Solana hooked her arms beneath his shoulders and caught the rear of his tactical harness. "That's the universe voting against further discussion."

She started pulling.

The casualty cried out as they moved across the debris-strewn floor, but his vitals remained within survivable limits on the scanner clipped where Solana could see it. She kept moving backward toward the corridor, her boots slipping once against simulated dust before she recovered. Ahead of them, the Blackwatch operator already had the other casualty across his shoulders and was heading for the extraction point.

"You're clear!" he called back.

"Then keep going!" Solana shouted without slowing.

The computer announced twenty seconds remaining as she dragged harder. The ruined room suddenly seemed much larger than it had when she'd entered. Every meter mattered now, and there was no technique elegant enough to make pulling a grown man across a damaged floor easy. Her shoulders burned, the casualty's harness dug painfully into her hands, and somewhere behind them metal groaned with the exaggerated menace of a computer that knew exactly how much time it had left.

They crossed the doorway with fifteen seconds remaining.

The operator reached the marked extraction area first and lowered his casualty as carefully as the clock allowed. Solana kept pulling until she and the amputee were across the boundary as well, then dropped beside him and immediately put the scanner back over his chest.

His pulse was ugly, but it was still there.

"I told you I'd get you out" she said between breaths.

The crewman stared at her. "You cut off my foot."

"And you're welcome" Solana replied.

The world behind them disappeared in a deafening crash.

Then everything stopped.

The smoke, alarms, screaming and ruined corridor all vanished at once, taking the casualties and the blood with them. Solana found herself kneeling on the clean floor of the Deck Eighteen combat simulator with one hand still wrapped around a harness that was no longer there.

For a few seconds she remained exactly where she was. The silence after a simulation always felt wrong, almost unnaturally clean after several minutes of her body expecting the next shout, scanner alarm or problem demanding attention.

"Simulation complete."

"I gathered" Solana said as she sat back on her heels.

The computer reported an overall casualty survival rate of eighty percent, medical prioritization at ninety-six percent, treatment efficiency at ninety-three, and team preservation at one hundred.

That got her attention. "Eighty?"

"Four of five casualties survived or remained viable for advanced treatment."

Solana looked toward the section of floor where the trapped crewman had been. "So the amputation was the correct call."

The computer confirmed that removing the nonviable extremity had shortened the extraction enough to prevent the loss of both the casualty and attending medical personnel.

She nodded slowly. It had been the right call. That didn't mean she had enjoyed making it.

"And casualty four?"

"Expectant classification remained medically appropriate."

The answer immediately brought back the first man, the one she'd left against the wall. Solana exhaled and reached for her field pack. It had never actually been used, but she checked the compartments anyway, fingers moving automatically over the equipment as she replayed the last minute of the exercise.

She'd gone back for the trapped man.

That was what the computer had really wanted to test. Not whether she knew what expectant meant or whether she could read a scanner, but whether she could distinguish between a casualty who couldn't be saved and one who could be saved only by doing something drastic enough to make hesitation feel reasonable.

There was a difference, and out there she wouldn't get a score afterward telling her whether she'd chosen correctly.

"Reset simulation" Solana said as she stood.

The computer asked for parameters, and she told it to keep the same casualty load but change the injuries. When it asked for difficulty, she slung the medical pack over one shoulder and told it to increase the scenario by twenty percent.

Walls began rising around her again. Smoke crawled across the ceiling, damaged equipment appeared along the floor, and somewhere beyond the forming doorway came the first distant sound of weapons fire. Solana tightened the strap across her shoulder and rolled her neck once.

"Computer?"

The system acknowledged her.

"Try not to pin anybody by something I'm going to have to cut off this time."

There was a brief pause before the computer informed her that it couldn't guarantee that.

"Of course you can't" Solana muttered.

Someone screamed for a medic from somewhere beyond the doorway. She started toward the sound as the simulation came alive around her.

"All right" she said under her breath. "Who's having the worst day?"