So, she thought without allowing herself any real feeling, this is what it looks like for the other guy.

“Captain? Captain Francois, ma’am?”

The voice dragged her back into the world.

“We’re starting to run low on burn gel, ma’am. It’s not critical yet. But it will be soon enough, if we keep running through it at this rate.”

Francois looked at the intern. “Thanks for the snack. It helped.”

“Ma’am?”

“Yeah, I know, the goddamn burn gel. Can’t be helped, Ensign. It’s there to be used. You know the principles of triage. That’s all you need to worry about for now.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The young man saluted and hurried away.

“Captain?”

Francois turned toward the deep bass of Colonel Jones’s voice, acknowledging him with a tired salute.

“You need anything down here, Doc?” he asked.

“Some answers would be good,” she said a touch bitterly. “Failing that, more burn gel and vat tissue. We’re going to need plenty of both.”

Jones rubbed his shaved head in frustration. “How many of our people are down?” he asked, meaning the battalion.

“Sixty-two dead,” she replied without hesitating. “Another fifty-three wounded. Mostly from blast effects, but a few were just unlucky. Happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“At the Transition point?”

“If that’s what we’re calling it, yeah.”

A man lying in a bed nearby suddenly howled like a wounded animal. Francois hurried over, reaching him before anyone else. His uniform had been stripped so there was no way of telling to whom he belonged by just looking at him. A quick scan with a sensor wand told her he had no inserts, which meant he almost certainly came off an old ship. A transmitter node on the bed beamed his data to her flexipad: Leading Seaman Murray Belknap, one broken hip, seven broken ribs, a ruptured spleen and second-degree burns to 15 percent of his body. A trauma team arrived as she finished reading his slate.

“We got him, Captain,” one of them shouted.

Jones took Francois by the arm and steered her away.

“Let them work, Margie. You’ve trained them well. Give them some room. You can’t lay hands on everybody who comes in. You got the bigger picture to keep you up nights.”

“I know,” she admitted. “You just get into the groove, that’s all.”

“I understand. How many of the locals do you have with you here?”

“Nearly three hundred here, just a shade under two thousand spread out through the rest of the fleet. We’re at capacity now. We’ve starting taking over the sleeping quarters.”

Jones nodded. “And how many are we going to lose? For certain?”

Francois took a few seconds to think it over. She consulted her flexipad for a minute after that before answering. “My best guess at this stage, we’ll lose about eight percent.”

“Okay, better than I’d expected.”