"I'm used to the suits," she said. She took a careful swig. She'd drunk some from the condenser in the hard suit, but it was hard to get enough fluid—and food—down while you were on. "We're short. It's better not to have people screwing around with their armor if the shit hits the fan."
A tractor was pulling one trailer slowly across the cleared area. Steve Nessman and a pair of girls who'd lost their puppy fat on the march were manhandling rolls of sheeting off the trailer to the teams of civilians waiting to place them on the bulldozed ground.
The whole group sang the "Prisoners' Chorus" from Verdi's Nabucco. They were surprisingly good. One of the civilians had been a voice coach.
"I'm learning to drive the bulldozers," Lock said. "Using the blade correctly is surprisingly complex. I hadn't realized that it tilts, it doesn't just push straight ahead."
"What is this?" Meyer asked, lowering the bottle. "Is this converter-run water?"
"There's the usual electrolyte fortification from the converter, yes," Lock said. He began to put the pieces of the hard suit away in the carrying bag. "There's a few drops of lemon syrup also. Mrs. Regley provided it. She had a tree of her own on the roof garden of Horizon Towers. Do you like it?"
"It's good," Meyer said. Really, it was odd; she'd thought somebody'd screwed up the converter setting. She took another swig. The slight tartness did have a cleansing feel if you knew it didn't mean something had gone wrong. "I'll have to thank her."
"You saved her life, you know," Matt said. "The first day. When you saved mine."
"We're all saving each others lives in this ratfuck," Meyer said. She leaned forward and kissed him hungrily. "All of us."
Doctors Parelli and Ciler talked briefly as the latter arrived to take his midnight shift with the wounded. Parelli walked off to join her husband; Ciler sat down beside the monitor.
"Hey, Doc," Caius Blohm said. He smoothed Mirica's hair back from her forehead, then gently placed the child on the nest of bedding where she lay while Blohm was on patrol. "Got time to talk?"
"Yes, ah . . ." Ciler said.
Blohm gestured toward the berm. Ciler thought about his duties and decided that for a few minutes the wounded would be all right by themselves. He followed the striker to the darkness and relative privacy.
"I wanted to ask you about Mirica, Doc," the scout said, facing the forest. "Is she going to get better?"
Ciler considered a number of ways to answer the question. He settled on the truth. "No," he said. "I'm terribly sorry, Striker Blohm. The injury she received is total and irreversible. If we were back on Earth, my answer would have to be the same."
"Yeah, pretty much what I figured," Blohm said. His left hand was gloved. He ran the index finger gently over the surface of a log the dozer blade had wedged into the berm; blue sparks popped nervously from its surface.
"You know," he said, "I thought about maybe bringing ears back to her when I caught the Spooks who did it. There's guys who collect Spook ears. I never got into it, but I thought, you know, for Mirica . . ."
Ciler watched him without speaking. Blohm met his gaze, but the scout's eyes were merely glints reflected from the light beside Major Farrell's hunched form.
"She wouldn't have liked that, Doc," Blohm said earnestly. "She was a great kid, you know? Wouldn't hurt a fly."
A hollow clock! clock! clock! rang through the starlit forest, then died away. "I'm glad you came to that decision," Ciler said quietly.
"Yeah," said Blohm. He sounded as though he was discussing a problem with a machine that he couldn't get to run the way it should. "And hell, I couldn't even get pissed at the Spooks. I mean, they didn't mean to shoot her. It was a waste shot, right? They wanted to get me and they fucked up. What am I supposed to do? Hunt down the training cadre that didn't make them better marksmen?"
His gloved hand touched the log three times, each time harder. The last was a full-strength blow with the edge of his fist. Sparks sizzled, outlining his prominent knuckles.
"They just wasted a shot," he repeated. "Everybody does, you know. One time or another, you shoot something you didn't mean to because you didn't have time to think. Everybody does."
"Mirica knew you loved her," Ciler said carefully. "I think the part of her that is with God still knows that."
"She was a good kid," Blohm said. "Wish I could've known her longer. What's wired up to the machine now, that's not her, though. I guess you'd like your machine back?"
"There are . . ." Ciler said. "Patients. For whom the use of the life support system would be the difference between life and death, yes."