"Sixteen chapters," she mutters over the warning klaxons, reaching a hand out to stab a finger blindly at some of the flashing lights on her control panel. "Sixteen fuckin' chapters I'm slogging through, I just get to the good part, and these assholes decide they need extraction now?"
"Are you addressing me?" FILSS says.
She snorts, twisting in her seat to deactivate the alarms. "Sure, why not? FILSS, log my frustration and disappointment at being unable to find out whodunit until after this mission. Which I might very well die in, actually. Huh." The final alarm finishes sounding around the time she's plotted her approach vector, and she breathes easy in the new stillness. "FILSS, if I die, log my eternal irritation and determination to come back as a ghost to haunt this terminal and read the rest of the book."
"Logged," FILSS says, blandly.
"Great. Someone gonna tell me what I'm flying into, here?"
Another voice comes over the intercom. He's probably got a name, but she calls him 'The Smart AI' because when she does he actually preens sometimes and it's fucking hilarious. Now he sounds kinda distracted, like he's listening to a few channels at once. "Uh, right, yeah, that'd be me. Maine and the new guy are requesting medical evac from a city getting hit with a missile strike. Domestic, not orbital. Well, Maine's the one doing the requesting. Apparently newbie got a bit blown up and isn't really doing much of anything."
"Ah," she says. "Fuck. That's, what, third this month?"
"Fourth," he says, sounding a little more subdued. "Remember Alabama?"
Yeah, she remembers Alabama. She remembers Alabama hunched over in the passenger compartment, puking up his guts and screaming while Carolina tried to hold him down. She remembers Carolina making vague, sympathetic noises, her expression a solid wall, right up until Alabama stopped breathing.
The Director's voice filters through next. "What is your ETA?"
"Thirty seconds," she says. "Can you patch me in direct to Maine? EM bleedthrough from the missiles is playing havoc with my sensors. Can't quite get a lock on their position."
She hears a flash of static.
"That you, big guy?"
"Yeah." Maine doesn't talk much, but she already knows his voice well enough to recognize the tension in it, and she's not really surprised. On the way out here, he and the rookie had fallen into a sort of half-unspoken banter with lots of elbowing and even a bit of snickering. She's pretty sure they knew each other from before the Project. Which, y'know. Kinda sucks for him now. "Flare going up."
Slowing her approach, she switches to short-range passive sensors, waits for the blip on the correct frequency. "Got it. Should reach your position in five. Nobody's targeting yet. You aren't on the move, right?"
"No," Maine says. There's an explosion in the background, and she can see the blast through her front window, coming from the top floor of a ragged structure that might, charitably, have been called a building at some point. Even as she watches, a few tiles from the roof slide off to join the growing pile of rubble and detritus below.
"You guys are in that fucking thing?"
"Basement," Maine says. "You outside?"
"Yeah, hang on." She winces as the port side of the ship grinds against some sort of lightpost, then braces herself for the crunch of the awkward landing, the Pelican's gear cracking the pavement beneath. "Okay, we gotta go now. I'm picking up something really fucking big incoming, and I'm pretty sure we don't want to be here when it lands."
She waits a few seconds, then opens the rear hatch. The scream of missiles and the roar of collapsing structures pierces the quiet in the Pelican, and she flinches when a particularly explosive-sounding whine passes a bit too close for comfort. Then Maine is loping awkwardly into the back, a heap of armor slung over his shoulder. She's already lifting off, dragging up the damaged landing gear—flight chief's gonna have her ass for that one—and kicking the engines into overdrive. The ship peels away from the fighting with an encouraging roar, and she grins, fucking exhilarated as always when the atmosphere finally tears away in front of her and the stars turn that much brighter.
Once she's sure they've made an appropriately subtle escape and haven't, y'know, exploded or anything, she says, "We're inbound, Mother of Invention. Have a medical team at the ready."
"Copy," the Director says. "Good work." He doesn't ask how the new guy's doing, she notices. Huh.
She cranes her head back, but all she can see of the rear compartment is the corner of Maine's shoulder. His white armor is splashed red with blood. "Going on auto for a bit, FILSS. Let me know if something comes up."
"Understood," FILSS says.
She triple-checks the autopilot's parameters, then slides out of the chair—her legs protest the change in position after so much forced loitering—and walks back to stand in the entrance to the rear compartment.
Maine is crouched over the new guy, and like, she's seen him covered in blood enough times to wonder why the hell anyone thought giving him white armor was a good idea, but now there's just. Yeah. A whole lot of blood. She thinks it'll be a pain in the ass to clean up after this one, then feels sorta bad for thinking it. But, y'know. This isn't exactly her first rodeo. After you've scrubbed blood out of metal enough times it stops seeming quite so ominous.
New guy's got his helmet off. New guy's young and blond and has a really confused expression on his face, like someone's just asked him to recite pi to a million digits. New guy's also got a massive chunk of shrapnel in his gut.
"Ah," she says. "Fuck."
Maine looks up at her, shrugs a little. He's applying biofoam to a bleeding gash on the kid's shoulder, keeping away from the big wound entirely. She's pretty sure the rookie's gonna bleed to death whether or not Maine pulls out the shrapnel to attempt first aid, but hell, she's no medic, what the fuck does she know?
"Um," says the rookie—what the fuck was his designation? Colorado? Washington? Washington, yeah. Washington squints at Maine. "Did you, uh. Throw me into the ship?"
"Probably," Maine says.
"Okay." Washington glances down to the wound in his gut, and his face goes about the same shade of gray as his armor. "Oh, that's not good."
"No," Maine says. He's pulling off the more intact pieces of Washington's armor with a calm, practiced efficiency. She can see from here that there's a sizeable pool of blood building up between the Kevlar undersuit and the power armor. She's glad for her helmet, because even with her famously iron stomach she's pretty sure the smell alone would make her puke. Gut wounds aren't exactly pretty. "Keep breathing," Maine adds.
"Okay," Washington says again, then, more thoughtfully, "It really doesn't hurt that bad. Can't feel it."
She's not sure whether or not that makes him better off than poor Alabama. With a grimace, she crouches down next to Maine. "Lucky you," she says. "We're five minutes out from the MoI. You're probably gonna want to hang in there, at least until we land. It'd be a bit embarrassing if you kicked the bucket so close to home."
He smiles at her shakily, furrows deepening in his brow. She figures maybe he's not as young as she thought.
"He's had worse," Maine says, a little defensively.
Washington shudders. "Don't remind me." Despite the dry humor in his voice, he keeps shaking, she notices. Shivering. "Uh," he says. He's tensing up; the tendons in his neck stand out. "Yeah. I think I'm starting to feel it."
She's got a vague platitude on her lips, but Maine just leans forward and grabs Washington's hand. He doesn't say anything when Wash's fingers spasm and clamp tight around his, even though, supersoldier or not, that kind of force has gotta hurt. He just sits quietly. Waiting. After a while, she moves back up to the cockpit, feeling unaccountably like she's just intruded on something private.
Wash is breathing in short, haggard gasps by the time they finally grind to a halt in the hangar bay, but at least he's still breathing. Medics swarm over him the second she opens the rear hatch, and then it's just her and Maine, staring at the blood on the deck.
"Okay," she says, her voice loud and strident enough that he actually jumps. "Here's what's gonna happen. You and I are gonna clean this up, and then you and I are gonna duck the debrief, and then you and I are gonna go get ourselves absolutely blasted on the shitty moonshine from the still in the baffles while we wait to hear about your buddy. Okay?"
He stares at her. His helmet's really fuckin' freaky—at least the others have some semblance of, like, here's your face, here's your eyes, whatever. His is just this big gold bowling ball that stares. "Can't get drunk," he says.
"No kidding," she says. "Won't or can't?"
"Can't."
"All right," she says. "Keep me company while I get drunk, then." She nudges him with her shoulder when he hesitates. "Trust me, big guy, you don't want to be alone with your thoughts right now. I'll read you a bit of Murder on the Orion Express. See, it's a murder mystery that takes place on a starship, and-"
"The pilot did it," Maine says.
She stares. Bowling ball head stares back, implacably.
"Motherfucker," she says, contemplatively. "I don't know whether I'm more pissed you spoiled the ending or pissed I never figured you for a shitty-novel kinda guy before now. Just think of all that time spent waiting in orbit when we could've been talking overly elaborate schemes to win inheritances."
He shrugs and twitches a hand up to signal a smile.
It takes only a few minutes to clean up the worst of the gore—the sterilizer does most of the job, and Maine doesn't flinch or stall the way some of the other operatives do when faced with dirty-work. The whole thing seems sort of soothing for him, she thinks. Something clinical, something useful. Something to keep him busy.
It's only when they're on their way to the still that she remembers he was on the ship, too, when Alabama died. There's gotta be some uncomfortable echoes there.
"Hey," she says. Nudges him with her shoulder again, because she's starting to get that this is how he communicates, through touch and gesture. "I bet your rookie's gonna be fine. Seemed like a stubborn little shit."
He shrugs, but as they walk down the corridors, he leans into her, just for a second, and says, "Thanks."
She thinks she's starting to like Agent Maine.