His old friend knew him too well, knew Wolf would never leave a wounded companion behind to chase after him. Not a companion who meant as much to him as Fitz. Helplessness burned in his throat as he watched the canopy lower, heard the thrusters cough to life.
Wolf knelt beside the figure sprawled on the hanger floor, gathered her in his arms. “Bloody hell, Kimber, I should have been the one to take that shot.”
Her eyes fluttered open, trying to focus on him. “Sorry, I screwed up.” The words started her coughing.
“No, you didn’t. This was all my fault.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Wolf, you know…” The roar of the courier ship’s engines drowned out her voice.
He shielded her from the hot back-blast with his body. Heat seared across the side of his face as the ship rotated and accelerated away, the sound of its thrusters receding into the night sky. He stripped off his jacket, folded it and pressed it against her chest. That would do little good; Fitz would bleed out in a matter of minutes.
“I’m taking you back down to Medical.” He slid his arm under her and lifted her.
She stopped him with a hand against his chest. “No, you have to get out of here before the Imperial reinforcements arrive.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
She smiled up at him. “We made a pretty good team, didn’t we?”
“The best.”
“It was fun, but I wish we could’ve had some real time together, time when no one was shooting at us. Maybe a resort with a beach and those funny drinks…”
“And chocolate cake. Don’t forget the cake.” Her face seemed to blur and shimmer. He blinked away tears.
“Oh yeah, the cake, but right now I’d settle for one last kiss, soldier.”
He brushed a kiss against her lips, then stood clutching her against him. “Hang on for just a few more minutes and I’ll get you to Medical. I’m not going lose you.”
“I’m afraid the indomitable Wolfgang Youngblood has found an opponent he can’t beat—death.” She chuckled and started coughing again. “I forgot, you already have, but I can’t. In the last stages of TKS, my body can’t survive a wound like this.”
“Don’t argue with me, Kimber. I am going to save you.” He started for the exit. “Jumper, get out of here. You can make it out through the open hanger entrance and take your chances on the outside.”
“No, Boss. I’m going with you and Kimber.”
“Suit yourself.”
He sprinted up the long corridor, back into the base, running as he’d never run in his life. Lit by the red emergency lights, the way down the stairwell transformed to a descent into hell. He staggered, almost falling several times but he managed to reach the Medical level before his knees gave out. He fell. Fitz moaned as he lurched back to his feet.
The door hung open, twisted back. Since he was last there, the office had accumulated a few more bodies. A dazed-looking man clad only in his underwear, staggered out of the operating room.
“Get the hell out of here,” Wolf shouted at him. The guard edged around him, eyes bulging, and dashed into the hallway.
Wolf placed Fitz on the table, stripped off her weapon harness, jacket and shirt, then slammed his palm down on the auto-doc activation button. The unit rose from under both sides of the table, wrapping around her body. It hummed in the diagnostic mode. He locked the door to the operating suite, then started searching for the pouches of blood, crawling on his hands and knees, muttering curses and prayers. They were on the floor, somewhere. They had to be.
But they weren’t, even the case was gone.
“Bloody hell, where is it?” he shouted, but then remembered the briefcase Tritico had carried—not a briefcase, a stasis box.
He wrenched the cabinet open, but it held only cases of a universal synthetic blood substitute. She needed blood, for now that would have to do. He snapped a bag into the auto-doc’s infuser and checked Fitz’s vitals. She was shocky, her heartbeat rapid and weak, but still there. A breath of relief exploded out of him.
Wolf had only the basic field medic training, but he had put in IV’s manually several times, just not on himself. He wrapped the elastic around his upper arm and tied it. His hand shook so badly, he had trouble finding the vein, but he eventually got the needle in and taped down. His blood began to flow into the bag.
A wave of dizziness rolled over him. The skin on his side twitched as the symbiont knitted the flesh back together. His face itched as the burned skin sloughed off. Sweat crept in frozen rivulets down his back. Heart hammering, he urged the pouch to fill faster.
The slow beeping of the medical monitor counting out Fitz’s life kept him company as the auto-doc hummed, releasing a flood of nanites to clean the wound, remove bits of shattered bone and hardware and repair damage, faster and more surely than any human.
Far overhead, he heard the distant thunder of an explosion shudder through the base. The lights went out, plunging him into the dark, but then they came back on. Medical had its own emergency generators—a backup to the backup. In a crisis, it was the last place that could afford to lose power.
The pouch was finally full. He removed the bag of synthetic substitute, but paused, suddenly terrified to send his blood coursing through her. If the doctor was wrong, if the bastard had lied to him, this would kill the woman he loved. She would die screaming like those others had in that forgotten field hospital. He would never forgive himself if that happened, but he’d hate himself more if he didn’t try to save her. He plugged the bag into the auto-doc’s infuser. The computer challenged him, warning that the use of whole blood was not advisable. He typed in an override and waited.
She was so pale, her lips blue, cyanotic. The monitor continued to beat off the rhythm of her heart as the auto-doc droned. Wolf filled another pouch and then a third.
Voices filled his head, words he couldn’t understand. His comm. He tongued the off switch behind his last molar, shutting it down. His legs quivered, and he had to lean against the counter to stay upright. The symbiont’s song inside his head had turned into an angry howl, shouting and cursing at him, calling his name. Or was it only Jumper screaming at him. No way to tell. He’d been dancing on the ragged edge too long, too hard, but he couldn’t stop now. Couldn’t let Fitz down, not while there was even the slightest of chances to keep her with him.
He remembered the medical case in his pocket. Fingers fumbling, he dug it out and managed to get it open. Only two ampules remained, but that would keep him on his feet to see this through to the end. He held one against his neck, but stopped.
Would Fitz need this more than he did? Not only was the symbiont trying to establish itself inside her, but there was that terrible wound to heal. There couldn’t be enough resources in that tiny body to do all of that. He placed one of the injectors against her throat and tapped it. Then the other.
The computer urged him to insert another pouch of blood. He shuffled to her side, but he couldn’t make his eyes focus properly, so he placed it by feel. He filled another bag and loaded it into the infuser when prompted. He lost track of the number of times he repeated the action, only knowing that each time it was harder to remember what he was doing.
Eventually, the auto-doc shut down, lifted and swung back under the table. A new scar split Fitz’s chest, red and angry under a dressing of nano-skin. Wolf lowered his head, brushing his mouth against hers. Her lips seemed warmer, her face pinker. An emotion that might have been hope threaded through the noise inside his brain.
The door buckled as something heavy crashed against it, pounding again and again. Wolf pulled the slug thrower from his belt, but remembered it was out of ammunition. There had been a clip on Fitz’s harness. He dropped to the floor, searching through her discarded clothes until he found it. He ejected the spent clip and slammed the new one in on the second try.
The lock on the door sh
orted out. The panel slid back to reveal a fully armored trooper, pulse-rifle turned in his direction. He tried to raise his pistol, but his body didn’t want to respond. The soldier plowed into him, the weight of all that armor trapping him beneath it. His shot went wide, blasting through a cabinet door and showering shards of glass in his face. He swung the slug thrower like a club, but the apparition on his chest captured his arms easily and pinned them.
The trooper screamed at him, voice high, bordering on hysteria. “Stand down, sir. It’s over.”
The helmet was so close, Wolf could see his haggard reflection in the armorglass face shield. The visor retracted, revealing café au lait skin and dark eyes dilated almost to black. Sweat plastered strands of purple hair to her forehead.
Purple hair? That should mean something, shouldn’t it?
“Wolf, please. It’s Bartonelli.”
“Bartonelli?” The word hurt his throat.
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re dead.”
“No, sir.”
“How did you…”
“Get here, sir? Jumper guided us.”
Whiskers tickled his cheek as the cat peered into his face. What did it matter how they got here? This was only a dream. He’d pushed himself too far and the symbiont had put him into a coma. The last time that had happened, it had trapped him in a nightmare dreamscape, one that felt like it stretched on forever.
“It’s safe to come in now, Doc,” the dream Bartonelli yelled.
Another armored soldier leaned over him. This one had Ski’s face. Definitely a dream. The doctor never went into combat.
She lifted his arm, pulled off the tape and extracted the needle. “What the hell have you been doing, Wolf? Playing doctor?”
“Fitz,” he croaked.
Ski scrambled up. “Ah, hell. This your blood?”
“Yes.” The word took the last of his energy.
Bartonelli stood and offered him a hand up. He reached to take it but his body refused to obey him. He was empty, nothing remained inside to sustain him.
The symbiont sent him into the darkness.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Death was not so bad. Fitz heard soft music playing in the distance, an old Lennon-McCartney symphony. She hung suspended between layers of coolness like the most expensive of sheets. There was no pain. Even on Doc Ski’s wonderful meds, there had been a low residual ache in her knees and fingers. Now even that was gone.
Definitely death.
A faint buzzing filled her, ascending from the cellular level. The sound rose and fell, almost as if something muttered to her, but in a language she couldn’t understand. And she was hungry. Who’d have thought there would be hunger in the afterlife? Maybe there was chocolate cake. Her stomach growled.
She stretched, rolling onto her side. Her back didn’t protest as she curled into a ball and buried her face in the pillow. It smelled of a familiar woodsy soap and…Wolf.
Wolf. She lurched upright. The room spun around her, and a hand grasped her shoulder, steadying her.
“Take it easy, kiddo. I don’t think you’re up to moving that quickly yet.” The voice was gruff with a thick islander brogue—a voice she’d feared she would never hear again.
“Maks,” she shouted and flung her arms around her commanding officer in a very unmilitary-like greeting. She could feel the chuckles in his broad chest and the scratch of his whiskers on her cheek. As she pulled back, she noticed dark circles under his eyes. Instead of the usual red uniform, he wore an old Academy tee shirt and Marine-issue sweatpants.
“I’m sorry, sir, but I seem to be way out of the loop. Perhaps a SITREP would be in order,” she said.
“I think that could be arranged, Commander.” He stuffed the pillows behind her back so she could sit up.
Fitz looked around. “I don’t recognize these quarters, sir. Where am I?”
“You’re on board that fancy yacht of the mercenaries.”
“Bifrost? But we thought all the Gold Dragon assets had been destroyed on Rainbow.”
“They took some losses, but according to Colonel Donkenny, he stumbled across some elements of Home Fleet out beyond Rainbow’s hyperlimit and figured they were up to no good. That gave them enough warning to get the majority of their people to safety, even if most of those are still stuck on Rainbow playing a game of hide and seek with the Imperials.”
Colonel Donkenny? Fitz wondered when the major had gotten his promotion.
Kiernan continued. “He did give us a bad moment when he jumped in at IAS-23. We thought Home Guard had found us, and we were in for a fight. Luckily, the AriR’s tactical officer recognized the ship as a Pulsar. Donkenny briefed us on what had happened since we bugged out and said he was on the way to retrieve the two of you. We decided to tag along.”
“Who’s with the Gold Dragons?” Fitz recalled the faces she’d seen at Ishtok.
“There’s the doctor who patched the two of you up.”
“Ski. What about Bartonelli?”
Kiernan cocked his head. “Who?”
“Little woman. Sergeant. Built like a block of titanium.”
“Purple hair?” Kiernan chuckled. “Now that woman is seriously scary. She led the team that brought you two back to sickbay. I’ve seen mother quollas less protective of their chicks than she was of you and Youngblood. I’ll say this much for him, he’s got some top-notch people working for him, even if there isn’t a one of them who knows how to salute properly.”
He smiled wryly. “When they brought you two in, I wouldn’t have given a spent power core for your chances of survival, but an hour later, Youngblood was up and strapping on body armor to go bug hunting.”
“Is that where Wolf is now?”
“Wolf, huh? Seems like that mercenary made quite an impression on my Shadow. Not an easy task.”
Fitz’s face warmed. “We work well together, sir. That’s all.”
Kiernan snorted. “Yeah, I bet you do. Well, your boyfriend is down at that Tzraka breeding site leading his people and a couple of platoons of our Marines. I was all for lobbing in some penetrator rounds and having done with it, but Ransahov was afraid there might be some local women alive in there, so they’re going in to check it out and kick some bug-butt, up close and personal.”
“Did you catch Tritico?”
Surprise crossed his blunt features. “Tritico? Was that who was in the PS-5 Youngblood warned us to be on the lookout for? We didn’t even see a sensor ghost. Those courier ships are too damn stealthy. That grinning bastard on the loose is going to cause us problems.”
And they would all be her fault. She wouldn’t make that mistake a second time if she ever got Smiley in her sights again.
“Any idea when I’ll be able to get back to duty?” She should be with Wolf, to guard his back.
Kiernan looked away, but not before she saw the hesitation in his eyes. What was it he didn’t want to tell her? Had he decided to retire her? Her cyber-systems were damaged and would require extensive surgeries to repair them. Had he decided the expense of rebuilding her wasn’t worth the few years of service she had left?
“The mercs’ doctor said you should be up and around by tonight and back to your normal routine by tomorrow although minus your augs. Those repairs will have to wait until we’re back on Scyr.” He frowned as he turned back to her. “Fitz, you were down for ten hours.”
“They operated on me for that long?”
“No. Ten hours ago you were brought on board with what I would have sworn was a fatal wound.”
“That’s impossible.” Her hand flew to her chest. No pain, no sensitivity even. Fitz jerked up the neckband of the oversized Gold Dragon T-shirt and looked down. Between a pair of medical data pickups, a patch of nano-skin covered an incision that looked days old.
“I don’t understand.” Her voice
quivered. What had Wolf done?
“Neither do I, Fitz. The Empire has some of the best medicos in the Human Sector, but I’ve never heard of someone with a wound as bad as yours being cleared for duty by the next day. And that merc doctor seemed to think this is normal.”
The door whisked open. Ski strode in, shaking an admonishing finger at Kiernan. “I warned you not to get my patient upset. Big time Imperial officer or not, I can still kick you out of here.”
Ski ran a handheld scanner over Fitz, then smiled, clicking it closed. “I commed Wolf as soon as you woke up and he’s on his way back. Yig knows you won’t be getting any sleep when he gets here.”
Fitz blushed and looked away, noticing the figure in the doorway.
Ari Ransahov wore a green fleet uniform sans insignias. She looked freshly showered and rested, and her trademark coppery hair shone.
Kiernan jumped to his feet and bowed. “Excellency.”
“Not quite yet, Admiral, but, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have a word with the Commander. Alone.”
“Of course, Excellency.” He hurried out. The doctor followed more slowly, stopping to address Ransahov. “And I’ll see you in my surgery in one hour. Prompt.” She started to leave, but paused at the door long enough to quip, “And Commander, you’re still recuperating so I’d appreciate it if you and Wolf would refrain from any sexual gymnastics until at least tomorrow.”
Fitz waited as the soon-to-be Emperor strolled around the room, inspecting each piece of artwork, each painting, looking everywhere but in her direction.
“I feel like I should be out there killing bugs with the rest of them, but Wolf informed me that I’m too valuable now to take that kind of risk.” Ransahov absently reached up to stroke her fingers across the eye patch but dropped her hand.
“I guess I’ll have to stop that. Doctor Rauschtonkowski assured me it’s quite a simple procedure to remove the defective ocular prosthesis and then my body will regenerate a new eye. The only tricky part seems to be keeping a Lazzinair anesthetized throughout the surgery, but I gather she’s accustomed to that. It will seem strange to have sight in that eye again.”
A Hero for the Empire: The Dragon's Bidding, Book 1 Page 31