Cadet Flight Methuselah

013

“They have the top medical equipment in the galaxy on the Sally Ride. He'll be... fine. In a while.” Calli placed her hand gently on Nim's shoulder. “He could be back before graduation.”

Leo eyed his fellow cadet with a critical stare. “We just had our graduation.”

“You're not helping things,” she hissed back at him angrily.

“Lying dishonors our dead,” he replied bluntly. “Everything has changed.”

“It's not lying to tell Nim things will work out,” countered Calli with a frown.

“It's not the truth, either.” He silenced her rebuttal with a stone-eyed glare. “None of us has any idea what will happen from here on out and you know it better than anyone else.”

Nim watched with a growing, hollow hole forming inside her chest as the flight surgeon wheeled Seig down the hallway towards the evacuation transport with the remainder of the Heinlein crew that had sustained significant injuries. Seventy-five people were dead and another fifty were incapacitated and being transferred to the NMV Sally Ride, which had jumped to their position after it had been declared secure. They came in with a full medical unit to relieve the cadets who had been drafted as corpsmen by the flight surgeon. Somewhere there was also a skeleton repair crew that had been quickly assembled from the Navy personnel within jump distance of where the Ride had been at the Hyecho Waypoint.

The after-action counts had been finalized three days before. Lieutenant Colonel Herald and Majors Hsing, Sonera, and Hadad were killed in action, their fighters and bodies recovered when the Heinlein jumped back to the battlesphere three days ago to retrieve them and a list of salvage Navy Research Division wanted them to pick up. Their coffins were laid out on the port flight deck along with the coffins of all of Lazarus flight, twenty-three members of the flight crew who had died when Backstop's fighter had exploded in the IED, the forty-two coffins for the crewmen who had died during the EMP bombardment, and one empty coffin for Shelke. They hadn't been able to recover anything of her but the DNA on her marauder's deadbox; her fighter had been all but obliterated.

All Nim had was a treated case of radiation poisoning, incessantly itchy skin grafts where she had gotten freezer burn during her spacewalk, and about eighteen or so puncture wounds filled with glue from where bits of high-speed debris had pierced her exosuit and lodged deep in her frozen flesh. She was on medical inactive for the time being, mostly because Captain Michael was furious with her for pulling such a stunt as the one she had in the debris field in the first place. Sparrow had her back the entire way, however; she had never seen the man speak so vehemently about anything as he had during their flight debriefing a week ago for. It was a shame she had only been partially conscious.

She could barely remember any of the actual fight at all. Whether it was the counter-radiation treatments, the painkillers she had been infused with over the past week, or simply because she didn't want to remember was currently being determined by the ship's psychiatrist. Doctor Trine had called her in for a very long session the day before and spent four hours picking the cadet's brain for any signs of post-traumatic stress. Her assessment was still in the pipeline somewhere.

Leaning against the bulkhead of the sickbay Nim watched as the nurses in powder blue coats grew smaller and smaller. Seig had a serious case of oxygen deprivation along with his radiation poisoning. The hits his marauder had taken had filled his body with enough shrapnel to build a scale model of his Haya; along with a shredded lung, stomach and liver they were picking pieces of both ships out of his actual bones. The only reason he was still alive was that he had lost relatively little blood; his exosuit had let him ice over once it detected the critical injuries, plunging him into a hypothermic coma that slowed his heart to a crawl and kept him from bleeding out. He was still in that coma and had been since Nim got them both back to the Heinlein. No matter how positively Calli tried to paint things for her she knew that he'd probably never come out of it.