“Doctor, how are your new patients?”

“Arrogant.” Rame didn’t look up from his terminal.

“Doctor!” Weston snapped, catching the doctor up sharply.

Glancing up, Rame took in the woman at Weston’s side and the captain’s dark glare, a deep-red flush crossing his face.

“Sorry, sir, ma’am,” he said quickly, then nodded to them both. “They’ll all live. Mostly dehydration and nutritional deficiencies. A couple appear to be suffering from early stages of oxygen deprivation as well, but that is being remedied naturally.”

Saraf nodded, diplomatically ignoring the doctor’s first comment. “The youngest?”

“Ah, yes, the infant. She’s fine. In better shape than many of the older children and adults. With youth comes remarkable resilience.” Rame beamed as he glanced over toward a makeshift incubator in the corner.

Saraf didn’t respond for a moment. Finally, she nodded, letting out a long and deep breath. “Yes. May I see my people now?”

“Certainly. This way,” Dr. Rame said. “We’ve had to improvise a lot of our facilities, I’m afraid. We simply weren’t expecting five hundred patients to drop in on us, so it’s a lot more hectic in here than normal.”

Weston allowed himself to fall behind, watching Dr. Rame show Titualar Saraf through the infirmary. His eyes wandered the room, moving from face to face as he tried to take in the scene. At his best guess, none of the patients were more than twenty years old, most considerably less, and at the far side of the area, he noted the tiny baby in an enclosed environment with medical equipment closely monitoring the child’s condition.

Weston tapped the induction mic on his jaw to open a channel. “Commander Roberts, could you please come down to the med-lab? I want to be on hand when Milla returns from the planet, and I need you to show Titualur Saraf around and arrange accommodations for our passengers.”

“Yes, sir,” Roberts’s voice sounded in his ear.

Ten minutes later, Weston was on his way down to the shuttle bay, checking the ETA on the next transport and the passenger list. The subsequent shuttle wasn’t due for over an hour, leaving Weston with the time to do something he had felt the need to do for several days.

He made his way over to the Archangel One, his own fighter, and pulled open a maintenance flap so he could do the customary check.

The Angels had a full maintenance staff, of course, and his own fighter had been checked out long since, but Weston had never believed that was quite sufficient. He’d been a student before enlisting in the old American Marine Corps, specializing in philosophy, oddly enough. One of the lines from the old books he read always came back to haunt him when he flew the last of the old joint strike fighters.

It was a foolish warrior who entrusted his weapons to the care of any man, save himself.

It was impossible for him to handle all maintenance on his fighter, of course, but he could check to ensure that the work had been done and done properly. So, despite the fact that his fighter was no longer his weapon, Weston settled in with the computer interface and called up the maintenance log, carefully moving down the checklist.