Nicola Griffith - Ammonite

“But you do have a medic?”

“Dead.”

“Then let us see her, Twissel. Thenike here might be able to help. Please.”

“I’ll need your knives first. Take them from your belts, two fingers only. Drop them on the grass.” Marghe felt a flash of anger and realized this reminded her of the way Aoife had treated her. But this was not Tehuantepec. She tossed down her knife. “Good. Kick them over here.”

The sled, all alloys and plastics, felt hard and strange to Marghe. It was air-conditioned and cool, but the smells were still there: alien, manufactured materials mingling with blood and excretia and rank sweat. Chauhan was crouched in the cab, blank-faced. They squeezed past her and into the covered flatbed.

Two women lay side by side on inflated medical pallets. Thenike immediately knelt by the nearest, a blond-haired woman in partial armor.

If Marghe had not known that the other was Letitia Dogias, she was not sure she would have recognized her. Her memory insisted that the communications technician was vibrant, alive, full of irreverence and crackling energy; she was not this, this thing breathing stertorously through an open mouth with a hole in her stomach that oozed dark, dark blood. She smelled terrible.

“She’s dead.”

For one hanging moment, Marghe thought Thenike meant Dogias, then realized she was talking about the other one, the Mirror. The viajera folded the woman’s hands on her breast, closed her eyes, had to use both hands to lift her jaw and close her mouth.

“What was your companion’s name?” Thenike asked Twissel.

“Foster. Alice Foster.”

“Then we should bury Alice Foster.”

“No. We have to take her back.”

“The heat…”

“We have a bag.”

Thenike looked at Marghe, who nodded. “Then put her in a bag.” She motioned Marghe away from Dogias and knelt.

Marghe marveled at her calm poise; she took Dogias’s pulse, listened to her breathing, lifted the tunic away from the awful wound in her stomach, pinched some skin and sniffed it, all as matter-of-factly as tuning a musical instrument. “I’ll need to get her outside in the light and air. Then I want water, and clean cloths, bandages if you have any. And I’ll need my knife back.”

Twissel must have been as impressed as Marghe with Thenike’s examination; the Mirror handed Thenike her knife without comment, then picked up one end of the pallet.

When they had Letitia outside, Thenike motioned Marghe over to the pallet lying on the grass. Letitia looked even worse in natural light. “I’ll do what I can here, but you must help the other one. Chauhan. She needs to be busy.” She opened the medical roll Twissel had found and picked out a swab. “She needs to stop thinking about what happened, just for a little while.”

Foster was already stiffening. It took three of them to strip her armor and clothes, her dog tag and wristcom, and get her inside the body bag. Twissel, with her injured arm, could not do much.

It was Foster’s left hand Marghe would always remember. It stuck out awkwardly, and Marghe had to wrestle it into the slick black plastic bag: she noticed that two fingernails were broken, that Foster had chewed her cuticles, that there was a pale band of skin around the wrist where she had worn her wristcom. The mark of civilization , Marghe thought, then looked at her own, evenly tanned wrist, and how easily it is lost .

With the motor off, the sled began to warm. The smell got worse. Marghe left the Mirrors scrubbing at the flatbed with bundles of spare uniform dipped in water and alcohol and went outside.

Thenike was squatting on her heels, running her hands, palm down, through the air an inch or so above Dogias’s body. She had stripped Letitia’s stained clothing, all of it, and washed her down. The wound was clean, still leaking a little blood, but Dogias looked… better. She seemed to be breathing more easily. Marghe crouched down next to the pallet; when Thenike’s hands passed near her, she felt as though someone had run a powerful magnet over her skin.

“She’s stable now,” Thenike said. She sounded shockingly tired. Whatever she had done to help Dogias had taken a great deal of energy. “Help me get a compress on her wound.”

Marghe lifted Dogias enough for Thenike to pass the roll of bandage under her ribs. The technician seemed heavier than the last time, when Marghe had dangled her over the rock edge and lowered her into Lu Wai’s arms, and her skin felt different: slack, clammy. “Will she be all right?”

Thenike nodded tiredly, tied the bandage, and tested the tightness of the compress.

Chauhan took the stick. The others stayed in the back where it was once again cool and dry. The body bag was tucked out of the way in an overhead storage bin.

Thenike checked Dogias’s pulse, then motioned for Twissel to come and sit by her. Marghe helped to get the Mirror’s armor off. Thenike examined the swollen forearm and frowned. “Lean forward.” She probed at the back of Twissel’s head.

The Mirror winced, and Thenike’s fingers came away with dark flecks of dry blood on the tips. “There’s nothing wrong with your head. But the bones in this arm are broken.”

Twissel just nodded. “Thought they might be.” She watched Thenike clip on splints and start to make a sling. “My own fault, this broken arm,” she said to Marghe. “Fell on it, when I got hit by the stone that bloodied my head. I know how to fall. Should have managed not to break my own damned arm.”

“You were probably half conscious.”

“Still, I know better.”

“Shouldn’t the suit have protected you?”

“It would have, if it was turned on. If I’d been all armored up. I wasn’t. None of us were, not fully. You just don’t expect to need full armor on a backward world like this. Anyone wants to play rough and all you have to do is pull one of these.” She pointed with her left hand at the weapon on her hip.

“So what happened?”

“I don’t really know. Danner sent us, Sergeant Leap’s squad, out under Captain White Moon. We were escorting Dogias and that other technician to the relay. To check it over. So we were lounging around, keeping an eye out, you know, while the two did their checking. Though I don’t know why they both—it was just a pile of slag. Useless. So anyway, they were doing that, we were talking, some of us playing a game of chicken with the crossbows—”

“When did Mirrors start using crossbows?”

“One of Danner’s ideas. A morale thing. Though now I’m not sure… Anyway, we were relaxed, but still keeping an eye open. You know. I mean, we weren’t worried, but you never can tell, not on a world like this. And we’d been told there were hostiles in the area.”

The tribes. Marghe nodded.

“And then the storm hit. The noise, the wind, it… It’s different out here, not the same as being safe in Port Central while the, wind tries to rip the grass out by the roots and the thunder rolls the hills flat. It was like the sky opened its mouth and roared. And out of the dust and roar, the flash of light, came those natives on horses. Like devils.” She shook her head.“We were disoriented, deaf, blind, surrounded by women like demons yelling, riding at us. Still, it takes more than hostiles and a bit of weather. We’re professionals. I’d seen worse. I pulled out my weapon. I wasn’t the only one. I fired.”

Twissel raised her free arm, reliving it.

“I fired, but nothing happened. Nothing. I thought it was a damaged power pack.

I had it stripped out and replaced in three seconds.” Marghe tried to imagine managing that in the middle of an attack and a storm, failed. “It still didn’t work. I couldn’t believe it. I just kept pointing that thing and pressing the stud. Nothing.