Page 44 of Starfighter’s Salvation

“Brennix first,” she ordered.

“Absolutely not,” he said from the door.

“Excellent,” Gina muttered. “A matched set of difficult patients.”

Gina listened to Cassia tell their story while cutting the Titan's armor away from the burn. The heavy metallic polymer was damaged and too heavy for Cassie wear and walk out of here. Cassia gave my mate a short summary of events. They'd been escorting a research team. Routine, not special considerations. They'd been ambushed. Brennix had dragged Cassia out of her disabled Titan after the strike but part of it was seared to her flesh. The Titan’s chest plating had taken a direct hit at some point. He carried her from the ambush site to this bunker on a broken ankle, then returned twice for the wounded engineers.

“You carried her on that?” she asked, glancing at Brennix’s ankle.

“It was functional at the time.”

“Men.” Gina frowned as I checked the other wounded. Other than the Titans, most had minor injuries. Except one.

Cassia chuckled at my mate, then groaned when the movement pulled at her shoulder. “He's always like this,” she told Gina.

“I know the type.”

Both women looked at me and my Gina smiled as I moved. Nine convoy members filled the rest of the bunker. Two apprentice engineers, aged sixteen and seventeen, had been taking turns holding pressure on an older male’s abdomen who was laid out on the floor of the cave, unconscious. One engineer had a compound fracture stabilized with a tool brace. Another had lost three fingers. Two suffered small burns and smoke damage. A convoy communications specialist named Halix had a deep gash across his scalp and the glassy, half-second-slow focus of a head injury, but he was upright and refusing to sit. The remaining researcher could walk, but only because he refused to lie down.

Gina took control of the bunker in less than a minute.

“If you can stand, you’re working. You with the arm brace, keep it on and carry whatever we can't leave behind with the other hand. Burn patients go first after Cassia. Nobody eats, drinks, or decides to be brave without asking me.”

“We have been without water for twelve hours,” one researched said.

“Then wet your mouth and spit it out. If I have to knock you out on the ship, I don’t want your lungs full of vomit.”

He obeyed her without question. They all did. I had commanded trained rescue crews who moved slower for me than these strangers moved for her.

Halix caught Gina’s sleeve as she walked past him. He had a scrambler unit clutched to his chest and a report he kept trying to deliver through cracked lips — something about a signal he’d pulled off the enemy net in the hours before the strike. He was mumbling. Incoherent.

“Sit, honey. Whatever it is, it’ll keep,” Gina told him, easing him down against the wall with one hand on his shoulder. “You’ve got a concussion and I’ve got a dying man. Priorities.” He let her go and frowned at the unit in his hands as though he couldn’t work out why he’d bothered to save it. Neither could I. I marked him stable as the walking wounded gathered at the door, waiting for us.

Gina was walking confidence. Assurance that everything was going to be fine. It was as if every person in the bunker could read her heart and knew, with certainty, that she would take care of them, get them out alive.

Except for Brennix, who was focused on protecting the group—and his mate—they ignored me as irrelevant. Gina was their sun and moon, their hope.

I knew the feeling. She was mine and I accepted the fact that I did not want to fly another mission without her. The need to be at her side, protecting her, completely consumed me. If I were being forced to abandon the idea of keeping her out of danger, then she would go nowhere alone.

“How long has he been like this?” I bent low and scanned the most severely wounded of the group. The med scanner identified the unconscious man on the floor as Sergeant Tavar. His injuries were bad. Very bad.

Gina dropped to her knees beside him. Her fingers rested over the artery in the man's neck, and I saw her jaw tighten with worry she did not show to the anxious teenagers next to her.

“Since the strike,” one apprentice said. “He taught us where to push. He told us not to stop.”

“You did great." Gina smiled at the worried youths. "Good work. Both of you. I got it from here. Go with Starfighter Corvan. He's taking everyone back to the ship.”

The taller apprentice looked close to tears. “Is he dead?”

“No.” Gina began cutting away the field dressing. “He is extremely committed to making my day difficult.”

I checked the med scanner again. “Gina.”

“I see it.” The same report had to be popping up in her helmet's display.

“He has a perforated bowel, advanced infection, and internal bleeding.”

“Yes. I am aware.”