“The fucking saints preserve me,” Mohr grumbled as he hauled himself back into clear space aboard the Astoria. He was gonna get himself a corned beef sandwich and a coffee, and then he was gonna find that lazy fucking Slim Jim asshole and maybe he was gonna knuckle him some, too.

Lieutenant Commander Helen Wassman taped off the IV line and stood up to stretch her back. She’d been crouched over for nearly four hours, attending casualties from both ships. Her back ached and the muscles in her legs burned with fatigue. It had been nearly thirty hours since she’d rolled out of her bunk, and she wondered whether the time might be coming when she’d have to dial up a little stim flush from her implants.

“Doctor! Doctor, over here!”

The Leyte Gulf’s medical officer had trouble focusing on the direction of the voice. The mess hall was full of wounded men and women. The worst cases had first call on the Gulf’s relatively small hospital, where they were stabilized before being choppered across to the Clinton or the Kandahar—a process that had been complicated by the destruction of the helicopter bays. The patients had to be carried up onto the deck through the bridge structure, a long and winding route.

“Doctor! Please!”

Wassman urgently cast around for the source of the cries. There had to be sixty people laid up in the mess. Most of them were in pretty bad shape. The walking wounded were all helping with salvage operations. The room presented a tableau from one of Goya’s nightmares, bloodied bandages, burned limbs, chaos, and horror. She’d treated deep tissue lacerations, compound fractures, crushed vertebrae, shrapnel and bullet wounds, and, of course, some terrible injuries caused by ceramic flechette rounds.

“Doctor!”

Wassman sourced the cries to a reedy-looking officer, off the Astoria, judging by his uniform. He didn’t look too badly hurt. He had a good long scrape on his forearm and a bruise on his forehead. But that was it.

This better be good, she thought.

The lieutenant fidgeted impatiently as she approached him. As she did so, his eyes roamed up and down. She was running into that a lot, and she was struggling not to react badly to it.

“Yes . . . Lieutenant?” she said, drawing up in front of him. “Is one of your men in need of treatment?”

“No, Commander . . . uhm, Wassman. But I’ve been waiting here for a blood tranfusion for nearly an hour.”

Wassman was genuinely confused. Her eyes flicked from the small bandage on his forehead to the one around his arm.

“I’m sorry, a tranfusion?”

“I’ve lost some blood,” he explained. “I may need a transfusion, but nobody has spoken to me about the type of blood I would need.”

She shook her head, wrestling with her irritation. Then she leaned over and somewhat peremptorily plucked his dog tags out to examine them.