[Republic Commando] - 03(127)

Darman started to get scared at that point. This wasn’t Fi. He’d seen Fi under stress, in pain, and at every other extreme, but nothing like this. Fi managed to get to within five meters of the larty and then stopped to tear off his helmet, throw it aside, and brace his hands on his knees to vomit. That was as far as he got on his own. Darman and Atin managed to haul him into the crew bay, and Niner was briefly forgotten as they propped Fi on the narrow bench seat along the aft bulkhead and tried to keep him talking.

Sergeant Tel was yelling at Niner to get the chest injury case inboard. Whatever else was happening in Eyat and the surrounding area, Omega Squad’s stay on Gaftikar was over. Darman tried to comm A’den to update him, but didn’t get a response.

He’s probably busy, not dead. Worry about Fi. Fi’s the one in trouble.

Both blast hatches dropped down to seal the crew bay and it was a full casevac to Leveler now, only minutes from liftoff to docking, always minutes too long. Darman relived the extraction from Qiilura, Omega’s first mission as a re-formed squad, which had nearly ended in Atin getting killed. Atin made it. Fi will, too. That’s what happens, isn’t it? We all lost our squads the first time around, and it can’t happen again.

“Come on, Fi.” Atin tapped his cheek to keep him conscious. “Keep talking. I’ve never had to ask you to do that before.” Fi was barely coherent now, mumbling about something he’d left behind in the camp and complaining that everything was blurred. Against the opposite bulkhead, the onboard IM-6 droid was busy with the chest injury. Niner couldn’t move across the deck because of the number of wounded, and stood hanging on to a safety strap.

They’d all done the basic training; they knew what was wrong. Almost nothing penetrated Katarn armor, but it was a sealed box, nothing more, and being shaken around in a box hard enough was still going to cause brain injury. That fitted the uneven pupils and the puking. Darman looked on the positive side. At least he now knew that he had to make the triage team treat Fi as a priority.

The helmet comlink clicked. “Dar, I don’t care who I have to kick out of the way,” Niner said, “but he gets seen first, soon as we dock.”

“You got it.”

But it wasn’t like that at all. When the larty disgorged its wounded, the hangar deck was almost empty, because they weren’t taking heavy casualties on Gaftikar. Leveler had already crippled a Sep assault ship and taken minimal damage. The battle on the ground seemed completely artificial, divorced from the size of the engagement or the importance of the planet below. It was a pathetic, pointless skirmish for Fi to get injured in. It felt more like senseless bad luck.

Niner and Dar pounced on the med droid at once. “Head trauma,” they chorused. “Loss of balance, headache, vomiting, gradual loss of speech and coherence.” Fi, unmarked and looking like he was simply settling down again after thrashing around in a nightmare, lay on the repulsor as the droid mapped his skull with a small scanner. Atin tried to limp across to join them, then gave up and hopped the rest of distance.

“Correct,” the droid said. “Intracranial pressure is increasing. We’ll chill him down and insert a shunt to drain the fluid before we put him in the bacta tank. That’ll reduce swelling in the brain.”

Darman felt instantly deflated, faced with cooperation when he was pumped with adrenaline and fear, primed to fight. The repulsor moved off to medbay and Darman kept up with it, telling Fi it was going to be fine, even if he couldn’t hear him now, until the twin doors closed in his face and left him helpless. Niner put a hand on his shoulder plate and steered him back to the hangar.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “Accurate diagnosis and quick treatment. He’ll make it. Now let’s look after At’ika. And get yourself checked out, too.”

“Yes, Sarge.”

“Nothing more we can do right now.” There was one more thing, but Darman didn’t want to call Skirata and get him worried when he only had half a story to tell him. Ordo, though, would kill him if he wasn’t kept informed; he’d taken a shine to Fi in that blindly devoted Null sort of way, and he’d want to know. He was also the right man to judge when Sergeant Kal should be told.

Darman went reluctantly to the med droid when the last man from the 35th had been assessed, and wondered who would take Fi’s place in the squad until he recovered. It would have be Trooper Corr, an accidental recruit to the commando ranks who’d settled into the special forces way of life with remarkable ease.

And it would be temporary.

It had to be.