“We got to her in time,” the man in white said reassuringly. “Actually, your people got to her in time and pulled her out while we still had something to work with. It’s going to take time and a lot of regen to put her back on her feet, but the actual repairs will be fairly routine. Extensive, but routine.”
“You have a different definition of ‘routine’ from me, Doctor,” the Marine officer said dryly, then looked back down at Maneka.
“Are you with us now, Lieutenant?” he asked, and she recognized the booming thunder which had disturbed her darkness in the quiet question.
She looked up at him, then tried to speak. Only a croak came out, and she licked dry, cracked lips with a tongue made of leftover leather. A hand reached down, holding a glass with a straw, and Maneka shuddered in raw, sensual pleasure as the unbelievable relief of ice water flowed down her throat.
“Better?” the Marine asked, and she nodded.
“Yes, sir,” she got out in a rusty croak. She stopped and cleared her throat hard enough to make her floating head reel, then tried again. “Thank you.”
At least this time it sounded a little like her, she thought.
Her brain was beginning to function once more, although her thoughts remained far from clear. She found herself wondering how she could possibly not feel the pain of her wounds, then gave a distant sort of mental snort. No doubt they had an entire battalion of pain suppressors focused on her. Which probably helped explain the haziness of her mental processes, now that she thought about it.
As if he’d read her thoughts, the man in white reached out, twiddling his fingers on a virtual keyboard, and the wooly blanket slipped back from the front of her brain. A faint wash of pain—an echo of something she sensed was vast and terrible, but which was not allowed to touch her—came with the clarity, and she swallowed again, then gave him a tiny nod of thanks.
“No more than that, Lieutenant,” the doctor said gruffly. “You looked like someone who wanted her mind working, but you’ll have to settle for where you are for the moment.”
“Yes, sir.” Her voice was still rusty and broken-sounding in her own ears, but her speech was less slurred and she felt more of her brain cells rousing to action.
“I’m Colonel-well, Brigadier-Shallek, Lieutenant Trevor,” the Marine said, and she returned her working eye to him. “I apologize for disturbing you, but they’re going to be shipping you off-world this afternoon, and I wanted to speak to you personally before they do.”
“Off-world?” Maneka repeated. “Sir?” she added hastily, and he gave her a smile. It was a very small smile, shadowed with things that were far from humorous, but it was real.
“For just this minute, Lieutenant, don’t worry about military courtesy,” he suggested gently.
She nodded on her pillow, but her clearer brain was beginning to function properly, and she realized that, impossible though it seemed, they must have won. It was the only way anyone could be talking about sending anyone off-world. And the only way she could still be alive.
“The reason I wanted to talk to you, Lieutenant, was to thank you,” the Marine officer continued after a moment. She looked at him, and he twitched one hand, palm uppermost, between them. “That thanks comes from me personally, from the Ninth Marines—what’s left of us—and from every living human on Chartres. Because without you and your Battalion, none of us would be alive today.”
“The Battalion—?” Maneka began, and Shallek squeezed her good shoulder again.
“You broke them, Lieutenant,” he said simply. “I doubt anyone would have believed it if they hadn’t seen it, but you broke them. You tore a hole ten kilometers wide right through the middle of their line, you took out every Surtur they had, and then you smashed their central command post. Apparently, they hadn’t had time yet to put in a backup CP, and when you took it out, their command and control went straight to hell. As did they, over the space of the next few hours.”
He smiled again, and this time his smile was harsh and ugly.
“It didn’t come cheap,” he went on after a moment. “Not for any of us. I’m the senior ranking officer the Ninth has left, and the entire ‘Division’ isn’t really more than one understrength brigade, but there isn’t a breathing Dog Boy on Chartres. On your way in, the Thirty-Ninth also took out what appears to have been their entire surviving fleet strength in the system after Commodore Selkirk got done with them, and Admiral Kwang’s relief task force got through to us two days ago. We lost almost seven hundred million people on Chartres, Lieutenant, but almost two billion others are alive because of you. Because of all of us, I suppose, but we couldn’t have done any of it without the Thirty-Ninth.”
Maneka looked at him, and a cold, icy fist squeezed her heart. He hadn’t said a word about the Battalion’s casualties, and he would have… unless he knew how much it was going to hurt when he did.
She closed her eye for just a moment, wishing with all her heart that she was still unconscious, but she wasn’t. And because she wasn’t, she had no choice.
“And the Battalion, sir?” she heard her voice ask levelly, almost as if it belonged to someone else entirely.
“And the Battalion… paid the price, Lieutenant,” Shallek said, meeting her single cobalt-blue eye unflinchingly. It wasn’t easy for him, she could see that, but he owed her honesty, and he paid in the coin of candor. Then he drew a deep breath.
“You’re the only surviving Bolo commander,” he said with terrible gentleness, and she stared at him in disbelief.
No, a small, stern voice deep within her said with ruthless clarity. Not disbelief. Denial.
But even as she thought that, she felt a wild, sudden surge of hope. Shallek had called her the only surviving Bolo commander, and that meant “Benjy?” she said. “Sir, Benjy—my Bolo. How badly is he damaged?”
Shallek looked at her, still meeting her gaze, and then, after a moment, shook his head.
“He didn’t make it, Lieutenant,” he said softly, and his gentle compassion was a dagger of fiery ice buried in her still-beating heart.
He was wrong. He had to be wrong. She was alive. That meant Benjy had to have survived, too, or she would have died in his destruction. She should have died in his destruction.
“The Bolo techs tell me one of your Bolos may survive,” Shallek went on and that same gentle voice. “Unit One-Seven-Niner-Lima-Alpha-Zebra. I understand his survival center is still intact, and the hit that took out his command deck and main personality center did surprisingly little additional damage. But every other unit of the Thirty-Ninth Battalion was destroyed in action.”
“But… but how—?” Her left hand moved weakly, gesturing around her at the hospital room and the medical equipment surrounding her bed, and Shallek shook his head.
“He got your survival capsule closed and pumped his entire command deck full of fire suppressant,” Shallek said. “The capsule’s emergency auto-medic kept you alive, and the suppressant had time to set its matrix before—”
He broke off, and Maneka’s eye squeezed shut in understanding. The fire suppressing foam used in the Bolos’ damage control systems was less effective at actually suppressing fires than other technologies might have been, but it was retained because within twenty seconds of deployment it set up into an artificial “alloy” almost as tough as the flintsteel Bolo warhulls had once been made of. Yet for all its toughness, it dissolved almost instantly under the touch of the proper nanotech “solvent.”
Benjy had used it to save her life. As he waded into that horrendous sea of fire, he had encased her duralloy capsule inside what was effectively a block of solid armor over three meters across.