‘Medic! Endorphin boost and GP anti-viral here.’ She bent over me again and I felt gloved fingers touch my head at the same time as the cold stab of the hypospray into my neck. The pain ebbed drastically. ‘Are you from the Evenfall front?’
‘No,’ I managed weakly. ‘Northern Rim assault. Why, what happened at Evenfall?’
‘Some fucking terminal buttonhead just called in a tactical nuclear strike.’ There was a cold rage chained in the doctor’s voice. Her hands moved down my body, assessing damage. ‘No radiation trauma, then. What about chemicals?’
I tilted my head fractionally at my lapel. ‘Exposure meter. Should tell you. That.’
‘It’s gone,’ she snapped. ‘Along with most of that shoulder.’
‘Oh.’ I mustered words. ‘Think I’m clean. Can’t you do a cell scan?’
‘Not here, no. The cellular level scanners are built into the ward decks. Maybe when we can clear some space for you all up there, we’ll get round to it.’ The hands left me. ‘Where’s your bar code?’
‘Left temple.’
Someone wiped blood away from the designated area and I vaguely felt the sweep of the laser scan across my face. A machine chirped approval, and I was left alone. Processed.
For a while I just lay there, content to let the endorphin booster relieve me of both pain and consciousness, all with the suave alacrity of a butler taking a hat and coat. A small part of me was wondering whether the body I was wearing was going to be salvageable, or if I’d have to be re-sleeved. I knew that Carrera’s Wedge maintained a handful of small clone banks for its so-called indispensable staff, and as one of only five ex-Envoys soldiering for Carrera, I definitely numbered among that particular elite. Unfortunately, indispensability is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it gets you elite medical treatment, up to and including total body replacement. On the downside, the only purpose of said treatment is to throw you back into the fray at the earliest possible opportunity. A plankton-standard grunt whose body was damaged beyond repair would just get his cortical stack excised from its snug little housing at the top of the spinal column then slung into a storage canister, where it would probably stay until the whole war was over. Not an ideal exit, and despite the Wedge’s reputation for looking after their own there was no actual guarantee of re-sleeving, but at times in the screaming chaos of the last few months that step into stored oblivion had seemed almost infinitely desirable.
‘Colonel. Hey, colonel.’
I wasn’t sure if the Envoy conditioning was keeping me awake, or if the voice at my side had nagged me back to consciousness again. I rolled my head sluggishly to see who was speaking.
It seemed we were still in the hangar. Lying on the stretcher beside me was a muscular-looking young man with a shock of wiry black hair and a shrewd intelligence in his features that even the dazed expression of the endorphin hit could not mask. He was wearing a Wedge battledress like mine, but it didn’t fit him very well and the holes in it didn’t seem to correspond with the holes in him. At his left temple, where the bar code should have been, there was a convenient blaster burn.
‘You talking to me?’
‘Yes sir.’ He propped himself up on one elbow. They must have dosed him with a lot less than me. ‘Looks like we’ve really got Kemp on the run down there, doesn’t it?’
‘That’s an interesting point of view.’ Visions of 391 platoon being cut to shreds around me cascaded briefly through my head. ‘Where do you think he’s going to run to? Bearing in mind this is his planet, I mean.’
‘Uh, I thought—’
‘I wouldn’t advise that, soldier. Didn’t you read your terms of enlistment? Now shut up and save your breath. You’re going to need it.’
‘Uh, yes sir.’ He was gaping a little, and from the sound of heads turned on nearby stretchers he wasn’t the only one surprised to hear a Carrera’s Wedge officer talking this way. Sanction IV, in common with most wars, had stirred up some heavy-duty feelings.
‘And another thing.’
‘Colonel?’
‘This is a lieutenant’s uniform. And Wedge command has no rank of colonel. Try to remember that.’
Then a freak wave of pain swept in from some mutilated part of my body, dodged through the grasp of the endorphin bouncers posted at the door of my brain and started hysterically shrilling its damage report to anyone who’d listen. The smile I had pinned to my face melted away the way the cityscape must have done at Evenfall, and I abruptly lost interest in anything except screaming.
Water was lapping gently somewhere just below me when I next woke up, and gentle sunlight warmed my face and arms. Someone must have removed the shrapnel-shredded remains of my combat jacket and left me with the sleeveless Wedge T-shirt. I moved one hand and my fingertips brushed age-smoothed wooden boards, also warm. The sunlight made dancing patterns on the insides of my eyelids.
There was no pain.
I sat up, feeling better than I had in months. I was stretched out on a small, simply-made jetty that extended a dozen metres or so out into what appeared to be a fjord or sea loch. Low, rounded mountains bounded the water on either side and fluffy white clouds scudded unconcernedly overhead. Further out in the loch a family of seals poked their heads above the water and regarded me gravely.
My body was the same Afro-Caribbean combat sleeve I’d been wearing on the Northern rim assault, undamaged and unscarred.
So.
Footsteps scraped on the boards behind me. I jerked my head sideways, hands lifting reflexively into an embryonic guard. Way behind the reflex came the confirming thought that in the real world no one could have got that close without my sleeve’s proximity sense kicking in.
‘Takeshi Kovacs,’ said the uniformed woman standing over me, getting the soft slavic ‘ch’ at the end of the name correct. ‘Welcome to the recuperation stack.’
‘Very nice.’ I climbed to my feet, ignoring the offered hand. ‘Am I still aboard the hospital?’
The woman shook her head and pushed long, riotous copper-coloured hair back from her angular face. ‘Your sleeve is still in intensive care, but your current consciousness has been digitally freighted to Wedge One Storage until you are ready to be physically revived.’
I looked around and turned my face upward to the sun again. It rains a lot on the Northern Rim. ‘And where is Wedge One Storage? Or is that classified?’
‘I’m afraid it is.’
‘How did I guess?’
‘Your dealings with the Protectorate have doubtless acquainted you with—’
‘Skip it. I was being rhetorical.’ I already had a pretty good idea where the virtual format was located. Standard practice in a planetary war situation is to fling a handful of low-albedo sneak stations into crazy elliptical orbits way out and hope none of the local military traffic stumbles on them. The odds are pretty good in favour of no one ever finding you. Space, as textbooks are given to saying, is big.
‘What ratio are you running all this on?’
‘Real time equivalence,’ said the woman promptly. ‘Though I can speed it up if you prefer.’
The thought of having my no doubt short-lived convalescence stretched out here by a factor of anything up to about three hundred was tempting, but if I was going to be dragged back to the fighting some time soon in real time, it was probably better not to lose the edge. Added to which, I wasn’t sure that Wedge Command would let me do too much stretching. A couple of months pottering around, hermit-like, in this much natural beauty was bound to have a detrimental effect on one’s enthusiasm for wholesale slaughter.
‘There is accommodation,’ said the woman, pointing, ‘for your use. Please request modifications if you would like them.’