I knew what was going on. One of my squad had her leg blown off in battle and had it re-created in the same way. They attached a nutrient-rich fake limb at the point of amputation, and then injected a stream of nanobots into the merge area. Using your own DNA as a guide, the nanobots then convert the nutrients and raw materials of the fake limb into flesh and bone, connecting to already-existing muscles, nerves, blood vessels and so on. The ring of nanobots slowly moved down the fake limb until it had been converted into bone and muscle tissue; once they were done, they migrated through the bloodstream to the intestines and you shat them out.
Not very delicate, but a good solution—there was no surgery, no wait to create cloned parts, no clumsy artificial parts attached to your body. And it took only a couple of weeks, depending on the size of your amputation, to get the limb back. It was how they got back my jaw and, presumably, the heels and toes of my left foot, which were now all present and accounted for.
"How long have I been here?" I asked.
"You've been in this room for about a day," Jesse said. "You were in the tub for about a week before that."
"It took us four days to get here, during which time you were in stasis—did you know about that?" Harry asked. I nodded. "And it was a couple of days before they found you on Coral. So you've been out of it more or less for two weeks."
I looked at both of them. "I'm glad to see both of you," I said. "Don't get me wrong. But why are you here? Why aren't you on the Hampton Roads?"
"The Hampton Roads was destroyed, John," Jesse said. "They hit us right as we were coming in from our skip. Our shuttle barely got out of the bay and damaged its engines on the way out. We were the only ones. We drifted for almost a day and a half before the Sparrowhawk found us. Came real close to asphyxiation."
I recalled watching as a Rraey ship slugged a cruiser on its way in; I wondered if it had been the Hampton Roads. "What happened to the Modesto?" I asked. "Do you know?"
Jesse and Harry looked at each other. "The Modesto went down, too," Harry said, finally. "John, they all went down. It was a massacre."
"They can't all have gone down," I said. "You said you were picked up by the Sparrowhawk. And they came to get me, too."
"The Sparrowhawk came later, after the first wave," Harry said. "It skipped in far away from the planet. Whatever the Rraey used to detect our ships missed it, although they caught on after the Sparrowhawk parked itself above where you went down. That was a close thing."
"How many survivors?" I asked.
"You were the only one off the Modesto," Jesse said.
"Other shuttles got away," I said.
"They were shot down," Jesse said. "The Rraey shot down everything bigger than a bread box. The only reason our shuttle survived was that our engines were already dead. They probably didn't want to waste the missile."
"How many survivors, total?" I said. "It can't just be me and your shuttle."
Jesse and Harry stood mute.
"No fucking way," I said.
"It was an ambush, John," Harry said. "Every ship that skipped in was hit almost as soon as it arrived in Coral space. We don't know how they did it, but they did it, and they followed through by mopping up every shuttle they could find. That's why the Sparrowhawk risked us all to find you—because besides us, you're the only survivor. Your shuttle is the only one that made it to the planet. They found you by following the shuttle beacon. Your pilot flipped it on before you crashed."
I remembered Fiona. And Alan. "How many were lost?" I asked.
"Sixty-two battalion-strength cruisers with full crews," Jesse said. "Ninety-five thousand people. More or less."
"I feel sick," I said.
"This was what you'd call a good, old-fashioned clusterfuck," Harry said. "There's no doubt about that at all. So that's why we're still here. There's nowhere else for us to go."
"Well, that and they keep interrogating us," Jesse said. "As if we knew anything. We were already in our shuttle when we were hit."
"They've been dying for you to recover enough to talk to," Harry said to me. "You'll be getting a visit from the CDF investigators very soon, I suspect."
"What are they like?" I asked.
"Humorless," Harry said.
"You'll forgive us if we're not in the mood for jokes, Corporal Perry," Lieutenant Colonel Newman said. "When you lose sixty ships and one hundred thousand men, it pretty much leaves you in a serious state of mind."
All I had said was "broken up," when Newman asked how I was doing. I thought a slightly wry recognition of my physical condition was not entirely out of place. I guess I was wrong.
"I'm sorry," I said. "Although I wasn't really joking. As you may know, I left a rather significant portion of my body on Coral."
"How did you get to be on Coral, anyway?" asked Major Javna, who was my other interviewer.
"I seem to remember taking the shuttle," I said, "although the last part I did on my own."
Javna glanced over to Newman, as if to say, Again with the jokes. "Corporal, in your report on the incident, you mention you gave your shuttle pilot permission to blow the Modesto shuttle bay doors."
"That's right," I said. I had filed the report the night before, shortly after my visit from Harry and Jesse.
"On whose authority did you give that command?"
"On my own," I said. "The Modesto was getting hammered with missiles. I figured that a little individual initiative at that point in time would not be such a bad thing."
"Are you aware how many shuttles were launched across the entire fleet at Coral?"