Geoffrey Merrick had been hoisted onto the deck in a medical basket. Julia Huxley was already hunched over him, her lab coat dragging in a hardened pool of oil. Under it she wore blood-smeared scrubs. She’d been patching together wounded men since the first moment the container Max had used to transfer the soldiers to the ship had been opened. With her were two orderlies standing by to bring Merrick down to surgery, but she wanted to do an assessment as quickly as possible.

A blindfolded Susan Donleavy had been escorted to the ship’s brig by Mike, Ski, and Eddie as soon as she’d set foot on the Oregon. It was plain to see that the fact that no one had said a word to her since Juan had nabbed her in the desert was wearing on her mind. Though not yet defeated, her façade was cracking.

“What do you think, Doc?” Juan asked when Julia pulled her stethoscope from Merrick’s bare chest.

“Lungs are clear but his heartbeat’s weak.” She glanced at the saline drip bag one of her people was holding above Merrick’s prone form. “That’s the third unit of saline he’s taken. I want to get some blood in him to get his pressure up before I go after the bullet that’s still in the wound. I don’t like that he’s unconscious.”

“Could it be the heroin they gave him back at the Devil’s Oasis?”

“It should be out of his system by now. It’s something else. He’s also spiking a fever and the wound looks infected. I need to get him on antibiotics.”

“What about the others? Moses Ndebele?”

Her eyes clouded over. “I lost two of them. I’ve got one more that’s touch-and-go. The others were mainly flesh wounds. So long as no one shows an infection they should be fine. Moses is a bloody mess. The human foot has twenty-six bones. I counted fifty-eight separate pieces of bone on his X-ray before I gave up. If he’s going to keep it we need to get him to an orthopedic specialist within a couple of days.”

Cabrillo nodded, but said nothing.

“How are you doing?” Hux asked him.

“I feel worse than I look,” Juan said with a tired smile.

“Then you must feel like crap, because you look like hell.”

“Is that your official medical diagnosis?”

Julia pressed her palm to his forehead like a mother checking a child for a fever. “Yup.” She motioned for her people to lift Merrick’s stretcher and started for the nearest hatch. “I’ll be below if you need me.”

Cabrillo suddenly called out to her, having remembered something he couldn’t believe he’d forgotten. “Julia, how’s Sloane doing?”