The Color of Steel

Part 3, Chapter 8

Kingsfoil's continued presence was a tense, uncomfortable thing. The near-silence of the medic running a variety of scans over Suvorov lasted far longer than either party wanted it to. Interruptions came only in the form of the occasional grunt from Kingsfoil as they parsed a readout or asked Suvorov to shift positions. It felt endless; there was no clock in the room, and virtually everything on her uplink had been disabled during the escape from the factory, so the only thing she had to mark time by was her own perception. A perception that was, more often than not, grossly inaccurate.

Suvorov had a good reckoning of it, once. A soldier with an accurate sense of time was far happier than one that had to rely on alarms or angry commanding officers to determine whether they had more time to eat, sleep, or prepare for moving out. Never one to give someone else a chance to take shots at her if she could avoid it, she'd trained herself to track it down to the minute. It had frustrated a few COs she hadn't gotten along with; her go-to tactic for warfare against the tyranny of boot inspectors was irritating precision with her timing.

Nowadays, though, she could never pull something like that off. Time had increasingly passed her by as the years marched on. She'd asked a doctor about it once in a moment of weakness and received a confused reply; with the treatments she went through, her brain was - in theory, anyway - frozen at about the state it'd been in when she began. Yet, regardless, Suvorov found herself forgetting the month or even the year more and more. The world whirled past her, while she felt as if she was still working through the year the army had finally forced her into retirement.

Her reflection was shattered by Kingsfoil clearing their throat. Her startlement was clearly enough to be visible, but to her relief, the medic was in a foul enough mood that they failed to rib her over it. "Scan didn't show any microfractures. Some striations, though; you're out of action until those vanish. If you ever get back to action." Suvorov's eyes flicked sideways to meet Kingsfoil's. "Don't look at me. I don't make the decisions, like I said."

"You got any brains in your head or just medical textbooks? Form an opinion, I don't give a shit if you can do anything with it." The veteran swapped her glare back to the wall, silently cursing at herself as well.

"Hell of a way to ask for it. Think that's the best way to get it out of me?" Kingsfoil echoed her irritation with herself. "Don't know or care what you got away with because you had status, but I'm sure as fuck not going to sit here and let you verbally abuse me as much as you want." The medic stood up, turning to leave.

"Hold on." Suvorov pressed her lips together, as if resisting the next phrase being physically dragged out of her. "I'm sorry." That was enough to get Kingsfoil to stop and turn to her with a curious expression. "I don't know if you figured this out -" Kingsfoil rolled their eyes "- but I'm in a tough spot. I'm not afraid of dying, but I'm not gonna do it in some alleyway after I manage to piss off a country-spanning rebellion and the government at the same time."

Kingsfoil raised an eyebrow. "Didn't expect that for a while." They sat back down on the uncomfortable thing they'd called a chair when she'd been given the room. "What I think is that you could still be full of shit. I also think you're probably too dense to pull this off for this long." Suvorov frowned, but refrained from commenting; turnabout was fair play, after all. "Main reason I don't think you're actually being honest is that you're trying to tell me you somehow didn't notice someone installing new components in your rigging."

"How the hell was I supposed to know? After the twentieth maintenance cycle, you stop paying attention to whatever bullshit they're doing," Suvorov said, a defensive note creeping into her voice. "Especially if in the ten before that, they tried to update everything and it didn't take."

Kingsfoil's brow furrowed in thought. Their eyes glanced off to the side as the medic perused their memory. "Your gear is pretty ancient, yeah. Haven't seen that kind of deflector setup in a long time, now that you mention." The brown gaze refocused on Suvorov. "They ever tell you why?"