THE CENTRAL LIFE-MONITOR screen lit up, pinpointing the positions of soldiers down on Target wearing Fleet medical monitors in their gear. Even as the dots glowed into life, some of them began blinking distress, and just as quickly, others went blue. By watching, one could map out where action was taking place, and where the Fleet was losing ground. As positions stabilized, the medical ships moved in to pick up the survivors who were not able to get to their personnel carriers on foot. And the bodies of those that didn’t survive. It was the Fleet tradition to bring back every combatant, alive or dead, for reasons of honor, if not because of what the Khalians did to those left behind.
Hospital ships were supposed to be inviolate in battle. Elizabeth Blackwell, though unarmed herself, had an escort of three heavily armed battle cruisers to make that so. The Elizabeth, as the main hospital ship, had a complement of over six hundred doctors, researchers, diagnosticians, and technicians on board and standing by.
Sixty scooters—medical shuttles—were already flashing their way between the ship and the battle, carrying away the Fleet’s wounded and dead. Each worked its own territory which overlapped slightly with that of its nearest neighbors, so that no wounded man would go untended.
The streamlined scooters, at just under twenty-five feet in length, were among the smallest ships employed by the Fleet. They consisted mostly of engine, fuel, and powerful boosters designed for easy, rapid landing and takeoff. They were sprinters, not intended for long trips. The small cabin contained a compact primary care unit where a doctor could sustain life in up to sixteen beings while they were evacuated to a full-service hospital.
Inducer units were as much standard issue on a scooter as in the hospital ships. They were used during surgery to put a subject under without chemical anesthesia by broadcasting relaxing alpha waves to the lower centers of the brain, and did not interfere with normal dreaming of REM sleep. Violent or distressed patients often lay under its influence to halt manic spirals of energy. And it was common practice for doctors to use the device on themselves when running long, irregular shifts. It relaxed them enough to get in a little shut-eye. In fact, for anyone used to its effects, it would work almost instantly.
The computer woke Dr. Mack Dalle up from under the inducer in his research laboratory. He had crawled under for a much-needed nap when he realized he wasn’t going to be able to, sleep because of the excitement and anxiety surrounding the coming battle. Which, obviously, must be going on right now. He pushed the square metal hood up and lurched over to his intercom. “Dalle,” he grunted into the audio pick-up, almost falling against the switch in the effort to turn the com unit on. Six hours of sleep, the holographic analog clock face informed him. Almost his normal allotment, though induced sleep tended to be more restful. He felt as though he had been under for over eight.
“Can you wake up, Mack?” a female voice requested from the unit. The color monitor screen resolved into the image of a human woman with large brown eyes and dark blue hair streaked with white.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mack said, stifling a yawn and giving her his whole attention. Commander Iris Tolbert, herself a neurochemist, and a good friend of Mack’s, had been assigned as dispatcher of the Medical Shuttles for the assault against Target. “Just inducer sleep. I’m fine.”
“Good. I need a pilot,” she told him, looking as if she was under great strain. “Scooter FMS-47 is not responding to signal, and I haven’t been able to raise the scooter-jockey, Leodli Schawn. The computer reports no life forms on board except a couple of critical patients who were reported by Leo herself. Fleet controller refuses to lend me a pilot to retrieve a medical shuttle, so I’m forced to deprive myself of the services of a doctor.” Commander Tolbert let one corner of her mouth go up in a sour half-grin. “You.”
“Whatever you say,” Dalle said matter-of-factly, moving out of the viewscreen’s range. He assembled clean medical coveralls from a storage cabinet and made for the small bathroom attached to the lab suite. He caught sight of himself in the mirrors over the line of scrub sinks and groaned. He looked like a terminal patient himself. Bags under his eyes, lines around his mouth, hair ruffled into a shock. He swiped at his hair with one hand.
“I say we have to get those soldiers aboard,” Tolbert’s voice said, fiercely. “You won’t have time even for a shower,” she commanded, guessing his thoughts. “You’ll go down with Dray Kavid in FMS-38. I’ve called the flight deck. He’s expecting you, so you’d better get a move on. Tolbert out.” The screen went blank just as Dane moved in front of it. With a sigh, he stepped out of his sweat-smelling off-duty jumpsuit and reluctantly pulled the white flight coverall up over his tall, thin frame. The suit was stenciled on both chest and back with the stylized red caduceus of the Medical Corps. On his way out of the lab suite, he called Stores for an extra diagnosti-kit to be waiting for him at the launch bay.
* * *
The scooter shot away from the Elizabeth like a waterbug on a pond, frictionless. In the distant blackness around Target, Dalle could see the tiny rectangles of other scooters moving to and fro, silver in the planet’s reflected corona.
“The battle is gone from our sectors,” Kavid told him. He was a somber black-haired pilot with some paramedical training, and a lot of experience in bussing live freight. “Half the scooters are still hovering. God, the place is full of those stupid feather-faces. If they’re not staring at you in droves, they’re getting in the way. They live here, you know? It’s been all over the waves. They’re the native life form, and they’re greedy little buggers. I caught one of the short ones trying to make off with my medikit. They’ll steal anything.”
“So you’ve been down once?” Mack asked, swallowing a quick cup of caffeine.
Kavid waved a negative, still staring at the forward viewscreen, and presented four fingers. “Four times. Once because they steered me in while the fighting was still going on. I felt like a damned pogo stick: Boing, down, up. It’s a good thing I was strapped in. Damned near lost my teeth. The other three times I brought wounded back. The prep rooms are full. I’m going to get good and drunk when I go off duty.” He punched a control button, and the view changed briefly to their aft. The gigantic ring-shaped form of Elizabeth Blackwell was quickly receding.”
“I believe it,” Dalle said, and sipped his coffee in silence. He read down the list of shuttles and their pilots on a side screen, noting the indicator which showed whether the scooter was in the docking bay, in transit, or dirtside. “FMS-27, Jericho, bay; FMS-28, Otlind, transit; FMS-.29, Cooper, Target . . .” and all the way to one which was flashing: “FMS-47, Schawn, Target.”
He pictured Leo as she was the last time he had seen her, laughing over a game or a drink in the rec room, surrounded by their friends. The pilots did fraternize with the doctors, at least on Elizabeth, during the year she had been assigned aboard her. There were so many who overlapped into both functions, like Mack himself, both shaman and bus driver. Leo was a birdlike female—with a long, swanlike neck, and vestigial feathers along, her forearms and the nape, of her neck—from some interesting genetic cross between an avian race and some humanoid stock. She put up with the usual bird jokes with grace, retorting with wit directed at monkeys and pigs.
Target zoomed in on them from the corrected view. Kavid cut in the jets, and, the shuttle tilted and set down on its side in a dirt area that was obviously normally used for livestock. Empty feed troughs stood at the perimeter of the field. “Your shuttle’s that way,” Dray pointed to planetary west between two of the wooden troughs. “Sorry I can’t get you closer, but I’ve got to get moving.”
Mack shouldered his diagnosti-kit and picked his way out of the farmyard, avoiding the newest deposits of excrement. He passed through a wooden gate into a beautifully laid out garden of exotic flowers and pretty stones. Three of Kavid’s “feather-faces” peered out at him timidly from a glassless casement, their multicolored faces almost as exotic as their garden. Dalle and they stared at each other for a moment, and then he went on westward.
His monitor tracer gave him no clear idea where to look for the scooter. Undoubtedly, there were more wounded around than Leo had managed to pick up before she disappeared, so there wasn’t a concentration of red lights by which he could judge. He was afraid that she must be dead. He couldn’t believe that in an organization so rife with communications backups as the Fleet she could be conscious anywhere and still remain out of touch.
A handful of Alliance marines, their tan uniforms coated with dust, saluted him as they passed. He returned the salute sharply. “Have you seen a grounded med scooter?” he asked them. They pointed back over their shoulders, and he plodded on.
Scooter FMS-47 lay in the rubble of a blasted cottage, smooth blue-grey surrounded by splintered brown. There were five feather-face bodies lying outward near where the door had been, surrounded by pots and rolls of textiles: residents fleeing with their little household goods. A clutch of dead Khalia sprawled nearby, fur mottled with laser burns and bullet holes. No Fleet or Alliance dead. This must have been one of the more successful skirmishes. Dalle had to step right over one of them to get to the starboard hatch. He rolled the Khalian over with one foot. Its face had been punched inward and charred black with a laser blast. Dalle gave it another push so it landed facedown again.
He put his palm on the door lock and waited. A beep deep sounded within, and the door slid back. Dalle took a step to the side. A low, wide ramp extruded itself at his feet, and he walked into the ship, bowing a little to pass under the arch.
The two patients-were there, and one of them stirred as the door opened. “Doc?”
“Yes?” Dalle came over to the woman and took her wrist. The stocky woman’s pulse was strong, and the monitor showed her vitals to be good. At first he thought the bandages over her eyes hid the only wound, but when she sat up, he saw that there was a leg missing. Her hair was scorched, leaving a bald place over her left eye that stretched to the crown of her head.
“You’re not the same doc,” the marine accused, gently touching his chest with one hand.
“I’m Mack,” he said, in a soothing, professional voice. “Hasn’t Leo been back? Is anyone else here?”
“Nope. Just the guy breathing over there.” Mack glanced over at the other marine, who was in deep sleep. His wounds were more extensive than the woman’s, though not as severe.
“Do you need anything, corporal?”
“Nope,” the woman said. “Doc told me they’d try to do something about my eyes later. I’m okay for now.”
Stoic, Mack thought. Or shock. ”Fine. I’m going to look for Leo and the rest of the wounded out there, and then we’ll be heading back to the hospital.”
“That’s okay, Doc. Thanks.” The woman settled back onto her bunk, patting her bandage to keep it in place.
There were no other sounds within except the chucklings of the ship’s systems maintaining themselves, but he heard shuffling feet running outside. “Leo?” he called.
Mack was just in time to see a white-backed shape vanishing around the comer of a mostly intact house to his left. “Hello?” He stabbed at the communicator button on his sleeve, on general immediate-range broadcast. “Hello? I am Dr. Dalle. Please identify yourself.” No reply. It couldn’t have been Leo, or any other Fleet personnel. He hadn’t received even an echo from a nearby transmitter. A Khalian? A live Khalian in this area? His hand twisted forward to his sleeve.
Mack took another quick look around for the missing pilot, his hand curled under to the arming switch that operated the weapon hidden under the medical insignia on his sleeve. It was a laser, with a self-contained battery good for three short-range but powerful shots. He admitted at last that Leo was nowhere around, and went back to the scooter to begin his rounds.
“Doc?” the marine called out.
“Just me,” Mack said, and started gathering equipment. The motorized travois, a rolling two-tiered gurney for four, was, moored just forward of the inside hatch. He unfastened the straps holding it in place, and manipulated the control lead, a long, curving neck of metal that terminated in a tiny ten-button keypad, until the trolley followed him at heel out of the ship like an obedient three-wheeled dog. His medical paraphernalia rode on the near end of the cart, ostentatiously marked with the same red caduceus he wore. He had no armaments in plain view, but the laser was ready. He was also running through everything he knew about unarmed combat with opponents that bite, a required course ordered by Commander Tolbert.
He passed hundreds of featherhead natives, who all stared at him without comprehension. “I bet they don’t even understand they’ve been invaded twice,” Mack said to himself, sarcastically, stopping to run the portable monitor over the body of a very large Alliance marine. There were no wounds visible, not even bruises, but the man was deeply unconscious. Mack couldn’t even guess what had happened to him. The echo of the heartbeat and brain functions was weak, but the frequency monitor remained clearly on red, not blue. The cleanup shift would come in for the dead, later on after the battle had ended or moved on, led by the blue frequency band.
After dispensing a “shock absorber” to the marine, Dalle pushed, pulled, and shoved him into the shelter of the low eaves of a hut. To pick him up on the outward journey made it more awkward to haul the motorized travois Dalle pulled behind him. It made more sense to haul it out empty, and pick up the wounded on his way back to the ship. He had three other life monitors on his, scope along this vector. In his condition, the man would last until Dalle came back.
A sharp crack! startled him, and Dalle stopped cold, listening. Someone was stalking him. The image of the white figure haunted him. He wished that he had been able to get a clear look at it. Pok, the sound of a footstep, came right behind him. He spun and dropped just as a laser blast seared overhead and gouged a five-inch strip of plaster out of a wall. The plaster exploded with a loud bang! Mack gulped. On his belly, he wriggled over to the travois, hid in its shelter. A second blast ricocheted silently off the shiny metal of the travois’s surface, heating up the place just in front of his head, and peeling more stucco from a building facade with a crack that echoed down the street. He peered around the gurney’s front end, readying his laser, but there was nothing to shoot at. His assailant was well hidden. Mack didn’t want to expose himself, but he could, have a long wait before being rescued, and there were the wounded to consider. He craned his neck around the metal frame, and swept an eye over the square. There wasn’t much left of the buildings on that side, but the ragged lean-tos formed by fallen timbers and panels made terrific places for snipers to hide.
A bullet zinged past him from the other direction. Mack buried himself in the broken quartz paving and tried to scramble backward out of the way. That shot came from a walkway between two of the brown and white wooden houses. Dalle lay flat and spat out gravel. The laser shrieked again, sounding near to overheating. At the same time more bullets flew from the other side of the square.
“Stay down, dammit!” barked a male voice. Another scream, animal this time, tore the air, and the laser bolts stopped coming. There was a rush and rumbling, and more of the masonry fell in. Dalle, with a cautious eye on the heaped rubble, rose and dusted himself off.
“You’re a doc?” a voice gritted from the walkway. Dalle activated a powerful tight-beam torch and shone it into the alley. He let out an involuntary hiss. There was an Alliance marine sergeant lying braced against a wall with a broad hand pressed to his side. His helmet was gone, and his eyebrows were drawn down with the pain.
“Help me.” The left side of the man’s face was torn open, and his other arm, thickly muscled, rested bonelessly on his lap. Blood dripped purposefully from his wounds, showing the heart muscle was still working hard, and nothing had clotted yet. This must have happened just before Dane moved into the middle of the firefight. Dalle swallowed, looking around for Khalia. Dead ones lay at grotesque angles all over the street, some spilling out of a crashed floater. No living ones were in sight. He knelt by the marine, prying the man’s strong fingers away from the wound. He squeezed anesthetic and antibiotic over it, and probed gently with his fingers. There were shards of bone mixed in with the shredded muscle.
“Slug-thrower,” the marine told him through gritted teeth. “Big one.”
“I hope you got him,” Dalle said, without looking up. He pulled bone splinters away from the great blood vessel and held the vein shut with his fingers until he could clamp it with a temporary. He unfolded a heavy soft dressing and fitted it over the tear. It would hold together until they got back to the hospital ship. He didn’t want to plant new skin on it until he had a chance for adequate debridement, and this was no place to do it.
“I do, too,” the marine assured him. “Can you get me out of here?”
Dalle rose to his feet, wiping his hands down the sides of his jumpsuit, leaving red streaks in the dust. “Wait here for me. I won’t be more than five minutes. I’ve got two others on scope. They’re just a little way from here.”
“No!” The wounded man tried to struggle to his feet. “You’ve got your trolley. Take me back!”
“I can’t yet.” Dalle tried to explain about the travois’s limited capabilities, but the marine drew his sidearm and leveled it on him. “Let’s go, doctor,” he said in a low voice trembling with pain and stress. “Now. I’ll die if you don’t get me to a hospital right away.”
Dalle stood his ground. This was not his first battle, or his first threat. War affected strong men in odd ways. “I can’t, soldier, but more than that, I won’t. Those could be men from your command out there. Even if you won’t, I must give them every chance of survival. You’ll last.” And he turned purposely away, looking into his monitor and not at the wounded sergeant. The man had behaved in a perfectly understandable and predictable manner, and so, after much practice and many battles, was Mack’s response. He kept his muscles taut as he walked. If the man was going to shoot at him, it would be . . . Now! His head jerked up nervously in anticipation, but the shot didn’t come. He relaxed with a sigh. The sergeant would wait. The logic, however inhumane it seemed at first, had gotten through to him. It did, in eight times out of ten—and only one of those other two had had decent aim.
The other two marines were easy to find. The were the only dull-colored humps in the midst of a particolored “rug” of Khalia and feather-faces dead in a town square.
The square was surrounded by the typical low-eaved buildings, and one tall structure with antennas on top stood off to one side. The Alliance men’s khaki uniforms were stained with dirt and much blood, but they still managed to respond when Dalle sought to rouse them. One, who had lost a foot and had a deep bite under his collarbone, crawled onto the gurney under his own power, and helped Dalle to drag his buddy on board. When they turned him over, the doctor could see the second marine had been lasered across the back. In a way, he had been lucky: the strip of dark pink flesh showed that he’d been broadside to the gunner. On the other hand, it would take time to see if there had been nerve damage in the spine. The man could end up being paralyzed from the ribcage down. Dalle sprayed him with antiseptic, not wanting to numb the endangered nerves with anesthesia. He put a patch on the other’s wrist to feed antitoxin into the bloodstream, to counteract any infection that he might get from the weasel bite; he closed up the bite itself and the end of the leg. Mentally, he was already doing’ surgical prep on these men.
The marine sergeant was waiting patiently where Dalle had left him. He straightened up when he heard the travois trundling toward him. “Hi, Doc,” the sergeant said, in unaccustomed embarrassment. “It’s bad luck to shoot at a doctor. Hope you didn’t take offense before. You know . . .”
Dalle nodded. “I know. I’ll get you home, sergeant.”
“Shillitoe is my name. Alvin Shillitoe, but my mates call me Tarzan.”
Dalle grinned. “At least it’s not as bad as Hound Baskerville.”
“Yeah. I knew him,” Tarzan acknowledged. “Unngh!” he grunted, using his good hand to lever himself aboard. “Another good old nickname.” He struggled to flatten out as the gurney bumped into motion. The other men gave him faint grins of greeting.
“Yo, sarge,” one of them said, noticing Shillitoe’s insignia.
“And they call me Sunday Driver,” Dalle smiled, watching the man try to disguise his discomfort as they moved over the ridged dirt streets. “No, really. I’m Mack, but you can call me Doctor.”
“Thanks, Mack,” the sergeant said, relaxing.
Dalle stopped only once more, to pick up the comatose patient. There was still no response or signs of awakening, but his heartbeat was a tiny bit stronger. Not enough, Dalle thought, with a wrench.
“He won’t last,” Shillitoe observed.
Privately, Dalle agreed with him, but aloud he said, “Everyone gets his chance.”
* * *
He got them all stowed in the bunks aboard FMS-47, patched, and started plasma on the three with deep wounds; he slapped a fibrillator alarm onto the chest of the fourth in case his heart should go into arrest in the doctor’s absence. The woman had fallen asleep, and Dalle was glad to see an improvement in her blood pressure. They should be stable enough until he got back. With a thoughtful nod, he rolled out and down the ramp for a second load.
* * *
The streets were so cramped along his second vector that Dalle was forced to leave the travois and step carefully among the massed bodies to search for his quarries. There were three on his screen, and he was still hoping one of them would be Leo Schawn.
The rough walls caught at his sleeve with protruding wooden splinters or dribbled stinking gray plaster dust all over him. Floaters and jet-packers had been through here. Dalle could tell by the odd streaks where lasers had hit and gouged, yards above the reach of anyone at street level.
Dead bodies, Alliance, featherheads, and Khalia, were crowded together against a crumbling wall as if they had been bulldozed aside. The Fleet personnel, most of them technicians and doctors, had all been tied up and then killed. Most of them showed bullet or laser wounds, but others had suffered more gruesome deaths. He recognized Leo’s shocked, open-eyed face among the dead, realized with a hollow feeling inside that only her head was there. Her body, dressed in its white jumpsuit, hands bound with a thong, was ten feet away, with another heap of bodies on the stones. The neck, which was narrow enough to be encircled by one of Dalle’s long hands, had been violently severed. He gagged out of sheer reaction, then swallowed and went over to place the head with the body. With a gentle hand, he closed her eyes and drew her jaw shut
“Dalle, FMS–47, on Target,” he said into his wrist communicator, and waited for acknowledgment. A hissing crackle came, which was the dispatcher hooking in. “Confirm that Pilot Schawn, late of FMS–47, has been found. She’s dead. Khalian-style killing. Her neck was chewed through. It’s nasty.”
A sigh came out of the grille. “I thought so, Mack,” Iris Tolbert said. “If you’ve got room, bring her back up. Otherwise, leave her for the cleanup squad.”
“I’ll bring her back,” Mack said, grimly. “Out.”
* * *
The sight of her open eyes stayed in his mind all along the rest of his vector, while he loaded up two surviving marines and turned back along a detour. The third man’s life monitor had turned to blue as he watched, unable to halt death, and under the circumstances, unwilling to try. This marine had caught the edge—only the edge—of a plasma blast, which had cauterized the places where his right ribcage, arm, neck, and jaw used to be. He looked as though someone had taken a giant bite out of him, like a gingerbread man. A husky male voice sputtered out of the helmet communicator, demanding attention. “Marlowe? Do you read me?”
Dalle lifted it off the dead man’s head and thumbed the switch which would normally be pressured open by the heck muscles. “This is Dr. Dalle. Who is speaking?”
“l am Sergeant Villanova,” the voice snapped in surprise. “Where is my marine?”
“He died a minute ago, Sergeant. I’m sorry.”
There was a quiet, sad growl out of the speaker. “He was talking to me. I was keeping him awake ‘til we could get back there. He was hurt bad?” It was a question.
“Very bad,” Dalle confirmed. “I don’t think I could have saved him. Are you in need of assistance?”
“Nope,” Villanova said, curtly. “Thank you, Doctor. Out.”
As Dalle stood up to drag away his travois, he saw a flash of white. The tension took over his reactions, and he turned and fired his sleeve laser in the direction the shot came from. Then he screamed. His left sleeve bad been punctured, and a laser had etched a hot pink line in his forearm up to the back of his hand. To his amazement, he heard an answering scream from his assassin.
Cautiously, he edged over and peered around the corner. On the ground a Khalian lay. The fur of its arms and upper body was bleached white, some mark of vanity, or perhaps a sign of rank. One could never tell with the Khalia.
With an eye on the claws, he checked under the pointed muzzle for a pulse. His shot had only grazed its head, but it was nearly dead from a half-dozen other wounds. There was an entry and exit wound from one of Alvin’s bullets, Dalle was sure. Its weapon holsters on crossed leather straps were empty.
“Spot check, FMS–47!” Dalle’s communicator crackled.
It was Iris Tolbert. “How’re ya doing, Mack? I’m not going to lose touch with another pilot.”
“I’m okay, Commander,” ‘Mack replied. “How do you think the lab boys would like to play with a weasel?” While he talked he was squirting anesthetic on his arm. He unwound strips of plasti-skin and pressed them over the pink line. In a moment, the pain died down. There was no need for antibiotics—lasers made clean wounds, but the sonovabitch hurt like hell.
“We’ve got all the dissection subjects we need, Mack.”
“I’ve got a live down here. He’s beat-up, unconscious, but I think he’ll make it. He’d better. I think it might be one of the ones that killed Leo.”
Tolbert was silent a moment, considering. “Good idea. We don’t get many live ones. Bring it aboard. I’ll tell Security to expect you.”
“Thanks, Commander. Out.”
The limp weasel body was astonishingly light. Dalle felt almost no strain as he carried the alien over to the cart and strapped it down. Its breathing was very shallow. There was little of life left in it, but perhaps the lab techs would have enough time to study its responses before it died. Most Khalian prisoners suicided after capture, but this one wouldn’t be given the chance. He gave it a general antibiotic booster, hoping the drug wouldn’t kill it.
Leo’s light skull rolled from side to side in its gurney bed just across from the pinioned Khalian. Her narrow jaw had flopped open, and she looked like she might be screaming. Betrayal. Dalle felt a stab of guilt for possibly saving the life of the very Khalian who had taken hers. On the other hand, making it so her killer lived the short, proscribed life of a laboratory rat was perhaps apt revenge.
He saw a few of the feather-faces robbing supply packs from the dead. He made no move to stop them. Those that the Fleet reclaimed would get tossed into the disposer anyway. Someone may as well get use out of them. Except for their scratching and quiet conversation, there was no sound at all for miles under Target’s sun.
* * *
Dalle bandaged the Khalian’s injuries and left it strapped down on a bunk, ignoring the questions of his other patients. “Prisoner of war,” was all he would tell them. Tarzan squinted a question at him, but Dalle looked away. The last vector he needed to cover showed only two pinpoints of red. Out of curiosity, he turned the monitor dial to blue for the same tangent, and cringed at the vast number of indicator lights that appeared. Some sectors were just overlapping blurs of blue. Quickly, he snapped the control back to its original position, unable to deal emotionally with the scope of violent death. He chided his subconscious. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen war before, but he never got used to it. He didn’t want to get used to it.
* * *
One of the two soldiers was kicking and twitching his arms feebly by the time Dalle brought him back to the scooter. His eyes were open, but he was not seeing Dalle. He was reliving the battle, fighting off the assailants who left the pattern of deep scratches, on his skin and shredded his uniform. He must have been beset by a whole gang of weasels. The knife Dalle had found near his hand was bloody, but his slugthrower had never been drawn from the holster. He was a good candidate for inducer-rest. Perhaps the man would need psychotherapy anyway, but his anxiety level could be significantly reduced in the meanwhile.
He hit the hatch control and guided the travois up the ramp. At the top, he nearly let go of the metal leash in shock. The room was an abattoir. His patients lay in their own blood, dead, unable to have defended themselves. Some had died without ever having regained consciousness from their first encounters. And the bunk where the Khalian had been was empty, the straps chewed through. “By the hand of the goddess, what have I done?” Dalle whispered. He dashed around to each bed, searching for signs of life. It was a vain pursuit, except for two bodies, the female marine, knocked unconscious with a heavy plasma canister that lay nearby; and another, stretched out on its side on the floor.
“Doc,” Alvin croaked, his jaw and neck covered in blood from his face wound. One eye was glued shut and bruised. “Your pet weasel—”
“Where is it?” Mack looked around, but all he saw were dead men.
“Don’t know. It attacked me and I grappled it. Damned things don’t weigh much, and I could a taken it down in spite of my busted arm, but see what it did to my eye? Kicked me in the gut, too.”
“Yeah,” Mack said, retrieving a flat, blue leechpak from the refrigerator unit. It didn’t draw out blood, as its name suggested, but did assist in promoting circulation in hematomae. Alvin put it over the side of his face.
“Little bastard. Why’d ya bring it in anyway?”
Dalle took a moment, teeth in his lower lip, to confirm that, all of his other patients were dead. Where was the Khalian now? “Did it get out of the ship, Alvin?” he asked, ignoring the marine’s question.
Shillitoe cringed at the sound of his given name. He glanced around. “No. It’s in here somewhere behind the panels. It couldn’t figure out how to work the controls.”
Warily, Dalle moved to the console, turned on the ship’s security, system. He didn’t have any taste for playing hide-and-seek with a bloodthirsty monster, in spite of the fact he must have a good two feet in height on it. There, on the schematic, was a life form moving toward the other five life forms, his and the living patients. Dalle twisted, stared. The Khalian, dripping blood, was racing toward the open hatch.
Quickly, Dalle pounced on a control, slammed the heel of his hand down on it. The door whooshed shut almost on the alien’s claws. It let out a panicked squeal. Whirling, it dodged toward the tiny bridge, and even as Dalle lunged for it, discovered there was no door to shut on its pursuer, and backpedaled toward the bank of storage cabinets.
Mack ran after it, trying to guess what its next move would be. Having been in the thick of hand-to-hand skirmishes with Khalia before, he probably knew as much or more about their fighting style than any other doctor in the Fleet. They were smaller, weaker, lighter than human beings, but they were faster than hell, and they had a lot of energy.
He got a sudden inspiration—he could throw it under the inducer. Kayo it with waves, and it would be no more trouble. He cursed, looking at the bodies of the dead and, wishing he had thought of that solution earlier. Keeping his eye on the Khalian, he sidled over to the device, a more portable version of the one in his lab, and switched if on. The inducer’s gentle hum filled the air.
The Khalian’s shiny black eyes followed Dalle suspiciously. It had no idea what the soft-skin’s machine did, but it had no intention of getting anywhere near it to find out. The device smelled dangerous. Teeth and claws were no use’ against the walls of this ship, and its position of mere soldier had never allowed it to learn such intricacies as technology. It would have to make him open the door before it tore his throat out.
Dalle moved purposefully toward the weasel, seeking to maneuver it toward the inducer. It cringed, flattening its back against the wall and spreading out its front claws. Dalle feinted toward the left, driving it out of its niche to the right. It flashed across the room, pounding on the control console to make it open the door, then turned at bay. Mack moved inexorably toward it, cornering it, until it found that it had its back to the deadly machine.
The weasel sprang at Dalle, teeth bared. It was still very weak from blood loss and its wounds, but it was determined to go out fighting. Dalle looked at the long, sharp incisors, and regretted not pinning it down with metal straps when he had gone out. Ironically, it was his own fault that the weasel had enough strength to fight. The shock absorber and local anesthesia had done their work; the weasel didn’t feel its wounds. He had set it free to kill. It made him sick to see the mangled dead strewn about his control room.
The Khalian leaped at him. One claw whistled through the air. Dalle nearly loosed off another of his laser shots, but remembered in time how much damage it would do to the inside of the ship. He stiff-armed the weasel in the face, bending backwards to grab the heavy plasma canister off the floor. The weasel raised a back claw and raked down his leg, came up again, and grazed the cloth over Dalle’s abdomen. It ducked its head around his arm to bite at the exposed side of the doctor’s neck. To its owner’s surprise, the claw caught in the fabric, halting the Khalian’s strategy momentarily. Dalle Iet go of the weasel’s face, linked his arm under the leg, and flipped it up and over.
The weasel went flying, but it regained its feet in a blur and fixed its teeth into Dane’s shoulder. Mack screamed, and a tingling raced down his left arm to his fingers, followed by a shock of numbness. The can fell from his hand with a boom! as it hit the deck. Instantly, the weasel tried to break to the right. In automatic response, Dalle’s arm tightened around it and squeezed.
The weasel gasped involuntarily through the comers of its mouth. Its front claws let go, but its teeth didn’t.
Ignoring the deadening of his left hand, the doctor locked his right hand on his left wrist, and lifted the small Khalian off its feet, waltzed it struggling toward the inducer. As a creature so close to base animal, Dalle was confident that the effect the waves had on the low brain in so many Allied species would put the beast quickly under.
He body-slammed it against the side of the table, trying to bend it backwards, but its spine was designed to bend only forward and to the side. He was afraid he would snap its backbone, and twisted instead to the side, pinioning the Khalian’s paws over its head. It brought them both within inches of the edge of the inducer’s beam. The weasel doubled over between its own forepaws, jaws reaching for Dalle’s throat. The doctor recoiled, remembering what had happened to Leo. His head moved just under the focused beam of the inducer.
Dalle saw the writhing white figure of the Khalian change, until the face was Leo’s, screaming at him as his hands closed around her throat. It was a waking dream, and he was fighting the urge to fall asleep as much as his furry opponent. He kept convincing himself that it wasn’t Leodli he was fighting, but a Khalian, and the face changed over and over again. He was determined not to lose his prize. He wanted to bring the alien home still breathing. It became Leo again, this time pleading with him not to kill her. “No more,” she begged.”
The Khalian took advantage of his uncertain grip to scratch at him again. Dalle felt the gouge across his belly and thigh from very far away. It was as if it was hurting someone else, not him. The soft, cottony wadding of unreality around his mind was starting to work on the rest of his body. He realized that his brilliant stratagem was more dangerous to him than to a weasel. If he moved fully under the inducer’s beam, he would be instantly asleep. There was no telling how long it would take the Khalian’s unaccustomed brain to be affected. In the back of his consciousness, he could hear the intercom screaming at him, Commander Tolbert wanting a progress report. He heard the murmur of voices in the background near him, but none of them made any sense.
* * *
He batted away a claw he couldn’t quite see. It kept metamorphosing as it moved closer to his face. He was losing the fight. If he moved one more inch under the hood, he would be helpless, and his opponent could quite easily kill him. He was becoming groggy. It was overwhelming him now, pushing him, forcing him . . .
His attention was dragged back to the surface just then by a magnificent, full-throated yell. His limbs twitched and jerked, all control lost from the startlement.
But that was nothing compared to the reaction of the Khalian. It jumped high in the air, whiskers out, fizzing and spitting, and spun at bay to face the attacker who loomed behind it, gigantic in the glaring white light.
Without the alien’s pressure to keep him on the table, Dalle slid out of the inducer’s influence to the floor, where he banged his head on the tiles. He rolled over, gained his hands and knees by inches. The war cry sounded forth again, forcing the weasel into an attitude of defense. Alvin stood before him, waving the plasma canister and uttering the huge sound that had the weasel frozen in its place. Without hesitation, Dalle wrenched himself upright, enveloped the small figure of the alien in a hammerlock, and threw it bodily under the inducer beam. In a few moments, it was still. Mack let go and leaned back against the wall, panting, then grinned up at Shillitoe, who was supporting himself against the travois. The other two patients were cheering.
“Now I know how you got your nickname,” Dalle joked weakly.
* * *
Colonel Bar Kochba of the security occupation force, from the planet that orbited Magen Perdido, was on hand with five of his men to assist with the transfer of Mack’s prisoner. They put restraints on the helpless Khalian before dragging it out of the inducer unit. Until they were gone, Mack was more than half convinced he would be led away in irons too, to face court martial for letting an enemy murder helpless patients. Instead Bar Kochba threw him a casual salute and grinned through his beard at him. Mack returned the salute, and bent to care for the survivors. Gently, orderlies from the Morgue lifted Leo Schawn’s body from the stretcher bed. Mack watched them roll away with her and the other dead before turning to care for the remaining living passengers of FMS–47.
He went to visit Alvin in the ward after the big sergeant had been through surgery and recovery. The torn place on the sergeant’s face was patched up, with a ring of white wadding around the eye to keep seepage out of the new skin graft. Mack’s other three patients were all doing well, and seemed to bear Dalle no ill feelings for accidentally turning a Khalian loose among them.
“Fortunes of war, doc. If the brass let you off, I can forgive you,” the female marine told him philosophically. If anything, they respected him for capturing one alive single-handed. Shillitoe promptly offered to take him on as medic for his unit, the Apes.
“No, thanks,” Mack said, laughing. “I’m happy at what I’m doing: Research and Diagnosis. If I can ever get back to my lab and do some.”
“You’re missing a great opportunity, Mack,” Alvin chided him, shaking his head. “Ooooh.” He touched a hand to the eye patch.
While he and Alvin were chatting, a mate came up and touched Mack on the shoulder. “Excuse me, Captain, Admiral Duane requests your presence on the Caffrey. We’ve got a wounded Khalian. It’s unconscious, I think.”
“Why me?” Dane demanded.
The aide shrugged. “The Admiral’s decided you’re the closest thing we have to an expert.
Dalle ignored the grin on Shillitoe’s face as he followed the aide out.