This choice: You reach for the med-kit • Go Back...Chapter #3You reach for the med-kit by: Slaad11   You scramble painfully up the wall, lifting your weight with your good leg and wrenching the med-kit off of its wall-mount. The bug skitters toward you with amazing speed and leaps up at you from one meter away. You swing the med-kit by the handle and bat the creature off to the side. It lands on its feet and skitters in an arc around you, its front feet raised like claws, as it seems to look for an opening to attack. You open the med-kit, causing the contents to fall and scatter, but you managed to grab hold of the mono-filament scalpel and pull the sheath off just in time for the bug to make another leap at you. This time it latches onto your abdomen and begins cutting into your flesh with its razor sharp barbed legs as it extends what looks like a clear glass feeding tube. You slice wildly at its legs, severing three of them before it drops to the ground and skitters away on it remaining seven. You gasp with relief as it disappears around the corner of the far bulkhead. You slide back down the wall and grasp at the other contents of the med-kit, panting for air and sweating profusely.
Painkiller first. You tear the already ripped pant leg to expose your thigh and press the bright red jet-injector to your clammy skin, pulling the trigger. Two seconds later, you are feeling no pain and the room spins very slowly around you. With partially numb but now steadier hands, you pull at the metal shard still lodged in your wound. It comes out easily, but bright red blood flows quickly after. Feeling sick and light-headed, you waste no time grabbing your shin with both hands and squeezing as hard as you can to set the bone back into place. It snaps straight with a sickening wet click. Thank God for pain meds. You slap a new-skin patch on the bleeding wound and then grab the blue jet-injector, shooting your leg full of nanite-gel.
Now running on pure adrenaline, you crawl over to the dead guard and pull the MPL out from under his corpse. You look at the familiar feeling weapon and know that you have used one before, but you don’t remember where or why. You also notice the bio-lock trigger. It's a good thing you went after the med-kit instead of the gun, since the trigger is encoded with the dead guard's DNA pattern. You're going to need tools to hack this. Funny that you feel confident in that ability. You tuck the currently useless MPL under your belt.
Fighting off the urge to loose consciousness from blood loss and the effects of the painkiller, you crawl toward a section of ship with an in-tact door. You reach up and wrench the door open, finding a small lavatory. Perfect. You crawl into the slanted closet-sized compartment and shut the door, pulling the “occupied” latch and hoping that the bugs are the worst things looking for you. Finally, you let yourself drift into deep narcotic-induced sleep…
You wake up feeling groggy and your head is pounding, but otherwise back in one piece. You move your left leg to test it and find that the nanites repaired the bone and the laceration perfectly. Not even a scar left under the layer of dried blood. You’re hungry and thirsty. You reach out and unlatch the door, pushing it open tentatively. Cooler, but still humid, night air rushes in, along with a cacophony of chirps, chitters and shrieks from who knows what. You could probably walk now, taking your chances with the nocturnal critters and search the ship’s wreckage for food and water, or you could get some more sleep and see if you can wait until you have some daylight…  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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