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“OK, steady, and ease it closer,” Rev said.
Tomiko and Porter shuffled in half a meter until they were holding Pashu up and alongside his shoulder.
“Right there, stop!”
With his cannon down and no Daryll around to troubleshoot it, Rev was doing the only thing he could think of—the field-expedient power down and power back up. Tomiko and Porter had, with more than a little difficulty, been able to remove Pashu from his sleeve. But removing something was easier than connecting it, and the last two attempts to hook Pashu back up had failed. They couldn’t line her up.
If they couldn’t do it, then maybe they were going about it the wrong way. Rev had the most experience in this, so he was going to try connecting him to Pashu, not the other way around.
Looking over his shoulder, he tried to eyeball the alignment, then he leaned into her as his two teammates held her steady. To his surprised, she seemed to click into place. Lights lit up his display.
<Connection made and booting up.>
“Shit,” he said in relief, shutting his eyes.
“Shit? It didn’t work?” Tomiko asked.
“What? Oh, no. That was a good shit, not a bad one. She’s booting up now. I’ll see in a moment if we’re green.”
The lights cycled around until a single, beautiful green one shined steady. Rev lifted her, feeling the ease of movement. It wasn’t as smooth as before, and there was a slight hitch as he raised her above the horizontal, but she was moving on external power, not vampiring off his body.
<Charged.>
Rev raised Pashu and fired into the air.
“She looks good,” he told Tomiko.
“Thank the Mother. Carp, go track down the captain or the master guns and tell them Rev is back up,” she told Porter.
Even with that worry off his shoulders, Rev still had so much on his mind. “Strap?”
“Doc says he’s not as bad as he looks. I mean, he’s fucked up, but he can recover. The engineer corporal who’s in charge now sent a landline message for some sort of transport for the wounded.”
Rev raised his eyebrows at that. If a corporal was the senior combat engineer left, they must have taken pretty heavy casualties.
“You should have seen Doc, Miko, blasting killer-drones out of the air. He wasn’t going to leave Strap for anything.”
“Does that surprise you? Doc is Doc.”
“No, it doesn’t surprise me. But it was good to be a witness.”
“Pierson, though, that surprised me. Did you see that . . . that . . .”
“That soft, ex-Ninety-nine Marine?” Rev prompted.
“Yeah, now that you put it that way. I mean, Pierson? He was an animal.”
“Took out a courser. Probably saved a lot of us, and he certainly turned the battle.”
Rev hadn’t actually seen the end of the battle. The courser’s self-destruction had knocked him out, and it took a couple of minutes while his nanos assessed his condition then slowly brought him around again. But the moment the courser had gone up, the remaining four paladins had broken contact and sped back down the highway.
“Don’t get me wrong. I saw him, and he was amazing. But if it was going to be any one of you, I would have bet money on you or even McAnt—”
She stopped at the mention of McAnt. What remained of his body, if anything, hadn’t been located yet, only a mangled chunk of his IBHU.
“Respect for the fallen,” Rev said.
This had been an expensive mission. McAnt, Harisa, Gizzy. And those were the only ones he knew for sure. More Raiders, combat engineers, and sappers were KIA. He looked toward the highway down which the four paladins had retreated, hoping it was worth it.
It didn’t feel like it to him, though.
“Well, if you’re combat-ready now, let’s go find out how we can be useful,” Tomiko said.
Rev rotated Pashu around a few more times. She wasn’t perfect, but she was combat-capable. With McAnt gone, if Pashu was still down, that would have left only Pierson. And despite what Rev had witnessed an hour ago, he felt much better knowing that hadn’t put it all on the private’s shoulders.