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.Their squad also advanced, leaving me to look at Chaplain J as she looked over the top of the boulder at the simulated battle going on beyond.“One person couldn’t possibly keep up with it all,” I said.“Pardon?” she said, coming back from her far-gazing reverie.“One chaplain,” I said.“If the casualties were piling up fast, no single chaplain could handle everyone all at once.”“In a real fight,” Chaplain J said, “you wouldn’t be the only one.Though the chances of you finding each of the casualties still conscious, or even living, wouldn’t be as good as it is for us today.You’d be finding corpses, not wounded.Perhaps seven times out of ten.Even given how advanced these armor suits are, the weaponry of the enemy is very efficient.And space is very deadly, even when we’re not getting shot at.Most of the time you’d be getting to the dead long after the fact.Or hauling the less critically wounded back to the rear, with the medical people.”Which is precisely what I wound up doing a few minutes later.Some of the recruit medics—assigned to their roles, like all of us—had set up a makeshift aid station to the rear of the fight.When next Chaplain J and I bounded out to check on a squad with recruits who had red lights, those lights were flickering between red and yellow, back and forth.Hit, but not doomed.Not yet.And someone had to help get them back to where they could maybe have more done for them? Whatever that might be.Without a vacuum shelter there was no way to peel a person out of his or her armor without sentencing the troop to instant death.But the red-yellows couldn’t move on their own.So I wound up doing stretcher duty—thankful for the low gravity, and resentful of the bulkiness and clumsiness of the armor suit.DSes—also in armor suits—had clustered near the ad hoc aid station, and were seemingly making remarks to each other on the secure cadre wireless while half a dozen medics were putting hole patches on suits or inflating balloon bandages around limbs too imaginarily mangled for hole patches.The vital signs monitors on each of the wounded were carefully checked and integrated into a closed medical wireless loop, to which I was summarily added without my consent.Suddenly eight different waving sets of vitals appeared in my field of vision, each with a name next to it.I noted that one of the wounded was a recruit platoon sergeant from fifth platoon.“Are we winning?” I asked her as I pulled out a patch, per the DS nearest her pointing at her leg and informing us she had a hole in it.“Can’t quite tell,” she said.“Fifth platoon was split and I was trying to get us formed up on our weapons squad when a fat wad of mantes came over the top of a low rise and creamed us.Most of my squad were blue-lined immediately.The rest grabbed me and hauled it for the back of the battle.And dropped me here.”I looked around and noticed more red-yellows being dropped off.“How many casualties in all?” I asked the recruit platoon sergeant.“Uhhh,” she said, tapping keys on her suit’s wrist while I applied the patch to the imaginary hole where the drill sergeant had pointed.“Sixty-eight,” she said.“Dead?” I said.“Not all.Command stats wireless shows twenty-one wounded, the rest permanently out of action.”Heavy casualties, considering the fact that the fight was only about twenty minutes old.Charlie Company was down roughly a quarter of its total strength.I keyed my way back into the command wireless.Things still seemed chaotic.Once I was convinced my patch job would hold, I slapped the recruit platoon sergeant on her shoulder and went to work on others.Then I was summarily called away as a squad from first platoon began howling for medical support.I bounded behind the two medics who went with me, Chaplain J, and our four assigned guards.One of whom became a blue-liner along the way.One more was blue-lined on the way back.For the sake of three more simulated wounded.Back and forth.Forward, and out.I found blue-liners and red-yellows and reds-soon-to-be-blue.When the cluster of casualties at the aid station had passed thirty, I was sweating profusely and growing quite exhausted.Even in the weak lunar gravity, carrying someone—or assisting someone in the process of being carried—was strenuous work.Such that by the time the fight was over an hour old, I was trudging my way forward, not always looking where I was going, and allowing myself to be led by Chaplain J, who exhorted me forward with every new call for help.“Might as well be a corpsman,” I said, huffing.“We do a lot of that,” Chaplain J said, bouncing her way in front of me.“Since chaplains don’t carry weapons—we have chaplains’ assistants for that—we pretty much try to find ways to keep ourselves useful.One thing we didn’t do back on the carrier was have a pre-battle service.”“What’s that?” I asked.“If there had been time, and if we’d have been headed for a real fight, I’d have spared time to set up something on one of the assault carrier decks—where people could come and get a last dose of spiritual pick-me-up.Even offer confession, if I were ordained and authorized to hear it.”“Confession?”“Catholic stuff.Didn’t you look that up too?”“No,” I admitted
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