. We have explored approximately five point three
percent of the city surface and confirmed five hundred forty-six
fatalities.”

They might find another
cyborg, or just possibly someone with the kind of military
augmentations that would let them survive outside a ship’s hull for
a few hours.

A beep from the
robonurses pulled his attention back to the bed. The patient was
naked, with the scan data gathering across the wall beside him.
Reuben glanced at it, noting there was nothing scarlet enough to
suggest critical danger and then tapped the contagion report to
enlarge it.

No known pathogens and,
more importantly, no symptoms suggesting the presence of an unknown
or forgotten infection. With a sigh of relief, Reuben broke the
seal on his isolation suit, kicking it off. One of the robots
picked it up with a scolding beep, but he was too busy drawing a
proper breath to care. He had heard that city folk here in the
peaceful prime cities, used to the parks and gardens of the orbital
platforms, found ship air stale. After five hours in a sealed suit,
nothing tasted quite so sweet to him.

Rocking back on his
heels, he considered the data before him: some minor scrapes and
frost damage, especially around the meld points between skin and
cybernetic components, a slight excess of nitrogen in the blood,
already normalising, a dark spot on the brain scan. He brought that
up and out to examine properly and gaped.

It was a three-D
rendering now he had enlarged it, the two halves of the skull
folded back neatly to show the brain.

There was nothing there.
The rendering showed that the inside of the skull was coated with
something that gleamed and glittered like jet, but there was
nothing else material there, just flickers and pulses of light
darting in a web across the empty space within. Down towards the
base of the skull there was a patch where the crystals had gone
dull and the lights were flickering in repeating patterns, looping
round and round in an endless circle.