Romulus Buckle & the Engines of War by Richard Ellis Preston Jr. Page A

bandaging, Buckle slipped his hands under Max’s armpits and assisted her into a sitting position. She was shivering violently again, her teeth clamped against the convulsions, breathing hard through her nose. Herblack eyes wavered gold in the deeper layers, the Martian color of pain.
    Buckle began unwinding the gauze at Max’s shoulder, looping it around her torso and under each arm, circling the back, and returning to cross the injured shoulder again. His face was often mere inches from hers as she waited him to finish his work, and if she was embarrassed by her nakedness, she never showed it, nor made any attempt to cover herself.
    Buckle did not care one whit about her privacy right now. She was sitting up. She was speaking. She was very alive.
    “You do not listen to me as your captain, but I will demand that you listen to me as your surgeon,” Buckle said.
    “Aye,” Max whispered, with effort, followed by a rough swallow. She lifted her arms from her body slightly so that it would be easier for Buckle to loop the gauze. The motion must have caused her great discomfort, for she took a deep breath. Buckle tightened the bandages and tied off the ends. He laid Max down on the bearskin on her uninjured side, her frighteningly cold skin trembling under his warm fingers, and quickly covered her with his coat, tucking it up neatly under her chin. She was looking at him, looking at him with her big, bottomless black eyes, and he smiled at her.
    “You will get through this all right, Lieutenant,” Buckle said. “If you had not heard, I am one hell of a surgeon.”
    Max nodded. Martians were tough. A human being so torn up would have been dead by now, Buckle calculated. But her pain had to be immeasurable, no matter how she tried to hide it. He already had one of the glass morphine vials in his fingers. He worked his knife blade against the base of the nipple, weakening it enough that he could snap the cap away. He sank the syringe needle into the vial, drawing the golden liquid into the firelit glass.
    Max exhaled in a way Buckle knew meant disapproval. Martians did not like morphine much, though it alleviated pain for them in the same manner it did for humans. Buckle lifted the coat and swung out Max’s left arm. He searched for a vein inside her elbow, but the drained vessels refused to rise. He drove his thumb deep into the clammy flesh and finally found the flabby plumpness of a vein, and then he sank the needle home.
    Buckle slowly depressed the syringe plunger until the chamber was empty, then drew the needle free and replaced it in the still-steaming iron pot. He placed a patch of fresh gauze over the hole, but it hardly bled—Max’s body had little more to bleed with. Max released a sigh, a long, trembling signal of the onset of the morphine drowse, the release from the agony.
    Max was fast asleep before Buckle had time to tuck her arm back under her covers.

THE CHAMBER OF NUMBERS
    T HE FIRE BURNED WELL AND low, a gray husk packed with red embers, casting up bursts of sparks now and again, and Buckle hoped that the big chunk of wood he had procured would last them through the night. The blizzard still raged outside in the utter darkness where the weak illumination of the fire did not reach.
    Buckle was exhausted, and he might have felt sleepy if he was not so worried about Max. She had not moved since he had drugged her with the morphine about an hour before. His attention had barely drifted away from her sleeping face since.
    Her eyes moved back and forth beneath the lids, but he did not know if she was dreaming. He had heard that Martians did not dream in the same fashion as humans: rather than drifting into fanciful interludes that never escaped the confines of their skulls, like humans, they could somehow plug in to a massive Martian collective unconsciousness. Empowered in this mysterious way, some part of the mind could leave their sleeping bodies to travel, investigate, and interact with the conscious