“Good. If you need anything, let me know.”
“Sir.”
As promised, Michael made it to the sick bay inside Chief Kemble’s deadline after a short comm with Chen. The captain of 166 had sounded relieved to get a finish time for the repairs to 387. Clearly, hanging around in hostile Hammer space was not something he wanted to do any more than Michael did. Cosmo Reilly had cleared 387 to maneuver, the final rail-gun slug shaking the main engines up a bit, but nothing that a bit of recalibration couldn’t fix. Even better, Reilly and his team were well on the way to getting the ship jump-capable. With detailed designs for the emergency repairs uploaded to Mother, she should have the new ship mass distribution model completed within the hour. Terranova might be a distant 270 light-years away, but Michael was beginning to allow himself to believe that they’d be dropping in-system inside six days.
As he looked into the sick bay, the thought of going home almost overwhelmed him, and at that instant he would have given almost anything to be in Anna’s arms, to be home with the people he loved. He’d felt physically sick when he saw that Damishqui had been hit, but thank God, Anna had not been on the casualty list. Please God, get her home safely, he prayed.
As the sick bay air lock safety lights switched to green, Michael firmly shoved all thoughts of Anna into a distant corner of his mind. Like it or not, he was the skipper of 387, and he had a ship and what was left of 387’s crew to get home safely first.
The instant he stepped into the sick bay, Chief Kemble and her team were on him like a rash. Michael had been dreading what he might find, so he was pleased to see that the crash bags with the ship’s dead had been moved to the cargo containers for the trip home. The way he felt, it was bad enough just thinking about them. Seeing the physical evidence, seeing a line of crash bags, would have been too much.
It was the work of only moments for Kemble’s team to strip Michael’s suit off, leaving him standing in a ship suit saturated with a gruesome mix of reddish-black blood and bright green woundfoam. As he looked down at himself, he found it hard believe that he’d lost so much blood. He was drenched in it. But he stood only for a second until the accumulated insult and injury done to his long-suffering body finally overwhelmed him.
With a tired sigh, Michael’s eyes rolled up into his head, and he crumpled like an empty sack to the deck.
Michael was swimming in a strange sort of pool, the water deep, thick, and red. Something heavy was holding him back.
Slowly, doggedly, he fought his way to the surface, and as he did, the everyday sounds of a ship began to seep into a head stuffed full of cotton wool. But eventually he made it, opening his eyes to see Chief Kemble leaning over him, her face a mixture of amusement and concern.
“Hello, sir. The AI said you were coming back to us.”
“Try and keep me away,” Michael mumbled, his mouth thick.
“That’s what I said. Okay. How are you feeling?”
“Like shit. And sore all over.”
Kemble nodded sympathetically. If it were up to her and the medical AI, she’d have had Michael in a regen tank immediately, but she wasn’t going to waste her time asking. If her years in the Fleet had taught her anything, it was not to try to persuade a ship’s captain to put self first and duty second.
“You will be, I’m afraid. You have very severe bruising to your lower back and ribs and a lot of tendon damage. That will account for most of the pain. You managed to break your nose, but not too badly, but the rest of the face is just bruised. The base hospital will take care of that and make it look pretty again. Your left leg is the real problem. It’s a real mess, and I’m not at all sure how you’ve even been able to walk. Pity we didn’t get to it a lot sooner. It’s been sliced up pretty badly, so the medibots have been busy putting it all back together again, and we’ve transfused repairbots in to try to repair the muscle and tendon damage. It’s going to hurt like hell, but it’ll mend in time. You’ll just need to go easy on it. I’ve held off the painkillers until you surfaced, but we’ve loaded you up with drugbots, so just comm them when the pain gets to be too much.”
Michael nodded as he tried to take it all in. All he knew was that the longer he was awake, the more everything seemed to hurt.
Kemble offered him a large beaker with pale blue fluid in it. “Now drink this. We need to get you rehydrated. You’ll feel a lot better in a moment.”
Gratefully, Michael brought the large beaker of fluid that Kemble was holding up to his mouth, suddenly craving every sweet drop. “More. Please.”
Two more beakers later, Michael did indeed feel better. Much better, in fact, to the point where as Kemble turned to put the beaker back, he sat himself up. Wincing, he quickly wished he hadn’t, bruised ribs and back screaming in protest as the movement pulled at torn ligaments and ripped muscles. Ignoring the pain, he swung himself off the bunk to stand, swaying slightly, looking around for his suit, his left leg sore and stiff under the plasfiber bandages. He commed the drugbots to give him painkillers and sighed in relief as the pain evaporated almost instantly.
“Hey, hey, hey,” Kemble protested as she turned back and saw what he was up to. “Where are you going, sir?”
Michael stared at her in astonishment. It had never occurred to him to do anything other than get back to work.
“Things to do, chief. What time is it?”
“Time? It’s 08:20. Now get back on that bunk. That leg’s not good for much just yet.”
Michael shook his head. “Chief, I’ll get back on the bunk if you swear to me that I’ll do myself irreparable damage by walking on it, but if not, then I’ve got things to do.”
“No, I can’t swear to it, but you’ll see more of the inside of the base hospital than you’ll like if you don’t give the leg time to recover. As it is, you should be in regen. Moving it is going to undo a lot of what we’ve had to do.”
“Sorry, chief, you’ll have to forgive me. But I do promise to take it easy.” And with that Michael, pleased to see that someone had thought to bring him a new one, was struggling to get a very uncooperative left leg into his space suit.
“Fuck’s sake, sir. Let me give you a hand,” Chief Kemble said resignedly. “And let me see if I can find you something to lean on.”
The minutes dragged past, and Michael was acutely aware of the growing risk that the Hammer would finally get off their asses and do something about them.
Despite the best efforts of Commodore Kawaguchi’s pinchcommsat killers, the Hammers clearly had a working pinchcomms data channel with Commitment, so a response had to be coming soon. But the work had been frustratingly slow as Harris and his teams struggled to fill the holes punched in 387’s hull. The gaping void left by the failure of Weapons Power Charlie was proving to be a real problem as bracing, bracing, and more bracing was tap welded into place to try to give the foamsteel plug the strength it would need to hold back thousands of kilograms of air pressure.
Michael was smart enough to know that hassling Chief Harris wouldn’t cut one second off the time needed to make 387 jump-worthy.
Foot up, as firmly instructed by Chief Kemble, he sat, surrounded by the shattered remnants of 387’s command team, and watched the tactical picture on the holovid. The vectors marked the last three groups of ships left in Hammer space inching their way slowly forward, the seconds running down to Chief Harris’s best estimate of when 387 would be jump-ready with painful slowness. Michael stared obsessively at the countdown timer in the bottom left-hand corner of the holovid, willing the digits to change faster with every ounce of willpower he possessed but without any effect. If anything, the damn things seemed to go more slowly.