I ran back to the still smoking bunker, the medkit heavy in my arms. A box, fifty centimeters on the long side. What could it contain? How much?

  Enough?

  My boots slipped in the sand, my legs burning from the up-hill run, my breath cold and hot at the same time. The tufts of grass tried to trip me, and I was too tired to lift my legs over them properly. By the time I reached the bunker, my legs felt like wet noodles.

  Talain lay on the ground, her eyes closed, burnt face relaxed, serene.

  I was too late.

  "Crudmunging voidmucker," I said. I tried to feel anger, to recapture the rage that had driven me out into the plain, and back up the hill, but it wouldn't come. All I could feel was a sense of loss.

  That, and how tired I was.

  I hadn't known her long, didn't even know she existed until Stanko had assigned her to the mission, a bare month ago. And now she was dead, one more of Riina's Kylians gone.

  It brought up memories, bad ones, distant ones that came closer with every death. I wished for the Bucket, for the emptiness of space, for the hatchling. Neither was forthcoming.

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  And I had another wounded team-mate.

  "Pants off," I told Geir.

  He grimaced.

  "Don't think I can do that, Captain," he said.

  "You can keep your modesty on the Belithain," I said. "Here you obey. Pants off."

  Another grimace.

  "That's not what I meant," he said, poking at the black uniform he wore.

  It didn't move. Cheap weave, made to look like military grade protective. The polymer had melted, into Geir's flesh.

  "Crud," I said. "Hao, get a pair of scissors."

  "He'll bleed," Hao said. "And the void-loving sand will get into the wound."

  "Also, I'll be naked," Geir.

  I gave him a glare, then remembered that it was he who was wounded, not I. Crudmunging lot of guts to be joking about it. Either that, or Hao had managed to rescue one of the tranquilizers from his medpack.

  But no. Geir's breaths came too fast and shallow for him to be tranked up. His joke was pure bravado, keeping us going.

  "We'll see what the medkit can do," I said, opening it.

  The medkit couldn't do void. It was full of low-tech crud. Poly-weave bandages. Synth-skin grafts. Packets of non-restricted pain killers and antiseptics. Things you'd give a child for a scraped knee.

  I didn't even curse, merely turned the medkit, showing Hao and Geir.

  "I'd hoped for a medbot," I said. "I'd have settled for a surgi-kit, or a packet of vat-grafts."

  "Guess the Syndicates don't like their horses too healthy," Geir said.

  "Crudmuckers," Hao agreed. "What now?"

  "Now we beg the horses for help," I said. "I've already traded away your services."

  "Whose?" Geir said.

  "Hao's," I said.

  "Great," Geir said. "Then give me a fistful of those pain meds and a bottle of water."

  I grabbed for my bag, remembered that it was flash-fried inside the bunker.

  "I can give you the meds," I said. "The water we'll have to trade for."

  Assuming the Syndics' victims were still around.