Outrageous Fortune-Errant Freight Book One

Chapter 40

While Jagati's body was dropping to the deck of the Errant, her mind took a different sort of journey, drifting back in time to a day she'd gone stomping through the Kodiak in search of her captain.

* * *

She found him in the sickbay, where not even the bitter stench of her smoke-saturated uniform—remnant of the hours spent scouring Nasa's plasma-scarred plateau—could mask the reek of blood creeping into the passageway.

None of which seemed to bother the prov posted outside the sickbay door, who stood at parade rest, eyes forward. She was the image of readiness, slapping her fist to heart with enough vigor Jagati feared she might have broken something.

"As you were," she said (okay, growled), pushing open the sickbay door.

And almost stepped right back into the passageway.

The whiff of sepsis she'd picked up in the corridor was, in the confines of the infirmary, strong enough to push back.

"Commander O'Bannion?" Dr. Anyasim, short and stout, the close-cropped ink of her hair going to iron, stepped out from behind one of the infirmary's sliding shoji screens.

"Where is he?"

"Dr. Montoya is with the general, in his quarters."

"I know where Gabriel is," Jagati said. "I was the one who radioed for him. Where is the captain?"

In reply, Anyasim drew the screen aside to reveal the source of Jagati's inquiry, stretched out on one of the cots.

Captain Pitte lay on his left side, so he was facing the sickbay entrance, but as his eyes remained closed, she doubted he was aware of her arrival. He was shirtless, and it struck her this was the first time she'd seen him so, and his skin sheened with sweat above the sheet that covered him from the hip down.

Every so often his body gave a shudder, and his right hand clutched at the bedding in front of him. To Jagati it looked as if he were grasping for his sword, over and over.

"How?" she asked, forcing herself to look away from the unnerving sight.

"I'm told there was an altercation on the bridge."

"I know about the fight." Or she knew Rand's version of the fight. "And the wound?" She nodded to the lightly taped dressing on the right side, just above the hip. "How did it get infected?"

"You didn't hear? Of course not," Anyasim answered her own question. "You were in action."

"So?"

"I wasn't notified of the captain's injury until after the Kodiak anchored." Anyasim stepped up to the opposite side of the cot. "By then the damage was done. Threads from his shirt embedded in the entrance wound caused an infection. Dr. Montoya and I got it cleaned out," she said. "Now it's up to the antibiotics and maggots to do the needful."

"Ugh," Jagati said, giving the dressing above Pitte's hip her famed stinky eye. "Wait. Where are the little buggers?"

"As I said," Anyasim dipped her gaze meaningfully down towards the man on the bed. "The infection is in the entrance wound."

The flood of anger that statement brought on rushed through her system so quickly, so fiercely, she felt dizzy. "Are you saying he was stabbed in the back?"

She'd kill him—she would go to Rand's quarters and finish what the renegade colonel, Quinn, started. And then she'd track down Sgt. Jihan, and—

"Commander?"