Sarah smiled and laughed slightly at Pat’s suggestion that the group “do whatever the fook we want” so long as the sergeant did not notice. “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” she agreed.<br/><br/>The medic was relieved that neither man seemed at all taken aback by her treasonous background. Maybe she had been looking at this issue the wrong way—a lot of her fellow soldiers probably did not give a damn about her politics, only the more practical concern of whether or not she could hack it as a combat medic. And maybe it was not a charitable thing to think, but in her experience a lot of guys would say the moon was made of green cheese if they thought it would get them closer to placing their dicks inside a halfway attractive female.<br/><br/>At Church’s offer, Sarah shook her head. “Sorry, I haven’t drank in over a year. Had kind of a bad experience, although of a very different sort than you’d probably think I mean.” That cryptic remark probably required an explanation, so she decided to elaborate. “Basically, this one night I was set to go to this bachelorette party, and since I had the following day off I figured I might as well get my drink on. But on the cab ride to the party, I got a call from the hospital. Basically it boiled down to, ‘we know you’re not on call, but we’ve got this really fucked up case and we want you to take the lead on it.’ So of course I went to the hospital instead.<br/><br/>“So an hour later, instead of laughing at creepy male strippers, I was performing neurosurgery on this eight year old girl who’d been shot in the head. I won’t bore you with the medical jargon, but at one point during the procedure something unexpected happened and I had to make a quick judgment call. And while my assisting suggested one course of action, I did something else. Turns out I was right, and the girl made a full recovery.<br/><br/>“But if that call from the hospital had come an hour later I would have been too drunk to come in, the assisting physician would have been on his own, and the patient would have almost certainly died.” She paused. “Haven’t been able to touch the stuff since. Maybe it’s unreasonable to expect myself to constantly be ready for a fluke like that—maybe it’s arrogant as hell to think I’m so important—but it stayed with me.” Of course, Mass General would always be doing without her services from now on. And it still ate at her daily—if anything, her hatred toward the Empire only grew and grew. But she could not say a word on that subject without the risk of taking a long stroll in a short airlock.