“Ah?” Framingham’s eyes narrowed in speculation. No! Mark screamed inside. Silently. Very silently.

Chapter Eight

It was like being trapped in a locked room with half a dozen serial killers with hangovers. Mark could hear each one’s breathing from where they sat in a ring around the officer’s conference table. They were in the briefing chamber off the Peregrine’s main tactics room. Quinn’s breath was the lightest and fastest, Sergeant Taura’s was the deepest and most ominous. Only Elena Bothari-Jesek at her captain’s place at the head of the table, and Lieutenant Hart on her right, were shipboard-clean and natty. The rest had come as they were from the drop mission, battered and stinking: Taura, Sergeant Framingham, Lieutenant Kimura, Quinn on Bothari-Jesek’s left. And himself, of course, lonely at the far end of the oblong table.

Captain Bothari-Jesek frowned, and wordlessly handed around a bottle of painkiller tablets. Sergeant Taura took six. Only Lieutenant Kimura passed. Taura handed them across to Framingham without offering any to Mark. He longed for the tablets as a thirsty man might yearn after a glass of water, poured out and sinking into desert sand. The bottle went back up the table and disappeared into the captain’s pocket. Mark’s eyes throbbed in time to his sinuses, and the back of his head felt tight as drying rawhide.

Bothari-Jesek spoke. “This emergency debriefing is called to deal with just two questions, and as quickly as possible. What the hell happened, and what are we going to do next? Are those helmet recorders on their way?”

“Yes, ma’am,” said Sergeant Framingham. “Corporal Abromov is bringing them.”

“Unfortunately, we are missing the most pertinent one,” said Quinn. “Correct, Framingham?”

“I’m afraid so, ma’am. I suppose it’s embedded in a wall somewhere at Bharaputra’s, along with most of the rest of Norwood’s helmet. Friggin’ grenades.”

“Hells.” Quinn hunched in her seat.

The briefing room door slid open, and Corporal Abromov entered at a jog. He carried four small, clear plastic trays, stacked, and labeled “Green Squad,” “Yellow Squad,” “Orange Squad,” and “Blue Squad.” Each tray held an array of ten to sixteen tiny buttons. Helmet recorders. Each trooper’s personal records of the past hours, tracking every movement, every heartbeat, every scan, shot, hit, and communication. Events that had passed too rapidly for comprehension in real-time could be slowed, analyzed, teased apart, errors of procedure detected and corrected—next time.

Abromov saluted and handed the trays to Captain Bothari-Jesek. She dismissed him with thanks, and passed the trays on to Captain Quinn, who in turn inserted them into the simulator’s data slot and downloaded them. She also encoded the file top secret. Her raw-tipped fingers darted over the vid control panel.

The now-familiar ghostly three-dimensional holomap of Bharaputra’s medical facility formed above the table top. “I’ll jump forward to the time we were attacked in the tunnel,” Quinn said. “There we are, Blue Squad, part of Green Squad …” A spaghetti-tangle of lines of green and blue colored light appeared deep inside a misty building. “Tonkin was Blue Squad Number Six, and kept his helmet throughout what follows.” She made Tonkin’s Number Six map-track yellow, for contrast. “Norwood was still wearing Blue Squad Number Ten. Mark …” her lips pinched, “was wearing Helmet One.” That track, of course, was conspicuously missing. She made Norwood’s Number Ten track pink. “At what point did you change helmets with Norwood, Mark?” She did not look at him as she asked this question.

Please, let me go. He was sure he was sick, because he was still shivering. A small muscle in the back of his neck spasmed, tiny twitches in a prickling underlayer of pain. “We went to the bottom of that lift tube.” His voice came out a dry whisper. “When … when Helmet Ten comes back up, I’m wearing it. Norwood and Tonkin went on together, and that’s the last I saw of them.”

The pink line indeed crawled back up the tube and wormed after the mob of blue and green lines. The yellow track went on alone.

Quinn fast-forwarded voice contacts. Tonkin’s baritone came out in a whine like an insect on amphetamines. “When I last contacted them, they were here.” Quinn marked the spot with a glowing dot of light, in an interior corridor deep inside another building. She fell silent, and let the yellow line snake on. Down a lift tube, through yet another utility tunnel, under a structure, up and through yet another.

“There,” said Framingham suddenly, “is the floor they were trapped on. We picked up contact with ’em there.”

Quinn marked another dot. “Then the cryo-chamber has to be somewhere near the line of march between here and here.” She pointed to the two bright dots. “It has to be.” She stared, eyes narrowed. “Two buildings. Two and a half, I suppose. But there’s not a damn thing on Tonkin’s voice transmissions that gives me a clue.” The insect-voice described Bharaputran attackers, and cried for help, over and over, but did not mention the cryo-chamber. Mark’s throat contracted in synchrony. Quinn, turn him off, please… .

The program ran to its end. All the Dendarii around the table stared at it, as if willing it to yield up something more. There was no more.

The door slid aside and Captain Thorne entered. Mark had never seen a more exhausted-looking human being. Thorne too was still dressed in dirty fatigues, only the plasma mirror pack discarded from its half armor. Its gray hood was pushed back, brown hair plastered flat to its head. A circle of grime in the middle of Thorne’s pale face marked the hood opening, gray twin to the circle of red on Quinn’s face from her mirror-field overload burn. Thorne’s movements were hurried and jerky, will overriding a fatigue close to collapse. Thorne leaned, hands on the conference table, mouth a grim horizontal line.

“So, could you get anything at all out of Tonkin?” asked Quinn of Thorne. “What the computer has, we just saw. And I don’t think it’s enough.”

“The medics got him waked up, briefly,” reported Thorne. “He did talk. I was hoping the recorders would make sense of what he said, but …”

“What did he say?”

“He said when they reached this building,” Thorne pointed, “they were cut off. Not yet surrounded, but blocked from a line to the shuttle, and the enemy closing the ring fast. Tonkin said, Norwood yelled he had an idea, he’d seen something “back there”. He had Tonkin create a diversion with a grenade attack, and guard a particular corridor—must be that one there. Norwood took the cryo-chamber and ran back along their route. He returned a few minutes later—not more than six minutes, Tonkin said. And he told Tonkin, “It’s all right now. The Admiral will get out of here even if we don’t.” About two minutes later, he was killed by that projectile grenade, and Tonkin was knocked loopy by the concussion.”

Framingham nodded. “My crew got there not three minutes after that. They drove off a pack of Bharaputrans who were searching the bodies—looting, looking for intelligence, or both, Corporal Abromov wasn’t sure—they picked up Tonkin and Norwood’s body and ran like hell. Nobody in the squad reported seeing a cryo-chamber anywhere.”

Quinn chewed absently on a fingernail stump. Mark did not think he was even conscious of the gesture. “That’s all?”

“Tonkin said Norwood was laughing,” Thorne added.

“Laughing.” Quinn grimaced. “Hell.”

Captain Bothari-Jesek was sunk in her station chair. Everyone around the table appeared to digest this last tidbit, staring at the holomap. “He did something clever,” said Bothari-Jesek. “Or something that he thought was clever.”

“He only had about five minutes. How clever could he be in five minutes?” Quinn complained. “Gods damn the clever jerk to sixteen hells for not reporting!”