26
“Well, look who the cat dragged in,” a somewhat familiar voice said as Rev entered the Wounded Warriors Ward.
Rev looked to where a dozen Marines were sitting around in a brightly colored lounge in sweats and tees. Six were at a table playing cards . . .
“Angel Wings?”
“In the flesh,” Malaika said, getting up from the table and rushing over to envelop Rev in a bone-crushing hug. “Where the hell have you been? I heard you were CASEVAC’d back to the real world, but when I got here, no one knew where you were.”
Rev had an answer for that, given to him by the admiral herself—not that he thought he’d have to pull it out so soon.
“My body was having rejection issues,” he said, waving his stump. “They needed to keep me in isolation, purge my medinanos, and then give me more.”
Rev thought it was a weak excuse, but he’d been assured that while this was a rare occurrence, it did occasionally happen.
“Whoa. That sucks the big one. But you’re OK now?” she asked, dragging him back toward the card table.
“They say so.”
“Angel Wings, Mala?” one of the Marines at the table said as they came up.
“Private joke. Forget about it. But hey, this is Rev. He and I go way back, what . . . all of three months now? Snake-eater type, but don’t hold that against him.”
“Yeah, I know you,” one of the Marines said as he stood up, hand out. “Rafer Lindt. I met you at the E-club once with Bundy.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember,” Rev said, shaking the hand. “You’re in tanks.” He frowned and said, “I didn’t hear of any tanks getting hit by the Angel shits, except for Bundy getting stuck in that hole.”
There was a round of laughter, and one of the others said, “Tell him why you’re here, Rafe.”
His face turned red. “I sort of fell down a flight of stairs. Broke my back.”
“And he wasn’t even drunk,” Malaika said. “Just going to take a piss. And now he’s got another six months of rehab with us here.”
She started around the table, naming each Marine and a corpsman, before pointing to the others in the lounge and naming them in turn. About two-thirds were from Seventh Marines, the Red Lions, at Camp Kamachi, while the rest were from the Gryphons and Camp Nguyen.
One of them, an older woman Malaika called Bunny, lifted a leg when she was named and pulled back her sweats to reveal a silver prosthesis. “When you getting your arm? They’re not going to regen you, right?”
“Soon. I had a rejection problem, and they need to get that fixed before I get an arm.”
That was two times in less than two minutes he’d gone to that excuse. He was glad the admiral had fed it to him, and he had it on call.
“You’ll like it. The rehab staff are good shits. You’ll be an expert before you know it.”
Rev surveyed the room. Ten Marines and a corpsman. Except for Bunny and her leg, none looked that hurt, even if three were wearing healing chambers.
“This is all there is?”
“No. Tinsel’s in her rehab session, but yeah, this is it. The Angel shits weren’t really the best fighters around,” Malaika said.
“There’s F-Ward,” Rafer said.
The jovial attitude faded a bit, and Rev asked, “F-Ward?”
“That’s for the seriously messed-up. They’ve got people in there going back to Horry.”
Horry was HRY-355, a manufacturing station in the Grabowsky Belt, lost to the Centaurs nine or ten years before.
“Anyone from Alafia?”
“Two, from what I hear. We’re not allowed back there,” Rafer said in a somber voice.
“Hell, let’s not bring everyone down. You up for some Knock On?” Malaika asked Rev.
“Sure, why not? I don’t think I can deal, though. I can only knock with one hand.”
“Don’t worry about that, hon. You sit by me and let momma do your dealing.”
Rev took a seat and just drank in the feeling. He’d been extremely lonely in isolation with only Punch for company, but he was back with his tribe now. He was home.
“What happened to you, Mala?” Rev asked while Rafer dealt the next hand. “I mean, you don’t look—”
“I’m still beautiful, you mean?” She tapped the side of her head with her forefinger. “It’s up here that got messed up. Three weeks after you. Just mopping up the stragglers when one of the freaking Angel shits brought down a wall with me next to it. Boom! Blasted it right on top of me. Knocked me out and gave me a concussion.”
“In a PAL-3?”
It didn’t seem to him that a mere wall would do much damage to someone in the infantry combat suit.
“I didn’t mention it was a big wall,” she said as the others at the table laughed. “The docs swear I’ll be right as rain by next week.”
“Which is going to be a miracle ’cause you were never right as rain in the first place, Mala,” one of the other Marines, Copper, said.
Malaika threw a wadded-up napkin at him before picking up her cards.
Rev just soaked it in. The trash talk, the ribbing. The bonding. He had no idea how long he’d be here, and he wanted nothing more than to see Tomiko and the rest of the team, but as long as he had Marines around him, he’d be able to tough it out.
He picked up his hand, looked at the cards, and then groaned. At least one thing seemed not to have changed, and that was his horrible luck playing Knock On.