Last Full Measure - Michael A. Martin [98]
And especially not in front of Hayes.
“Sir?” O’Neill said.
Pondering his steadily narrowing set of options, Archer looked slowly around the shuttlepod’s not-very-spacious interior. He was startled by what he saw—or, rather, by what he didn’t see.
“Where is Ensign Chandra?” he asked, turning back toward O’Neill, whose mien suddenly grew sorrowful.
No, he thought.
Archer glanced toward Corporal Peruzzi, who stood nearest the airlock. Though she had removed her helmet, she was still outfitted in a standard gray MACO environmental suit.
And she was as pale as a ghost. It also didn’t escape his notice that her suit’s left thigh was torn and blood-spattered.
“We were ambushed on the way back to the shuttlepod, Captain,” Peruzzi said. “We took the attackers down, but Chandra didn’t make it. I’m sorry, Captain. It’s my fault. It’s my—”
The corporal’s body went limp, and she displayed the whites of her eyes as she collapsed. Reed and Kemper, who were standing nearest to her, caught her before she made it all the way down to the deck. They gently lowered her to a supine position.
“Get me the emergency medical kit!” Reed shouted, and Kemper immediately scrambled to pull it down from the upper storage compartment where it was stowed.
An Enterprise crew member was dead. And now maybe one of Hayes’s MACOs was about to join him.
“Captain, the Xindi vessels are charging weapons, and they’re on an intercept course with the nearest of the escape pods,” O’Neill said, her tone urgent. “If we want to get away, we’d better do it now.”
A sense of near-despondency seized Archer’s soul. It sometimes seemed that failure and death were becoming this mission’s twin leitmotifs.
“Get us back to Enterprise, Lieutenant. Best speed.”
“I guess not all the bullets missed us this time,” Archer said. “How is she?”
The captain’s voice startled Reed. He hadn’t heard Archer rise from behind the flight console, let alone cross to the aft section of the shuttlepod, where Reed and Kemper had just finished bandaging the unconscious Corporal Peruzzi’s leg wound.
“She’s lucky, sir,” Reed said, pushing aside the remnants of her gray MACO environmental suit and camo uniform pant leg, both of which he had been forced to cut away in order to stop the bleeding. “The shrapnel fragment in her leg could have severed an artery if it had gone in any deeper. I think she’ll be all right, though. Still, she’s lost a great deal of blood. We’ll need to take her straight to Phlox once we dock with Enterprise. Fortunately we’re only about six hours away from our rendezvous.”
Archer nodded silently. Reed hoped that he was consoled at least somewhat by Peruzzi’s happy prognosis, though he could see in the captain’s careworn expression that Chandra’s death weighed heavily on him. The ensign had been a valued member of Enterprise’s crew; in a community as small and as tightly knit as theirs, Ravi Chandra would be greatly missed.
We’ll have to have yet another funeral, Reed thought with a weary, melancholy sigh. He was uncomfortably aware that Lieutenant O’Neill must have stored the young man’s lifeless body in the cargo area just below the main deck. Given the limited space aboard the shuttlepod, however, he had to concede that she’d had little alternative, other than giving him a summary burial in space.
Looking at Archer, Reed noticed that the captain’s eyes were extremely bloodshot, no doubt because his brief exposure to hard vacuum had exploded countless tiny capillaries. Vacuum blossoms, he thought, recalling the slang term for decompression-related injuries he had picked up during his first EVA training sessions. I suppose we’ll all be wearing dark glasses for the next week or two to cover these up.
Reed turned his attention back to the slumbering Peruzzi. Finally satisfied that the injured MACO would rest comfortably on the aft portion of the shuttlepod’s deck, Reed stood and