had been shoved in among a group of injured, many of whom did not have beds, only cushions and thin mattresses. Casimir’s guard—one of his Torminel—stood by the head of the bed, rifle propped on his hip and a stolid expression on his furry face.
Casimir’s dark eyes turned to her as she approached, and his face lit with surprise and weary delight. She pressed herself to him and kissed his cheek. His flesh was cold. She drew back and touched his cheek, feeling the stubble against her fingertips.
His eyes were somber, though there remained the shadow of a smile on his face. “I thought I wouldn’t see you again,” he rumbled. “I’ve been making my will.”
“Wh-What?” she said, the word stumbling across her tongue.
“I’m leaving everything to you. I’m trying to remember the passwords to the hidden safes.”
She touched his chest, his arm. He was bloodless and cold. She looked at the Torminel. “Why’s he saying that?”
Uncertainty edged the Torminel’s voice. “The doctor said he’d be all right. He said the wounds weren’t serious and that he got all the shrapnel out. But the boss has this idea he’s dying, and so I’m recording his will on my sleeve display.” He gave an indifferent flip of one hand. “I mean, why not? He’ll laugh over it later.”
Casimir’s eyelids drooped over his solemn eyes. “Something went wrong. I can feel it.”
Sula looked at the bed displays and saw that none of them were lit. “Why isn’t the bed working?” she asked.
The Torminel looked at the displays as if seeing them for the first time. “The bed?” he said.
The bed wasn’t connected to the power supply, apparently because there were too many beds in the room. Someone else’s bed had to be disconnected before Casimir’s could be jacked into a wall socket. Casimir watched without interest as the displays over his head brightened as Sula told the bed that its contents was a male Terran.
Alarms began chirping immediately. Casimir’s blood pressure was dangerously low.
“I told you something was wrong,” he said. He spoke without apparent interest.
“Get a doctor!”Sula shouted at the Torminel. He raced for the door.
Sula turned back to Casimir and took his hand. He squeezed her fingers. His grip was still powerful.
“You’re going to need the money, after this,” he said. “I’m sorry I won’t be Lord Sula and help you loot the High City.”
His attitude outraged her. She had known him angry, known him convulsed with laughter, known him shocked and surprised. She had known his charm, known him filled with murderous fury. She had known him as a lover, boyish and a little greedy. She had known him cunning, planning the death of Naxids. She had known the way he tried to dominate almost every situation in which he found himself.
She had never before seen this passivity. It made her furious.
“You arenot going to die!” she commanded. “You are going to be Lord Sula.”
He looked at her through half-closed lids, and his lips quirked in a rueful smile. “I hope so,” he said, and then his eyes rolled back and he passed out. The bed chirped its alarm.
Casimir recovered somewhat as orderlies dashed to his bed. His eyes opened slightly and he surveyed without emotion the fuss going on around him. Then his eyes lighted on Sula, and he smiled again, his strong hand tightening on her fingers.
With her free hand Sula took from around her neck the beads One-Step had given her and put them in his hand.
“These will keep you safe,” she said.
His hand closed on the beads, and behind his heavy eyelids was a glow of pleasure.
A Daimong doctor arrived, dignified in sterile robes colored an elegant mauve, and he stared at the bed display for a long moment.
“I got every bit of shrapnel,” he said, as if offended by Casimir’s obstinate refusal to be well. “I don’t understand what’s wrong.”
Sula wanted to shriek at him, but instead caught a whiff of his dying flesh and felt her insides give a lurch.
Casimir passed out again. The doctor ordered the bed wheeled away for further tests. Sula tried to follow, but the doctor was strict.
“You’ll only be in the way,” he said. His unwinking eyes looked her up and down. “And you aren’t sterile.” Sula glanced down at herself, saw the spatters of blood and decided that the doctor was right.
Besides, the team and group leaders she’d ordered here were beginning to arrive.
“This place is a mess,” she told them after Casimir and the doctor had left. “You need to get it under control, and you need to get your people under control too.”
She assigned two of the groups to guard duty: Torminel and Lai-own, to alternate night and day. The rest she assigned to cleanup.
“From this point on,” she said, “and unless you’re needed for fighting, all your people are to be considered auxiliaries to the medical personnel. If an orderly asks one of your people for help, you’ll provide it. If a corridor needs cleaning, your people will clean it—and they’ll ask damn politely for the cleaning supplies too.
“And I want that pile of bodies at the entrance taken away. We want to keep this place sanitary, for all’s sake. If the morgue won’t hold the corpses, put them on a truck and take them to someplace that will.”
Something in her manner—possibly the rage and the spatters of blood—convinced them to obey without comment. At any rate, she didn’t have to shoot any more of her own command. It was only a few moments later that she saw some Terran fighters march past the door with their weapons slung over their backs and their hands busy with mops and buckets.
A whiff of dead flesh preceded the return of the Daimong doctor. He had an oversized datapad with a digitalized cross section of Casimir’s insides.
“I understand the problem now,” he said. “The young gentleman was hit by shrapnel from a rocket. The case was straightforward. All the scanners were in use, but with shrapnel we might as well use X ray, so that’s what we did. I located every bit of shrapnel and removed it.”
He showed Sula the display. Garish false color swam before her eyes.
“The problem is, the gentleman was wearing armor when he was wounded. A piece of the armor was driven into his body, and the armor is some kind of hard plastic that happens to be radiolucent, so the X rays didn’t see it. A full-body scan revealed the fragment, however, and here it is.”
Sula could make no sense of the display. She forced sound past the fist that had clamped on her throat.
“Tell me what’s happening,” she said.
The chiming Daimong voice took on a sonorous, practiced note of sympathy.
“The fragment of armor is in his liver. We can’t put fluids into him fast enough to counteract the bleeding. I’ll be operating as soon as the gentleman is prepped, but it’s bound to be a mess.”
She looked at him. “Get him fixed,” she said.
Superiority rang in the doctor’s voice. “I’ll do what’s possible, but please consider how hard it is to reassemble a Terran liver once it’s been cut up.”
The doctor floated out of the room, leaving Sula with the unsettling image in her mind. She knew it would be a while before she heard anything of Casimir, and she didn’t want to wait while acid chewed on her insides, so she made an impromptu inspection of the hospital, followed in silence by One-Step and Casimir’s Torminel bodyguard. Progress was being made, but the place was still in chaos, and more qualified personnel were clearly needed. She called Macnamara to tell him to have all broadcast stations put out a call for medical personnel and volunteers to report to the Glory of Hygeine Hospital.
“Immediately, my lady,” Macnamara said. There was a pause while he gave orders, after which Sula asked him for a report.
“The Naxids made another try at the funicular,” Macnamara said, “and it didn’t go any better than last time. Other than that, I’ve just been trying to get an idea of where our units actuallyare . A lot of them seem to have just disappeared.” There was a pause, and then he added, “It’s lunchtime. Maybe they’ll report when they’ve eaten.”
Sula told him to start putting together a staff.
“Butwho ?”
