Walter Williams - Conventions of War

Sula left Macnamara in charge of the headquarters and referred all immediate problems to him. One-Step shuttled her and a pair of walking wounded to the hospital. The wheels threw up clouds of choking dust, the drifting remains of the New Destiny Hotel. By the time she arrived, Sula knew which hospital ward Casimir was in and learned that he’d been through an operation and was still alive. The wounds were minor, the report said, and he was resting peacefully in his bed.

The hospital was a nightmare. Beneath the barrel-vaulted ceilings, with their mosaics of medical personnel flying to the aid of gracefully injured citizens, hundreds of wounded jammed the corridors, most of them High City residents caught in a cross fire. They were waiting for treatment because the secret army’s wounded, who had guns, demanded to be treated first. There was a small pile of dead Naxids in front of the building, mostly security forces who had come for treatment and then been dealt summary justice by the loyalist army. Some of the dead were medical personnel who had displeased the fighters one way or another. Others were civilians who had simply been in the wrong place.

The very fact that she had to observe any of this while she was on an urgent errand drove Sula into fury. She was barking angry orders as soon as she stepped out of One-Step’s truck, demanding that all group and team leaders meet her in Casimir’s ward.

The place smelled of blood, panic, and despair. The corridors were tracked with the rust-brown debris of the New Destiny Hotel that no one had time to clear. Fighters swaggered along the corridors brandishing weapons, and insolently supervised the work of the medical personnel. The wounded moaned, screamed, or cried for help as Sula passed. She pictured Casimir lying on the floor in some dingy, blood-soaked ward and hurried onward.

Her heart surged with relief as she saw him lying, as the report had indicated, on a bed in one of the wards. His eyes were open and she could hear the deep croak of his voice even over the continuous murmur of the other wounded in the ward.

She rushed toward him. His chest and one shoulder were bandaged and a pastel blue sheet was drawn up to his waist. An intravenous tube ran from a plastic bag on a rack to one arm. The ward was crowded, and the bed had been shoved in among a group of injured, many of whom did not have beds, only cushions and thin mattresses. Casimir’s guard-one of his Torminel-stood by the head of the bed, rifle propped on his hip and a stolid expression on his furry face.

Casimir’s dark eyes turned to her as she approached, and his face lit with surprise and weary delight. She pressed herself to him and kissed his cheek. His flesh was cold. She drew back and touched his cheek, feeling the stubble against her fingertips.

His eyes were somber, though there remained the shadow of a smile on his face. “I thought I wouldn’t see you again,” he rumbled. “I’ve been making my will.”

“Wh-What?” she said, the word stumbling across her tongue.

“I’m leaving everything to you. I’m trying to remember the passwords to the hidden safes.”

She touched his chest, his arm. He was bloodless and cold. She looked at the Torminel. “Why’s he saying that?”

Uncertainty edged the Torminel’s voice. “The doctor said he’d be all right. He said the wounds weren’t serious and that he got all the shrapnel out. But the boss has this idea he’s dying, and so I’m recording his will on my sleeve display.” He gave an indifferent flip of one hand. “I mean, why not? He’ll laugh over it later.”

Casimir’s eyelids drooped over his solemn eyes. “Something went wrong. I can feel it.”

Sula looked at the bed displays and saw that none of them were lit. “Why isn’t the bed working?” she asked.

The Torminel looked at the displays as if seeing them for the first time. “The bed?” he said.

The bed wasn’t connected to the power supply, apparently because there were too many beds in the room. Someone else’s bed had to be disconnected before Casimir’s could be jacked into a wall socket. Casimir watched without interest as the displays over his head brightened as Sula told the bed that its contents was a male Terran.

Alarms began chirping immediately. Casimir’s blood pressure was dangerously low.

“I told you something was wrong,” he said. He spoke without apparent interest.

“Get a doctor!”Sula shouted at the Torminel. He raced for the door.

Sula turned back to Casimir and took his hand. He squeezed her fingers. His grip was still powerful.

“You’re going to need the money, after this,” he said. “I’m sorry I won’t be Lord Sula and help you loot the High City.”

His attitude outraged her. She had known him angry, known him convulsed with laughter, known him shocked and surprised. She had known his charm, known him filled with murderous fury. She had known him as a lover, boyish and a little greedy. She had known him cunning, planning the death of Naxids. She had known the way he tried to dominate almost every situation in which he found himself.

She had never before seen this passivity. It made her furious.

“You arenot going to die!” she commanded. “You are going to be Lord Sula.”

He looked at her through half-closed lids, and his lips quirked in a rueful smile. “I hope so,” he said, and then his eyes rolled back and he passed out. The bed chirped its alarm.

Casimir recovered somewhat as orderlies dashed to his bed. His eyes opened slightly and he surveyed without emotion the fuss going on around him. Then his eyes lighted on Sula, and he smiled again, his strong hand tightening on her fingers.

With her free hand Sula took from around her neck the beads One-Step had given her and put them in his hand.

“These will keep you safe,” she said.

His hand closed on the beads, and behind his heavy eyelids was a glow of pleasure.

A Daimong doctor arrived, dignified in sterile robes colored an elegant mauve, and he stared at the bed display for a long moment.

“I got every bit of shrapnel,” he said, as if offended by Casimir’s obstinate refusal to be well. “I don’t understand what’s wrong.”

Sula wanted to shriek at him, but instead caught a whiff of his dying flesh and felt her insides give a lurch.

Casimir passed out again. The doctor ordered the bed wheeled away for further tests. Sula tried to follow, but the doctor was strict.

“You’ll only be in the way,” he said. His unwinking eyes looked her up and down. “And you aren’t sterile.” Sula glanced down at herself, saw the spatters of blood and decided that the doctor was right.

Besides, the team and group leaders she’d ordered here were beginning to arrive.

“This place is a mess,” she told them after Casimir and the doctor had left. “You need to get it under control, and you need to get your people under control too.”

She assigned two of the groups to guard duty: Torminel and Lai-own, to alternate night and day. The rest she assigned to cleanup.

“From this point on,” she said, “and unless you’re needed for fighting, all your people are to be considered auxiliaries to the medical personnel. If an orderly asks one of your people for help, you’ll provide it. If a corridor needs cleaning, your people will clean it-and they’ll ask damn politely for the cleaning supplies too.

“And I want that pile of bodies at the entrance taken away. We want to keep this place sanitary, for all’s sake. If the morgue won’t hold the corpses, put them on a truck and take them to someplace that will.”

Something in her manner-possibly the rage and the spatters of blood-convinced them to obey without comment. At any rate, she didn’t have to shoot any more of her own command. It was only a few moments later that she saw some Terran fighters march past the door with their weapons slung over their backs and their hands busy with mops and buckets.