Free Redshirts by John Scalzi Page A

not hearing the rest of what Dahl said. He drank some more.
    “You mind if I ask you a question?” Dahl said.
    With the hand not holding his drink, Kerensky made little waving motions as if to say, Go ahead .
    “How do you heal so quickly?” Dahl asked.
    “What do you mean?” Kerensky asked.
    “Remember when you got the Merovian Plague?”
    “Of course,” Kerensky said. “I almost died .”
    “I know,” Dahl said. “But then a week later you were leading the away team I was on.”
    “Well, I got better, you see,” Kerensky said. “They found a cure.”
    “Yes,” Dahl said. “I was the one who brought the cure to Commander Q’eeng.”
    “That was you ?” Kerensky said, and then lunged at Dahl, enveloping him in a bear hug. Kerensky’s drink slopped up the side of the glass and deposited itself down the back of Dahl’s neck. “You saved my life too! This room is filled with people who saved my life. I love you all.” Kerensky started weeping.
    “You’re welcome,” Dahl said, prying the sobbing lieutenant off his body as delicately as he could. He was aware of everyone else in the room studiously ignoring what was happening on the couch. “My point was, even with a cure, you healed quickly. And then you were seriously injured on the away mission I was on. And yet a couple of days later you were fine.”
    “Oh, well, you know, modern medicine is really good, ” Kerensky said. “Plus, I’ve always been a fast healer. It’s a family thing. We’ve got stories about one of my ancestors, in the Great Patriotic War? He was in Stalingrad. Took, like, twenty shots from Nazi bullets and still kept coming at them. He was unreal, man. So I inherited that gene, maybe.” He looked down at his drink. “I know I had more drink than this,” he said.
    “It’s a good thing you heal so fast, considering how often you get hurt,” Dahl ventured.
    “I know !” Kerensky said, suddenly and forcefully. “ Thank you! No one else notices! I mean, what the hell is up with that? I’m not stupid, or clumsy, or anything. But every time I go on an away mission I get all fucked up. Do you know how many times I’ve been, like, shot ?”
    “Three times in the last three years,” Dahl said.
    “Yes!” Kerensky said. “Plus all the other shit that happens to me. You know what it is. Fucking captain and Q’eeng have a voodoo doll of me, or something.” He sat there, brooding, and then showed every sign of being about to drift into sleep.
    “A voodoo doll,” Dahl said, startling Kerensky back into consciousness. “You think so.”
    “Well, no, not literally,” Kerensky said. “Because that’s just stupid, isn’t it. But it feels like it. It feels like whenever the captain and Q’eeng have an away mission they know is going to be all fucked up they say, ‘Hey, Kerensky, this is a perfect away mission for you,’ and then I go off and, like, get my spleen punctured. And half the time it’s some stupid thing I have no idea about, right? I’m an astrogator, man. I am a fucking brilliant astrogator. I wanna just … astrogate . Right?”
    “Why don’t you point that out to the captain and Q’eeng?” Dahl asked.
    Kerensky sneered, and his lip quivered at the effort. “Because what the hell am I going to say?” he said, and started making Humpty-Dumpty movements. “‘Oh, I can’t go on this mission, Captain, Commander Q’eeng. Let someone else get stabbed through the eyeball for a change.’” He stopped with the movements and was quiet for a second. “Besides, I don’t know. It seems to make sense at the time, you know?”
    “No, I don’t know,” Dahl said.
    “When the captain tells me I’m going to be on an away mission, it’s like some other part of my brain takes over,” Kerensky said. He sounded like he was trying to puzzle through something. “I get all confident and it seems like there’s a perfectly good reason for a goddamn astrogator to take medical samples, or fight killer