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being a star meant that she had to put up with being herded around. She loved
the glamour, but she had never counted on having to be so passive. Still, it
was worth it, she guessed-wasn't it?
"My dad was right," Vance Hasslewood steamed. "I shoulda been a CPA!"
In the Veritech hangar bays, the maintenance crews were getting to work
on the parked aircraft. There had been plenty of damage in the dustup with the
Quadronos; nobody on the crews was going to be sleeping very much for the next
few days.
Two enlisted ratings had deployed the boarding ladder of Skull Leader's
ship, ready to climb up to the cockpit. "Whew! This time he really got himself
clobbered," one said. "I don't believe he could taxi this thing, let alone fly
it."
He followed his sectionmate up the ladder, bumping into him when the
other stopped short. "Hey, what-"
He swung around and came up the side of the ladder with angled feet, a
common practice. And he, too, stopped short when he got a look at the cockpit.
There were bulges in the pilot seat's chickenplate armor and several
holes in the back of it. And the seat was red with blood that was now seeping
through, running to the floor.
Roy Fokker sat in triage with the others who had been injured. The boys
who were really bad had been taken to the ERs first.
Roy had lost a lot of blood, making him light-headed; but the wounds had
been closed easily enough, and he was hooked up to a plasma bottle.
"Hey," he asked a passing nurse, "is all this really necessary?" He held
up his shunted arm, the plasma tube dangling from it.
"Just shut up and sit there or I'll get Big Bruno the odorly orderly to
come sit on that pretty blond head," she said sweetly. She was the same nurse
who had looked after Rick, having been mobilized as soon as the alert sounded
as part of the special shock-trauma-burn military medical team.
"Doctor Hassan wants a few pictures of your gorgeous insides, dreamboat,
to make sure there's no internal hemorrhaging."
Beside being a top-notch RN, she was handsome and leggy and had a way of
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getting men, even headstrong fighter jocks, to do what she told them. She was
an esteemed member of the MM team.
Roy smiled and relaxed, leaning back. She blew him a kiss and went on
her way. He felt a little floaty from blood loss, but he'd refused a shot for
the pain, so he was lucid.
Then he remembered Kramer. He reached out almost blindly for the nearest
institutional-green uniform. "Hey, nurse-"
But he'd grabbed the trouser leg of Dr. Hassan, the stocky heart and
soul of the MM unit. Hassan, a surgical mask around his neck, stopped and
looked Roy over.
The doctor and the Skull Team leader knew each other somewhat; Roy had
had plenty of his men racked up, had been in that same room quite a few times
before.
"Kramer?" Roy asked hopefully.
Hassan had almost been out of the medical profession, maintaining a
limited practice, doing some consulting and a bit of teaching, for years up
until the SDF-1 spacefolded. Time and events had thrust him back into the
center of things, and there was no more dedicated individual on the ship. He
had originally started easing out of medicine because of moments like this,
and these days such moments were all too common.
"I'm sorry, Roy. He was dead before the rescue people even got to him."
Roy squeezed his eyes shut tightly, tears finding their way out the
sides, nodding. He forced his fingers to open, to release the leg of the
doctor's trousers. But how do you let go of the pain of a close friend's
death?
Hassan patted his shoulder. "Take it easy; I want to take a better look
at you. Be back in a minute."
Hassan hadn't gone ten feet when an orderly came rushing up to drag him
away for an emergency. The nurse was busy with a stat case that had just come
in, another downed flier, this one brought in alive by air-sea rescue.
Unnoticed, Roy disconnected the plasma tube, closing the shunt. His
flying suit had been mostly cut off him by the medics, but his robe would do
until he could get a uniform. All he wanted now was to be with Claudia-to hold
her and tell her he loved her and hear that she loved him.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
These mecha that they're always talking about-those are a perfect symbol of
the warmakers. Our lives and the life of our planet are too precious to be
entrusted to the military machines!
All they care about are their battles, their glory, their victories. The only
thing they love is their endless killing. They want to control us all to make
sure that their war goes on and on until they've destroyed the universe.
And I say, we're not going to let them run our lives anymore. Peace, no matter
what the price! Peace now!
From Lynn-Kyle's pamphlet, Let the People Make the Peace! [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]