When the light faded at last, leaving Grigg naked and bleeding on the pad and my heart stuttered.
“Fuck, Grigg. You’re a mess.” Grigg was covered in blood, his normally dark, golden skin a strange smear of orange and red almost everywhere. His left leg was cut through to the bone halfway between his knee and thigh, blood rushing to the floor with each beat of his heart.
Dropping to my knees I placed a bleed blocker over the wound. It wouldn’t heal him, but it would stop him from bleeding out while I carried his stubborn ass to the ReGen pod.
“I need more help over here!” I shouted. Aids and other techs came running.
“Help me. Careful of his leg.” I lifted him, once more under the shoulders, trying to keep his head from flopping like a loose doll’s. Other hands joined mine and he was quickly lifted from the table.
“ReGen pod?”
“Yes. Immediately.”
We moved as a unit, shuffling quickly to the large, full-body submersion unit used for the most critical wounds.
“Shouldn’t we sedate him first?”
“Shut up or get out,” I growled.
“Yes, Sir.”
The door to the medical station slid open and Captain Trist strode into the room, took one look at Grigg and came to a dead stop. “Is he dead?”
“No. But he will be if we don’t get him into ReGen.”
Trist stepped forward between two techs and helped lift Grigg under his hips. If Grigg had been an average Prillon warrior, we wouldn’t have needed five of us to move him, but he was a fucking seven-foot giant. Grigg, like all members of the warrior class on Prillon Prime, was a big motherfucker at close to three hundred pounds of hard, lean muscle. Built for war, the Prillon race was bigger and stronger than almost any other race in the Coalition. And the Zakar family? Well, Grigg and I belonged to one of the oldest warrior clans on the planet. He was genetically predisposed to be one big motherfucker.
I exhaled in relief as we lowered the commander’s body into the bright blue light of the Regen Pod. The clear cover slid over Grigg’s bruised and battered body automatically, the sensors beginning to work immediately. We stood back and inspected the raw burns and lacerations on his face that were clearly visible.
“He’s lucky he didn’t lost his right eye.” The medical officer who’d assisted me moved by rote over the control panel, adjusting the settings to ensure Grigg would heal at the maximum speed his body would allow.
“He’s lucky he’s not dead.” Trist slammed a blood-covered palm down on top of the clear casing.
He turned to me and I shook my head. “Don’t look at me.”
“You’re his second. Family. Can’t you fucking control him? He can’t keep doing this.” Trist’s rage colored his pale yellow skin a dark gold. “He’s the commander of this battle group, not infantry or a fighter pilot. We can’t afford to lose him.”
“He inspires the men.” The medical officer on the other side of the ReGen pod spoke reverently, awe in his tone. “They talk about him in the cafeteria. Hell, everywhere. They talk about him everywhere.”
“Do you need to be here?” Trist asked.
The medical officer looked at the monitoring panel. “The commander is healing properly. All protocols for his regeneration have been set.”
“Do you need to be here?” Trist repeated.
“Technically, no.” The young recruit looked shocked, his fear of Trist causing his skin to pale to a sickly gray nearly the same color as his uniform. With good reason. The captain was nearly as big as Grigg and twice as mean.
“Leave us.”
In seconds, I was alone with the captain, who slumped into a seat on the edge of the room. “How do we stop him? It’s like he’s insane. Hell, it’s like he’s turned into a raging beast, like a fucking Atlan berserker.”
Now that the danger was past, rage mixed with relief as I took a seat next to Trist where we both could keep an eye on the commander’s unconscious body. Blood coated our hands, our uniforms.
“We can’t stop him.” Staring down at my bloody palms, I wanted to strangle Grigg. I loved him like a brother, but he’d allowed his father’s rage to push him too far. He took too many risks. He was playing a very dangerous game and he was losing. He was alive, so it wasn’t a complete failure, but next time? And the next? Eventually the odds would catch up to him. Next time he really might die.
I’d had enough. Trist’d had enough.
I’d given it a lot of thought, and just one solution presented itself, I just hadn’t mentioned it before. There were no secrets between Grigg and me, but this one, I’d kept. Considered it. Ruled it out in the past. But now, now that he was in a ReGen pod healing a fucking severed femoral artery, broken femur, severe concussion and who knew what the fuck else, it was time.