Wounds, Book 1 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Been making all kinds of noise about taking the patient over to detention. I wouldn’t let them, not unless you ordered me to. Even threatened to call Nerrit over at High Command, and then they kind of backed down. Barely, but enough to buy me enough time to get you down here.”
    “This must be some patient.”
    “You have this really annoying habit of reiterating the obvious.” An exasperated sigh. Arin flexed his left knee, and his prosthetic clicked and whirred. “Sorry. Dragging you in was the only way I could think of to keep them from taking it out of here.”
    “No, you did right,” she said, only belatedly registering that Arin kept saying it . But then she was within earshot of the security director and attempted what she hoped was something bordering on a neutral expression. “Director Blate.”
    “Colonel.” Blate’s left eye was especially bad and wandered, giving him a walleyed stare that Kahayn always found disturbing because she was never sure which artificial eye to focus on. She suspected that this was precisely what the security director wanted. Blate said, “I hope Major Arin didn’t pull you from anything important.”
    No, no, just a little chest bleed, lung replacement, nothing big . “As I understand it, you’ve kept Dr. Arin from examining his patient.”
    “Indeed.” Blate’s right eye zeroed in. “This is not your ordinary casualty.”
    “Gee, you can tell all that without an exam?” She nodded beyond the guards at a back bay curtained from view by a gauzy yellow, nearly full-length drape. There was a gap between the floor and the bottom of the curtain, and Kahayn saw the gurney’s black rubber-wheeled castors and the disembodied off-white flats of a nurse crossing left to right. “And I thought that’s what you needed doctors for. If you’re so good, Blate, why the hell do you need us then?”
    “Idit,” Arin murmured.
    “I didn’t require your assistance,” said Blate. “I still don’t. I ordered Major Arin to stand down. He became belligerent and threatened to call High Command, and then he insisted that you had to authorize release of the casualty to our custody.”
    “Damn straight,” said Kahayn. “Now, as I get it, your people brought the patient here. I hate to point this out, but we’re doctors. Yeah, sure, we’re all military, but this is a hospital. We see casualties, only we call them patients. We even treat them. So since this is a patient and we’re on my turf, I have command authority, not you. The only person who can override my authority is the base commander, or Nerrit. You’re welcome to call the CO, but I suspect he’ll side with me. So the faster you let me clear this guy, the sooner your people can get at him. What say you get out of my way?”
    Blate raised a hand, his right, the one that clicked when the fingers moved. “It’s not that simple. We need to—”
    “Anyone says something’s not simple one more time, I’ll gonna rip out his tonsils.” Kahayn pushed past and yanked at the curtain. There was a rasp of metal; the curtain scrolled to one side. “Now, what…” she began—and stopped dead in her tracks.
    Two nurses and a tech hovered uncertainly around a gurney. On the gurney was a biped, lying prone. The fact that the patient was bipedal and had two arms to boot was a relief because, with all that radioactive sludge out there, she didn’t take anything for granted. But she couldn’t tell about the head because the patient wore some sort of soot-stained, off-white suit with a bulbous helmet of a design she’d never seen in her life. There were patches of something rust-red and black smeared on the suit. Red and yellow lights winked on some sort of control panel mounted like a bracelet on the left wrist. There were more red than yellow lights, and that was usually a bad sign. But she didn’t have a clue about what the lights meant, nor could she figure the power source. The helmet probably had some kind of polymer