“We’ll probably lose two or three men in the next few hours, sir. Over.”

“I’m sorry about that, Damiri, but you have to try to hold on. We just don’t have the facilities.”

Damiri rolled his eyes. That was so like them.

“Acknowledged,” he said, not needing to fake the hint of bitterness in his voice.

“We’ll be with you in five hours, Sutanto. And you’ll have air cover for all of that time.”

“Thank you, Clinton,” said Damiri. It was an effort to squeeze the words out.

Was there a waking hour in the last month when she hadn’t been confronted by legions of the doomed? Captain Francois couldn’t recall one. From the moment she’d regained consciousness after the Transition she’d seemed to be running from one casualty to the next, an endless line of them stretching out to a vanishing point somewhere in her future.

Her fingers twitched as she half considered dialing up another shot of stimulant from her thoracic implants. But she stayed her hand. The ward was full of patients, and most of them were not combat casualties. The liberated prisoners needed treatment for starvation, suppurating jungle ulcers, malaria, fungal infections, and a hundred minor aftereffects of captivity. But unlike the rocket rush of madness that had blown through this place after Midway, these patients died more slowly and, she supposed, more comfortably. Dozens of medical staffers moved among the beds. They adjusted drips, changed dressings and bedpans, administered medicine and vitamin shots.

She was losing patients every day, seventy-six of them since she’d come on shift eighteen hours ago. But by the dismal math of her profession, that wasn’t bad. She knew that were it not for the facilities available throughout the modern ships of the task force, hundreds more would succumb every day. She examined her heart and found it to be scabbed over with scar tissue and barely pushing blood through her veins.

She needed some rest.

Francois dragged her flexipad out of a coat pocket with fingers that felt numb except for a small tingling at their tips and found Commander Wassman on shipnet.

“I’m taking four hours, Helen,” she said. “You have the floor.”

Her new deputy nodded brusquely in the small screen. Wassman’s locator chip placed her down in the burns unit.

“Got it, ma’am. If I might, Captain? You need more than four hours. I can catch an extra shift. I had a whole half night’s sleep.”

The chief surgeon didn’t bother arguing.

“Thanks. I’ll take an extra two. Call me if I’m needed.”

As she signed off an alarm sounded in the distance, calling for a crash team. Francois checked her pad: a cardiac arrest in the next ward. She brought the patient’s file up. An eighty-five-year-old white female from Cabanatuan.