“I think it would be wiser to wait? Another week to give the gel time to bond?”
Tanaka didn’t dignify that with a reply. Her armor was out in the courtyard, packed neatly for recovery along with what was salvageable from the dead fire team, and she walked out of the infirmary to join it, with the medic trailing behind her like a wisp of tissue stuck to her boot. The transport cart from the Sparrowhawk was a plume of dust, still half a klick from the campus. The faculty and staff of the academy watched her from their windows and doors with a mixture of fear and disapproval. She was the woman who’d swept down from the sky and locked them all away while their school turned into a free fire zone. An honorary degree would have been a little much to expect.
She smiled at the thought, then winced.
When the cart arrived, Mugabo was on it. His practiced formality was as crisp as a starched shirt. He braced and saluted her. It actually made her feel better. More herself. While his little crew loaded the arms and armor of their dead, Mugabo stood at her side, head tilted forward.
“You took your damn time,” she said.
“My apologies. The damage we sustained made atmospheric entry problematic, and your transport ship was . . . Unfortunately, we were forced to salvage certain equipment from it. I am very sorry for the delay.”
“Where do the repairs stand?”
Mugabo nodded, not meaning anything positive other than that he’d heard the question. “While the damage is significant, I am confident we can continue safely. My chief mechanic recommends a return to Laconia for resupply.”
“Are we short of something?”
“The composites that feed the hull are understandably diminished.”
“Meaning the self-repair functions aren’t working.”
“The hull’s integrity is within the error bars,” Mugabo said. She liked the way he deflected. He didn’t want to go to Laconia, his chief mechanic did. His ship wasn’t broken unless Tanaka was willing to permit it to be. There had always been that thread in the tapestry of Laconian culture: the willingness to assert whatever reality your commanding officer proposed. She wondered what Mugabo’s internal life was like. Did he have a reserve of freedom and perversity hidden inside, the way she did, or was he the same blankness all the way down?
She swung herself into the front seat beside the driver and looked out over the school. The battlefield. She’d lost here—lost her fire team, her target, her blood, and her flesh. Part of her reputation. And she’d lost it because she had been too slow to reach for violence. Teresa Duarte was precious—a resource of one. Irreplaceable. Holden had been willing to risk her where Tanaka had not. Lesson learned.
Part of her wanted to drop a missile on the school grounds from orbit and erase the site. She could do it. A few lives wiped out— including that fucking medic—and no one would prosecute her for it. The only consequence would be that people would know she’d done it. They’d guess at the embarrassment and shame that had driven the act.
So fuck it. Let them live.
Mugabo’s team finished the loading and clambered back into their places on the cart. Some peculiarity of the atmosphere refracted the sunlight into six bands like a child’s picture of a star. She remembered something she’d heard once: I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. She didn’t know where the line came from. It didn’t matter. She had a hunt to complete.
“We can go,” she said.
“Yes, sir,” Mugabo replied, and the cart lurched, turned, and sped away toward the landing point. The wind of their passage tasted like dirt. She took comfort in the knowledge that she could live a full, rich life and never once come back to this shithole of a planet. The thought helped, if only a little.
When they were back on the Sparrowhawk and burning for the ring gate, she submitted herself to the medical team. Walking into the infirmary of her own free will and not flinching as they made their examination pulled some of the sting of her first experience of the wounds. By the time they’d checked the wound on her scalp, scraped the local regrowth gel out of her cheek, sewn a matrix in place, and put their own gel on, she felt better. It hurt badly, but showing them and herself that the pain was incidental was almost soothing. Mortification of the flesh had a long and glorious history among performance artists and religious zealots. She didn’t think of herself as either, but maybe there was some overlap.
The new nerve endings itched, and her head throbbed if she stood up too quickly when they were under thrust. Otherwise, she was ready to get back to work, starting with her after-action report. She sat at the little desk in her office, and while the air recycler hummed and the vibrations of the drive fluted gently through the ship, she recounted the failed mission in careful, exacting detail. It was the moral equivalent of the gel scrape. Proof that she could take this pain too. She sent it to Trejo like an atheist confessing her sins. The ritual of cleansing with only a little vestigial sense of actually being clean. After that was done, the work.