"Well, somebody's up there."

Novice Ginevra perked up at that. She'd been kneeling in the rubble for so long, bolter leveled at nothing in particular, that her left hip and right shoulder were killing her (even with the strength augmentation in the shoulder armature, the bloody gun was heavy), but apparently the Palatine and Superior Torres had stared at the other rubble down the street long enough to see something.

"Not heavy infantry, ma'am," Torres said, handing the Palatine back her auspex. "Flashlight and t-shirt boys."

"Yeah," muttered the Palatine, "but whose? PIGs or pervs or Petey F.?"

"Petey F. ran home long time ago," Torres answered.

"That what he do," the Palatine agreed. "So it's perverts or piggies."

There was another long silence. Ginevra looked nervously at the other novices. Granger was fiddling compulsively with her new chirurgeon's tools, Susan scanning the street, Luna smiling benignly into space, Portia absent-mindedly brushing the new golden Aquila insignia on her shoulder....

"Eyes front, Novice Ginevra," Portia hissed.

"Fine," Ginevra muttered.

"Fine what?"

"Fine, Provisional Squad Leader Portia ma'am."

"That's better."

Ginevra returned her gaze to the tediously empty street ahead of her. Empty of life, at least. There were plenty of broken rockcrete bits, glittering shards of broken glass, and empty shoes. She'd never seen so many shoes in her life. It was if the entire population of the town had been too terrified to tie their laces properly before they fled.

There were also some suspicious red-brown stains and a couple of black lumpy things that crows kept landing on. (All right, so there was some life). Also a bright pink plastic doll's carriage right in the middle of the street. It was perfectly intact but the doll was gone.

"So what do you think?" asked the Palatine. "Iggy piggies or traitor pervs?" She handed Torres back the auspex again and they continued staring down the street at the sprawling compound with the cracked concrete dome that they had been observing for approximately the last three thousand years. Ginevra's knees hurt now. She shuffled slightly to relieve the pain and to get into better eavesdropping position but....

"Eyes front, Novice Ginevra," Portia hissed again, smacking her on the back of her carapace armor this time.

"Feth you up the arsehole with a rotary power scythe," Ginevra muttered.

"What was that?"

"Yes Provisional Squad Leader ma'am."

Ginevra locked her gaze on the empty street ahead of her and strained to hear what the officers were saying.

"Look over there." The Palatine was pointing at some barely visible movement on a balcony. "Is that....Oho. Torres, look."

Torres looked. Was anyone ever going to kill anything fething ever?

"Let my girls secure the building," Torres said.

"What?" The pinch-faced Palatine looked irritably at Torres, then around at the waiting Novices with an expression suggestive of extreme disappointment that they had not yet disappeared. "But the place is full of..."

"Shhhh," Torres said. "Don't ruin the surprise! "

"Throne-damned fething little shitbitches," the Palatine said without taking a breath, as if it were a single word. "If one of your Training Bra Brigade gets herself hurt, just one, the Canoness will have my..."

"Back," Torres interrupted, smiling. "She will totally have your back, ma'am. They're here to learn."

The Palatine banged her forehead twice on the nearest bit of rubble -- she wasn't wearing her helmet, either -- and then sighed. "If one of the darling little lambies even pops a zit..."

"So I'll send them in, then," Torres said.

Torres got up. She rubbed her hands together gleefully -- the armored gauntlets made an awful scratching sound, they had those sandpaper-like pads a lot of Sisters applied to keep their grip on weapons from slipping -- and pranced up to Novice Portia.

"Portia daaaahling," Torres said.

"Ma'am! Superior Torres, ma'am!"

Torres winced. "Noise discipline, Portia. We're in a combat zone. With heretics who specialize in acoustic technology."

"Ma'am! Y...essss ma'am," Portia said more softly.

"How would you secure that building?" Torres said, pointing at the sprawling compound.

"Quick or slow, ma'am?"

"Quick-ish."

"Flamer team down the left side of the street, melta down the right, bounding overwatch, flamer team goes up those stairs, melta..."

"Which stairs?"

"Spiral staircase in that tower, ma'am, you can see it through the shell holes."

"Picturesque. Continue."

"Melta team is base of fire while we go up, then joins us at the top." Portia shrugged. "After that, ma'am, depends on the internal layout."

"You'd keep leading with the flamer?"

"Indoors? Yes'm, unless we need to cut through a barrier, ma'am."

Torres looked thoughtful.

And what happens if one heretic rolls a hand grenade down the stairs while we're coming up? Ginevra thought. Or if the top of the stairs is blocked by rubble? Branches and sequels, bitch.

But apparently Torres was satisfied. "Go do it."

"Ma'am?"

"I'm staying here where it's safe," Torres said, bouncing on balls of her feet a little. "You girls get to do this one solo. A little test."

"Ma'am!"

"You're Provisional Squad Leader," Torres said, tapping Portia's gold Aquila badge. "If you get killed, I'm going to have to shoot you."

"Yes'm."

"Now move your scrawny teenage arse."

"Yes ma'am!" Portia saluted, pivoted on one heel, and made furious tactical hand gestures at the other novices. They rose from cover and began to clamber over the rubble into the street.

"Ginny, sweetie?" Superior Torres called softly.

"Um, yes, ma'am?" Ginevra said.

"No insubordination this time, m'kay?"

"Yes, ma'am," Ginevra said, looking at her boots, and then followed the others.

As the girls entered the open they split into two fire teams: Portia, Ginevra, Susan, and Luna with the flamer on the left, Granger with the other three girls on the right.

Portia almost skipped along the sidewalk in her haste, hopping over broken rockcrete blocks and piles of shoes and one of the lumpy brown things (it had been a woman, maybe) while the other girls scrambled to keep up. Ginevra fell behind as she tried to scan the blown-out windows for snipers and the rubble for IEDs. Then Portia dropped to the ground, Luna and Susan following, and Ginevra almost tripped over them.

"Keep it together, Novice Ginevra," Portia hissed as she waved furiously for the melta team to move up.

The teams did bounding overwatch up the street -- I cover you while you move, you cover me while I move, repeat -- until they were in the shadow of the compound's cracked rockcrete dome. The balcony where the Superiors and the Palatine had seen something was empty now. Portia waved at the melta team to take up firing positions covering the tower with the spiral stairs. Then she waved at them to move six meters left because she didn't like the patch of rubble they'd chosen. She then waved about something else that neither Ginevra nor the melta team leader understood, at least if the increasingly irritable exchange of tactical hand gestures across the street was anything to go by.

"Move back into the broken storefront, dammit," Portia hissed. Ginevra realized the Provisional Squad Leader was speaking into her vox mike and felt a little shocked, because they weren't supposed to be transmitting anything. The melta team leader looked startled too -- you could tell her expression even behind her visor and across the street -- but she complied.

"Ginevra, you're with me," Portia whispered. "Susan, Luna, follow ten seconds behind, I don't want to lose the flamer if the stairs are booby trapped." Susan nodded crisply, Luna sleepily, Ginevra sullenly. "Ok, go!"

Portia burst out of cover and across the rubbled street and through the tower door so hard she slammed against the wall at the base of the stairs. Ginevra, caught off guard, was half a second behind.

"Fething keep up," snapped Portia, and then she started up the stairs, bolter leveled, left shoulder scraping along the outside wall. Ginevra went up a step behind and on the opposite side, her right shoulder on the inside wall. Portia ducked every time she passed a shell hole and Ginevra kept smacking her helmet on these little decorative flower carvings that stuck out a bit and both of them had to skip over broken steps and then there was this guy.

Time stopped.

Ginevra could see his eyes goes wide as he saw their bolters in his face, could see Portia's finger already tightening on the trigger, could see the Aquila sewn into his ragged grey uniform right over his heart and gak don't shoot.

She had just time enough to say the "g" out loud and think no insubordination no insubordination no insubordination before Portia had pulled the trigger back. Then Ginevra slammed into her and bodychecked her Provisional Squad Leader against the wall as the bolter roared. The round missed the Imperial Guardsman by something like a centimeter and exploded in the stones behind him.

Then he sat down heavily and started screaming with his hands over his ears (Why is he wearing that stupid hat instead of a helmet with acoustic dampers?, Ginevra thought distractedly), and Portia yelled "What are you doing?!" and hit Ginevra over the head with the bolter so hard her helmet visor cracked, and Ginevra dropped her gun and grabbed Portia's and shoved her back against the wall and screamed "He's on our side you bloody fething idiot" over and over for the four endless seconds before Susan and Luna came up.

The Guardsman was still screaming.

"Should I incinerate him or something?" Luna said dreamily, waggling her flamer so the pilot light made a pretty little circle in the air.

"Y--" "NO!" Portia and Ginevra yelled.

"Oh," said Luna.

The Guardsman was still screaming, guy had some lungs, you had to admit that.

Then the melta team came running up the stairs and practically slammed into Luna and Susan, and Ginevra had to yell at them "Back down, dammit, don't cluster!"

"What the feth?" shouted a voice, a deep male voice, and it was coming from higher up the stairs. "What happened? Baldwin, you okay?"

"No! They shot me!" screamed the screaming Guardsman. "They fething shot me!"

"No, we didn't, dammit," Ginevra snapped at him, then yelled back up the stairs: "Adepta Sororitas!"

"No, they're not!" screamed Screaming Guardsman. "They're not wearing power armor! They don't have them flower things on their boobs!"

"Yes, we -- dammit, no, we -- I mean, Novices!" Ginevra shouted, staggering through the wreckage of the sentence.

"What's the recognition code?" yelled the deep voice from up the stairs.

"The what?" Ginevra yelled back. "Nobody gave us any fething recognition...."

"Typical interservice feth-up."

Portia had found her voice again. "Come down and show yourselves! No weapons! Hands up!"

"You come up and show yourselves!" the male voice demanded. "No armor! Tits out!"

"We're fifteen-year-old nuns, you morons!" Ginevra yelled back.

"Those miserable heretical little...." Portia shrieked, spit splattering the inside of her faceplate. She made the tactical hand sign for "fire the flamer," but Luna looked at Ginevra, and Ginevra shook her head.

"Fifteen?" asked the voice from above.

"I'm sixteen," Luna offered. "That's legal in...."

"Shut up," Ginevra replied.

"Huh," said the male voice. "Now I feel like one of the pervs."

Portia pushed forward again. "How do we know you're not?" she snarled. "Come down with your hands up so we can see they aren't tentacles or pincers or whatever! You take off your armor!"

Ginevra sighed and shoved her back against the wall.

"Nobody's taking their armor off," Ginevra said. "We're in a combat zone."

"Anyway," she added, "I don't know about you guys, but taking off our armor is a pain in the arse. You can pop it pretty quick in an emergency, like if you're drowning and you need to lose the weight, or you're bleeding out and the Hospitaller can't get to the wound otherwise. But it's a bitch and a half to get it back on again. You've got to, like, take a really deep breath and hold it and hold it and hold it while somebody else pulls all the straps as tight as they can. Otherwise it's too loose and it chafes like feth all day."

"No gak."

"Yeah. We wear this padded bodysuit thing under but it doesn't stop the chafing if you don't do the straps right."

"Our armor basically just sucks."

"You insubordinate little bitch, I will fething end you!"

Ginevra shoved Portia back against the wall again.

"Maybe," came the voice from above, "we should roll just one grenade down the stairs, just for your charming friend?"

"Uh, no thank you."

"We'd leave the pin in," the voice offered. "You could shove it in her mouth and pull the pin and run."

"Tempting," Ginevra said.

"You traitorous insubordinate whore slag b..." (Wall shove). "Ow."

"Ginevra," Susan said, "can I help with...?"

"Sure." Ginevra took a step back and let Susan shove Portia against the wall for a while.

There was a long and somewhat socially awkward pause.

"Okay, you can come up," said the voice from up the stairs. "Well, guys, guess we're not rolling any grenades down the stairs after all." There were disgruntled murmurs.

"They fething shot me!" screamed Screaming Guy.

"Dammit, no we didn -- oh," Ginevra said, noticing for the first time the blood on his hand and arm and neck where the bolt exploding in the wall behind him had raked his body with shattered stone. "Oh. Oh. Granger!"

"You sent her back down the stairs," Luna said helpfully.

"Well fething get her! No, wait." Ginevra flipped her vox to TRANSMIT. "Granger, get back up here, we have wounded."

"You transmitted," Susan said, horrorstruck.

"Everyone in detection range is friendly," Ginevra said.

"No I'm not!" screamed Screaming Guy. His face had gone white and there was an alarming amount of blood on the steps below him.

"Yes, yes, we are," said the deep voice from up the stairs, except it had come down the stairs now, and it was attached to a dark-eyed man with dirty dark hair, a dirty grey uniform, and dirty flak armor. "Sergeant Fillion."

"Uh, Novice Ginevra," Ginevra said. "Sorry about Screaming Guy, I mean, about your man."

"You're sorry?" screamed Screaming Guy. Granger had come up and started cutting his shirt sleeve off. She looked almost as white as him.

"Yeah," the sergeant said. "Yeah, I'm sorry about that too."

"I'm sorry," Ginevra repeated, looking at the sergeant's boots but not his face.

"It happens." He shruggd. "A lot. To us."

"I'm really sorry."

There was a clatter of power armor coming up the stairs. Ginevra turned to see Superior Torres, pistol in one hand and power axe shimmering in the other, her mouth a mirthless line.

"Who's wounded?" Torres barked.

"Nobody, ma'am," said Portia.

"He is," said Ginevra, pointing at No-Longer-Screaming-Guy. Granger had his flak jacket and shirt completely off now and was slapping bandages on an alarming number of bloody gashes.

"These your kids?" the sergeant asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Wish they weren't," said Torres. "How'd this happen?"

"We were coming up the stairs," Ginevra said, "and he was just right there...."

"She hit me!" Portia shrieked. "She hit me, like, ten times!"

"She was going to shoot him!"

"Um," said the sergeant, "should I just go and let you, um...."

"No," sighed Torres, powering down her axe. "Girls, shut it. Let's all go up first."

"I'll stay with him, ma'am," Granger said, gesturing at her patient.

"Kid," said the sergeant, "we got more for you upstairs."

"Oh." Granger stabbed her patient with an injector full of something and started packing her tools back up. "Just a minute."

Torres looked at her. "'Just a minute,' what?"

Granger looked blank.

"'Just a minute, sergeant,'" Torres prompted.

"Oh! I'm sorry, sergeant."

"Yeah," he grumbled, "we're all so very fething sorry."

He led them up the stairs.

They emerged from the dark stairway, blinking, into golden light. As Ginevra's eyes adjusted, she saw that they were under the dome. It was covered in bright mosaics of the Emperor and His saints. Sunlight streamed through the shell holes. Across from them, a great archway opened onto a marble terrace. Beyond it gleamed the sea.

"It's beautiful," Ginevra couldn't help saying.

"Yeah," the sergeant said. "It's a good place for them."

"Them?" she began to say, but then she saw the wounded and the dead.

They lay on grey blankets in neat rows, boots towards the sea, heads propped up on rucksacks so they could see the water. They were remarkably quiet, on the whole, except for the constant murmur of low moans and the occasional bout of ragged coughing, so that it was hard at first to know which ones were still alive. Other Guardsmen moved among them, knelt beside them, gave them water, held their hands, spoke softly to them, wept. A few more soldiers wandered amongst the rows, looking dazed and aimless, as if there were something they ought to be doing but they just could not remember what it was. Still more sat on the steps leading down to the sea, looking at the sunlight playing on the water. One had taken off his boots and started wading. He bent low to wash the dried blood off his hands. His hand, Ginevra realized. There was just the one.

"Your perimeter security is for gak," Torres said calmly.

"Well, yeah," the sergeant said. He scratched the back of his neck. "Most of my effectives are pretty busy up here. Ma'am."

"Oh blessed God-Emperor on His Golden Throne on Earth," Granger said. She'd made it up the stairs. She stood, looking pole-axed, for a moment, and then scurried forward. "I already used so much, I didn't know, I didn't know...."

"She a Hospitaller?" the sergeant asked, following her.

"She's working on it," Torres answered.

He shrugged. "Better 'n what we got."

"Where are your medics?" Ginevra asked. "I mean, where are your medics, sergeant?"

He laughed. "Our company medic got scragged two days ago. All his kit is with him under the rubble."

"You never let the cleric carry all the healing potions," Luna said.

"It's regulation," the sergeant said mechanically, then gave her a sharp look. "Wait, what did you...?"

"Don't mind her," Ginevra and Torres both said at once.

"Psyker?" the sergeant asked warily.

"No," Ginevra answered. "She's just... Luna."

"Luna," Superior Torres said, "you and the other girls go help Granger, m'kay?"

"M'kay," Luna said, smiling, and led the others into the sunlight. The sergeant followed.

"Now, you two," Torres said to Portia and Ginevra. The girls snapped to attention, popped their helmets off, and stared rigidly straight ahead.

Torres sighed. "What. The. Feth."

"She hit me!" Portia shrilled. "She...."

Torres made a "keep it down" gesture. "Indoor voices, girls. There are people trying to die here."

"She hit me," Portia repeated, bringing herself back down to a low boil. "She struck a superior officer. Repeatedly. In a combat situation."

"Ginevra," said Torres, not looking at her, "is this true?"

"She was going to kill...."

"Is this true?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Might this, in your mind, possibly qualify as a form of insubordination?"

"Yes ma'am. I'm sorry ma'am."

"See!" Portia squealed. "I demand disci...." Torres's eyebrows shot up. "I request immediate disciplinary action. For her and Novice Susan, Novice Susan hit me also, Ma'am."

"Portia," Torres said.

"Yes'm?" the Provisional Squad Leader said perkily.

"Is it true you were about to shoot a friendly soldier?"

Portia looked panicked. "No ma'am!"

"No?"

"I mean yes. But he wasn't friendly! I mean, ma'am, I didn't know he was friendly at the time."

"You didn't know."

"I didn't know, ma'am!"

"You didn't know, Provisional Squad Leader Portia?"

"No, ma'am."

"Why not?"

There was a long and painful pause.

"Why did you not know?" Torres repeated. "Why did you not find out before opening fire, Provisional Squad Leader Portia?"

"I'm sorry, ma'am."

"Sorry doesn't make him any less wounded."

"Ma'am!" Portia sounded wounded herself. "Superior Torres, he's just a Guardsman!"

There was another pause.

"Just a Poor Imperial Guardsman?" Torres said.

"Yes, ma'am," Portia said brightly. "Just a Pig. An iggy piggy, and whatever happens, he will not be missed."

"Hmm," Torres said thoughtfully, and then she struck her. She struck Portia in the face with her hand still in its armored gauntlet. She struck her, and Portia staggered and spat out blood, along with what looked awfully like a tooth.

Torres plucked the golden Aquila badge off Portia's armor. "Go help the wounded."

Portia ran off, clutching her jaw.

Torres held the Aquila in one hand and tapped Ginevra on the chin with the armored fingers of the other. "No insubordination."

Ginevra flinched. "No ma'am."

"Good." Torres took the Aquila in both hands and carefully pressed it against the shoulder plate of Ginevra's armor until it clicked into place.

"Ma'am?" Ginevra squeaked.

"Now let's see if we can do something useful today," Torres said, and she strode off towards the wounded and the water. Ginevra wobbled for a moment and then scurried to catch up.

"You're in command, then?" Torres was saying to the sergeant.

"Um, not technically," he said. "Company commander's over there, but..." He pointed at a tall, lean, older man, grey hair cropped close to his skull, who stood with perfect military bearing, rigid, staring blankly at the sea. "He's had a long couple of days."

"Hmmm," said Torres. "Okay, about your perimeter...."

Ginevra shook herself. Then, stepping carefully between the rows, she walked over to where Granger was kneeling.

"So what did you clean it with?" Granger was saying impatiently to a young blond Guardsman kneeling beside her.

"Um -- water?"

"Feth."

Ginevra realized she'd never heard Granger say that before.

"Feth," Granger repeated, running both hands through her hair. Her helmet and her armored gauntlets were off, and her surgical gloves were slick with blood, but she didn't seem to notice. "I mean, how did you try to disinfect it?"

Granger and the Guardsman were kneeling on either side of one of the wounded, Ginevra could see now. The casualty's shirt was off and a mass of rust-brown bandages had been partially cut off his chest.

"Disinfect it?" the blond soldier repeated. "Um, they didn't issue us disinf..."

"Fething Munitorum," Granger interrupted. Then she noticed Ginevra. "Look at this! Smell this!"

Ginevra bent down and then snapped back. Where the bandages had been cut away, there was a deep, dark hole in the wounded man's chest, and the smell coming out of it was beyond description.

"The shrapnel drove part of his uniform into his chest," Granger told her.

"I know," the young, blond Guard said plaintively, "we got almost all of it..."

"Then why is that bit still in there?"

"Because," the soldier said, running his bloody hands through his hair now (he had no gloves), "it's wrapped around that bit of shrapnel, and the shrapnel's next to -- next to that big throbbing thing there...."

"Aorta," Granger said.

".... next to his aorta, right, and if we pull the shrapnel out, we will kill him."

"No we won't," Granger snapped. "All right, you might, you have no medical training, but I won't." She ran her hands through her hair again. "I hope. You have blood?"

"What?"

"Frozen blood in a bag. To transfuse. So he doesn't bleed out."

"No?" said the blond soldier. "They don't even issue....."

"Fething Munitorum," Granger said again. She pulled a rock-hard red bag out of her kit and yanked off a tab. "Can somebody elevate this? Hold it up?"

"I'll do it," said Luna softly. She'd slipped in without a sound, as usual. She took the bag of rapidly liquefying blood and held it at waist height as Granger ran an IV from it to her patient.

"Can I...." Ginevra didn't know what to say. "Can I do something?"

"Hold his hand," Granger said, rummaging through her kit. "You," she said to the blond soldier, "you hold his other hand. Say something reassuring."

"What?"

"I don't know, I'm no good at that," Granger snapped.

"No," the blond soldier said, "I mean, what can I say that'll reassure him? He probably can't even hear me."

"Just say something, dammit."

"Um." The blond soldier took his comrade's hand. "You'll, um, be okay, Mike. You'll be, um, okay?"

"Real convincing," Granger muttered.

Snapping off her gauntlets, Ginevra knelt on the other side of the wounded soldier and took his other hand. "His name's Michael?"

"Yeah," the blond one said. "Yeah. Mike. I'm, uh, Uri."

"Thank you for helping, Uri," Ginevra said.

"Um. You're welcome?"

"Bless you, Brother Michael," Ginevra told the wounded man. She had no idea if he could hear her, either. "We're going to help you."

A shadow fell over them: Superior Torres. "What's up, Granger?"

"Infected chest wound, contaminated fabric trapped by embedded shrapnel, you're in my light."

"'You're in my light' what?"

"Ma'am, get out of my fething light, ma'am."

"Oho," said Torres, chuckling. She stepped sideways so she wasn't between the patient and the sun. "Carry on."

The sergeant had stepped up to watch as well. Another half a dozen Guardsmen gathered round, and Susan, and some of the other novices. (Not Portia, though). Torres quietly moved them all out of the light as Granger pulled a few more bags of blood out of her kit, yanked the tabs to start them liquefying, and then laid on the ground in a tidy row. She reached in her bag again and got protective eyewear, the kind with the electrostatic charge to keep the splatter off.

"Okay," Granger said, coming up from her medical kit one last time with spreaders and a nasty looking pair of tweezers, "let's do this."

"You're actually going to take it out?" Uri said.

"Gonna try." Granger stuck the spreaders into the wound to keep it open. "Just keep reassuring."

"Umm," Uri said, unhelpfully.

"You'll be okay,," Ginevra said softly, leaning low over Michael's face and trying not to retch at the smell coming from his chest. "You'll be with your comrades or with the Emperor, soon, Brother Michael, it'll work out either way...."

"Oh, bloody brilliant," Granger muttered, reaching deep into the wound with one hand but not yet with the tweezers. "God-Emperor, that's really in there tight, isn't it?"

"I told you...." Uri began, but Granger shot him a glare. "Umm, you'll be okay, Mike? Okay?"

"We're here, Brother Michael," Ginevra whispered in his ear. "We're right beside you. We're not leaving."

"Ummmmmm," said Uri, more wringing Michael's hand than holding it at this point.

"Oh gak," said Granger.

"'Oh gak'?" Ginevra said, looking up sharply.

The first spurt of blood hit her right in the eyes.

"Oh gak," Ginevra said, recoiling. She tried to wipe it off her face and smacked herself in the nose with her forearm armor. She blinked the blood clear of her eyes but another spurt got her in the ear.

"BLOOD!" screamed Granger, covered in it herself. "BLOOD NOW!"

Ginevra blanked, Luna blanked, Uri was scrambling backwards, but the sergeant grabbed one of the spare bags from the ground. He ripped the empty bag off the IV in Luna's hand and attached the new one, which rapidly began to empty too.

Blood was still spurting from the patient's chest -- from Michael's chest -- but not so strongly now. Ginevra forced herself forward into the splatter and take his hand again. "Michael, Michael, Michael," she said, not knowing what else to say, "we're here, we're here...."

The sergeant swapped in another bag of blood.

"No no no no no," Granger was saying, her hands deep in the wound, her face covered in red, her hair a lumpy mass. "Oh no."

"We're here, Michael," Ginevra repeated, "we're here..."

Michael made a sound. It was inarticulate and almost inaudible, but he had definitely made a sound.

"No, no, no," said Granger, sitting back. "No."

"We're here, Michael," Ginevra told him, and she took him in her arms, but his head just smacked against her rigid armor.

She knew what to do now.

Ginevra laid the dying man across her knees and reached back to hit the emergency detach switches on her armor. Breastplate and backplate fell away, revealing the drab padded bodysuit underneath.

Then she pulled Michael close again. She cradled him, his head against her chest, so he could leave life just as he had entered it, held in a woman's arms, held to a woman's breast, a woman's heartbeat the last sound he'd ever hear.

The blood stopped spurting.

Ginevra, soaking red, gently laid what had been Michael to the ground.

No one said anything. The only sounds were the gentle murmur of the sea and the low moans of other wounded yet to die.

Then Luna broke the silence:

Requiescat in pace, Ollanius Pius,
Miles imperatoris, requeiscat,
Dimittis servum tuum, Imperator.....

It was the Requiem for Ollanius Pius, the patron saint of the Imperial Guard. Her voice was high and pure and ringing, and as she sang the men and girls all joined in.

It would be great to say their voices rose heavenward in perfect harmony, but of course they didn't. No one had rehearsed, half the Guards could hardly hold a note, and though the Sororitas all had choral training, the really good ones didn't get assigned to combat units. There was a particularly awkward moment when the two groups started singing entirely different words for verse three. The Guardsmen fumbled for a moment and then started using the novices' lyrics, but Ginevra wondered, because it was their patron saint, and when she looked it up afterwards she discovered that the Guard version was indeed the original, with several verses the Sororitas version just left out.

They all managed to sing together, anyway.

"All right," Superior Torres said quietly when they had finished. "Sergeant, let's get back to work on those perimeter defenses. Ginevra, Granger, Luna, get yourself cleaned off..."

Piece by piece, Ginevra removed the rest of her body armor. Then, clad in her blood-soaked bodysuit, she went down the steps and walked straight into the sunlit sea.

gak. feth