Orders — SciprogFi

The contractor came in at 0240 with a sucking chest wound and no fear in him at all, and that was the part Sergeant First Class Dana Hollis would not be able to stop seeing.

She’d been a combat medic for eleven years, the last three of them at Forward Aid Station Régulo outside Maracaibo, and she knew what a chest wound did to a man’s face. The animal arrived before the person did — the eyes going wide and white, the breath snatching, the hands that wanted to climb out of the body. She had held that animal down a hundred times and talked to it while she worked. You’re okay. Look at me. You’re okay. The talking was for the animal, not the man. The animal was the part that wanted to live.

This one had no animal. His pulse was 150 and climbing and his blood was leaving him in the dark arterial pumps that meant minutes, and his face was flat. Slack. Eyes open, tracking the ceiling light with a smooth machine sweep, no panic, no pain, no plea. His galvanic response — she had the pads on him before she’d thought about it — was nothing. A man bleeding out should light up the monitor like a storm. He read like a sleeping child. The body was in mortal crisis and whatever sat behind the eyes had not been told.

“Don’t unkit him,” the handler said from the tent flap. There was always a handler. “Stabilize and we extract.”

The contractors had shown up eighteen months ago, when the rotations stopped coming.

That was the thing nobody at Régulo said out loud, the way you don’t say the name of the sick relative at dinner. The Army that had taken Caracas in 2026 didn’t exist anymore. Not destroyed — evaporated. The recruiters back home were posting numbers that read like a hospice chart. The kids who’d have enlisted in another decade had walked south instead, or scored too low on a compliance check to be trusted with a rifle, or simply looked at the occupation — eight years, fifty billion a year, five hundred flag-draped boxes — and decided their country could finish it without them. The country could not finish it without them. So the country had found another way to fill the line.

They came through a contracting shell out of Panama with a clean DoD vendor number and a name nobody could keep straight — Aurelian, Aurigae, something Latin and forgettable. “Augmented security specialists.” They wore American kit with the patches removed. They didn’t sleep in the bays. They didn’t eat in the mess. They worked the perimeter and the night patrols and the door-kicking that made the morning reports, and they were good — tireless, fearless, surgically precise — and they took the casualties that used to take Hollis’s soldiers, and the brass loved them for exactly that reason. Every contractor on the wire was an American kid not in a box — and the official count of the dead, which had climbed for six years, had not moved in eighteen months. The war had not gotten safer. The dying had been moved off the books, onto bodies that did not get flags.

You learned not to ask. The handler said don’t unkit and you didn’t unkit. The contract was classified above the station. They came in broken and they went out — alive or not — in their own vehicles, and the paperwork was somebody else’s.

Hollis had a contractor’s chest opening up under her hands and a handler telling her to stabilize a man she could not stabilize without going into him, and for the first time in three years she did the thing the rules existed to prevent. She made a medical decision.

“He’s got a tension pneumo and he’s coding. I unkit him or you carry out a body. Your call, Specialist, but make it in the next twenty seconds.”

The handler made it. The handler always thought he was choosing the mission. He stepped back.

She cut the collar away to get to the chest seal and that was how she found it.

A small raised bump behind the left ear. Healed-over. She’d have called it a cyst on anyone else, but her hands knew the geography of a body and this was sitting exactly over the mastoid, exactly where you’d put a thing you wanted wired to the brainstem, and there was a hairline scar with the too-clean edge of a procedure done somewhere that called itself a clinic. She’d read the same three rumors everyone in-theater had read and filed under can’t be. Her thumb found the bump and her stomach went out from under her like a stair that wasn’t there.

She worked. Needle decompression, second intercostal, the lung re-inflating under her hands. She got the seal on. She got a line in. And somewhere in the middle of it — as the body climbed back from the edge it had felt nothing about — the thing behind the eyes that had not been told got told.

He woke up.

Not the smooth machine sweep. Eyes. A person slammed into the front of a face that had been empty for God knew how long, and the animal arrived all at once, eighteen months late, every alarm firing at the same instant — the pain he should have felt, the fear he should have felt, the where am I and the what is this and the who are you hitting a nervous system that had been held underwater and was now, suddenly, allowed to drown in air.

“Where—” His accent was flat American. Midwest, maybe. Young. “Where am I, where— I was in Texas, I was at the— they said it was security work—”

“You’re okay. Look at me. You’re okay.” The old words. For the animal. The animal was the part that wanted to live, and it was the only true thing in the tent.

“Don’t let me— don’t let me go back to sleep, don’t—”

The handler had two more men at the flap by then. They were very calm and very practiced and they had him sedated and off her table in ninety seconds, kit reattached, collar back on, the person pushed back under the surface mid-sentence. The last thing Hollis saw of him was his hand, reaching, and then not.

“You didn’t see that,” the handler said. It wasn’t a threat. That was the worst of it. It was a procedure. A line in a manual. “Nobody sees that. It’s not a thing that happens.”

She went up the chain in the morning, because that was what you did, because eleven years had built the reflex into her bones. Her captain looked tired in the specific way everyone at Régulo looked tired — the tiredness of people running a war on inertia because stopping required a decision nobody above them would make. He heard her out. He did not pretend not to understand.

“Sergeant,” he said. “What you’re describing, if it’s real, traces to a vendor contract that three agencies signed and none of them will own. There is no inspector general anymore. There’s a man in a building in Virginia whose job was this, and he left in '31, and they never backfilled the billet.” He rubbed his face. “I can route it up. I’ve routed things up. They go up and they don’t come down and the people who sent them get a new posting. That’s not a chain of command. That’s a hole with rank on it.”

“So we do nothing.”

“I’m telling you there’s no up anymore. The building’s still there. The lights are on. But there’s nobody home to take the report.” He looked at her, and for a second he wasn’t her captain, just a man who had also seen something behind an ear and decided he couldn’t afford to. “Don’t make this your hill. There’s no flag to plant on it. The flag left.”

Hollis went back to the aid station. She did her shift. She did the one after that.

But a combat medic keeps records, because records are how you save the next one, and the telemetry from a coding patient dumps automatically to the station’s local node before anyone thinks to wipe it. The galvanic trace that read like a sleeping child. The implant on the secondary survey, photographed because you photograph everything on a survey. The ninety seconds of a man waking up. She had it. It sat on a hardened drive in a tent in occupied Venezuela, and she had no chain to send it up, because the chain was a hole with rank on it, and the only direction left was out — out past the wire, out into the mesh that the deserters and the makers had strung across a hemisphere, the network her own government had spent eight years calling a traitors’ toy.

She didn’t move it that year. She wasn’t ready, and the way out was a relay chain she didn’t yet know how to reach, built by a woman in San Jose she’d never meet. It would take her another fourteen months, and a second contractor, and a great deal of being afraid, before the file finally went over the wire and the world learned what its largest army had been buying to hold a line it could no longer hold itself.

But it started here. In a tent. At 0240. With a man who felt nothing while he bled and everything while he woke, reaching for a hand, and a sergeant who had run out of orders worth following and was left, for the first time in eleven years, with only the thing she could not stop seeing.