Страница 35 из 125
“I have no idea,” she said.
“But you-” Holden started. She talked right over him.
“If he were made of metal, I’d just hammer him straight and then weld everything into place,” she said.
“I-”
“But he isn’tmade out of ship parts,” she continued, her voice rising into a yell, “so why are you asking mewhat to do?”
Holden held up his hands in a placating gesture.
“Okay, got it. Let’s just stop the bleeding for now, all right?”
“If Alex gets killed, are you going to ask me to fly the ship too?”
Holden started to answer and then stopped. She was right. Whenever he didn’t know what to do, he handed off to Naomi. He’d been doing it for years. She was smart, capable, usually unflappable. She’d become a crutch, and she’d been through all the same trauma he had. If he didn’t start paying attention, he’d break her, and he needed not to do that.
“You’re right. I’ll take care of Amos,” he said. “You go up and check on Kelly. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
Naomi stared at him until her breathing slowed, then said, “Okay,” and headed to the crew ladder.
Holden sprayed Amos’ leg with coagulant booster and wrapped it in gauze from the first aid kit. Then he called up the ship’s database on the wall terminal and did a search on compound fractures. He was reading it with growing dismay when Naomi called.
“Kelly’s dead,” she said, her voice flat.
Holden’s stomach dropped, and he gave himself three breaths to get the panic out of his voice.
“Okay. I’ll need your help setting this bone. Come on back down. Alex? Give me half a g of thrust while we work on Amos.”
“Any particular direction, Cap?” Alex asked.
“I don’t care, just give me half a g and stay off the radio till I say so.”
Naomi dropped back down the ladder well as the gravity started to come up.
“It looks like every rib on the left side of Kelly’s body was broken,” she said. “Thrust g probably punctured all his organs.”
“He had to know that was going to happen,” Holden said.
“Yeah.”
It was easy to make fun of the marines when they weren’t listening. In Holden’s navy days, making fun of jarheads was as natural as cussing. But four marines had died getting him off the Do
“We need to pull the bone straight before we set it. Hold him still, and I’ll pull on his foot. Let me know when the bone has retracted and lined up again.”
Naomi started to protest.
“I know you’re not a doctor. Just best guess,” Holden said.
It was one of the most horrible things Holden had ever done. Amos woke up screaming during the procedure. He had to pull the leg out twice, because the first time the bones didn’t line up, and when he let go, the jagged end of the tibia popped back out the hole in a spray of blood. Fortunately, Amos passed out after that and they were able to make the second attempt without the screaming. It seemed to work. Holden sprayed the wound down with antiseptics and coagulants. He stapled the hole closed and slapped a growth-stimulating bandage over it, then finished up with a quick-form air-cast and an antibiotic patch on the mechanic’s thigh.
Afterward he collapsed onto the deck and gave in to the shakes. Naomi climbed into her couch and sobbed. It was the first time Holden had ever seen her cry.
Holden, Alex, and Naomi floated in a loose triangle around the crash couch where Lieutenant Kelly’s body lay. Below, Amos was in a heavily sedated sleep. The Tachidrifted through space toward no particular destination. For the first time in a long time, no one followed.
Holden knew the other two were waiting for him. Waiting to hear how he was going to save them. They looked at him expectantly. He tried to appear calm and thoughtful. Inside, he panicked. He had no idea where to go. No idea what to do. Ever since they’d found the Scopuli,everywhere that should have been safe had turned into a death trap. The Canterbury,the Do
Do something,a mentor of a decade earlier said to his young officers. It doesn’t have to be right, it just has to be something.
“Someone is going to investigate what happened to the Do
“No it ain’t,” Alex said.
“Explain that, Mr. Kamal.”
“This is a torpedo bomber. You think they want a nice transponder signal to lock on to when they’re makin’ runs on an enemy capital ship? Naw, there’s a handy switch up in the cockpit that says ‘transponder off.’ I flipped it before we flew out. We’re just another moving object out of a million like us.”
Holden was silent for two long breaths.
“Alex, that may be the single greatest thing anyone has ever done, in the history of the universe,” he said.
“But we can’t land, Jim,” Naomi said. “One, no port is going to let a ship with no transponder signal anywhere near them, and two, as soon as they make us out visually, the fact that we’re a Martian warship will be hard to hide.”
“Yep, that’s the downside,” Alex agreed.
“Fred Johnson,” Holden said, “gave us the network address to get in touch with him. I’m thinking that the OPA might be the one group that would let us land our stolen Martian warship somewhere.”
“It ain’t stolen,” Alex said. “It’s legitimate salvage now.”
“Yeah, you make that argument to the MCRN if they catch us, but let’s try and make sure they don’t.”
“So, we just wait here till Colonel Johnson gets back to us?” Alex asked.
“No, I wait. You two prep Lieutenant Kelly for burial. Alex, you were MCRN. You know the traditions. Do it with full honors and record it in the log. He died to get us off that ship, and we’re going to accord him every respect. As soon as we land anywhere, we’ll bounce the full record to MCRN command so they can do it officially.”
Alex nodded. “We’ll do it right, sir.”
Fred Johnson replied to his message so fast that Holden wondered if he’d been sitting at his terminal waiting for it. Johnson’s message consisted only of coordinates and the word tightbeam.Holden aimed the laser array at the specified location-it was the same one Fred had beamed his first message from-then turned on his mic and said, “Fred?”
The coordinates given were more than eleven light-minutes away. Holden prepared to wait twenty-two minutes for his answer. Just to have something to do, he fed the location up to the cockpit and told Alex to fly in that direction at one g as soon as they’d finished with Lieutenant Kelly.
Twenty minutes later the thrust came up and Naomi climbed the ladder. She’d stripped off her vacuum suit and was wearing a red Martian jumpsuit that was half a foot too short for her and three times too big around. Her hair and face looked clean.
“This ship has a head with a shower. Can we keep it?” she said.
“How’d it go?”
“We took care of him. There’s a decent-sized cargo bay down by engineering. We put him there until we can find some way to send him home. I turned off the environment in there, so he’ll stay preserved.”
She held out her hand and dropped a small black cube into his lap.
“That was in a pocket under his armor,” she said.
Holden held up the object. It looked like some sort of data-storage device.
“Can you find out what’s on it?” he asked.