“Good, I won’t have to change. We’ll advise when we’re ready to depart Port Beauchene. Quinn out.”

Miles sat on the duffle, staring down at his sandals, awash in unpleasant memories. It had been one of the Dendarii Mercenaries’ sweatier smuggling adventures, putting military advisors and material down on Marilac in support of its continuing resistance to a Cetagandan invasion. Combat Drop Shuttle A-4 from the Triumph had been hit by enemy fire on the last trip up-and-out, with all of Red Squad and several important Marilacans aboard. The pilot, Lieutenant Durham, though mortally injured and in shock himself, had brought his crippled and burning shuttle into a sufficiently low-velocity crunch with the Triumph’s docking clamps that the rescue team was able to seal on an emergency flex tube, slice through, and retrieve everyone aboard. They’d managed to jettison the damaged shuttle just before it exploded, and the Triumph itself broke orbit barely ahead of serious Cetagandan vengeance. And so a mission that had started out simple, smooth, and covert ended yet again in the sort of heroic chaos that Miles had come to despise. The chaos, not the heroism.

The score, after heartbreaking triage: twelve seriously injured; seven, beyond the Triumph’s resources for resuscitation, cryogenically frozen in hope of later help; three permanently and finally dead. Now Miles would find out how many of the second category he must move to the third. The faces, names, hundreds of unwanted facts about them, cascaded through his mind. He had originally planned to be aboard that last shuttle, but instead had gone up on an earlier flight to deal with some other forest fire… .

“Maybe they won’t be so bad,” Quinn said, reading his face. She stuck out her hand, and he pulled himself up off the duffle and gathered up his flight bag.

“I’ve spent so much time in hospitals myself, I can’t help identifying with them,” he excused his dark abstraction. One perfect mission. What he wouldn’t give for just one perfect mission, where absolutely nothing went wrong. Maybe the one upcoming would finally be it.