Lieutenant Commander Gerhard Lundquist wasn't dead. And that astonished him.
Gerhard didn't have to check his wrist chrono to know that the fallout from the Bolo's destruction of the Tersae base camp had reached Rustenberg. He'd been standing in the dust cloud for ten minutes, now. And he was still alive. Maybe, he gulped, it just takes longer for humans to die of the stuff?
He finally pulled out his comm link and radioed the shuttle he'd helped pack full of terrified refugees. "This is Lieutenant Commander Lundquist. Are you there, Carter?"
The comm link sputtered. "Gerhard?"
He grinned. "Hi, Patty. Yeah, it's me."
"Why the hell aren't you dead?"
"Search me." He managed a wan chuckle. "Literally, I suspect, once the biochemists get their hands on my corpuscles. Look, according to what the Bolo said, I ought to be dead by now, but I don't even feel sick. And I'm standing right in the thick of the dust cloud. I figured there wasn't any point in hiding, so I just decided to get it over with. I've been breathing the stuff for, uh," he glanced at his chrono again, "eleven and a half minutes now. By the way," he asked, stomach fluttering slightly despite the fact that he was—as of yet—unharmed, "did everybody get out of the kill zone in time?"
"Barely, but yes. We're forty-five klicks out, sitting in a deep ravine, out of the worst of the wind. Hold tight, Gerhard. I'm patching you through to General McIntyre, via the Darknight."
A gravelly voice boomed from the comm link. "McIntyre here. What the devil d'you think you're doing, Lundquist, not dying on schedule?"
Gerhard blinked, startled speechless.
"That's a joke, Commander," the general's voice rumbled. "And a poor one, my apology. But you've given us a nasty little problem, y'see, staying healthy when you ought to be flopping around like one of those oversized chickens."
"Yes, sir, I know. Believe me, I know only too well. I'm a ship's surgeon."
"Now there's a piece of luck we hadn't counted on. I'm routing Unit SPQ/R-561 back to your location. I want blood samples, tissue samples, urine samples, hell, I want samples of everything it's possible to sample. We need to know if all humans are immune to this bio-weapon or if you're a confounded freak. No insult intended."
Gerhard grinned. "None taken, sir."
"Good. Report anything out of the ordinary. Notify your medical colleagues on the Darknight and the Bolo's commander. Captain Alessandra DiMario will be working with you for the duration. We've got another Bolo team en route to Eisenbrucke. If the research team is still alive, you'll have some help on this."
"Any help at all is welcome, General. Meanwhile, I'll see if the evacuees left behind any medical gear, to get started on those samples. I'm afraid we jettisoned our equipment during drop, to coax extra speed from the engines."
"Good job, that, by the way. Notify me the instant you have any hard data to report. McIntyre out."
The comm link sputtered, then Gerhard's own commander hailed him. "Captain Harrelson here. I second the general's opinion on that rescue effort. Good work, Lundquist. Very good work. And I'm real glad of the chance to tell you that."
"Not half as glad as I am to hear it," he chuckled. "In all the rush, did anyone think to ask for replacement supplies? We still have two key administrators with hard-radiation exposure. They need treatment, stat."
"Understood. We'll drop a medical team with a new batch of supplies on another shuttle."
"Deeply obliged, Captain."
"Get to work then. I want a full report, so don't you dare go dying on us before you finish it, you hear me?"
"Yes, ma'am. You want it, you got it."
"Good. Harrelson out."
He clipped his comm link to his uniform belt, then started hunting through the evacuated town, settling on a big warehouse as the likeliest spot to search. He found jumbled piles of personal belongings, foodstuffs, tools, ammunition for various weapons, equipment whose purposes were beyond him, clothing, all manner of miscellany. A computer someone had left running in the scramble hummed softly in the silence. Gerhard's footsteps echoed as he hurried across and scrolled through the data screens. The open file proved to be a master inventory of the seemingly random heaps. He found the entry he needed just a few screens down.
"Meeting hall," he muttered aloud, just to hear something besides the sound of the wind through the open warehouse doors. "Recreation cabinet. Huh. I wonder which building the meeting hall is?"
He found it three minutes later by checking the largest structures first. Two minutes after that, he was sorting through a hodgepodge of medical supplies, badly depleted by the sheer volume of Rustenberg's wounded. Fortunately, the shortages were mostly in wound dressings, pain-killers, antibiotics, and surgical supplies like saline and sutures. He found plenty of hypodermic syringes and specimen containers.
It took very little time to fill the various cups, vials, and plastic bags, although it was more awkward than he'd thought, trying to draw blood one-handed. "They don't teach this in medical school," he muttered under his breath, wincing slightly. He'd just finished jotting down a list of metabolism tests he would need—providing he hadn't died before it was time to conduct them—when he heard a low rumble in the distance. Gerhard looked up, startled, then realized what it must be. "The Bolo's coming!"
He hurried outside, heading in the direction of the noise, and clambered up a sturdy section of scaffolding to peer over the town's defensive wall. He'd been so busy, he hadn't been able to peek at the five Bolos tucked into the Darknight's immense cargo bay. He'd never seen a Bolo, not up close and personal.
By the time it was a few hundred meters away, he was gaping. "My God, that thing's huge!" The closer it came, the bigger it loomed, until it blotted out the light like an immense metal cloud above his head. The engine noise changed pitch and the rumbling of the wall under his hands and the scaffolding under his feet changed as well, then the machine stopped. Gun snouts jutted out above Gerhard's head, protruding over the top of the wall, it had come so close.
An amplified voice, sounding female, spoke from its depths. "You look pretty healthy to me."
Gerhard grinned. "Sorry if that disappoints you."
"Not at all," the voice chuckled with a smooth, rich sound like sun-warmed honey. He wondered if she were as beautiful as her voice. "I'm Alessandra DiMario, commanding Unit SPQ/R-561. And this," she added, "is Senator."
He gave the Bolo a salute. "Lieutenant Commander Gerhard Lundquist, sir, ma'am, at your service."
A different voice, distinctly male with a metallic burr around the edges, greeted him. "It is good to meet you, Commander Lundquist."
"The pleasure is definitely mine," Gerhard said with genuine feeling. Not only was he talking to a Bolo, he was fizzing with the sheer exuberance of still being alive. "I've got a batch of samples ready, by the way. When I heard you coming, I rushed outside without them. I can bring them out."
"No need," Alessandra DiMario reassured him. "Just climb down and lead the way. We'll come through the hole we punched in the wall last night and follow you."
Gerhard, he smiled giddily as he scrambled down, today is just your lucky day.
To which the back of his brain whispered, Yeah—ain't it great?
He certainly wasn't going to argue the point.