Until I talked to the doctor, that is.

“We pulled you out early,” she told me, the rage she’d exhibited on the shuttle deck tamped a little further down in her voice now. “On orders from Wedge command. It seems there isn’t time for you to recover from your wounds fully.”

“I feel fine.”

“Of course you do. You’re dosed to the eyes with endorphins. When you come down, you’re going to find that your left shoulder only has about two-thirds functionality. Oh, and your lungs are still damaged. Scarring from the Guerlain Twenty.”

I blinked. “I didn’t know they were spraying that stuff.”

“No. Apparently nobody did. A triumph of covert assault, they tell me.” She gave up, the attempted grimace half formed. Too, too tired. “We cleaned most of it out, ran regrowth bioware through the most obvious areas, and killed the secondary infections. Given a few months of rest, you’d probably make a full recovery. As it is…” she shrugged. “Try not to smoke. Get some light exercise. Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

I tried the light exercise. I walked the hospital’s axial deck. Forced air into my scorched lungs. Flexed my shoulder. The whole deck was packed five abreast with injured men and women doing similar things. Some of them, I knew.

“Hey, lieutenant!”

Tony Loemanako, face mostly a mask of shredded flesh pocked with the green tags where the rapid regrowth bios were embedded. Still grinning, but far too much of far too many teeth visible on the left side.

“You made it out, lieutenant! Way to go!”

He turned about in the crowd.

“Hey, Eddie. Kwok. The lieutenant made it.”

Kwok Yuen Yee, both eye sockets packed tight with bright orange tissue incubator jelly. An externally-mounted microcam welded to her skull provided videoscan for the interim. Her hands were being regrown on skeletal black carbon fibre. The new tissue looked wet and raw.

“Lieutenant. We thought—”

“Lieutenant Kovacs!”

Eddie Munharto, propped up in a mobility suit while the bios regrew his right arm and both legs from the ragged shreds that the smart shrapnel had left.

“Good to see you, lieutenant! See, we’re all on the mend. The 391 platoon be back up to kick some Kempist ass in a couple of months, no worries.”

Carrera’s Wedge combat sleeves are currently supplied by Khumalo Biosystems. State-of-the-art Khumalo combat biotech runs some charming custom extras, notable among them a serotonin shutout system that improves your capacity for mindless violence and minute scrapings of wolf gene that give you added speed and savagery together with an enhanced tendency to pack loyalty that hurts like upwelling tears. Looking at the mangled survivors of the platoon around me, I felt my throat start to ache.

“Man, we tanked them, didn’t we?” said Munharto, gesturing flipper-like with his one remaining limb. “Seen the milflash yesterday.”

Kwok’s microcam swivelled, making minute hydraulic sounds.

“You taking the new 391, sir?”

“I don’t—”

“Hey, Naki. Where are you, man? It’s the lieutenant.”

I stayed off the axial deck after that.

Schneider found me the next day, sitting in the officers’ convalescent ward, smoking a cigarette and staring out of the viewport. Stupid, but like the doctor said for fuck’s sake. Not much point in looking after yourself, if that same self is liable at any moment to have the flesh ripped off its bones by flying steel or corroded beyond repair by chemical fallout.

“Ah, Lieutenant Kovacs.”

It took me a moment to place him. People’s faces look a lot different under the strain of injury, and besides we’d both been covered in blood. I looked at him over my cigarette, wondering bleakly if this was someone else I’d got shot up wanting to commend me on a battle well fought. Then something in his manner tripped a switch and I remembered the loading bay. Slightly surprised he was still aboard, even more surprised he’d been able to bluff his way in here, I gestured him to sit down.

“Thank you. I’m, ah, Jan Schneider.” He offered a hand that I nodded at, then helped himself to my cigarettes from the table. “I really appreciate you not ah, not—”

“Forget it. I had.”

“Injury, ah, injury can do things to your mind, to your memory.”—I stirred impatiently—“Made me mix up the ranks and all, ah—”

“Look, Schneider, I don’t really care.” I drew an ill-advisedly deep lungful of smoke and coughed. “All I care about is surviving this war long enough to find a way out of it. Now if you repeat that, I’ll have you shot, but otherwise you can do what the fuck you like. Got it?”

He nodded, but his poise had undergone a subtle change. His nervousness had damped down to a subdued gnawing at his thumbnail and he was watching me, vulture-like. When I stopped speaking, he took his thumb out of his mouth, grinned, then replaced it with the cigarette. Almost airily, he blew smoke at the viewport and the planet it showed.

“Exactly,” he said.

“Exactly what?”

Schneider glanced around conspiratorially, but the few other occupants of the ward were all congregated at the other end of the chamber, watching Latimer holoporn. He grinned again and leaned closer.

“Exactly what I’ve been looking for. Someone with some common sense. Lieutenant Kovacs, I’d like to make you a proposition. Something that will involve you getting out of this war, not only alive but rich, richer than you can possibly imagine.”

“I can imagine quite a lot, Schneider.”

He shrugged. “Whatever. A lot of money, then. Are you interested?”

I thought about it, trying to see the angle behind. “Not if it involves changing sides, no. I have nothing against Joshua Kemp personally, but I think he’s going to lose and—”

“Politics.” Schneider waved a hand dismissively. “This has nothing to do with politics. Nothing to do with the war, either, except as a circumstance. I’m talking about something solid. A product. Something any of the corporates would pay a single figure percentage of their annual profits to own.”

I doubted very much whether there was any such thing on a backwater world like Sanction IV, and I doubted even more that someone like Schneider would have ready access to it. But then, he’d scammed his way aboard what was in effect a Protectorate warship and got medical attention that—at a pro-government estimate—half a million men on the surface were screaming for in vain. He might have something, and right now anything that might get me off this mudball before it ripped itself apart was worth listening to.

I nodded and stubbed out my cigarette.

“Alright.”

“You’re in?”

“I’m listening,” I said mildly. “Whether or not I’m in depends on what I hear.”

Schneider sucked in his cheeks. “I’m not sure we can proceed on that basis, lieutenant. I need—”

“You need me. That’s obvious, or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Now shall we proceed on that basis, or shall I call Wedge security and let them kick it out of you?”

There was a taut silence, into which Schneider’s grin leaked like blood.

“Well,” he said at last. “I see I’ve misjudged you. The records don’t cover this, ah, aspect of your character.”

“Any records you’ve been able to access about me won’t give you the half of it. For your information, Schneider, my last official military posting was the Envoy Corps.”

I watched it sink in, wondering if he’d scare. The Envoys have almost mythological status throughout the Protectorate, and they’re not famous for their charitable natures. What I’d been wasn’t a secret on Sanction IV, but I tended not to mention it unless pressed. It was the sort of reputation that led to at best a nervous silence every time I walked into a mess room and at worst to insane challenges from young first-sleevers with more neurachem and muscle grafting than sense. Carrera had carpeted me after the third (stack retrievable) death. Commanding officers generally take a dim view of murder within the ranks. You’re supposed to reserve that kind of enthusiasm for the enemy. It was agreed that all references to my Envoy past would be buried deep in the Wedge datacore, and superficial records would label me a career mercenary via the Protectorate marines. It was a common enough pattern.