Mission accomplished.
I passed out.
19
It was not, unfortunately, the first time I’d woken up shivering and damp in the cold, hard plastic of an auto-doc. At least this time, they hadn’t had to grow any new parts of me. Probably.
I blinked, rubbed rheum out of my eyes and blinked again, finally able to see. Gravity. Not exactly Earth-standard, which meant I wasn’t in Transition Space on a ship. The lid of the cylinder was unlocked and I pushed it open, gasping at the sudden influx of cold air. The room was small, the walls plastic sheeting, and the medics moving from auto-doc to triage bed to auto-doc were wearing field utilities and not their white, shipboard uniforms. Point Barber, then. An aid station.
I tried sitting up, prepared for it to hurt, but it didn’t. However long I’d been in the auto-doc, the nanite bath had done good work. I was fairly sure my ribs had been shattered and while I hadn’t exactly been coherent enough for a complete self-assessment, I probably had some internal injuries as well. No one tried to stop me from climbing out of the cylinder, so I assumed it was all good now.
I didn’t wait for any of the harried, overworked medical staff to contradict the impression. There was a row of wire basket shelving against one of the walls, each filled with clothes, though none of them were labelled. I guess that would have been too much to ask when they were busy trying to save lives. I knelt down and began shuffling through them, hoping mine would be in there, hoping I would find something before someone came along and made a joke about my naked ass hanging out.
“You ain’t gonna find your stuff in there.”
I craned my neck around and saw the hulking, shaven-headed orderly resetting the controls of the auto-doc I’d been confined in. He wasn’t looking at me, still concentrating on his work, but he continued, just the same.
“Anyone who comes in unconscious,” he told me, “we cut their clothes off.”
“How long was I in?” I wondered, shifting my focus from finding my clothes to finding clothes my size. Because I wasn’t staying here long enough to get someone to pick me up.
“Thirty hours, ten minutes, fifteen seconds,” he said, reading off the display as he reset it. “Three cracked ribs, three compound fractures, punctured and collapsed lung, ruptured spleen, dislocated shoulder and a sprained left knee.”
This one. I pulled out a set of utility fatigues and checked the tags just to be sure. Yeah, this should fit. I wished for underwear, but you can’t have everything and I wouldn’t really want to wear someone else’s used underwear, anyway. I straightened and began pulling the clothes on. They felt weird and uncomfortable against my skin, still slightly damp and clammy from the biotic fluid of the nanite suspension, but not as weird and uncomfortable as walking around naked.
Boots. I needed boots. It took another half a minute to find some close enough to my size to strap them down tight and make do. I stood from securing them and found the gorilla staring at the name-plate on the chest of my fatigues.
“Captain Emil Johansen, huh?” he asked, an eyebrow shooting up. “That’s you?”
“It is now,” I assured him. “Any idea where Fourth Battalion of the 187th Armored might be?”
“Not a one,” he admitted. He jerked a thumb behind him toward the door flap. “But there’s a shitload of armored Marines and all their equipment down at the end of this row of tents. You can probably find out there.”
“Thanks, man.”
The inside of the aid station was air conditioned. Deltaville was not. Stepping through the airlock-style door of the tent, I was hit by a wave of humidity and I hoped like hell this was summer, because if it was winter, this planet would be pretty much uninhabitable the rest of the year.
After the heat, the next thing that struck me was the frenzy of activity. In the thirty hours I’d been under, I guess the city had been pacified, at least enough to start work on a temporary base. Construction bots were scuttling everywhere, tracked undercarriages clicking and clacking along as they poured buildfoam into prefab metal molds, laying down the dome structures that would serve until something more permanent could be built.
And we would be here permanently, I thought. At least for a few decades if I was any judge. There was no way we’d let the Tahni run their own government until we were damned sure they wouldn’t go back to building up their war machine and come right back after us for revenge. At least I hoped we’d learned that lesson in the first war.
It took me another twenty or thirty steps before I realized we were out at the spaceport, not too far past the battle where I’d gotten my ass kicked. My first clue was the screaming roar of jets and the descending wedge of a cargo lander, coming down nearly on top of the construction before it curved around and landed somewhere less than a klick away. My second was when I reached a gap in the construction and saw the remains of the administration building. There wasn’t much left of it, just a bare, forlorn framework standing watch over piles of debris. I couldn’t see if the mecha was still back there. I liked to think it was, waiting so I could come
