some nerve, charging a plasma arc with a stunner. The mercenary only got one shot off—that's what happened to Baz's arm. I don't think I would have dared, would you?'
Miles walked around the room during this recitation, mentally reconstructing the action. He stirred the inert body of the former plasma arc wielder with the toe of his boot, and thought of his own tally for the day—one tottering drunk and two sleeping women. Jealousy twinged. He cleared his throat thoughtfully and looked up. 'No, I'd probably have taken my own plasma arc and tried to burn through the brackets on that overhead light bar, and drop it on him. Then either nail him after he was smashed or else stun him as he jumped out from under.'
'Oh,' said Elena.
Jesek's grin faded slightly. 'I didn't think of that.'
Miles kicked himself, mentally. Ass—what kind of commander tries to score points off a man who needs build up? A damned short-sighted one, obviously. This mess was only beginning. He amended himself immediately. 'I might not have either, under fire. It's deceptively easy to second-guess somebody when you're not in the heat yourself. You did extremely well, Mr. Jesek.'
Jesek's face sobered. The edge of hysterical glee faded, but left a residue of straightness in his spine. 'Thank you, my lord.'
Elena went off to examine one of the unconscious mercenaries, and he added to Miles in a low voice,
'How did you know? How did you know I could—hell, I didn't even know myself. I thought I could never face fire again.' He stared voraciously at Miles, as though he were some mystic oracle, or talisman.
'I always knew,' Miles lied cheerfully. 'From the first time I met you. It's in the blood, you know. There's more to being Vor than the right to tack a funny syllable on the front of your name.'
'I always thought that was a load of manure,' said Jesek frankly. 'Now .. .' He shook his head in wonderment.
Miles shrugged, concealing secret agreement. 'Well, you carry my shovel now, that's for damn sure. And speaking of work—we're going to stuff all these guys into their own brig, until we decide, uh, how to dispose of them. Is that wound going to incapacitate you, or can you make this ship go pretty soon?'
Jesek stared around. 'They've got some pretty advanced systems …' he began doubtfully. His eye fell on Miles, standing straight as his limitations would allow before him, and his voice firmed. 'Yes, my lord. I can.'
Miles, feeling quite maniacally hypocritical, gave the engineer a firm commander's nod copied from observations of his father at Staff conferences and the dinner table. It seemed to work quite well, for Jesek collected himself and began an orienting survey of the systems around him.
Miles paused on the way out the door to repeat the instructions for confining the prisoners to Elena. She cocked her head at him when he finished.
'And how was your first combat experience?' she inquired, softly truculent.
He grinned involuntarily. 'Educational. Very educational. Ah—did you two happen to yell, charging through the door here?'
She blinked. 'Sure. Why?'
'Just a theory I'm working on …' He swept her a bow of good-humored mockery, and exited.
The shuttle hatch corridor was lonely and quiet, but for the soft susurrations of air circulation and other life support systems. Miles ducked through the dim shuttle tube and, free of the artificial gravity field of the larger ship's deck, floated forward. The mercenary pilot officer was still tied where they'd left him, his head and legs lolling in that strange bobbing fashion null-gee gave one. Miles cringed at the thought of having to explain the man's wound.
Miles's calculations about how to keep the man under control on the way to the brig were shattered when he came in view of his face. The mercenary's eyes were rolled back, his jaw slack; his face and forehead were mottled and flushed, and scorchingly hot to Miles's hesitant touch. His hands were waxen and icy, fingernails empurpled, pulse thready and erratic.
Horrified, Miles scrabbled at the knots binding him, then impatiently drew his dagger and cut the cords. Miles patted his face, on the side away from the dried streak of blood, but couldn't rouse him. The mercenary's body stiffened suddenly, and began to jerk and tremble, flailing in free fall. Miles ducked and swore, but his voice squeezed upwards to a squeak, and he clamped his jaw on it. Sickbay, then, get the man to sickbay, find the medtech and try to wake him up, or failing that, get Bothari, most experienced in first aid …
Miles wrestled the pilot officer through the shuttle's hatch. When he stepped from free fall into gravity he suddenly found out just how much the man weighed. Miles first tried to maneuver under him for a shoulder carry, to the imminent danger of his own bone structure. He staggered a few steps, then tried dragging him by the shoulders. Then the mercenary began to convulse again. Miles gave up and ran for sickbay and an antigrav stretcher, cursing the whole way, tears of frustration and fear in his voice.
It took time to get there, time to find the stretcher. Time to find Bothari on the ship's intercom and order him in a clipped fierce voice to report to sickbay with the medtech. Time to run back through the empty ship with the lift unit to the shuttle hatch corridor.
When Miles got there, the pilot officer had stopped breathing. His face was as waxy as his hands, his lips purple-blue as his nails, and the dried blood looked like a smear of colored chalk, dark and opaque.
Frantic haste made Miles's fingers seem thick and clumsy as he fitted the unit around the mercenary—he refused to think of it as 'the mercenary's body'—and floated him off the floor. Bothari arrived at sickbay as Miles was positioning the mercenary over an examining table and releasing the lift unit.
'What's the matter with him, Sergeant?' asked Miles urgently.
Bothari glanced over the still form. 'He's dead,' he said flatly, and turned away.
'Not yet, damn it!' cried Miles. 'We've got to be able to do something to revive him! Stimulants—heart massage—cryo-stasis—did you find the medtech?'
'Yes, but she was too heavily stunned to rouse.'
Miles swore again, and began ransacking drawers for recognizable medications and equipment. They were disorganized, the labels on the outside having, apparently, no relation to the contents.
'It won't do any good, my lord,' said Bothari, watching him impassively. 'You'd need a surgeon. Stroke.'
Miles rocked back on his heels, at last understanding what he had just seen. He pictured the implant wires, ripped through the man's brain, sliding against the rubbery covering of a major artery, slicing a fine groove in the heart-stressed tubule. Then the weakness propagated with every pulse until catastrophic failure filled the tissues with the killing hemorrhage.
Did this little sickbay even have a cryogenic chamber? Miles hastened around the room and into the next, searching. The freezing process would have to be started immediately, or brain death would be too far advanced to be reversed—never mind that he had only the vaguest idea of how patients were prepared for freezing, or how to operate the device, or …
There it was! A portable, a gleaming metal chamber on a float pallet looking faintly like some deep-sea probe. Miles's heart seemed to fill his throat. He approached it. Its power pack was empty, its gas canisters read fully discharged, and its control computer was laid open like some crudely dissected biological specimen. Out of order.
Bothari stood at rest, awaiting orders. 'Do you require anything further, my lord? I would feel easier if I could supervise the weapons search of the prisoners myself.' He gazed on the corpse with indifferent eyes.
'Yes—no . . .' Miles walked around the examining table at a distance. His eye was drawn to the dark clot on the pilot officer's right temple. 'What did you do with his implant nexus? '
Bothari looked mildly surprised, and checked his pockets. 'I still have it, my lord.'
Miles held out his hand for the crushed silver spider. It weighed no more than the button it resembled, its smooth surface concealing the complexity of the hundreds of kilometers of viral circuitry packed within.
Bothari frowned a little, watching his face. 'One casualty is not bad for an operation of this nature, my lord,' he offered. 'His life saved many, and not just on our side.'
'Ah,' said Miles, dry and cold. 'I'll keep that in mind, when I come to explain to my father how it was we happened to torture a prisoner to death.'
Bothari flinched. After a silence, he reiterated his interest in the ongoing weapons search, and Miles released him with a tired nod. 'I'll be along shortly.'
Miles puttered nervously around sickbay for a few more minutes, avoiding looking at the examining table.
