Athena awoke from a light doze as the ship’s attitude changed. Good. We’re landing. She felt the ship as it maneuvered downward and sideways, to meet up with the hospital’s emergency entrance.
    They shuddered to the pavement with a solid thump. Trouble never did have the sense to delegate. The ship’s airlock mated with the hospital’s docking tube and opened. Immediately the medics began wheeling critically injured men off the ship.
    Athena unbuckled herself and draped her suit over her arm. She waited while medics swarmed through the docking tube, undogged gurneys, and rushed them off the ship. She jumped at a tap on her shoulder.
    Idoru, the co-pilot, was standing there. “You have no idea how many times I’ve wanted to do that,” she whispered. “But wasn’t it taking an awful risk?”
    Athena smiled for the younger woman. “It’s all a matter of image. I cultivated an image that bullys respect. So Trouble doesn’t dare complain. If he does, he knows he’ll find himself accused of groping a superior officer.”
    Idoru looked down. “I could never do that.”
    “You could, you know.” Athena waited until she looked up again. “Pick a believable image, and a handle to go with it. Ninja, perhaps. Study ninjas – the historical reality, not the Hollywood hype – and recast yourself in that image. Learn martial arts, and work out in the gym. Throw shuriken at dartboards. When you get good, start doing it at the Officer’s Club. Then, when some creep goes too far, demolish him. You’ll find your handle changes overnight.”
    “But . . . I wouldn’t still be me.”
    Athena shrugged. “Your other choices are to put up with it. Or get out of the service.
    “It’s so easy for you –”
    Athena’s eyes grew hard. “You have no idea of what you’re saying, Lieutenant. When I’d been your rank for six hours, my ship was hit by a Lunar defense laser array. I was the only survivor. If challenges like unwanted advances seem easy to me, it’s because they’re trivial.”
    Athena turned in disgust as the girl’s face crumpled. Was I ever that soft?
    Maybe before Diana died. Not since. I was all of twelve then.
    “Colonel Inkata?”
    Athena looked up. The medics had cleared away, taking all the patients with them. All except the medic standing before her, and herself.
    “I need to see the representative from my unit.”
    “As soon as we’ve triaged you.”
    Athena stared. The medic’s air of assurance dropped and he backed up a step.
    “I am carrying material that I will turn over to proper custody before I allow treatment.”
    “Colonel, medical considerations override –”
    “Not according to the National Security Act of 1954, nor any of its amendments. If I wanted to be hard-nosed, I could insist that I not be sedated without a cleared observer. But I’ve been admitted before, and we learned that I don’t blab under anesthetic.”
    The medic squared his shoulders to try again. Athena reached out with her good hand, picked him up – admittedly, no major feat in lunar gravity – and set him down facing the shuttle’s airlock.
    “Why don’t you just lead me to him, and we’ll take care of this little formality.”
    The medic led the way off the shuttle. Athena followed. When the tube opened into the hospital emergency room, Athena glanced toward the waiting area and saw her custodian. Ignoring the medic’s protests, she walked toward him.
    “Sergeant Drake.”
    “Colonel.” The man stood hurriedly.
    “I have a couple of items for you.” She unsealed her suit top and extracted the data cube. “Make at least one copy, mark them both Top Secret, and store them in separate security containers. I want no chance of this record being accidentally lost.”
    Drake took the cube and tucked it in his shirt pocket, then sealed the pocket.
    “Second is this.” She handed over the suit. “My sidearm is in the pocket. It’s loaded and the safety is on. Make sure you clear the receipt at the arms room.”
    “Yes, Colonel.” Drake took the suit and turned to leave.
    Athena sagged in relief and turned to the medic. “See, that wasn’t so bad.”
    “Why didn’t you just hand that over to us?”
    Athena smiled. “I doubt anyone on the hospital staff has as high a clearance as Sergeant Drake. Now, where do you do this triage?”

    Athena blinked her eyes and looked around. The world seemed bleary and out of focus, her ears stuffed with cotton. Must still be on sedatives. She blinked again. I don’t even remember being treated.
    Looking down, Athena saw her arm was encased in bandages and an immobilizer. The immobilizer was in a sling, which swayed as her arm twitched. Athena frowned at the arm and tried to stop the twitching. Instead of stopping, the pace of twitching increased slightly.
    Athena sighed and turned her attention from the arm. Using her other arm, she pushed herself up slightly and looked around. She was alone in a double room.
It’s never good news when you’re alone in the room. It usually meant you were terminal – unlikely in her case – or expected to be uncomfortably emotional.
    Her first stay in Grissom Memorial, Armstrong Moonbase’s hospital, Athena had been emotional. Within the seventy hours preceding her stay, she had been the sole survivor of her ship’s crew; she had killed her first three men, the first one so close that his blood had splashed across her spacesuit; and been taken, at gunpoint, by a squad of nervous and untrusting Aerospace Force Security Police.
    It had been the last time she had broken down in front of others. She had spent her convalescent leave practicing on flight simulators, and became one of the first pilots in the Lunar Special Operations Squadron. Which had grown into a full Wing in the course of stamping out the last remnants of the lunar colonial rebellion.
    Morons, Athena thought. All they managed to do is kill half the people on Luna, and demonstrate that we don’t have the technology for lunar self-sufficiency.
    Athena looked up as the door opened. She glanced from the rank insignia on the collar to the symbol on the nametag. Good, a doctor, not a nurse or medtech. It’ll be harder for him to weasel out of telling me anything.
    “How are you feeling, Colonel Inkata?”
    “Well enough, except for this.” She pointed with her jaw toward her slowly twitching arm. “What’s wrong with it?”
    The doctor grimaced. “We’re not entirely sure. Decompression palsy is still a rare disorder.”
    “So you don’t have any clue what to do about it, I suppose?”
    “No clue is a little too harsh,” the doctor replied. “We know a few treatments that are usually helpful.”
    “Usually?”
    The doctor walked to Athena’s side. “Usually. Twenty-three cases have been recorded. The course of treatment you are receiving was helpful in eighteen, may have been harmful in three, and was refused by two.”
    “Refused?”
    “They were civilians, although one was injured as a pilot. A rather difficult case, it seems. He also rejected prosthesis, and chose to live the rest of his life in free fall.”
    “How successful were the cases where the treatment helped? How soon until I can return to flight status?”
    “Ahem. Well, Colonel, it’s too early to judge that.”
    Athena looked at the doctor’s insignia again. “What are the odds, Major Kazanji?”
    The doctor ignored her as he peeled back her bandages, poked at her hand with some diagnostic instrument, and scrawled notes on the display to supplement the instrument readings. Athena waited until he rewrapped her hand and turned to leave.
    “I asked you a question, Major.”
    He turned. “Yes, Colonel?”
    “The odds. How fast did the lucky eighteen recover.”
    “None recovered fully.”
    “How much damage was permanent? How many could go back on flight status?”
    He was definitely avoiding her eyes. “None of them recovered sufficiently to, say, pilot spacecraft.”
    Athena fell back against the bed. Kazanji made his escape as she stared at the ceiling. No flight status. Will they kick me out of the service?
    What do they do to those they kick out? Memory supplied the answer. Return them to their home of record.
    Athena’s home of record was a burned-out shell of a tenement, in a neighborhood where the major economic activities were illegal drug sales, prostitution, and theft. Pure luck, animal cunning, and determination had let her claw her way out. After her adolescence, basic training – a torture to her classmates – had seemed a low-pressure environment.
    Athena imagined a service truck dropping her and her personal belongings, on the curb in front of the wreckage she had told her recruiter was home. A maimed woman, with all that visible wealth, and no gun. I doubt I’d live to see the sun set.
    Despite the sedatives still in her system, the tears Athena had been holding back since her ship crashed began to flow.

    The days flowed by in a blur of medication and tests. The tests all involved sticking pins into Athena’s arm and running current through them. She wondered whether they were testing her resistance to pain. When she asked that, however, the only response she received was an increase in the mind-numbing pain medication.
    After a time, Athena became adept at pretending to swallow the pills they gave her. As her mind cleared from the medical fog, she found a network node at her bedside. She pulled it onto her lap, only to find that it was set for light entertainment only.
    After another round of hidden pills, Athena’s mind cleared enough to attack the problem seriously. The node’s protection was the sort that computer-illiterate parents put on household consoles, thinking it prevented their children from accessing on-line pornography. Once Athena identified the protection software, she broke through it in less than five minutes.
    Breaking though the software lock did little useful. The terminal was hard-coded to log on the hospital network with the username of guest. Probing only found that modifying that hard coding took the network administrator’s password. And the guest username was specifically restricted from looking up medical data. After several minutes of thought, Athena tried to log on her squadron’s network. To her surprise, she succeeded. She was not at all surprised when the system warned her that she was logged on from an unsecure terminal, which severely restricted her access.
    Athena then logged on the hospital’s public-access areas, using her squadron-commander-level access. She smiled when the system obligingly called up the current physician’s pharmaceutical reference database.
    Athena dug the pills she had not taken out from under her pillow and started the identify-this-pill module. As she matched pills, she bookmarked the descriptions for the seven drugs she identified.
    Athena read the descriptions with growing unease. She was receiving more than the recommended maximum daily dose of two sedatives, two immunosuppressants, and three neural depressants.
    Athena marked all seven drugs, then ran the drug interaction predictor. She froze when she saw the result.
    Near-total cessation of voluntary muscular function. Near-total cessation of physical sensation. Marked and increasing cognitive dysfunction. Prolonged exposure may make these symptoms permanent through rearranging neural pathways.
    After staring at the screen for several minutes, Athena collected the results into a file, which she prepared to transmit. Then she typed a cover letter to the Special Operations Wing commander:

General McAffrey,

    This is what the doctors here are feeding me. If I read this right, I’ll be a senseless, blathering idiot soon after they realize I’m not taking my pills. Get me out of here!

Athena Inkata, LtCol, USAF

    An hour later, there was a knock on the door. Athena looked up from the network node, which was displaying definitions for the jargon on the other console’s screen.
    The door opened, and a uniformed doctor strode in. The silver eagles on his collar told her that the delay had been in part to find a doctor who outranked her. “I understand you have a problem with your therapy.”
    Athena hit a hotkey on the network node, and the drug interaction file she had built earlier popped onto the screen. “I have a problem with this.” She turned the screen to face the doctor.
    He paused for a bare glance at the screen. “Yes. In most cases, this quantity of drugs is a bad idea.”
    “So why am I an exception?”
    “Decompression palsy is . . . something we don’t fully understand. Your test results show that you have a rather extreme case.”
    “So I’m a lab rat for new therapies?”
    “Not quite.” He paused. “What do you know so far?”
    “Just the name. I can’t find any references to it in the hospital’s diagnostic database.”
    “In affected tissues, something – we can’t explain what, yet – causes neurons to lose their sheathing. It’s a little like wires losing their insulation. Your sensory neurons are swapping signals with your motor neurons.”
    Athena looked down at her arm. As if prompted, it seemed to tremble more.
    “It gets progressively worse. If left untreated, the neurons grow together, forming new links in affected tissues.”
    Athena bit her lip. “So, what therapy is possible?”
    “Left untreated, the neurons grow new sheathing. Diet can affect the rate of regrowth.”
    “Which explains why the food is worse than my last hospital stay. So why the mind-numbing drugs?”
    “The drug therapy is designed to suppress neural impulses, which in turn reduces the number of undesirable cross-connections your body spontaneously generates. In the short term, it’s not as dangerous as the database implies. Especially in genemod individuals.”
    Athena’s head snapped up and her eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”
    “Didn’t you know you’re genemod? I’m not too surprised. Your genome map looks like a home genesplice.”
    Athena paused, remembering her early years. Her mother had eked out a bare living as an unlicensed genetic counselor. The last time she had seen her mother, police had taken her away in handcuffs, and a social worker took Athena and her sister to the first in a series of foster homes.
    “No . . . I hadn’t realized I was genemod,” Athena finally replied. “Is there anything else you can tell me about that?”
    The doctor grimaced. “You realize what I’m about to say is speculation. I have only your gene map and my clinical experience to go on.”
    Athena nodded.
    “The pattern of your gene map implies that the mother’s genetic contribution is unchanged, while the father’s was spliced together. What I call the paternal contribution isn’t necessarily all from men, mind you. But sperm probably delivered it.
    “Anyway, there were several paternal donors. It looks like genome sequences were grafted in place to encourage desired traits. The geneticist probably was not professionally educated, because there are several places where sequences that should work together have genes to pull in different directions. In five places, sequences were cut across the patent notices, which in itself is illegal.”
    Mother, how could you do this to me?
    Later.
    Athena shook her head. “Colonel, what happens if I go untreated? Do I automatically get a medical discharge?”
    “Not necessarily. There is, of course, the issue of insubordination. Unless you convince a panel of medical ethicists that the treatment is harmful, refusing treatment is a court-martial offense.”
    “You mean turning me into a mindless zombie isn’t harmful? Anyway, if the panel agrees not to force treatment, what happens?”
    “Whether or not you are treated, there will be some disability. The degree of disability will determine whether you receive a medical discharge. If you stay in, the panel that determines your degree of disability will dictate what physical restrictions your future duties will require. From that, the personnel system will determine what specialty to reassign you to.”
    “One more question, Colonel. Why was everyone determined to keep me in the dark?”
    The officer allowed himself a tight smile as he edged away. “The psychological profile from your first stay here is part of your medical record. It is rather scary reading. I admit, it took me some time to nerve myself to confront you.”
    Athena forced a matching smile. “Then please add a notation to that profile. I only attack those I feel deserve it. And keeping me in the dark about my own condition is one way of deserving it.”
 

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