When Varlik awoke from sedation, he was in a troop carrier fitted to move wounded from the Beregesh field hospital to the base hospital at Aromanis. He could remember nothing beyond the evac floater and the medic with the syringe. He'd known something was wrong with his hip, but now his guts hurt badly, too.
He moved his head, his eyes finding a doctor with a captain's collar lozenge. The doctor saw his movement and spoke to him.
"You're back with us, eh?"
"More or less," Varlik answered thickly.
Taking a syringe from a case, the doctor walked over. "The pilot tells me you're the famous white T'swi," he said. "You keep dangerous company. I'm going to give you a little sedative now. It's another hour to the base hospital, and it's best if you sleep your way there."
The way he hurt, it seemed a good idea, but he had a question first.
"Wait, doc."
The doctor paused.
"How are the guys in my squad?"
"I have no idea. I don't know who was in your squad."
Varlik looked at him blankly. Some of them were probably aboard this craft, and if he asked by name . . . But he was having trouble thinking.
"What happened to me? Something hit me in the hip, and then I couldn't move. Now my belly hurts."
"You were hit in the ilium—part of the pelvis, the hip bone—and the left end of it was broken off. Then the bullet went through the abdominal cavity and some of its contents emerged through the obliquus externus on the right side. They opened you up at the field hospital at Beregesh and did a nice repair job. Now all you have to do is lie quietly in a nice cool ward at Aromanis and heal. Just like your buddies."
The doctor pressed the syringe against Varlik's bare shoulder and fired it. Somehow it seemed to Varlik that he had more questions, but he couldn't remember what they were. Then the sedative took him.
It was one of the T'swa wards, a busy place well stocked with medical technicians and wounded. His Romblit doctor there told him with some amusement that reception had initially been unwilling to put him in a T'swa ward. True, he'd been brought in with T'swa wounded, and his tag said "Company A, T'swa Second Regiment," but clearly he was not T'swa. Then a big T'swa sergeant with his lower face heavily bandaged had gotten off his stretcher, backed the reception sergeant into a corner, gathered a fistful of shirt front, and in grunted, barely intelligible words, made it clear that all his squad went with him, Lormagen included.
Varlik wondered if this was another case of facts inflated and embroidered, but the story pleased him. And he was glad to be where he was, a feeling that increased with the days. T'swa wards had a reputation among hospital personnel as the most cheerful, and T'swa the patients who were easiest to work with and recovered most rapidly.
Meanwhile Varlik enjoyed a rich dream life, though he could never recall more than bits and pieces of his dreams. Long afterward, he'd remember his days in the T'swa ward as among the more pleasant of his life, even though it was there he learned that only four of the First Squad had survived, besides himself. Bik-Chan had been killed on the ridge, and Jinto had died on the evac floater of multiple wounds.
On his first day they took him into surgery, where they welded his pelvis and did a mesh job on some ligaments. His visceral and major vascular damage had been handled at Beregesh.
By the end of the third day he'd talked the hospital into giving him temporary use of a small examination room, and there, after recording a long and reassuring cube to Mauen, he narrated his report on the T'swa raiders and the last days of the First Squad, then edited cubes both for newsfacs and broadcasting. This took him two days—his energy level was low—but when he was done, the cube was the best facs feature he'd ever seen or heard.
Three days later General Lamons came through the ward, pinning medals on the wounded. Varlik, who'd been sitting in bed reading, was deeply surprised, but not too surprised to slip on his visor and pick up his camera. Lamons saw him with it, scowled only briefly, then continued. When he got to Varlik's bed, he stepped in beside it and looked down at him. Varlik set the camera aside, though the audio recorder was still running.
"Your T'swa have been doing a good job," said Lamons.
"Yes, sir."
"Your Colonel Koda showed me a copy of your reports on the T'swa interdiction teams. That was good work you did. Took guts."
"Thank you, sir."
The general grunted, then bent and pinned a medal on Varlik's pajama top. "Carry on," he said, then turned to the next bed.
By that time the hospital had begun to feed Varlik solid food—not whatever he wanted, but solid food. And he was allowed to wheel himself to the "library," where boxes of books had been spread unsorted on tables. Walking would have to wait a while.
It was in the library that he ran into Konni. Eight days earlier she'd been recording the hardening of perimeter defenses when a Bird lobber rocket had hit a hover truck less than twenty yards away. Pieces of truck had smashed her left humerus and cracked her left supraorbital ridge and four ribs, while small rocket fragments had struck her in the left arm and leg. The left side of her face was an interesting purplish-green.
"My Revax is all right, though," she said, "and I ought to be out of here in about three weeks. The home office is sure to be sending another team out, so I'll probably go back to Iryala then, although . . . it's a temptation to stay. How about you?"
How about him? He hadn't looked at that. And for the first time, it occurred to him that there was nothing here to report on the T'swa now except more of the same. Maybe later, if there was a later, if the T'swa were given a new assignment. But now . . .
"I'm going to Tyss," he said. The statement took him totally by surprise, but he continued from there. "To the world that produces the T'swa regiments. There are guys going there from my ward—guys disabled or requiring prolonged rehab and reconditioning. I should be able to talk my way into going with them."
Having said it, he felt a pang of guilt. He could, after all, go home to Mauen now if he wanted to, and they could start the family they'd been approved for. Central News wouldn't complain. After all, he'd almost been killed. Probably they'd treat him like a hero.
He kept the pang for about ten seconds, then his attention went to procedural matters. Legally, his status with the Red Scorpion Regiment didn't validate traveling to Tyss without a visa from the Iryalan Foreign Ministry. In fact, legally he'd probably had no right to work for a foreign military force. But he was sure that Colonel Koda would approve his request, and for practical purposes, that would settle that. As soon as he had approval from Koda, he'd send word to Fendel. He was supposed to be here covering the war of course, but his reports to date would have built up a lot of interest in Tyss, and he had to spend his rehabilitation somewhere.
Besides which, he'd be gone long before they could get any argument to him.
He and Konni talked a while longer, mostly about the T'swa and his experiences with them in Birdland. She told him how impressed both she and Bertol had been with the early cubes Varlik had let them copy, then Varlik let her borrow his cubes of the Birdland mission. After that she'd gone back to her own ward, and he'd called Lieutenant Shao, the one-armed officer who'd been left in charge of the T'swa's Aromanis camp. He explained that he wanted to be evacuated to Tyss so he could record something of the planet and its people.
It was marvelous, Varlik thought, how casual the T'swa were about so many things. Without a moment's hesitation, Shao promised to add him to the roster on the evac ship which would arrive, and leave, later that week. And no, the lieutenant assured him, there'd be no problem; he had all the authority necessary.
It was late the next day that Konni reappeared, just after Varlik had sent off letter cubes to Mauen and Fendel telling them what he was going to do. It was a lot harder to tell Mauen than Fendel.
"Well," said Konni casually, "how's your plan coming along to be evacuated to Tyss?"
"I leave day after tomorrow," he said. "No problem. Lieutenant Shao has even issued me the clothes and stuff I'll need there."
Her eyes lit up. "Good!" she said. "Look at this." She handed him a sheet of stiff paper.
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN:
KNOW YOU BY THIS CERTIFICATE THAT KONNI WENTER, BY VIRTUE OF HER PARTICIPATION IN THE 711. 10.01-02 NIGHT RAID ON KELIKUT, ORLANTHA, IS HEREBY APPOINTED AND RECOGNIZED AS AN HONORARY MEMBER OF THE NIGHT ADDER REGIMENT, LODGE OF KOOTOSH-LAN, WITH ALL THE RIGHTS AND PREROGATIVES PERTAINING THERETO.
(SIGNED)
BILTONG, COL., COMMANDING
When he'd finished reading, Varlik stared at it for a moment longer and then at Konni. An extraneous, non sequitur thought drifted into his mind—that T'swa apparently only had one name each.
"In the name of Pertunis!" he said. "How did you get this?"
"When I left you the other day, the first thing I did was listen to your Birdland report and look at your video cubes. And decided I wanted to go to Tyss, too. Actually, I wanted to as soon as you talked about it; that just hardened it. So I called Colonel Voker and asked him if he could think of any way to do it without my having to go through the Foreign Ministry back home. That might take a year. He said he'd see what he could do. And this afternoon, this came from Beregesh. I know Colonel Voker's behind it. He had this made up in his office and sent it south for Colonel Biltong's signature, I'm sure of it."
She took the "certificate" back. "I'm going to call your T'swa lieutenant now and apply for evacuation."
"It's Lieutenant Shao," Varlik said, and she hurried from the ward.
She was right, Varlik thought—it must have been Voker. How nonstandard—perhaps even non-Standard—they'd become, getting around regulations the way they were! And Voker most of all—that was flagrant! Konni's certificate was an even flimsier legal basis for bypassing the Foreign Ministry than his own position as regimental publicist. Back home, for something like that, a person could be charged with a misdemeanor, at the very least. For Voker, surely a felony.
But that didn't disturb Varlik at all, because the T'swa couldn't care less, and no one at the hospital was going to question it.
He realized he was grinning broadly.