“Righto.”
Orca’s surgeon commander arrived promptly. “Lieutenant Helfort, morning,” she said. “I’m Commander Ghella. Good to see you awake. How do you feel?”
“Believe it or not, sir, I feel pretty good. Nothing hurts.”
Ghella laughed. “After all the drugbots we’ve pumped into you, I should hope not.”
“Ah. Knew I felt too well. So what’s the story?”
“Well, it’s bit of a list, I’m afraid. Cuts and bruises everywhere, but nothing to worry about. You’ve suffered some blast damage to your brain, but it’s minor. Your helmet did a good job protecting your skull, so there’ll be no long-term problems, just headaches for the next few days. The big problem’s two gunshot wounds, one just below and behind the armpit, the second in the upper thigh, at the back, about ten centimeters below your left buttock.”
Michael thought about that for a moment before replying. “Jeez,” he said, “that’s okay.”
Obviously baffled, Ghella shook her head. “What’s okay?”
“Not getting shot in the ass,” Michael said with a smile. “I’d never live that down, never. Trust me, sir. A wound stripe for being shot in the butt is not something to be proud of.”
“Oh, I see,” Ghella said with a look that showed she did not understand and probably never would. “The news gets better, I’m happy to say. Your body armor took most of the sting out of the first round. You have massive bruising, cartilage damage, superficial lacerations, some internal damage and bleeding, but none of that is too serious. And”-she pulled a small packet out of her pocket-“here it is,” she said triumphantly, “the bullet in question, well, what’s left of it. We found it in your body armor.”
Michael took the packet and shook the contents into his hand: a single bullet, deformed by impact into a crumpled cylinder. “Must have been my lucky day,” he said. A cold shiver ran through him; a few centimeters up and forward, and it would have been all over. The bullet would have come in under his armpit and trashed his upper chest so badly, it would have been beyond anything Fed medicine, for all its awesome power over the human body, could ever hope to repair.
“My lucky day,” he said somberly.
“It was,” Ghella said. “It really was. The second round did a fair bit of damage to the muscles at the back of your left thigh, in one side and out the other, tearing things up as it went. We see from your records that your left leg has been injured before.”
“Yes. November ‘98. Shrapnel from a Hammer rail-gun slug. Sliced it up pretty badly.”
“Well, it’s been sliced up again, I’m sorry to say. Fortunately, no bone damage, and it missed all the major blood vessels. We’ve fixed up what we can with surgery and transfused nanobots to start putting it all back together again, but it will be a while before it’s right. You’ll be laid up for a week or so; then you should be able to get around using a legbot to support the leg while it heals.”
“Terrific,” Michael said under his breath. Legbots might get him back on his feet quickly, but they were a pain. “Thanks, Doc.”
“Don’t thank me. Thank the marines; their medics did all the hard work. So,” she said briskly, “you up for visitors?”
“Sure am.”
“Hang on … right, your XO and coxswain are on their way. I’ll check on you later.”
“Thanks, sir.”
Commander Ghella had barely left his bedside when the pair appeared. It was good to see them. “Hi, Jayla; hi, Matti. Well, we made it, eh?”
“Yes, we did, but Jeez, you’re a worry, sir,” Bienefelt said with a shake of the head. “You sure Fleet is the career for you?”
“Hell, yes. I’m as sure as I can be, Matti,” Michael said. “Jayla, tell me everyone made it off Serhati okay.”
“We did,” Ferreira said, “every last one.”
“Pleased to hear it. Serhati’s one place I don’t ever want to see again.”
Long after the last of a steady stream of visitors departed, Michael lay back exactly the way they had left him, eyes locked on a sprinkler set into the deckhead over his bed.
More focused than he had ever been in his life, he struggled to come to grips with the crisis that was on him.
He shook his head in despair.
Crisis? More like an ocean-a large ocean-of crises. Where the hell was he supposed to start? He had not received a single vidmail from Anna despite all the pressure put on the Hammers to honor their responsibilities under the Geneva Conventions. His left leg was months away from full recovery. The board of inquiry into Operation Opera had been convened, doubtless with him as its star witness. Perkins had lodged formal charges against him, alleging insubordination in combat. The Fed trashpress had picked up Perkins’s line that the ship losses suffered during Opera-they preferred to call it “the Battle of Devastation Reef” were mostly his fault. To cap it all, the Hammer Worlds wanted him dead so badly, they had started sending assault landers to hunt him down.
How much worse could things get?
Not that he cared much about himself, boards of inquiry, Fleet, the trashpress, or even the Hammers. The doctors would fix him up; the rest would sort itself out, of that he was sure. He had made the right decisions, and he had enough faith in Fleet to believe that the truth would emerge eventually. If the gutter scum producing the rivers of crap spewed out by the trashpress gave him a hard time along the way, so be it. Their day would come.
What he cared about most of all was Anna. But caring was not enough to get her back safely, and even if he did get her back, that left the problem of the Hammers doing what they did best: corrupting, killing, destroying. No, he had to resolve both problems at the same time if he was ever to shake off the ghosts of all those he had promised to avenge: the dead from the
But quite how he was going to rescue Anna and destroy the Hammers at the same time, he had absolutely no idea.
Thursday, April 19, 2401, UD
The moon threw a thin light across the city of McNair.
The streetscape was washed of all color: flame-blackened buildings, crude barricades smashed apart in the night’s fighting, smoke drifting from shops and government offices, from the wrecked cars, mobibots, and buses that littered the streets-all were painted in shades of gray splashed with daubs of black.
DocSec troopers in black jumpsuits and body armor, visors down and riot shields up, stood in small groups at crossroads, with more in front of those government offices as yet undamaged, stun guns and gas-grenade throwers cradled in their arms, assault rifles slung across their backs. Close at hand, half-tracks and troop carriers were parked in neat rows. They struck an incongruous note, their good order in stark contrast to the chaos around them.
The rioters had been forced out of the city center, harried and harassed every step of the way by DocSec; the streets were deserted. Nothing moved except smoke and ash.
The city waited, silent, still, an edgy calm settling over devastated streets.
Chief Councillor Polk stared out of the armored plasglass window of the flier while it climbed away from the brutal ceramcrete bulk of the Supreme Council building. From the air, McNair was an ugly sight. All across the city, piles of burning plasfiber spewed pillars of protest up into a gray sky, every greasy black plume of smoke a stark reminder that his grip on power might be slipping away.
He had been around long enough to know how the Hammer Worlds worked. When the unwritten contract
