Prognosis

It might have been better if I'd simply killed him.

People have asked my why I carry the fifties. The large bore round means they don't have a lot of capacity and the charge means they kick like a mule when they fire. The weapon could break a big man's wrist, let alone that of a 41 kilogram woman. Of course, I'm stronger than I look and I don't miss often so I'm willing to trade ammunition capacity for stopping power. Plus, a lot pf practiced mated with a good recoil compensator makes up for my size.

Most times, when a man takes a .50 round to the chest, he winds up in the morgue. This time, he got to the infirmary before he bled out Problem was the half inch slug made a mess of his chest. Lungs, heart, liver, a bunch of other organs I'd remember if I had to play field medic again. The doc wasn't so sure she'd be able to save him given the resources we had available, which meant putting him on ice.

Stasis wouldn't cure what was ailing you, but it'd keep you from dieing of it whilst the medics figured out how to cure what ailed you. In this case, lead poisoning. The medlab on the Sun Tzu, or one of the bigger hospitals on a world that considered itself a Colony, rather than a glorified mining settlement, would be able to patch him back together. Except the Alliance wasn't willing to resurrect my attacker until we knew more about him, least not without my pulling strings I didn't want to pull. We could ship him off world to one of the big medical facilities, but then we'd have to deal with outsiders wanting to know why we were leaving a guard with him.

Which left stasis.

Wasn't the ideal solution, but it would have to do for now. So far, we hadn't turned up much on the man in the box. History and the like, yes. Motive? Nary a clue. Had a strong sense that the Sabine he'd talked about wasn't the Sabine I knew here on Hale's Moon. Which led to a number of other possibilities, all of which we'd have to pursue. Each one of which made less sense than the one before.

Who knows. Maybe it was something Niska tossed out there. A bit of attempted payback for sending a couple of his Orokana hito-gumi home in body bags. Didn't seem likely, but it would be easy enough to check.

For now though, it was back to business.