To Honor You Call Us Read Online Free Page B

more than 50,000 dead and only a dozen or so survivors.  No wonder the poor bastard looked like he just lost his best friend.  He probably did.  And his second best friend.  And his third.
    Max struggled only briefly with what to say when faced with an officer who had lived through what this man had endured.  He fell back on the time-honored Navy Way:  minimize the emotional and talk about the facts.  “Sorry to hear it, Lieutenant.  How did you manage to make it?” 
    The doctor shook his head slightly, almost as though he was prepared to disbelieve his own story.  “I was treating a patient for decompression sickness in a hyperbaric chamber.  When the hospital wing was destroyed, the chamber was blown clear.  I closed all the pressure valves and my patient and I lived off of the treatment oxygen bottles in the chamber for twenty-nine hours until we were rescued.  We had emergency lights for only the first three hours or so.  After that, it was dark.  Very, very dark . . . .”  His voice trailed off.  He collected himself and went on.  “Well, in any event, the patient lived and is now being evacuated to the naval hospital on Epsilon Indi III.”
    That made sense.  A hyperbaric chamber had to be built like a diving bell to withstand the high pressure air it contained, so it would survive even if that part of the station were breached.  And the things had to be air tight to work in the first place.
    “Quick thinking.  And a helluva stroke of luck,” Max observed.
    “You could look at it that way.  I’m wondering if I might have been better off if I had been in the corridor or in the head relieving myself when that part of the station went.”
    It wasn’t the first time Max had heard that kind of talk.  Max had gone aboard his first warship as a squeaker when he was eight years old, and the Union had been at war for years before that.  Now, at age twenty-eight, Max had a lifetime’s worth of experience dealing with people who had survivor’s guilt.  It had to be nipped in the bud or he would soon be reading in the Naval Gazette that the Admiralty was saddened to announce that Dr. Sahin had died in a “regrettable airlock accident.” 
    He put his arm around the man, leading him gently away from the window.  “Walk with me, Doctor.  Let’s both of us get another drink.”  The two made their way to the bar and were waited on right after a short Commodore who looked as though he would be better off drinking strong New Lebanon coffee than the Scotch the bartender had just poured for him.  Max got another bourbon on the rocks.  Doctor Sahin got a glass of Forthian Stout, a dark beer-like brew that contained no alcohol because Forthian yeast produced no alcohol.
    “Been in the Navy long?”  It was a somewhat less lame opener than most, anyway. 
    “Only four years.  When I completed my Residency on Earth and it was time to go back home, there was no home to go back to.  So, I joined the Navy, spent two years at the DeBakey Joint Forces Physicians Training Facility and when I graduated was immediately assigned to Travis.  I’ve been there ever since.”
    “No home to go back to, you said?”
    “That’s correct,” Sahin replied.  “I’m from Tubek.”
    Max couldn’t remember anything about Tubek, except two salient facts:  first, it had fallen to the Krag about six years ago.  And, second, as with most Krag conquests, no one knew what happened to the people who lived there.  Naval Intelligence believed that they were either killed, enslaved, or some unsavory combination of both.  So, Doctor Sahin had not only just lost everyone he had worked with his entire professional career, but six years before had also likely lost his entire family and everyone he had grown up with.  There weren’t many Grief Counselors in the Union Navy’s Medical Corps, but this guy was a candidate to have one assigned to him full time.
    “My God.  How’re  you managing?”
    “I manage.