camp. It had happened suddenly, and Tara almost missed it because she was worn out herself. One moment her patient was wet and sweating, the next she was wet and shivering. Not uncommon in some cases, but it was the first time in this case. After that she checked the temperature and slumped in relief when it came back several degrees below the last check she'd made, almost down to normal.
The flow of water stopped, and within the hour the soldier stirred.
“Are you feeling better?” Tara asked her softly.
The Soldier nodded slowly, her voice halting. “Guess I’m back... again.”
Tara frowned, “What?”
She smiled tiredly, “Nothing.”
“Can you shut down your implants now?”
The Soldier blinked, her jaw moving, and then the glow in her eyes faded. Tara watched intently, and the soldier looked back at her with an intense gaze that she found discomforting. Long seconds passed, and when the glow didn’t return the soldier slumped back and closed her eyes.
“Thank god...”
Her whispered words were almost inaudible, but Tara heard them well enough. She let out a breath of relief herself as her soldier patient slipped into a sleep after more than thirty hours, and didn’t move again.
“Thank God,” the Nurse agreed, closing her own eyes as she rubbed them tiredly.
She got up and grabbed the closest person, “Watch her. Come get me when she wakes up. I need about a week’s sleep, and she probably needs two.”
*****
She didn’t take two weeks, not even two days, not quite anyway. Sergeant Aida awoke after thirty two hours, her fever well and truly broken, and her body healed and regenerated by the mechanical and biological systems she had been assigned. The light was streaming in through the walls and ceiling, as well as under the door frame and between the windows. The shades had been pulled on the windows, so they were about the only squares of black against the streaming light.
She flipped the toggle for her heads up displays, navigating the neurological interface with practiced ease, and closed her eyes again as a systems status glowed under the thin stretch of skin.
Damn it
. She thought grimly.
Suit power was all but shot, barely three percent above the minimum unlock state. She killed the extraneous systems, and toggled the suit lock to unseal the armor. The magnetic seals broke silently, but she left them as they were for the moment while she took stock of her surroundings.
There was a man in the room, snoring softly as he leaned against the far wall. His rifle leaning about eight feet from where he’d settled in for the night. She twitched slightly at that, sighing silently. Chances were the weapon didn’t have a round chambered either, and she wouldn’t have been completely shocked to find that the magazine wasn’t in the receiver, though she couldn’t see from where she lay.
It was a hunting weapon, used for food or protection, not war. So the man was a hunter, not a soldier. First rule of weapons for a hunter, she reminded herself, was safety. Don’t keep your weapon loaded, don’t store ammunition in the same place as the weapon, and keep trigger locks on it until it was ready for use.
Good rules for a hunter who may have children in the home, bad rules for a warzone.
She broke the seal on her armor, the chest flap making a sucking sound as it pulled away from her flesh. The oxygenated gel that both connected her body to the suit’s internal sensors and provided her with another line of defense against injury and infection clung to her skin as the armor pulled away, giving Sorilla that familiar sensation of being skinned as she peeled the segments back.
The noise should have woken the ‘guard’ posted to the hut, but he didn’t do more than snort and shift as she sat up, her nude form glistening in the streaming light as globules of suit gel slid off her skin.
Her head hurt when she moved, but it wasn’t unendurable. She lifted herself out of