Alpha Three-One, inbound to your position, ETA two-point-five mikes. Ready your patient for pickup, and transmit suit data, over.”
“We’re ready to go at this end. Uploading data now.”
He spent the time checking for other wounds, monitoring the patient’s heart and vitals, and entering the computer code that caused the man’s armor to go rigid, locking him immobile against the chance of further injury. The patient’s condition continued to deteriorate, and Lee was beginning to guess that he’d made a wrong choice, a wrong guess somewhere along the line.
His patient was dying.
Two and a half minutes later, a silent swirl of lunar dust marked the arrival of Alpha 3/1, a UT-40 battlefield transport converted to use as a medevac flier. Bulbous and insect-faced, it settled to the lunar regolith on spindly legs. A pair of space-suited men dropped from the cargo deck and jogged over to Lee and the patient.
Lee stepped back as they attached a harness to the rigid armor. He was already scanning for another casualty. His suit scanners were giving him another target, bearing one-one-seven, range two kilometers. …
“Belay that, Lee,” Gunnery Sergeant Eckhart’s voice told him. “The exercise is concluded.”
“But Gunnery Sergeant—”
“I said belay that! Mount up on the Bug and come on home.”
“Aye aye, Gunnery Sergeant,” he replied. From the sound of Eckhart’s voice, he’d screwed this one up pretty badly. He looked over one of the Marine’s shoulders at the patient and saw the deadly wink of red lights: PATIENT TERMINATED.
Damn, what had he missed? He’d followed procedure right down the list.
He mounted the UT-40, popularly known as a “medibug,” or “bug” for short. The passenger compartment wasn’t much more than an open framework of struts, with a bit of decking underfoot. The two Marines were strapping the patient onto a carry stretcher slung portside outboard, but without the usual formalities of connecting life support and condition monitors. The exercise was over.
The patient, of course, wasn’t really dead, had never been alive to begin with in the traditional sense. It was a high-tech dummy, a quite sophisticated robot, actually, with a very good onboard AI that let it realistically simulate a wide range of combat wounds, injuries, traumas, various diseases, and even potentially fatal conditions such as drop-sickness-induced vomiting, followed by choking inside a sealed helmet. He was called “Misery Mike,” and he and his brothers had helped train a lot of Navy corpsmen for SMF duty. He couldn’t really die of vacuthorax because he wasn’t alive to begin with … but how Lee had treated his problems could mean life or death for Lee’s hopes to ship out with the Marines.
The UT-40’s plasma thrusters fired, the blasts both silent and invisible in the lunar vacuum. Dust billowed out from beneath the bug’s belly as the ugly little vehicle rose into the black sky. After a moment’s acceleration, the thrusters cut out, and the medibug drifted along on a carefully calculated suborbital trajectory, the cratered and dust-cloaked terrain slipping smoothly past a hundred meters below.
He spent the time going over his treatment of the last casualty. He knew he should have been more careful about moving the suit. If he’d left the wound in the shade, kept it below freezing, he might not have damaged the patient’s lungs as badly. But the lungs had already been damaged and vacuthorax would still have been an issue. Damn, what had he missed?
Minutes later, the medibug was descending over the powdery desert of Fra Mauro. Ahead, the Navy–Marine Lunar Facility was spread out in the glare of the early morning sun, its masts, domes, and Quonset cylinders casting oversized shadows across the surface.
The Fra Mauro facility had started life a century and a half ago as a U.N. base, with attendant spaceport. Taken over by U.S. Marines in the U.N. War of 2042, it had been converted into a joint Navy–Marine lunar base. It now consisted of over one hundred habitat and storage modules clustered about the sunken landing bay, including the blunt, pyramidal tower of the Fra Mauro Naval Hospital, ablaze with lights. A secondary landing dome at the base of the hospital was already open to receive the bug, which bounced roughly—still in complete silence—as the pilot jockeyed the balky little craft in for a landing.
Twenty minutes later, Lee, shed of his armor but still wearing the utility undergarment with its weave of heat-transfer tubes and medinano shunts, palmed the access panel to a door marked GSGT ECKHART. “Enter,” sounded in Lee’s thoughts over his implant and the door slid aside.
The room was small and tightly organized, as were all work spaces in the older part of the facility. Deck space was almost completely occupied by a desk and two chairs. Most of the bulkheads were taken up with storage access panels, though there was room for a holoportrait of President Connors, another of Commandant Marshke, and a framed photograph of an FT-90 in low orbit, the dazzling curve of Earth’s horizon below and beyond its sleek-gleaming hull.
“Hospitalman Second Class Lee, reporting as ordered, Gunnery Sergeant.”
“At ease, at ease,” Eckhart waved him toward the chair. “I’m not an officer and we don’t need the formal crap. Copy?”
“Uh … sure, Gunnery Sergeant. Copy.” He took the offered seat. Was this the prelude to a chewing out? Or to his being booted out of the program?
“Relax, son,” Eckhart told him. “And call me ‘Gunny.’”
“Okay, Gunny. Uh, look. I’ve been reviewing my procedure for that last casualty and I see what went wrong. I shouldn’t have rolled the wound into sunlight—”
Eckhart waved him to silence. “Your dedication is duly noted, son. And we’ll debrief your session later, with the rest of the class. Right now I want to review your request for SMF.”
Lee went cold, as cold as the shade on the Lunar surface, inside. “Is there a problem?”
“Not really. I just think you need to have your head examined, is all. What the hell do you want to ship out-system for, anyway?”
Lee took a deep breath, hesitated, then let it out again. How did you answer a question like that?
“Gunny … I just want to go, that’s all. I’ve been space-happy since I was a kid, reet? ‘Join the Navy and see the stars.’”
“You’re in space now, in case you haven’t noticed. Most space-happy kids never get as far out as the moon. Or even low-Earth orbit. You know that.” He leaned forward, hands clasped on the desktop before him. “You made it! You’re in space. Why are you so all-fired eager to take the Big Leap?”
“I wouldn’t exactly call the moon space, Gunny.” He pointed at the overhead. “I mean, Earth’s right there, and everything, in plain view.”
“There are always billets on Mars. Or Europa. Or on Navy ships on High Watch patrol. I want to know why you want to go to another fucking star. That’s what you put in for on your dreamsheet, right?”
He sighed. “Yes, Gunny. I did.”
“You want to sign on for a deployment that might last twenty to thirty years objective. You come back home aged maybe four years and find yourself completely out of pace with everything. Everyone you knew is thirty years older.
