The three soldiers, two men and one woman, were thin, with haunted, confused eyes. “They look like hell,” Marphissa said to the senior medical specialist who was examining them. All three had already had med packs slapped on their arms, the packs providing intravenous nourishment, fluid replacement, and antishock drugs.
“They’re in awful shape, Kommodor,” the medical specialist paused to report.
“Keep working,” Marphissa said. “Brief me as you work.”
“Yes, Kommodor,” the medical specialist replied gratefully, maintaining the formal tones of an official report as he continued working. “Living in battle armor for so long is stressful under the best of conditions. They were also conserving energy, and their available food and water, and running their armor life support on filters that should have been cleaned or replaced long before.”
“Are any of them in danger?”
The specialist paused to consider the question. “No, Kommodor. Not now that they are receiving proper care. They will require extensive recovery time.”
The soldiers, though dazed, had slowly shifted their gazes to Marphissa and appeared to have realized that she was a superior. All three began trying to rise from their seats and come to attention. “Sit down!” Marphissa ordered, and the three instantly dropped back down. “Report.”
One of the men blinked, then began reciting a standard Syndicate accounting for himself. “Capek, Katsuo, Worker Third Class, First Squad, Eighth Platoon, Third Company, Nine Hundred Seventy-First Ground Forces Brigade. Immediate Superior Worker First Class Adalberto Horgens. Unit Commander—”
“Enough.” Marphissa looked at the other two. “Your names and ranks, only.”
“Dinapoli, Mbali, Worker Fourth Class,” the woman said.
“Keesler… Padraig… Worker Fourth… Class,” the second man managed to recite. He was in the worst shape of the three, his eyes having trouble focusing on Marphissa.
Marphissa looked at Capek, who was watching her with a bewildered expression as he tried to figure out her rank from her uniform. “What happened?”
“Honored, um—”
“Do not worry about titles. Just tell me what happened.”
Capek blinked again, but with a clear order to follow he managed to rally his thoughts. “We were on a wide patrol… checking out areas far from Iwa City Complex. Our orders were to search for… for… anything out of the ordinary. My supervisor told me that we were searching for… infiltrators. On the third day of our patrol, we received an emergency alert that hostile forces had entered the star system. We were ordered to… return to Iwa Complex to defend the city. Two hours later, we were ordered to hold positions and… prepare to ride out orbital bombardment.”
He stopped, his gaze on Marphissa growing troubled. “Are we prisoners, honored… ?”
“No,” Marphissa said. “My ship, our forces, did not attack Iwa. What happened after you received orders to dig in?”
“Our unit commander told us to head away from the city. Get as far away as we could, he said. All units were… dispersing.” Capek paused, trying unsuccessfully to swallow and continue his report.
“We got far enough out,” the woman took up the tale, her voice thin with exhaustion. “We saw the rocks come down and felt the impacts, saw the flashes and the debris clouds even from as far away as we were. All comms lost. We could not contact anyone. Worker First Class Horgens ordered us to head back toward the city.” She paused, her face twitching. “Toward where the city had been. We would fight to the death, he said.”
Capek managed to start speaking again. “We traveled for over a day, on foot. It got very hard when we hit the bombardment zone. Very hard.” He appeared to be about to cry. “They destroyed… everything. We saw their ships coming down. Not like ours. Not Alliance.”
“Like turtles?” Marphissa prodded. “Big turtle shapes?”
“Yes,” the woman soldier agreed. “Different sizes. They came down. Worker Horgens led us toward them.”
“Dispersed column formation,” Capek said. “Standard dispersed column formation. Horgens was in center. Then… his head exploded. We went to ground. Others dying. We could see. I realized our links… were… being… targeted. I told Di— Dinapoli and K—Keesler, only two near to me, to kill links. Total elec… tronic silence.” He stopped again, staring at nothing but clearly seeing the slaughter of his comrades.
“You three survived,” Marphissa said, “because you went totally passive. Did you see the enemy?”
Capek focused back on Marphissa as if momentarily uncertain of where he was, then shook his head. “Long-range smart rounds… I think. Nobody close to see us. They came much later, we are certain. To take away bodies.”
The woman spoke once more. “We didn’t move for… an hour? Then Worker Capek said we should get spare power packs and rations off the dead. We would need them. But don’t take packs already plugged in. If the enemy saw armor had been looted… they would come looking for us.”
“That was smart, Worker Capek,” Marphissa said. “You’ve been hiding since then?”
“Hiding, watching their ships come and go. No ships for a while, though.” Capek’s eyes went distant again for a moment. “Long time. Lying quiet, conserving power. Not transmitting. Cold. Air getting bad. Not enough water, food. Make it last. Someone will come. Someone will come.”
She thought about how many days those soldiers had spent suffering and in fear, nursing a wild hope that rescue would arrive. Marphissa looked over them again, seeing how thin they were, their badly cracked lips, the bleeding skin sores from their long time in Syndicate armor, the eyes that twitched around as if expecting to wake and discover that this was a dream. “How did they manage to run to the cage?” she asked the medical specialist.
He shrugged. “In extreme conditions, people find strength sometimes. They knew if they didn’t get in that cage they would die.”
“But they will be all right now?”
“It will take some time, Kommodor. I will soon sedate them and strap them down, because”—he tapped his head—“nightmares come, you know. After this sort of thing. Nightmares come.”
“I know.” She stood up, stopping with a stern gesture the automatic attempts by the three soldiers to rise again as well. “You will rest now. You are safe. I will speak with you again when you are better.”
Capek tried to stand yet again despite his unsteadiness, and shakily recited the standard Syndicate Acceptance of Responsibility. “This worker is responsible for the failure. My coworkers did not—”
“There was no failure,” Marphissa said.
“You came,” the woman said. “You came for the CEO. We failed to—”
“We came for you.”
“But… we’re just workers.”
“You are our comrades,” Marphissa said. “We do not leave anyone behind.”
As she walked back toward her stateroom to try to get some rest, Marphissa realized that was why the crew had cheered. It wasn’t simply that they had plucked three soldiers away from certain death, it was that those soldiers were “just workers.” They hadn’t been saved because they were high-ranking executives or CEOs. The risk had been run, the chance taken, even though the objects of the rescue were “just workers.”
The Syndicate never would have approved such an operation, Marphissa knew. It wouldn’t have been cost-effective. The risks would have been out of proportion to the possible gains, as precisely calculated in spreadsheets that assigned the same sort of carefully calibrated values to human beings as they did to pieces of equipment. The workers would have been left to their fates, slowly dying as they waited in vain for rescue.