by David Weber
A bell pinged, and he looked away from the report with guilty relief as his com screen flicked to life with a lieutenant he didn't recognize. A shuttle's cockpit framed the young woman's face, and her eyes were bright. Yet there was something amiss with her excitement, like an edge of uncertainty. Perhaps even fear. He shook off the thought and summoned a smile.
"What can I do for you, Lieutenant—?"
"Surgeon Lieutenant Sikorsky, Sir, detached from Vindication for Search and Rescue." Okanami straightened, eyebrows rising, and she nodded. "We've found another one, Captain, but this one's so weird I thought I'd better call it in directly to you."
"Weird? How so?" The rising eyebrows lowered again, knitting above suddenly intent eyes at Sikorsky's almost imperceptible hesitance.
"It's a woman, Sir, and, well, she ought to be dead." Okanami crooked a finger for her to continue, and Sikorsky drew a deep breath.
"Sir, she's been hit five times, including a shattered femur, two rounds through her liver, one through the left lung, and one through the spleen and small intestine." Okanami flinched at the catalog of traumas. "So far, we've put over a liter of blood into her, and her BP's still so low we can barely get a reading. All her vital signs are massively depressed, and she's been lying in the open ever since the raid, Sir—we found her beside a body that was frozen rock solid, but her body temperature is thirty-two-point-five!"
"Lieutenant," Okanami's voice was harsh, "if this is your idea of humor—"
"Negative, Sir." Sikorsky sounded almost pleading. "It's the truth. Not only that, she's got the damnedest—excuse me, Sir. She's been augmented, and she's got the most unusual receptor net I've ever seen. It's military, but I've never seen anything like it, and the support hardware is unbelievable."
Okanami rubbed his upper lip, staring at the earnest, worried face. Lying in sub-freezing temperatures for over a week and her temperature was depressed barely five degrees? Impossible! And yet . . . .
"Get her back here at max, Lieutenant, and tell Dispatch I want you routed straight to OR Twelve. I'll be scrubbed and waiting for you."
Okanami and his hand-picked team stood enfolded in the sterile field and stared at the body before them. Damn it, she couldn't be alive with damage like this! Yet she was. The medtech remotes labored heroically, resecting an intestine perforated in eleven places, removing her spleen, repairing massive penetrations of her liver and lung, fighting to save a leg that had been brutally abused even after the hit that shattered it. Still more blood flooded into her . . . and she was alive. Barely, perhaps—indeed, her vital signs had actually weakened when the support equipment had taken over—but alive.
And Sikorsky was right about her augmentation. Okanami had decades more experience than the lieutenant, yet he'd never imagined anything like it. It had obviously started life as a standard Imperial Marine Corps outfit, and parts of it were readily identifiable, but the rest—!
There were three separate neural receptors—not in parallel but feeding completely separate sub-systems—plus the most sophisticated set of sensory boosters he'd ever seen, and some sort of neuro-tech webbing covered all her vital areas. He hadn't had time to examine it yet, but it looked suspiciously like an incredibly miniaturized disrupter shield, which was ridiculous on the face of it. No one could build a shield that small, and the far bulkier units built into combat armor cost a quarter-million credits each. And while he was thinking about incredible things, there was her pharmacopoeia. It contained enough pain suppressers, coagulators, and stim boosters (most of them straight from the controlled substances list) to keep a dead man on his feet, not to mention an ultra-sophisticated endorphin generator and at least three drugs Okanami had never even heard of. Yet a quick check of its med levels indicated that it wasn't her pharmacope which had kept her alive. Even if it might have been capable of such a feat, its reservoirs were still almost fully charged.
He inhaled gratefully as the thoracic and abdominal teams closed and stepped back to let the osteoplastic techs concentrate on her thigh. Her vitals kicked up a hair, and blood pressure was coming back up, but there was something weird about that EEG. Hardly surprising if there was brain damage after all she'd been through, but it might be those damned receptors.
He gestured to Commander Ford, and the neurologist swung her monitors into place. Receptor Two was clearly the primary node, and Okanami moved to watch Ford's screens over her shoulder as she adjusted her equipment with care and keyed a standard diagnostic pattern.
For just a moment, absolutely nothing happened, and Okanami frowned. There should be something—an implant series code, if nothing else. But there wasn't. And then, suddenly, there was, and buzzers began to scream.
A lurid warning code glared crimson, and the unconscious young woman's eyes jerked open. They were empty, like the jade-green windows of a deserted house, but the EEG spiked madly. The thigh incision was still open, and the med remotes locked down to hold her leg motionless as she started to rise. A surgeon flung himself forward, frantic to restrain that brutalized body, and the heel of her hand struck like a hammer, barely missing his solar plexus.
He shrieked as it smashed him to the floor, but the sound was half lost in the wail of a fresh alarm, and Okanami paled as the blood chem monitors went beserk. A binary agent neuro-toxin drove the toxicology readings up like missiles, and the security code on Ford's screen was joined by two more. Their access attempt had activated some sort of suicide override!
"Retract!" he screamed, but Ford was already stabbing buttons in frantic haste. Alarms wailed an instant longer, and then the implant monitor died. The toxicology alert ended in a dying warble as an even more potent counteragent went after the half-formed toxin, and the amber-haired woman slumped back on the table, still and inert once more while the injured surgeon sobbed in agony and his fellows stared at one another in shock.
"You're lucky your man's still alive, Doctor."
Captain Okanami glowered at the ramrod-straight colonel in Marine space-black and green who stood beside him, watching the young woman in the bed. Medical monitors watched her with equal care—very cautiously, lest they trigger yet another untoward response from the theoretically helpless patient.
"I'm sure Commander Thompson will be delighted to hear that, Colonel McIlheny," the surgeon said frostily. "It only took us an hour and a half to put his diaphragm back together."
"Better that than what she was going for. If she'd been conscious he'd never have known what hit him—you can put that on your credit balance."
"What the hell is she?" Okanami demanded. "That wasn't her on the table, it was her goddamned augmentation processors running her!"
"That's exactly what it was," McIlheny agreed. "There are escape and evasion and an anti-interrogation subroutine buried in her primary processor." He turned to favor the surgeon with a measuring glance. "You Fleet types aren't supposed to have anything to do with someone like her."
"Then she's one of yours?" Okanami's eyes were suddenly narrow.
"Close, but not quite. Our people often support her unit's operations, but she belongs—belonged—to the Imperial Cadre."
"Dear God," Okanami whispered. "A drop commando?"
"A drop commando." McIlheny shook his head. "Sorry it took so long, but the Cadre doesn't exactly leave its data lying around. The pirates took out Mathison's data base when they blew the governor's compound, so I queried the Corps files. They don't have much data specific to her. I've downloaded the available specs on her hardware and gotten your medical types cleared for it, but it's limited, and the bio data's even thinner, mostly just her retinal and genetic patterns. All I can say for sure is that this—" his chin jutted at the woman in the bed "—is Captain Alicia DeVries."
"Devries?! The Shallingsport DeVries?"
"The very one."
"She's not old enough," Okanami protested. "She can't be more than twenty-five, thirty years old!"
"Thirty-one. She was twenty when they made the drop—second younge
st sergeant first class in Cadre history. They went in with two hundred and seventy-five people. Nine of them came back out, but they brought the hostages with them."
Okanami stared at the pale face on the pillow—an oval face, pretty, not beautiful, and almost gentle in repose.
"How in heaven did she wind up out here on the backside of nowhere?"
"I think she wanted some peace," McIlheny said sadly. "She got a commission, the Banner of Terra, and a twenty-year bonus from Shallingsport—earned every millicred of it, too. She sent in her papers five years ago and took the equivalent of a thirty-year retirement credit in colony allotments. Most of them do. The Core Worlds won't let them keep their hardware."
"Hard to blame them," Okanami observed, recalling Commander Thompson's injuries, and McIlheny stiffened.
"They're soldiers, Doctor." His voice was cold. "Not maniacs, not killing machines—soldiers."
He held Okanami's eye with icy anger, and it was the captain who looked away.
"But that wasn't the only reason she headed here," the colonel resumed after a moment. "She used her allotment as the core claim on four prime sections, and she and her family settled out here."
Okanami sucked in air, and McIlheny nodded. His voice was flat when he continued.
"She wasn't there when the bastards landed. By the time she got back to the site, they'd murdered her entire family. Father, mother, younger sister and brother, grandfather, an aunt and uncle, and three cousins. All of them."
He reached out and touched the sleeping woman's shoulder, the gesture gentle and curiously vulnerable in such a big, hard-muscled man, then laid the long, heavy rifle he'd carried in across the bedside table. Okanami stared at it, considering the dozen or so regulations its presence violated, but the colonel continued before he could speak.
"I've been out to the homestead." His voice had turned soft. "The bastards didn't get any of it cheap. Her grandfather was out there, too—Sergeant Major O'Shaughnessy. He was one of ours, and he took four of them with him. It looks like her father got five more . . . and he was Ujvári, Doctor."
The colonel looked at Okanami, then back down at the doctor's patient.
"Then she got home. She must've been out after direcat or snow wolves—this is a fourteen-millimeter Vorlund express, semi-auto with recoil buffers—and she went in after twenty-five men with body armor, grenades, and combat rifles." He stroked the rifle and met the doctor's eyes once more. "She got them all."
Okanami looked back down at her, then shook his head.
"That still doesn't explain it. By every medical standard I know, she should have died then and there, unless there's something in your download that says different, and I can't begin to imagine anything that might."
"Don't waste your time looking, because you won't find anything. Our med people agree entirely. Captain DeVries —" McIlheny touched the motionless shoulder once more "—can't possibly be alive."
"But she is," Okanami said quietly.
"Agreed." McIlheny left the rifle and turned away, waving politely for the doctor to precede him from the room. The surgeon was none too pleased to leave the weapon behind, even without a magazine, but the colonel's combat ribbons—and expression—stilled his protests. "That's why Admiral Gomez's report has a whole team of specialists on their way here at max."
Okanami led the way into the sparsely appointed lounge, empty at this late hour, and drew two cups of coffee. The two men sat at a table, and the colonel's eyes watched the open door as Okanami keyed a small hand reader to access the medical download. His cup steamed on the table, ignored, and his mouth tightened as he realized just how scanty the data was. Every other entry ended in the words "FURTHER ACCESS RESTRICTED" and some astronomical clearance level. McIlheny waited patiently until Okanami set the reader aside with sigh.
"Weird," he murmured, shaking his head as he reached for his own coffee, and the colonel chuckled without humor.
"Even weirder than you know. This is for your information only—that's straight from Admiral Gomez—but you're in charge of this case until a Cadre med team can get here, so I'm supposed to bring you up to speed. Or as up to speed as any of us are, anyway. Clear?"
Okanami nodded, and his mouth felt oddly dry despite the coffee.
"All right. I took my own people out to the DeVries claim because the original report was so obviously impossible. For one thing, three separate SAR overflights hadn't picked up anything. If Captain DeVries had been there and alive, she'd've showed on the thermal scans, especially lying in the open that way, so I knew it had to be some kind of plant."
He sipped coffee and shrugged.
"It wasn't. The evidence is absolutely conclusive. She came up on them from the south, with the wind behind her, and took them by surprise. She left enough blood trail for us to work out what must've happened, and it was like turning a saber-tooth loose on hyenas, Doctor. They took her down in the end, but not before she got them all. That shuttle must've been lifted out by remote, because there sure as hell weren't any live pirates to fly it.
"But that's where it gets really strange. Our forensic people have fixed approximate times of death for the pirates and her family, and they've pegged the blood trails she left to about the same time. Logically, then, she should have bled to death within minutes of killing the last pirate. If she hadn't done that, she should have frozen to death, again, probably very quickly. And if she were alive, the thermal scans certainly should have picked her up. None of those things happened—it's like she was someplace else until the instant Sikorsky's crew landed and found her. And, Doctor," the colonel's eyes were very intent, "not even a drop commando can do that."
"So what are you saying? It was magic?"
"I'm saying she's managed at least three outright impossibilities, and nobody has the least damned idea how. So until an explanation occurs to us, we want her right here in your capable hands."
"Under what conditions?" Okanami's voice was edged with sudden frost.
"We'd prefer," McIlheny said carefully, "to keep her just like she is."
"Unconscious? Forget it, Colonel."
"But—"
"I said forget it! You don't keep a patient sedated indefinitely, particularly not one who's been through what she has, and especially not when there's an unknown pharmacology element. Her medical condition is nothing to play games with, and your download—" he waved the hand reader under the colonel's nose "—is less than complete. The damned thing won't even tell me what a half-dozen of the drugs in her pharmacope do, and her augmentation security must've been designed by a terminal paranoiac. Not only do the codes in her implants mean I can't override externally to shut them down, but I can't even go in to empty her reservoirs surgically! Do you have the least idea how much that complicates her meds? And the same security systems that keep me from accessing her receptors mean I can't use a standard somatic unit, so the only way I could keep her under would be with chemicals."
"I see." McIlheny toyed with his coffee cup and frowned as he came up against the captain's Hippocratic armor. "In that case, let's just say we'd like you to keep her here under indefinite medical observation."
"Whether or not her medical condition requires it, eh? And if she decides she wants out of my custody before your intelligence types get here?"
"Out of the question. These 'raids' are totally out of hand. That's bad enough, and when you add in all the unanswered questions she represents—" McIlheny shrugged. "She's not going anywhere until we've got some answers."
"There are limits to the dirty work I'm prepared to do for you and your spooks, Colonel."
"What dirty work? She probably won't even want to leave, but if she does, you're the physician of record of a patient in a military facility."
"A patient," Okanami pointed out, "who happens to be a civilian." He leaned back and eyed the colonel with a marked lack of affability. "You do remember what a 'civilian' is? You know, the people who don't wear uniforms? The ones with something called c
ivil rights? If she wants out of here, she's out of here unless there's a genuine medical reason to hold her. And your 'unanswered questions' do not constitute such a reason."
McIlheny felt a grudging respect for the surgeon and tugged at his lower lip in thought.
"Look, Doctor, I didn't mean to step on any professional toes, and I'm sure Admiral Gomez doesn't want to, either. Nor are we medieval monsters out to 'disappear' an unwanted witness. This is one of our people, and a damned outstanding one. We just need to . . . keep tabs on her."
"So what's the problem? Even if I discharge her, she's not going anywhere you can't find her. Not without a starship, anyway."
"Oh, no?" McIlheny smiled tightly. "I might point out that she's already been somewhere we couldn't find her when all the indications are she was lying right there in plain sight. What's to say she can't do it again?"
"What's to say she has any reason to do it again?" Okanami demanded in exasperation.
"Nothing. On the other hand, what's to say she did it on purpose the first time?" Okanami's eyebrows quirked, and McIlheny grinned sourly. "Hadn't thought about that, had you? That's because you're insufficiently paranoid for one of us much maligned 'spooks,' Doctor, but the point is that until we have some idea what happened, we can't know if she did whatever she did on purpose. Or what might happen to her if she does it again."
"You're right—you are paranoid," Okanami muttered. He thought hard for a moment, then shrugged. "Still doesn't matter. If a mentally competent civilian wants to check herself out, then unless you've got some specific criminal charge to warrant holding her against her will she checks herself out, period. End of story, Colonel."
"Not quite." McIlheny leaned back and smiled at him. "You see, you've forgotten that she wasn't Fleet or Marine, she's Imperial Cadre."
"So?"
"So there's one fact most people don't know about the Cadre. Not surprising, really; it isn't big enough for much about it to become common knowledge. But the point is that she's not really a civilian at all." Okanami blinked in surprise, and McIlheny's smile grew. "You don't resign from the Cadre—you just go on inactive reserve status. And if you don't want to hang onto our 'civilian' for us, then we'll just by God reactivate her!"