She was still smiling when Ednund came rushing in fifteen minutes later, declaring, “You won’t believe it. The marines are scrambling around down on the Transportee Deck like frazzled chickens. And they’re going to Capella III!”

“Aguila,” Falise and Chad said in unison.

Chapter 19

  19  

“I just took him down. I don’t think the toilet-sucker had any clue. I mean, he’s supposed to be some kind of tough guy. Gets in fights all the time. He never so much as laid a hand on me.” Kylee nodded righteously as she talked. “You would have loved it. I just up and kicked him in the balls. As he jerked forward, I hammered him in the nose with a knee. When he staggered back, I smashed a fist to his throat, and he went down. Wham! Right on that filthy floor.”

She could feel the Rocket part of her chortling in delight. She liked that about Rocket. He had a sense of humor. Like when they used to play. Or the time that . . .

No. Concentrate. This was about Tip, not the joy of reliving old memories.

Kylee resettled herself in the chair, double checking that Tip was breathing easily. He lay in the hospital bed, an oxygen tube running to his nostrils. His eyes were closed, chest rising and falling, but his color was off, and with her IR vision, she could see that his temperature was about forty Celsius. Definitely fevered.

Tip’s leg, where it stuck out from under the blanket, was restrained, swollen, and still discolored. A drain tube ran from the incision to weep foul stuff into a glass beaker on the floor. The incision in Tip’s calf looked pretty gruesome. Stitches held it together, a thin line of dried blood like a perverted smile. Another tube snaked out from under the blankets to a graduated bottle. This one ran from a catheter and caught Tip’s urine. She’d checked it out, having never heard the term before, and decided that she would have been better off not knowing.

What mattered was that Tip was still alive. If she were a quetzal, she’d be glowing in blue and pink bands of gratitude.

She glanced around the hospital room. Outside of the bed and a toilet, it had one working light in the ceiling. Mold could be seen where the window in the dome wall leaked. And beyond it was the chain-link fence that separated the hospital from the landing field. Also depressing was the pale green paint on the walls. Like, what was wrong with something bright and refreshing? Or maybe they used these drab colors so that people would choose to die faster, freeing up the beds and cutting the workload for Raya and Vik Lawrence.