Angles of Attack (23 page)

“Anything on active?” Colonel Campbell asks.

“Some short-range ship-to-ship comms. Nothing directed our way, though.”

“We just stole an OCS out of the docking clamps and shot it out with a fleet destroyer,” Major Renner muses. “Why isn’t half the remaining fleet looking for us with all their active sensors running?”

“Good question. This whole thing stinks from top to bottom.” Colonel Campbell reaches into the holographic plot display and draws a trajectory with his finger.

“Do a corrective boost, and bring us around the other side of Independence. I want to get a better idea of what’s going on. Passive sensors only.”

“Aye, sir.” The XO reads off the new course data to the helmsman.

“Three-second burn, on my mark.”

“Three-second burn, aye.”

The pleasant numbness wrapped around my left hand is slowly giving way to a decidedly uncomfortable throbbing ache that gets sharper by the minute. The meds in the trauma pack are wearing off. I stick my left hand underneath my right armpit and grimace at the pressure. I didn’t spend much time yet thinking about what’s underneath that trauma pack—or rather, what isn’t there anymore—and I don’t really care to.

“Mr. Grayson,” Colonel Campbell says.

“Sir?”

“You look like absolute hell. Go to sick bay and have the medical officer look at that. You’re bleeding all over my CIC, son.”

I manage to muster a half-cocked grin. “Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.”

I turn and walk toward the CIC hatch, leaving
Indy
’s command crew to their work. Now that it looks like we won’t blow up in the next few seconds or minutes, I suppose I have the luxury of seeing to my own battle damage.

When I step through the hatch and into the passageway beyond, the tension goes out of me like the oxygen from a decompressing airlock, and I just feel drained. We made it through to Earth, against all odds. I should be in a fleet mess right now, eating fresh food and catching up on messages from Halley and my mother. Instead I am in a battle-weary warship again, on the run from our own people, and on my way to see how much of my left hand I’ll get to keep. Right now I very much wish I had stayed on New Svalbard with Sergeant Fallon and her fellow HD grunts.

Not the best idea you have this week
, I think, and the voice in my head has a heavy Russian accent.

CHAPTER 13

Indy
’s medical specialist is a female corpsman named Randall. She’s an E-6, a staff sergeant like me, and I’ve seen her in the NCO mess often, but we’ve not had any interactions other than me picking up some no-go pills from sick bay a few times on our trip from New Svalbard.

“The broken nose I can fix in about five minutes,” she says when she has examined my various defects. “Won’t even leave a mark. That hand, though. How’d you manage that?”

“Reached in front of a muzzle. I think the blast did more damage than the bullets.”

“Oh, they both did their share,” she says. “Trauma pack meds wearing off yet?”

I nod and grimace in reply. She scoots back her examination chair and gets up.
Indy
’s sick bay is tiny, just a little room about twice the size of my berth, and much of it is taken up by the treatment and surgery chair. There are lockers lined up in front of one of the bulkheads, and she opens one and takes out an injector unit. I try to ignore the searing pain in my left hand while she draws up a dose of whatever it is she’s about to give me.

“This will take the edge off. I don’t think you’re a dope seeker.” She winks at me and scoots back over to the treatment chair. “Annnnd . . . here we go.”

I feel the pinprick of the needle in the hollow of my left arm. Almost instantly, I feel a wave of dizziness and nausea flooding my brain at an alarming speed.

“Hang in there for a second, and it will pass,” Corpsman Randall says. “Feels bad at first, but it gets better.”

“It gets better” is a massive understatement. A few moments after the initial feeling of intense nausea that almost makes me throw up, a massive wave of relaxation and relief washes over me. The pain in my hand goes from almost unbearable to nonexistent in just a few seconds. I let my head tilt back against the headrest of the chair and let out a loud sigh.

“Not bad, huh? Modern pharmaceutics are magic in a syringe.”

“Dark, delicious magic,” I murmur, and she laughs.

“I’m going to immobilize your left arm for a bit and clean up this mess. Try not to look at it. Take a nap if you want. I don’t mind.”

“Not really in the mood for a nap,” I say, but my eyelids are getting heavy as I say it. Whatever she put into my bloodstream not only took away all the pain, it also put me into a very relaxed mood. I could almost forget the fact that I am on a damaged warship in the middle of what is now a three-front war. Compared to the way I’ve been feeling since we left Earth to be stranded in the Fomalhaut system, this is damn near euphoria. I close my eyes and listen to the ever-present humming of the ship’s environmental and life-support systems.

“How did you end up on
Indy
?” Randall asks. “I’ve seen you around since New Svalbard, but I never asked.”

“I’m a combat controller,” I mumble. “I’m babysitting the Russian sergeant who has the access codes to the SRA Alcubierre node. Which is a tightly guarded secret, by the way.”

“I won’t tell,” she says.

My left arm is numb now, and I only feel anything from that part of my body when Corpsman Randall tugs on my hand hard enough to move the arm in its shoulder joint. I remember her advice and keep my eyes closed and away from whatever mess she’s stitching up.

“I served under the skipper once,” I say. “Five years ago, on
Versailles
. At first contact with the Lankies.”

“You were there, huh? I was just out of boot when that happened.”

“Where’d you go to boot?” I ask.

“NACRD Orem. January to March ’08.”

“No shit? Me, too. Which platoon?”

“1068.”

“I was 1066,” I say. “Corpsman Randall, it looks like our boots churned some of the same dust.”

“At the same time,” she says. “Small world.”

“Getting smaller all the time,” I say. I wonder how many graduates of our respective boot camp platoons have been killed in action. There were a whole lot of destroyed hulls in orbit around Mars—dozens of ships, thousands of sailors.

“You made staff sergeant pretty fast,” I say. “I thought I got to E-6 quickly.”

“Yeah, well. Corpsman billet means you’re always in demand. Same as you, I imagine. You’re doing good, by the way, all things considered. This shouldn’t be too much of a bother.”

“Whatever you gave me, I’m not sure I’d mind if you started sawing that arm off.”

“I don’t think it’s going to come to that,” she says. “Although you got yourself pretty mangled, Staff Sergeant.”

“Andrew,” I say. “We’re the same rank. Same time in service.”

“Nancy,” she says. “Now use this opportunity to take a nap while I stitch you up and fix that broken nose. We may be the same rank, but you’re in my sick bay, and you will follow the orders of your medical professional.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

I do as ordered and let the medication and the ambient noise of
Indy
’s distant business lull me into a warm and easy sleep.

When Corpsman Randall wakes me up again, the warm and pleasant feeling from the medication is mostly gone. My left arm is still numb, but my brain is no longer fuzzy, and even if there had been any of the slight euphoria left, it would have dissipated the moment I opened my eyes and looked down at my hand. It looks asymmetrical, off balance, more like a claw than the appendage I’ve been using to manipulate my environment for the last quarter century. Where before the edge of my hand flared out into a slight fleshy curve, now there’s a straight line going from my wrist to the base of my middle finger, which is now the outmost digit. The wound is dressed in new adhesive bandage, so I can’t see what the damage looks like after the corpsman’s cleanup job, but it looks like there’s an awful lot of substance gone.

“How are you feeling?” she asks.

“Like I had too much lousy soy beer last night,” I reply without taking my eyes off the bandage. “What’s the verdict on the hand?”

“The bad news is that your guitar-playing days are over.”

“I never learned to play an instrument. Guess I won’t be starting, either.”

“They’ll fit you for new fingers at Great Lakes,” Randall says. “We’ve come a long way in the medical cybernetics field. Won’t be your old fingers, but they’ll work just as well.”

“Yeah, they can do magic now,” I say. “Friend of mine has a new lower leg courtesy of the Medical Corps. She says it’s much better than the old one. Says she wouldn’t mind having another to match the set.”

“I cleaned everything up and removed all the bone shards. Whatever hit your hand pulverized both your MCP joints on the outer two fingers.”

“The what?”

“Metacarpophalangeal joints,” she says, and holds up her hand. She taps the knuckle joints at the base of her fingers. “Those right there. That’s going to be a bitch to fix. And they’ll need to do it soon if they want to reconnect those nerve endings.”

“How soon?”

“The sooner, the better,” Randall says. “I just cleared up the worst of the mess and fused you up a bit. That hand needs a lot more attention than I am qualified to give. You need to see a fleet physician, and soon.”

“That may be a problem.” I sit up and wince. “I don’t think we’re on speaking terms with the fleet right now.”

She turns to her medicine cabinets again and takes out a medication cylinder. She pops it open, verifies the contents, and closes it again. Then she hands it to me. I take it with my good hand.

“I’m not going to put a DNA lock on those. Take for pain as needed. No more than two every four hours, though, or you’ll be shitting bricks for a month straight. And don’t operate a starship or heavy ordnance-loading gear. There’s a fair chance these won’t do the job completely for the sort of pain you’ll have soon. If it gets too much, come to me and I’ll shoot you up with something stronger.”

“Thanks.” I put the cylinder into the chest pocket of my CDU blouse, which is still stained with the blood from my nose. “What if I can’t get this hand seen by a navy doc for a month or two?”

“Then you may have to retrain how to tie your boots with a hand and a half,” Corpsman Randall says.

The combat information center is back to its usual level of focused activity when I walk through the hatch again.
Indy
’s supply sergeant issued me a new set of fatigues, and the blood is gone from my face, but the thick adhesive bandage pack on my hand keeps me from feeling restored.

“Mr. Grayson,” the colonel says when he sees me. “How’s the hand?”

“What’s left of it seems fine,” I say. “Two fingers still gone, though.”

Colonel Campbell grimaces when he sees my wrapped hand. “Those stupid, trigger-happy SP morons.”

“He didn’t mean to shoot me. He meant to put one into Dmitry.”

“Yeah, I saw that. If it’s any consolation at all, your fingers bought us our return trip to Fomalhaut. XO?”

“Yes, sir,” Major Renner says.