"Aff."
Aidan was happy that Kael Pershaw was so intent on the briefing that he had not noticed the look of surprise that must have glimmered briefly in his eyes. Joanna! Not only was this mission cursed from the start, not only did it require traversing the cursed Blood Swamp, not only was his unit diminished in weaponry, not only was the objective at the end of impossible terrain, but the objective itself was Joanna. And if Star Captain Joanna was not Aidan's own curse, then nobody was. He would rather have gone barefoot across a field of poisonous snakes, carrying burning sticks in his arms, with a cloud of methane gas settling around his head, than have to see Joanna again.
7
Joanna came to, leaving behind a dream of drowning in murky water. She came to choking, for a moment not sure if the dream was real after all, or if her desperate need for air originated elsewhere. She tried to inhale but got only a trace of air, just enough to make her conscious that her lungs seemed crushed from behind. The left side of her face was pressed against something very hard. It felt like rock. She moved her face slightly, and the substance seemed to abrade her skin like rock. But what was it pressed so hard against the rest of her face? Her next attempt to breathe seemed to get a bit more air, plus the smell of something very wet. Water? No, something else. Something with a familiar, somewhat cloying odor. It was the smell of a battlefield. Blood, it was blood. Was she smelling her own blood, pooled somewhere in the ground nearby? And what was pressing against her? The next breath added an aroma of cloth, very wet cloth.
She tried to move her body. What little movement she could accomplish was painful. A fierce pain ran up and down her back and legs, and the only movement she could manage was a twitch of her left foot. Nothing much happened when she concentrated on her arms. It was as if they had been shot off at the shoulder, like some armless 'Mech. The lack of feeling frightened her, but then came a tingling in her right hand. Knowing that she was at least one-armed brought a bizarre sense of relief.
Another breath. Nothing new. Then, suddenly, by her ear, there was an explosion. At first she thought the sound might be some signal that accompanied death, but no, she was still alive when the next moment arrived. Joanna would have been angry about dying, a whirling tornado of wrath. She intended to die on a battlefield, and that was that. This could not be death.
Just as she felt the warmth of an expired breath on her right cheek and the unmistakable stale odor of carbon dioxide contaminated by some recently ingested and unpleasant food, she abruptly understood her plight. Someone was lying on her, chest against her face, head near hers. Something else pressed down on her body, though she did not know what it was. For the moment, that was all right. At least she had defined something.
Then came another explosion of sound, another moan apparently. Whatever it was, the head shifted, then slid a bit, creating an opening, and air seemed to rush in at Joanna's face. The cloth that had been suffocating her must have been moved along with the body. She took several deep breaths, trying to get as much as she could in case the head shifted again and cut off the air.
The body moved again and her right hand was free. Reaching up and behind her, she felt the muscles in her shoulder erupt with agony. Her fingertips came down on skin, but she could not tell where on the head it was located. Her fingers roamed around, brushing against what felt like a cheekbone and going backward to some hair and an identifiable ear. Twisting her hand unnaturally, straining her wrist, she was able to grab the ear and pull weakly at it. The jerking motion moved the head, and Joanna's own head felt freer. Now her angle was really difficult. Her shoulder throbbed, her wrist threatened to break, but she managed to grab some hair and, tugging at it, somehow made the head slide to her aching shoulder.
She lifted her head from the ground, perhaps a centimeter or two, her neck muscles competing with her shoulder and wrist for pain. She could not open the eye that had been groundside, but that did not matter. She could not make out anything around her with the other one. It was apparently night, and whatever the landscape around them, everything was pitch dark.
With the clearer air came the unmistakable smell of charred matter. Something nearby had burned. But there could be no fire now, for there was no light.
She blinked her open eye several times, but nothing clarified itself for her vision. Settling her head back again to relieve the pain, she considered her situation.
No matter what she did, she could not move her body. Her right arm, pain running up and down it, could be moved, but could not do much. She could use it to move the body on top of her some more, but would have to wait a few minutes until the arm and her shoulder felt better.
No matter what her other physical incapacities, she still had one powerful weapon left in her arsenal. Her voice.
Drawing in a good lungful of air, she held the breath for a moment, then let it out in one massive, earth-shaking scream. It was the scream of the jade falcon, as taught her by a long-forgotten sibparent, back in the days when she was a mewling, spitting child of a sibko. She had been told she reproduced the bird's sound rather well, though it had been years since she had heard one, and then only at a distance.
The head above her was abruptly dislodged. It hit the rocky ground with a thud. "Wha—," said the person. It was a male voice, but she did not recognize it.
"Get up, you," Joanna said. She was distressed at the paltriness of her vocabulary in a crisis situation.
The man slid forward, bumping her head. She ignored the new pain. "I said get up!"
"What? I'll—oh damn damn damn!"
"What is it?"
"My arms. I can't move them."
"Nomad? Is it you?"
"I'll have a committee study the subject. Of course it's me, Joanna."
"Do not address me familiarly."
"Joanna, we are rammed together on a hillside, both of us in bad shape. It's no time for formalities."
"I will put you on report."
"Do what you will. Oh, damn!"
"Why are you so profane?"
"You would let out a few profanities, too, if both your arms were in pain. I can't move them. Therefore, I cannot get up. I can tell by the way my legs are resting at a higher level than my head that we are on a hill. My body is twisted in such a way that I have a steady ache in both sides. I can move my legs, but there seem to be things on either side of them, preventing them from doing anything helpful. That is my report, Star Captain. Your move."
Joanna tested everything in her body that was supposed to move but obtained only infinitesimal responses from them.
"You cannot move your arms, Nomad?"
"I have been trying. One arm is getting numb, but I can get some movement from the other. What's hurting there is my hand. Each time I move the arm, there is a sharp—oohh, there it is again. Okay. Okay. I think if I—I think I can. There. Well, that was something."
"Whatwas something?"
"I am propping myself up on my elbow. I can twist onto my side, but I'm afraid that is about all. Now what?"
"You stupid fool!"
"Insults are not of much use just now, Joanna. Why don't you let off another of those yells or whatever it was?"
"I would strangle you if—"
"If you had the use of your arms."
"I have one arm free. I could do it with that, your neck is so scrawny."
"The way I feel right now, I might rest my neck in your hand and let you do it."
Joanna almost laughed. She had to admit that he had the advantage on her.
"A jade falcon," she said.