"Worse," Anderson said. "Mike, it looked like … like a cross between a battlefield and a mass third-stage interrogation."
"Dear God." Odeon bowed his head in a brief silent prayer for the victims, then looked up. "We'll find the bastards who did this, and make sure—"
His beltcom interrupted him. "Sir, we've found a survivor. ID says Captain Joan Cortin, Royal Enforcement. Boris is working on her, but he says she'll need a lot more help than he can give."
"She'll get it," Odeon snapped. Anderson was already signalling urgently for the medics, who'd been waiting to bring out what everyone was certain would be only dead bodies. "I'm on my way. Set for homer."
"On homer, sir." The sergeant's voice was replaced by a series of tones, increasing in pitch and speed as Odeon more than half-ran into the hospital and through the corridors.
The scenes he passed were as bad as Rascal had suggested, and Odeon's stomach needed stern control to prevent rebellion. Doctors, nurses, patients, the service staff—all had been bound, then brutally murdered. The stench of gutted bodies was enough, even without the blood and corpses, to stagger anyone.
It wasn't long until he reached his men. Two of them were checking for other survivors while Boris and Sergeant Vincent knelt over the inert form that had to be Joan Cortin. Vincent was giving her Last Rites while Boris tended to her physical needs, his posture evidence of his intense concentration, and Odeon thanked God again that the St. Dmitri exchange troop he'd drawn for his team was so damn competent. He'd love to take his whole team to that world for a bit, he thought irrelevantly. He'd worked with a Dmitrian team once, here on St. Thomas, and thought everyone in SO should have that experience.
"How is she?" he asked, joining the medic. If the ID said "Joan Cortin," he'd have to accept that evidence; he certainly couldn't identify the woman he knew so well in this bloody, mangled body.
"Not good, Captain." Boris' English had a heavy Dmitrian accent, but Odeon had no trouble understanding him. "Badly beaten, raped—more than once, I believe—and she appears to have a spinal injury. The Brothers of course burned their mark into her hands, but that is minor." He looked up with a frown. "I regret having to tell you, Captain. She was your protego, was she not?"
"Yes, and she's still my friend." Odeon stood, making way for the other medics who promptly began working on the unconscious woman. So the Brothers had burned their circled-triangle mark into Joanie's hands, had they? That didn't happen often, but he was no more surprised than Boris had been that they'd given her that distinction. Not even all Special Ops officers rated that mark of the Brothers' special hatred, and why Joanie did was something he couldn't guess—she'd never been on an anti-Brotherhood operation, that he knew of—but they'd taken a special dislike to her for some reason none had divulged even under third-stage interrogation, calling her "the damned Enforcement bitch" in a tone Odeon himself reserved for those who had begun the Final War. Maybe they hated her just because she was the only active-duty female Enforcement officer. At any rate, they had marked her—and she was the first he knew about to survive the torture that accompanied the mark's infliction.