Nate slowly opened his eyes, squinting against a harsh sterile white light. Feeling groggy, he tried to sit up only to be held down by a pair of strong steel hands. He settled back down onto the bed, tried to speak but failed, managing only to make a dry croaking sound. Someone passed him a cup of water and he drank greedily.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“Little bit of bad news,” said Damon, quietly. “We brought you in, treated you for a little dehydration and then had to put you under and remove your arm for repairs. I'm sorry but I don't think we'll be able to save it. Now, the anesthetic we have here isn't great, you can expect dry mouth, maybe headache and a little nausea as side effects.”

Nate looked over to his right, his prosthetic had been completely removed at the shoulder, leaving stubs of nerve cable and a set of shiny brackets poking out through the scar tissue. Looking up he could see Damon standing over him, still holding him by the shoulders.

“Looks like I'll be taking an upgrade after all,” said Nate.

Damon looked surprised, “Are you sure?” he asked. “I know you were never too keen on being augmented.”

Nate sighed. “Well I can't fly one handed. So yeah, let's go find an engineer.”

Damon helped him out of the bed and together they walked out into the bright afternoon glare. Nate breathed in a deep breath of the warm salty sea air. They stepped into the large tent on the beach, finding Izzy, Reginald and Olivia leaning over a workbench. The engineers all had a vacant, half asleep look, like they’d all been working extra long hours. Nate stepped over to the bench, the engineers were looking down at his old arm. 

“What’s the damage?” asked Nate.

Reginald took off his glasses, rubbing at his eyes. “It’s pretty bad. Muscle fibers are pretty busted up, servos are locked and I’m not sure we’ll ever get this forearm bone to sit straight again.”

“Now what we could do is use whatever components we can salvage to make a new piece,” said Izzy.

Nate looked around at the meager tools and parts in the tent. “Do we have the right parts for that?” he asked.

Izzy shrugged. “The supply crate came with some spare parts for the ship, and some stuff to patch up Rowan and Onyx, I think we should be able to cobble something together.”

Nate looked past the engineers, Rowan was laid out on a table in the corner of the tent. Izzy’s multi-limbed backpack stood over him, working diligently on the Construct’s chest. Nate stepped slowly over to the damaged construct. His chest plate had been removed, revealing an orderly tangle of cables and processors. Rowan’s eyes fluttered open.

“Hey, you made it back,” said Rowan weakly. “Looks like you left some hardware behind too.”

“I didn’t leave it behind,” said Nate. “It’s just over there on the table.”

Rowan laughed. “I hope they can fix it.”

“I hope they can fix you too.”

Rowan shook his head. “Come on, you don’t mean that. Machines are replaceable, isn’t that what you said the other day?”

Nate bowed his head looking down at the ground. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “Onyx left me with some information on Constructs when I was stuck in the dropship. It was a real eye opener. You’re right, we’re not so different.”

Rowan nodded. “You know the first generation of constructs had their neural lattices made with imprints of real human brains, from scientists and engineers and stuff. We might as well be people, we’re just a slightly different species.”

The robotic backpack jammed a new component into Rowan’s chest. He went limp and his eyes closed slowly. Nate looked down in stunned silence at the machine’s limp form. Rowan’s legs twitched and low hum rose up from somewhere deep inside him. His eyes snapped open and he sat up suddenly, grabbing his chest plate off the table and snapping it back into place. “I guess they couldn’t fix the hole.” said Rowan, poking at the circle of charred metal in the middle of his chest.

“I think it makes you look tough,” said Nate with a small smile.

  Izzy waved him back over to the workbench. “We’ve got a design sketched out,” she said. “We can bring you back up to human standard if you want, or we can use some extra parts to boost your strength or speed, or if we really push we might be able to add a set of integrated tools or weapons.”

Nate took a moment to consider the options. Part of him wished he could stay one-armed, and slink home, but then he thought of Vance. If he’d been stronger he could have moved that rock, he could have helped. He looked over the designs, considering the strength boosting model. Did building himself up to be stronger and faster make him any different, any less human? Part of him still thought it did, but after spending so much time with the augmented members of the crew he was starting to think otherwise. Damon was more machine than man and he’d been nothing but helpful and kind.

“I think I like this one,” he said tapping, on the strength boosting design. “But maybe give me some time to sleep on it?”

Izzy gave him a sympathetic nod. “Sure thing” she said, “I’ll get a more complete technical drawing done in the meantime and then you can decide if you want to go ahead with it or not.”

“There’s one more thing you might want to consider before going ahead with this,” said Damon. “We found a couple military grade gene tonics with the medical supplies. They were in a case marked ‘emergencies only’ ; they'll boost the healing process even further and make the new graft a less painful process.”

Nate shook his head. “I think I have enough upgrades for now, can we try the graft first and see how it goes?”

Damon nodded. “Sure, an upgrade should be less painful than the original replacement. Might still take a while for the nerves to bond fully, though.”

“I can deal with that,” said Nate.

Damon placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m excited for you,” he said with a smile. “Getting new hardware is always fun.”

Nate meandered out of the engineering tent, stepping out into the bright morning sun. Onyx was standing by the rover, idly wiping a streak of mud off of it.

“Nathan,” said Onyx. “I am sorry about your prosthesis. How are you?”

“I’ll be fine,” said Nate. “The engineering team should be able to build me a new one.”

“That’s good, I hope the grafting process goes well.”

Nate nodded. “I didn’t see Vance in the medical crate, is he okay?”

Onyx hung his head. “He did not make it.”

Nate took a step back in shock. “He didn’t make it? What happened?”

“He was killed in the cave system, just before you were knocked into the water. In the commotion we were unable to recover his body. I feel terrible we could not give him a proper burial. The rest of the crew has been keeping busy, maintaining equipment, repairing Rowan, looking for you. I think they are doing their best to keep themselves busy and avoid thinking about it.”

Nate walked numbly into the dropship and sat down on the edge of one of the cots, hanging his head in his hands. Onyx followed him into the ship a short while later.

“We need to keep working, Nathan,” he said. “We need to make it off this planet. For Vance’s sake.”

Nate nodded. “You’re right.”

Onyx inclined his head and let out a long mechanical sigh. “You know, being out here, as awful as this part of the journey has been, reminds me of happier times.”

“Oh really? How so?”

“I’ve been around a long time, Nathan. I know I look as youthful as the day I was built but would you believe I am nearly eighty? This isn’t my first trip to uncharted space.”

Nate let out a small laugh. “From the picture you showed me of you fighting in the Rebellions I could believe that. So, you’ve done this before?”

“It wasn’t as large an operation as this, back then it was just me and my husband William, on our own, mapping planets for the Construct Collective.”

“Husband? You were married? I didn’t know Constructs got married.”

Onyx nodded. “We do. In some ways you remind me a lot of William. He was a deep space trader from a small jungle planet in Second Wave Space, a real maverick, and one of the finest pilots I’ve ever seen. He was headstrong and stubborn, but ambitious and wildly creative, he never let anyone or anything stand in his way. I bet you would have liked him. We met when his ship suffered a catastrophic drive failure in low orbit, and crashed just outside the space port. I was part of the spaceport security team investigating the crash and was responsible for interrogating the survivors. You see before this, we had very little contact with the rest of the galaxy and a human pilot crashing on the capitol was an oddity. His was William and he had such a passion for life and adventure. I lack the words to describe his zeal properly, but I was quite enamored with him after the interrogation was complete. The war was still recent in everyone’s minds and Human-Construct relationships were quite frowned upon, I was determined to discover what had drawn him to Construct space, and where he was going next. His response: I just wanted to see it all.”

“So you started an exploration company after that?”

“Yes, we spent the next thirty years exploring the galaxy together. We visited worlds of ice, worlds of volcanic glass, fought monsters on a tropical paradise and mined gemstones from a rogue planetoid millions of kilometers from any star.”

“Sounds pretty interesting, what happened to William?”

Onyx’s antennae flattened against his armoured skull. “Eventually William grew old and passed away.”

Nate put his hand on the old war machine’s shoulder. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It is fine, Nathan, he is in a better place now. Death is an unfortunate part of human life. He is gone and I linger still. I try not to dwell on the sad memories but instead focus on the good times we shared, and that is what we should do with Vance, forget the bad and remember only the good.”

***

Izzy stepped into the dropship after supper. She pulled her tablet off her belt and turned it towards Nate, a gleaming cybernetic limb rotating on the screen. The arm was a mix of chrome plating with deep red synthetic muscles, and black armoured panels attached to the outer forearm.

Nate frowned. “It’s a little flashy isn’t it?”

“What?” said Izzy incredulously. “I’ve seen the civilian clothes you packed, I thought you liked red?”

“It’s fine in a shirt but not so much in an arm,” said Nate.

“Come on, be different! Let me put a little colour in the design.”

Nate shook his head. “Listen, you get your own cyber-arm, you can paint it whatever colour you like.”

“If I had the money I would” Izzy said under her breath.

Nate’s frown deepened. “You don’t think that would be weird? I mean, it just doesn’t seem right to me to go lopping off a perfectly good arm for no reason.”

Izzy shrugged. “I know a lot of people back home who would love to have a prosthetic with an integrated toolset.”

“Really?”

“For sure, remember how I said my home station should be called the Shithole? It’s because it’s about sixty years past its decommission date, everyone on board has to learn a little bit about repairing the station or it’ll drop out of orbit.”

The other two engineers filed in and began speaking in bursts of rapid fire tech-jargon that went over Nate’s head.

Nate raised a hand and waved. “Can we slow up a little? Remember you’ve got a dummy in here who can’t keep up with the acronyms.”

Izzy rolled her eyes and smiled. “Okay, dummy. We’re just trying to decide the best material to build the piece. Once we get that sorted out we should be able to machine and fit the prosthetic.”

“Which brings us to our next problem.” said Reginald. “There won’t be much time to work out any bugs.”

“Well shit,” said Nate. “Last time it took nearly a week to get the twitches and spasms worked out on the last arm. There isn’t really a choice though is there?”

“Not really,” said Izzy. “So can we go ahead and get our automated rigs printing the parts?”

“Yeah go for it,” said Nate.