He inhaled gratefully as the thoracic and abdominal teams closed and stepped back to let the osteoplastic techs concentrate on her thigh. Her vitals kicked up a hair, and blood pressure was coming back up, but there was something weird about that EEG. Hardly surprising if there was brain damage after all she'd been through, but it might be those damned receptors.
He gestured to Commander Ford, and the neurologist swung her monitors into place. Receptor Two was clearly the primary node, and Okanami moved to watch Ford's screens over her shoulder as she adjusted her equipment with care and keyed a standard diagnostic pattern.
For just a moment, absolutely nothing happened, and Okanami frowned. There should be something-an implant series code, if nothing else. But there wasn't. And then, suddenly, there was, and buzzers began to scream.
A lurid warning code glared crimson, and the unconscious young woman's eyes jerked open. They were empty, like the jade-green windows of a deserted house, but the EEG spiked madly. The thigh incision was still open, and the med remotes locked down to hold her leg motionless as she started to rise. A surgeon flung himself forward, frantic to restrain that brutalized body, and the heel of her hand struck like a hammer, barely missing his solar plexus.
He shrieked as it smashed him to the floor, but the sound was half lost in the wail of a fresh alarm, and Okanami paled as the blood chem monitors went berserk. A binary agent neuro-toxin drove the toxicology readings up like missiles, and the security code on Ford's screen was joined by two more. Their access attempt had activated some sort of suicide override!
"Retract!" he screamed, but Ford was already stabbing buttons in frantic haste. Alarms wailed an instant longer, and then the implant monitor died. The toxicology alert ended in a dying warble as an even more potent counter-agent went after the half-formed toxin, and the amber-haired woman slumped back on the table, still and inert once more while the injured surgeon sobbed in agony and his fellows stared at one another in shock.
"You're lucky your man's still alive, Doctor."
Captain Okanami glowered at the ramrod-straight colonel in Marine space-black and green who stood beside him, watching the young woman in the bed. Medical monitors watched her with equal care-very cautiously, lest they trigger yet another untoward response from the theoretically helpless patient.
"I'm sure Commander Thompson will be delighted to hear that, Colonel McIlheny," the surgeon said frostily. "It only took us an hour and a half to put his diaphragm back together."
"Better that than what she was going for. If she'd been conscious he'd never have known what hit him-you can put that on your credit balance."
"What the hell is she?" Okanami demanded. "That wasn't her on the table, it was her goddamned augmentation processors running her!"
"That's exactly what it was," McIlheny agreed. "There are escape and evasion and an anti-interrogation subroutine buried in her primary processor." He turned to favor the surgeon with a measuring glance. "You Navy types aren't supposed to have anything to do with someone like her."
"Then she's one of yours?" Okanami's eyes were suddenly narrow.
"Close, but not quite. Our people often support her unit's operations, but she belongs- belonged-to the Imperial Cadre."
"Dear God," Okanami whispered. "A drop commando?"
"A drop commando." McIlheny shook his head. "Sorry it took so long, but the Cadre doesn't exactly leave its data lying around. The pirates took out Mathison's data base when they blew the governor's compound, so I queried the Corps files. They don't have much data specific to her. I've downloaded the available specs on her hardware and gotten your medical types cleared for it, but it's limited, and the bio data's even thinner, mostly just her retinal and genetic patterns. All I can say for sure is that this-" his chin jutted at the woman in the bed "-is Captain Alicia DeVries."
"Devries?! The Shallingsport DeVries?"
"The very one."
"She's not old enough," Okanami protested. "She can't be more than twenty-five, thirty years old!"
"Twenty-nine. She was nineteen when they made the drop-youngest master sergeant in Cadre history. They went in with ninety-five people. Seven of them came back out, but they brought the hostages with them." Okanami stared at the pale face on the pillow-an oval face, pretty, not beautiful, and almost gentle in repose.
"How in heaven did she wind up out here on the backside of nowhere?"
"I think she wanted some peace," McIlheny said sadly. "She got a commission, the Banner of Terra, and a twenty-year bonus from Shallingsport-earned every millicred of it, too. She sent in her papers five years ago and took the equivalent of a thirty-year retirement credit in colony allotments. Most of them do. The Core Worlds won't let them keep their hardware."
"Hard to blame them," Okanami observed, recalling Commander Thompson's injuries, and McIlheny stiffened!
"They're soldiers, Doctor." His voice was cold. "Not maniacs, not killing machines-soldiers." He held Okanami's eye with icy anger, and it was the captain who looked away.
"But that wasn't the only reason she headed here," the colonel resumed after a moment. "She used her allotment as the core claim on four prime sections, and her family settled out here."
Okanami sucked in air, and McIlheny nodded. His voice was flat when he continued.
"She wasn't there when the bastards landed. By the time she got back to the site, they'd murdered her entire family. Father, mother, younger sister and brother, grandfather, an aunt and uncle, and three cousins. All of them."
He reached out and touched the sleeping woman's shoulder, the gesture gentle and curiously vulnerable in such a big, hard-muscled man, then laid the long, heavy rifle he'd carried in across the bedside table. Okanami stared at it, considering the dozen or so regulations its presence violated, but the colonel continued before he could speak.
"I've been out to the homestead." His voice had turned soft. "She must've been out after direcat or snow wolves-this is a fourteen-millimeter Vorlund express, semi-auto with recoil buffers- and she went in after twenty-five men with body armor, grenades, and combat rifles." He stroked the rifle and met the doctor's eyes. "She got them all."
Okanami looked back down at her, then shook his head.
"That still doesn't explain it. By every medical standard I know, she should have died then and there, unless there's something in your download that says different, and I can't begin to imagine anything that might."
"Don't waste your time looking, because you won't find anything. Our med people agree entirely. Captain DeVries" -McIlheny touched the motionless shoulder once more "-can't possibly be alive."
"But she is," Okanami said quietly.
"Agreed." McIlheny left the rifle and turned away, waving politely for the doctor to precede him from the room. The surgeon was none too pleased to leave the weapon behind, even without a magazine, but the colonel's combat ribbons-and expression-stilled his protests. "That's why Admiral Gomez's report has a whole team of specialists on their way here at max."
Okanami led the way into the sparsely appointed lounge, empty at this late hour, and drew two cups of coffee. The two men sat at a table, and the colonel's eyes watched the open door as Okanami keyed a small hand reader to access the medical download. His cup steamed on the table, ignored, and his mouth tightened, as he realized just how scanty the data was. Every other entry ended in the words "FURTHER ACCESS RESTRICTED and some astronomical clearance level. McIlheny waited patiently until Okanami set the reader aside with sigh.
"Weird," he murmured, shaking his head as he reached for his own coffee, and the colonel chuckled without humor.
"Even weirder than you know. This is for your information only-that's straight from Admiral Gomez-but you're in charge of this case until a Cadre med team can get here, so I'm supposed to bring you up to speed. Or as up to speed as any of us are, anyway. Clear?"