pulled back.
When the tank bearing Belinda, Xenia, and the injured Zen pulled into Gibbons Valley they were directed to the center of the small valley where a landing zone had been established. Sitting on the ground here were two hummingbirds, their ramps open. Three soldiers bearing the extra camouflage of special forces members came trotting over to them. The lead soldier held up five fingers to them, indicating which short-range channel they should switch down to. Xenia and Belinda both did so.
'I'm Sergeant Fargo,' the lead soldier told them. 'This is Corporal Wong and Corporal Horishito. How bad is your guy here?'
'Pretty fuckin' bad,' Xenia said. 'He took shrapnel from an eighty in the back. He's having trouble breathing.'
Fargo looked down at him and winced. 'You ain't shitting,' he said. The poor bastard's face was a visible shade of blue beneath his helmet. He was barely breathing at all now. 'Let's get him to doc right away. Priority.'
'Right,' said Wong, reaching over and grabbing the upper handles on Zen's suit.
'We'll carry him,' Xenia said forcefully, jumping down onto the ground and grabbing the handles away from her.
Wong nodded. 'Suit yourself,' she said, unoffended. She stepped back.
Belinda grabbed the lower handles and they picked him up, carrying him thirty meters over to a triage area where about two dozen other wounded were being attended by two medics. They set him down in a clear area.
'Brandy,' Fargo said, talking to Mike Branderson, his squad medic, 'come and look at this one. He's pretty bad.'
'Coming, sarge,' Branderson said, picking up his pack and trotting over. He took one look at Zen and muttered an obscenity. He then knelt down and pulled out his scanner.
'How is he?' Xenia asked when the medic finished the scan.
'He has a tension pneumothorax and his left kidney got shredded which is causing internal bleeding,' Branderson said, reaching into his pack and pulling out a wicked looking device that resembled a small jackhammer with a needle on the end.
'What does that mean?' Belinda asked.
'The internal bleeding ain't too bad at the moment,' Branderson said. 'The problem is the tension pneumo. His lung is punctured and the air he's breathing is leaking out of it and getting into his chest cavity, causing pressure to build up. That's made the lung collapse and it's starting to wrap around his heart and keep it from beating. It'll strangle his heart in a few minutes if I don't relieve the pressure.' He shook his head. 'I'm surprised it hasn't done it already.'
'Can you fix it?' Xenia asked. 'I've been through a lot with this asshole.'
'Doc's the best,' Wong said, kneeling down next to her. 'If he can be fixed this is the man to do it. He's a dip-hoe in Eden when he's not out here yelling at us to drink our fucking water.'
Xenia looked up at her and smiled gratefully. 'Thanks,' she said. 'You're Lisa Wong, right? The first bitch in the special forces?'
'That's me,' she said. 'You've heard of my exploits I take it?'
'Everyone's heard about you,' Xenia told her. 'You're famous, especially the part about that fight you had in training in the locker room.'
'Oh yeah, that,' Wong said. 'I was just trying to establish my place in the hierarchy of things.'
'Did you really squeeze off his windpipe until he started flopping like a fish?' Belinda asked, repeating the current rumor of choice about Wong's training days.
'Uh... yeah,' she said. 'Something like that.'
'I also heard about you from other people,' Xenia said. 'I'm a friend of a friend of the guy who flies with your partner from the police department.'
'I guess that makes us friends ourselves, doesn't it?' she asked.
'Okay,' Branderson said, putting the tip of the needle against the upper left portion of Zen's torso. 'Here we go.'
'What is that thing?' Xenia asked him.
'An outside, trans-biosuit decompression needle,' he replied. 'It'll go through the suit and into his chest cavity to let the air building up escape. That should decompress the lung.' He pushed the button on the top and the entire device jolted in his hand. Zen moaned and twisted his head a few times. There was a pop that was audible even in the thin air and a stream of bloody vapor began to expel from the top of the needle.
'Is it working?' Belinda asked.
Branderson nodded. 'It's actually easier to decompress someone outside than it is in the city,' he said. 'The low atmospheric pressure is a big help. In fact we have to dampen down the draw on the way out to keep from decompressing his entire chest cavity and sucking his lung out through the needle.
Within a minute Zen's breathing began to normalize, the breaths deeper and more effective. His face began to turn from blue to a color that was merely pale. He came awake a little, enough to start screaming in pain.
'Get him some Vexal,' Branderson told Xenia. 'Fire him up with double dose.'
'Isn't that too much?' Xenia asked.
'No,' Branderson said. 'It'll slow his heart rate down so the kidney won't bleed as bad. Now stop questioning me and do what the fuck I say!'
She did what the fuck he said, accessing his control panel and directing his suit to inject two shots of the potent painkiller — one into his right thigh, one into his right arm. Within a few minutes the screaming faded out and Zen began to relax. By this time Branderson had installed an intraosseous line in his tibia and was pushing synthetic blood and further sedation through it. Zen relaxed even more and some of his color started to come back.
'Okay,' Branderson said, nodding in satisfaction. 'He's doing a lot better. Sometimes I think I really am God, you know?'
'That's what we think, Brandy,' Wong told him.
'So he's gonna make it?' Xenia asked.
'I think so,' Branderson said. 'He's tagged priority and he'll be on the first hover out of here but as long as he gets to surgery in the next sixty minutes, I think he'll pull through.'
Aboard the WSS
1645 hours
General Browning was livid, his anger directed at the man who had planned this campaign.
'How in the hell could something like this happen?' he demanded of him. 'Enemy tanks in our rear? How did they get there? Did they just stroll right through our line? Or maybe the greenies have some sort of teleportation device that we've never been told about?'
Major Wilde was still stunned at how quickly everything had changed in the Eden theater. They had been within an hour of victory, maybe two, their guns poised to obliterate the Martian anti-tank positions, which would have allowed their APCs to drive right up to the very edge of the open ground before their infantry positions. And then, in an instant, the guns had fallen silent, attacked by more than five hundred Martian tanks that had appeared from nowhere. And if that wasn't enough, those tanks had then gone after their supplies, ripping into the column and destroying heavily armored boxcars and tankers that had been thought to be invulnerable to attack. 'We don't know for sure, sir,' he answered. 'My best guess is they somehow sent those tanks through the mountains.'
'Through the mountains?' Browning said. 'That's your theory? Do those greenies have roads through those mountains that we're not aware of? Do they have tunnels and bridges to take them through the passes? I sure as hell never saw anything like that on the overheads.'
'They have no roads through there,' Wilde said, 'but they have done extensive mapping and surveying of the area — much more extensive than anything we have. They might've been able to formulate a route through.'
'Impossible,' Browning spat.
Wilde shook his head in frustration. 'It doesn't really matter how they did it, sir,' he told his boss. 'What matters is that they did and that we must now deal with the consequences of it.'
'How bad did this hurt us?' Browning asked.
