Lieutenant. All I know is that since Up doesn’t have any
family, there was no one to speak for him when he was
lying there on that operating table.” She looked at Taz.
“They say you knew him best, Lieutenant. Do you think he
would have wanted this?”
A half-life, an experimental existence? Taz dropped her
gaze to her hands, and thought of his fingers entwined in
the Mexican sand with hers. Would he ever hold her hand
again?
“I don’t know.”
The stasis tank was as frightening as the nurse had said it
was. A filmy whitish liquid nearly obscured the contents
within, thick tubes and wires snaking throughout both the
room and the tank, making a grotesque octopus out of the
figure at its centre. Taz could just barely make out his
shape, the shape that was supposed to be Up, dwarfed by
the machinery around him. She made to rise out of her
chair, press her face to the glass, but a firm hand on her
shoulder restrained her. She turned to glare, but found her
doctor’s gaze elsewhere, a look on her face so venomous
that it even made Taz draw back a little.
Dr. Space-Claw had entered the room.
“Ah, Lieutenant, we meet again,” he said warmly,
coming over to Taz’s wheelchair with a broad smile on his
face, his arms spread wide. What, no apologies for nearly
killing me the last time we met? “I want your face to be the
first thing the Commander sees when he awakens. If you
would, Dr. Tripp.”
Taz barely had time to register the familiar name before
she was wheeled toward the waiting operating table with
enough fury that she began to worry she’d be tipped over. It
had been her doctor who’d insisted on the wheelchair, not
her - she wanted to be standing on her own two feet when