I’m going to go ahead and assume that you haven’t ever lost a hand. It is a bizarre feeling. Painful, sure. Every bit as painful as you might expect. But there are a dozen more weird pains that instantly come along with it that you might not expect. There’s the child’s pain of having something that was absolutely and unequivocally yours taken for reasons you don’t understand. There’s the more adult pain as your mind is suddenly filled with all the things you will no longer be able to do without help. There’s a hatred and rage for whatever took that from you so intense that it’s like swallowing a blazing coal. And there is the absolute panic you feel as you wonder how long it will take to bleed to death from a missing hand that is actively pulsing blood and holy shit those are my arm bones sticking out of my arm meat.

It’s a complicated moment in your life.

I could literally see my panic as my fluttering heartbeat forced more and more blood to pour out of my body in gushing little pulses. I punched buttons on the case, torn between cradling my arm stump to my chest and aiming the leakage away to keep from interfering with the case’s interface. The case popped open and blood splattered on the suit inside.

And then the suit seemed to inflate itself and stand up in the box. I was pretty sure that I wasn’t yet at the point of hallucinating from blood loss, but there was an awful lot of it, everywhere. I had no idea I had so much blood.

Lights appeared inside the suit’s eyes, showing me the back of its… head? Helmet? Whatever. It was unsettling as hell.

“Injuries have been detected. May I assist?”

The suit’s voice was completely inhuman. There was absolutely nothing in it that was mistakable for a conscious, thinking being. And nothing else could have made me more comfortable at that moment.

“Yes. My arm is-“

“Please stand. I will assess your injuries,” it said. I got shakily to my feet. Nearly put out my missing hand to steady myself in the process which added just one more layer of oh god no to the entire day. And then a seam split in the suit from its head down to its chest, legs and arms. Then it ate me.

It might be more accurate to say it engulfed me, but as far as I was concerned, it ate me. I had no idea what the suit was made of but it seemed solid as steel one second and then flowed like water the next. In one particularly uncomfortable moment I saw it ripple underneath the survival suit I was wearing and then pop it off like it was tearing apart a wrapper to get at the delicious nutrients inside. Or maybe that was just the blood loss talking.

“Your left forearm is missing,” it said in my ear.

“No shit.”

“The blood loss is not currently life threatening but I will need to stop the wound from bleeding. Do you have the missing limb?”

My shock-addled brain decided that was a good time to look back at the door. The frost-wolf was still there. There was less blood on its face than I would have expected.

“I’m pretty sure he has it,” was what I meant to say but it came out in a slurry mess. I felt lightheaded and strangely disconnected. I knew that there were things I should be doing but I seemed to have lost the ability to move and make them happen. I tried again.

“My arm is gone.”

“It appears to be irretrievable and you are going into shock. The situation is still dangerous. As such, I am going to have to deal with your injury with only minimal analgesics. I apologize for the inconvenience.”

“Wait wha…“ I slurred, and then I felt a series of sharp pricks like needles going into the meat of my forearm. That brought my mind back to my arm and I felt the rising panic as my brain finally really registered that something was horribly wrong and why was I sitting on the floor and then…

Pain like I had never felt exploded in my arm. Had I shoved the remaining stump of my arm into a meat grinder, I don’t think it could have hurt as much. I screamed and tried my hardest to shake, to escape, but the suit around me pressed in and held me in place. My whole body was soaked in sweat, like I’d just come out of a sauna. What little was in my stomach seemed to be trying to crawl its way up my throat and all I could smell was my own breath forced back into my face. That, and cooking meat.

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“Done. Some of the bone had to be removed and the wound needed to be scoured and cauterized in places,” the suit’s empty voice said in my ear. As it did I saw it push two pieces of very white bone up out of the shiny black material that had enveloped me, like it was being pushed through a substance with a similar consistency to pudding. The bone was jagged and torn on one end but cut perfectly flat on the other. My body was back in control of the suit and I slumped to the floor and just shook and cried. I curled in on myself, wrapping my body around my horribly injured limb.

In my visor an image appeared. It was a left human hand, briefly. Then something seemed to pass in front of it and I saw it as my own hand had been, though stark and somehow sterile despite the bone sticking out of bleeding meat.

“This is what has been done to your arm. I had to excavate some of the tissue and bone so that there would be enough skin to close the wound effectively.”

And sure enough some of that bleeding meat and the bone were removed, though it looked less like surgery in the image and more like a child’s block toy being pulled apart. The skin around the injury was folded down over the bleeding remains and needles sowed the flesh back together into a rounded point, sort of like the end of a marker.

“The pain killers should be working in your system by now. You will still need to be functional for the moment, so I apologize for their relative weakness.”

As the robotic voice spoke, I raised my arm to look at my hand. I don’t know what I expected. I certainly didn’t think I’d be able to see my own arm through the suit. But I could.

The wound was raw and I could see bent black lines swirling up to the… end of my arm. It looked like the suit had burnt the wounds closed. And then the suit became opaque again and I was looking at the suit’s black hand. I went to curl my body back around my wounded arm and that black hand curled into a fist.

And I realized I could feel it. I’d heard of phantom limb syndrome. Anyone who worked around the kind of heavy machinery like what was on the Reliant knew about that.

“Suit?”

“Yes?”

“Are you feeding me sensation through the suit’s hand?”

“Yes. The neural link between myself and you gives you tactile information. If I may suggest, we should deal with that large predator there soon. I do not believe it can fit through the door but it would be best to be proactive in case I am wrong.”

The painkillers in my arm were starting to take effect. My wound still sent waves of burning pain down my nerves but it was more like embers rather than a full blaze. I could think through it. I needed to think through it. I could deal with the loss later.

“Right. What are our options?”

“Plentiful. Would you prefer non-lethal measures?”

I had to think about that. This thing had taken my hand. But I had barged into its home. Where it likely kept its young. It was (probably) just an animal with no real malicious intent towards me, even if it did want to kill and eat me.

“Non-lethal.”

“Very well.”

A moment later, although as far as I could tell nothing had happened, the wolf jerked its head back. It writhed in what appeared to be pain and flung itself away from the opening. I heard it running down the halls along with other sets of clawed feet that had apparently been waiting outside the door where I couldn’t see.

“What did you do?” I asked in confusion.

“They appeared at least somewhat canine in nature so I chose an auditory defense measure. I am currently emitting a sound above the range of your hearing that is extremely unpleasant for them.”

“So they’re gone?”

“In confines like this it is difficult to predict exactly how far the sound will carry. However, I do not think they will come close enough to attempt to physically harm you again.”

“Great. Can you pull the data from my old suit?”

The remains of that suit were scattered on the floor all around me, sort of like an empty snake skin, only human shaped. I felt a weird moment of pity for it, being discarded that way. I wished I could thank it somehow for keeping me alive for so long. Although maybe that was just the painkillers talking.

“I extracted all available data from the suit as well as the extraneous items stored inside it before removing it from you.”

“Alright. Let’s… god I lost my hand…” I had to shake myself and push that thought out of my head. Movement. Movement was what mattered now. “Let’s go.”

I walked out into the hall, and without being asked the suit turned on several lights, pulled up a map of the ship based on my previous movements through it on the upper left side of my vision. It also put another camera view from behind me in the upper right. All of that was extremely useful but that last, more than anything helped me focus. Cyrus had to be stopped. Now maybe I had the first tool I needed to make it happen. Next I would need a nano-immunizer if I was going to even be able to get close enough to Cyrus to do anything about it.

Moving through the dead ship was still scary, but the suit took in ambient noises and use them to mark where it thought the frost wolves were likely to be. Even with the noise deterrent going, I didn’t want to corner one. It might attack just in an attempt to kill the noise.

Outside, I realized I didn’t feel cold anymore. The new suit was enough to keep me actually warm. I felt… good. That was definitely the pain killers though.

“Alright, I need to get back to the ATV. Where is it?”

“Your vehicle is in this location,” the suit said and marked it on the map that had changed from the interior of the ship to the surrounding geography. “However, if you would prefer, there are other travel options I should make you aware of.”

“Other options? Was there something else in the ship? Is it faster than the ATV?”

“Would you like to engage flight mode?”

It took me a little while to process that question.

“Yes. Yes, I would.”