The Officers

Chapter 7 - Time to head home

~~~ Recovery

That afternoon he was able to get out of bed. The moment he was up and dressed he went to check on the other troopers who'd been hurt. Mila came with and they took the time to talk to each one for several minutes. One of the worst hurt was the woman who'd fired the initial shot since she'd been so close. He'd checked his tablet when he'd finished eating and her armor was considered a total write off. They'd ended up needing to cut her out due to the extent of the damage. When the grenade had been fired at the weapon the reaction had been that bad.

"Hey Corporal, sorry you were hurt so bad. You have my thanks for noticing." He rubbed his chest and scowled, "Damn thing broke or damaged about half my ribs and now I'm stuck with some normal heavy armor." He wasn't happy about that. He didn't expect to need the ability to change but having the ability was nice.

Mila gave her a light hug, "Thanks for your quick response even if you were hurt. You saved everyone there from even worse. When you get out of here I'll have one of our special steaks cooked for you."

The Corporal blushed slightly with the compliments and hug, "Just doing my job Sir, Ma'am. I'm glad you weren't hurt worse." She had to grumble, "Now I get to break in a new suit of armor. I watched you two working with the special armor. At least I don't have to worry about all the additional steps, but it still sucks." She remembered the first set she broke in and now she had to do another. Even bringing the settings to a new suit you had to do the break in.

Holcum snorted, "Yah, lucky you. You don't need to worry about growing in height or changing to a Liger. My cat was not amused by certain connections." He felt his cat yowl in the back of his mind at that. He still didn't like them not that Holcum blamed him. He didn't either.

Mila did yowl, "Tell me about it. I keep getting growled at."

The Corporal managed not to laugh, "Thank goodness I'm human and don't have to worry about that. It's bad enough for us but your type? I'm sure it's far more uncomfortable for you. Thanks for coming by. I'm going to try and sleep and hopefully wake up healed." One of the medication pumps kicked in and gave her some pain medication.

"Well I suppose we could bite you, but we might be frowned at..." Holcum grinned at her when he said that, "Relax and we'll stop by later." He stood and gave her shoulder a light squeeze before he and Mila left the room.

~~~ Continuing explorations

By the end of the week most of the injured troops were returned to full duty. The most critically injured were on light duty but out of medical. His team was sent back to the bubble they'd been in before. Further exploration had been changed to locate the hidden weapons. It had slowed down any other exploration by a great deal. Neither ends of the station had been penetrated at all.

As the search for the hidden weapons had been going on the techs working in engineering had been working on converting one of the reactors to be operated by human tech. It was slow going but the basis of how they worked was close enough they would get it working eventually. Until the weapons were either disabled or controlled power was not going to be restored to the station. Certain sections if they could figure out how to do it such as the bubbles but not the entirety of it.

Linguistics was working hard on the language. It helped having someone familiar with Kanji and Han writing was showing some results. They were identifying characters which related to each other and how they fell in the words. Unlike English which was left to right or Japanese which tended to be right to left and started with what to English readers would consider the back of a book this went top to bottom.