“Your people will need my help to open the armor,” he said, walking toward the medical teams.

The guard signaled to the others and rushed along behind the hulking figure as he reached the first medical team.

They were puzzling over how to treat a man they couldn’t seem to get onto their platform, let alone physically reach. The hulking figure just grabbed the limp figure, disconnecting the cable that supported him effortlessly, and slung him onto the platform.

“The suit has a subsurface breach in case of medical emergencies,” he told him in that curiously flat tone as he placed a finger alongside the prone man’s helmet.

They couldn’t see it, but Major Brinks initiated a physical link to the suit so that he could access a command set that wasn’t available over any wireless link, for obvious reasons. Once the link was established, he ordered the suit to breach.

A hiss of escaping gas startled the team, causing many of them to jump back, and the suit split along the center of the chest, down along the abdomen. It then slid open on hidden pneumatics as Brinks popped the helmet seal and pried the clamshell armor from Lieutenant Mackay’s head.

“You can treat him in the armor, or pull him out if you have to,” Brinks told them brusquely, then turned and moved over to where Jaime Curtis was still hanging suspended above the ground by her cable connection to the chute.

The medical team stared after him for a second before the lead doctor shook her head and snapped at them. A few seconds later, the platform retreated into the facility with the three of them jogging alongside as they scanned and attached devices to their new patient.

“If they continue their current deceleration,” Waters told his captain, “they’ll rendezvous with the other ship in eight hours. If he accelerates to match course with them on a least-time approach, we’ll be facing all six of them in about twelve, sir.”

Weston looked at the status board. The Odyssey would have its forward armor repaired long before that, but its flight deck would still be breached, though the circuits for the traps should be repaired by then. That would put the Odyssey in near-fighting trim, along with a full charge on her pulse torpedoes. This, even under ideal circumstances, placed the Odyssey at the wrong side of long odds. Weston shook his head, letting his PDA clatter to the console in front of him and looking over at Susan Lamont.

“All right, what’s the status on the Archangels?”

“Not as bad as we’d feared, but they’re still down by four pilots. No fatalities, but three of the injured pilots have major radiation burns from cockpit hits, and we have one man with a head injury. We think his CM field collapsed when he ejected his cockpit,” Ensign Lamont said. “Counting Clarke, that brings our total fighter complement down by just over a third.”