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“Good morning,” Kate murmured from the bed.

Connor started.

“Sorry—didn’t mean to wake you,” he murmured back.

“You didn’t,” she assured him, pushing back the blankets and propping herself up on one elbow. “I only got to bed an hour or so ago. I heard everyone else come in, and I’ve just been dozing a little while I waited for you. How did it go?”

“About like usual,” Connor said as he crossed to the bed and sat down. “We got the Riverside radar tower—not just taken down, but blown to splinters. If Olsen’s team got the Pasadena tower like they were supposed to, that’ll leave Skynet just the Capistrano one and no triangulation at all. That should take a lot of the pressure off our air support in any future operations. At least until Skynet gets around to rebuilding everything.”

“Good—we can use a breather,” Kate said. “How many did we lose?”

Connor grimaced.

“Three. Garcia, Smitty, and Rondo.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, and Connor could see some of his own pain flash across her eyes. “That’s, what, ten including the ones Jericho lost when his team took out the Thousand Oaks tower?”

“Eleven,” Connor corrected. “Those towers come expensive, don’t they?”

“They sure do,” Kate said soberly. Abruptly, she brightened. “By the way, I have a surprise for you.” Reaching to the far side of the bed, she came up with a small bag. “Merry Christmas.”

Connor stared at the bag in her hand, a surge of husbandly panic flashing through him. How could he possibly have forgotten—?

“Wait a minute,” he said, frowning. “This is March.”

“Well, yes, technically,” Kate conceded innocently. “But we were all kind of busy on the official Christmas.”

Connor searched his memory, trying to pick the specifics out of the long, blended-together nightmare that life on earth had become.

“Was that the day we raided the air reserve base for parts?”

“No, that was Christmas Eve,” Kate corrected. “Christmas Day we were mostly playing hide-and-seek with those three T-1s that wanted the stuff back. Anyway, I didn’t have anything for you back then.” She jiggled the bag enticingly. “Now, I do. Go ahead—take it.”

“But I didn’t get anything for you,” Connor protested as he took the bag.

“Sure you did,” Kate said quietly. “You came home alive. That’s all I want.”

Connor braced himself.

“Kate, we’ve been through this,” he reminded her gently. “You’re too valuable as a surgeon to risk having you go out in the field.”

“Yes, I remember all the arguments,” Kate said. “And up to now, I’ve mostly agreed with them.”

“Mostly?”

She sighed.

“You’re the most important thing in my life, John. In fact, you’re the most important thing in everyone’s life, even if they don’t know it yet. Whatever I can do to keep you focused, that’s what I’ll do. Whether I personally like it or not. If having me stay behind helps that focus, well, I’ve been content to do that.”

Connor had to turn away from the intensity in her eyes.

“Until now?”

“Until now.” She reached up and put her hand on his cheek, gently but firmly turning him back to look at her. “People are dying out there. Far too many people, far too quickly. We need every gun and every set of hands in the field that we can get. You know that as well as I do.”

“But you’re more valuable to us right here,” Connor tried again.

“Am I?” Kate asked. “Even if we grant for the sake of argument that I’m any safer hiding in a makeshift bunker than I am out in the field, is this really where I can do the most good? Patching up the wounded after you get them back is all well and good, but I can’t help but think it would be better if you had me right there with you where I could do the preliminary work on the spot.”

“You could teach some of the others.”

“I have taught them,” Kate reminded him. “I’ve taught you and them and everyone everything I can about first aid. But there’s nothing I can do to give you my experience, and that’s what you need out there. You need a field medic, pure and simple. So you’ve got Campollo and me, and Campollo is seventy-one