Do No Harm

But Kill If Necessary

Mother Baby Unit, 2nd Floor, United States Naval Hospital Guam

Hagåtña Village, Guam County, State of the Marianas

Lieutenant Tia Alvarez, United States Navy

Acting Department Head, Mother Baby Unit, US Navy Medicine Readiness and Training Command Marianas

2215 Local Time, APR 10, 2037

“I cannot wait for Angela to get back from vacation, no cap,” Lieutenant Alvarez laughed, trying to put her mind at ease, “Put me back on Mercy. That hellhole is preferable to this—and I had to amputate some dude’s leg back in the day.”

“Tia, you could take it easy once in a while,” Ensign Reynolds chided, “I know entire departments that work less than you.” She glared at him. He gulped and gave a bashful nod before changing topics, “Another pot of coffee?”

“Dude, it’s 10 PM on a Friday. I need a drink.”

After that comment, a young mother and swaddled baby who barely had a line of sight to the pair gave Alvarez a very disapproving look. She paid it no mind and just smiled and chatted with Reynolds before restarting her rounds. She did take him up on the fresh coffee.

Then her phone started blowing up. An MR Civil Defense Agency automated alert was pinned to the top. “Oh fuck.” She mumbled as she scrolled. The notifications came thick and fast, like autumn rain. Everyone started looking at their phones. One of the new mothers began crying. “The Reagan. Holy shit. It’s happening.” She could not believe it. Not even after seeing bits of an endless stream of videos from mainland China showing missiles lifting off into the night. She traded a forlorn, distant glace with Reynolds.

Two women went into labor—both several hours early.

The unit’s landline started ringing as people started moving. Their muscle memory over-whelmed the fear and the shock. They were now all on a very short, extremely ruthless timer. A lifetime’s worth of security briefings and contingency planning poured from the banks of her memory in an instant.

One of the staff nurses answered, “Ma’am, it’s for you.”

“This is Alvarez.” She held the phone to the side of her face, barely holding on—in more ways than one. She could feel the color leave her face.

“Where is Lieutenant Commander Memphis?” The Director of Nursing Services's voice was calm, laced with raw shock and exasperation. She was rattled. That shook Alvarez. DNS was a cool customer.

“She’s still on leave, ma’am.”

“Christ, well, Tia… Osaka has transmitted the Condition One alert. Skipper… Skipper has initiated Contingency Order 42.” Those phrases sent a shiver down her spine. It was real. There was a war on. “JRM has given the go word. Prep your patients for evac to Nimitz Hill CDEC, and get your people ready for triage.”

“Ma’am, I have two who just entered—”

“Move ‘em,” The voice cut her off, words stark and stern and annunciated with forceful precision. “They can push out those pinkies when they’ve got sixty feet of rock and flashcrete over their heads.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Alvarez replied. No point in arguing; DNS was correct. USNH was very likely on the target list; she excised that thought from her mind. “We’ll get it done.”

“Very well,” DNS said, “Good luck, Lieutenant, and Godspeed.”

“To you as well, ma’am.” Alvarez hung up and turned, “PEOPLE! WE ARE NOW AT CONDITION ONE. CONT-ORD 42 IS IN EFFECT. WE’VE ALL GOT A JOB TO DO. LET’S GET GOING!”

The entire building shook as several large explosions rocked the island, heralding the beginning of a waking nightmare.

The next twenty minutes were a blur. No one said much. Everyone had a glassy look in their eyes but moved about their duties without fuss or complaint. Any minute, the next wave of missiles would start to fall.

And they did.

Looking out the window, she saw bolts of light sprint down from the night. There was a tremendous fireball and pall of smoke—a brief, faint sunrise—the arrival of hell on earth. There was a brief rise in chatter, a verbalized disbelief after a collective flinch. The shockwave took a few seconds to reach the hospital, and the windows rattled as it passed. The patients were shaken—terrified. Alvarez passed windows and saw a missile explode as it screamed down from the heavens and watched more interceptor missiles rise over the horizon from the defensive batteries at Blaz, Hanlon, and Andersen.

The steel rain did not stop. The ambulances started arriving soon after.

“But Harrison, he’s—” one of the new mothers protested. “He’s at Hanlon, he’s—I need to know he’s okay.”

“Maddyn…” Alvarez got down on bended knee beside the wheelchair, “Harry is a smart, tough guy. He’s good at his job, and he knows that Lilbet here is waiting for him. You have to focus on her and you right now. That’s all you can control; don’t focus on what we can’t.” She smiled and patted Maddy on her shoulder. “Reggie here is gonna bring you down to the bus to the Civil Defense complex, and you’ll be safer there.”

An Army MP platoon, a FLTSEC det, some Transportation Company guys, and civvie cops were crowding the entrance—helping patients into buses and trucks. Alvarez looked on in disbelief as a line of olive-drab trucks screamed down Marine Corps Drive. It was an endless grim parade of High Mobility Air Defense Systems variants—guns, missiles, lasers—and all the support they’d need.

A NES launcher, a gun truck, and a pair of ammo carriers rolled up to the far side of the parking lot as Alvarez helped some of her patients onto a bus.

“What the fuck are they doing here?” Alvarez murmured.

“They’re here to cover the Hospital and the State Government Campus, ma’am,” one MP answered.

“Christ.” The wails of sirens came down the road, beams of red lights dancing over darkened buildings.

“Yeah…” The MP sighed. “Yeah.”

The buses started rolling, the reassuring woosh of their brakes and then their electric motors' soft hum filled the night as another ballistic missile impacted near the horizon. The shockwave passed over them. Alvarez just looked at the column of fading red-orange flame with a blank face. Fewer people flinched this time.

Alvarez returned to their side of the second floor. She felt like a ghost in Pripyat; there was no one around. Most of the staff were helping clear out the first floor or helping to receive the first casualties of this war. They converted a place where families began into a place where god knows how many would die.

She looked out the window as she helped clear one of the rooms. There was a flash of light, and a missile screamed out of the NES launcher. A MIM-162D Enhanced Super Sea Sparrow Missile left only a plume of grey-white smoke in its wake as it tore into heaven. It fired one another missile and another—then a third—all at a depressed trajectory.

Oh fuck.

“GET DOWN!” Her voice filled the floor and shook the window pane, “INCOMING!”

The gun truck woke up and started blastin’. Something detonated and fell apart just over the coast. The fuzzy shapes of a mixed pattern of CJ-30 subsonic and YJ-27 supersonic cruise missiles tore overhead the ESSMs got two. One slammed into the NES Launcher and detonated. The launch vehicle instantly turned into a burning hulk as the windows in the hospital shattered. The gun truck got one more, sending debris raining from the sky.

“LET’S MOVE PEOPLE! AWAY FROM THE FUCKING WINDOWS!”

She headed out of the room and started moving her people to their stations. As she ran through the halls, she saw the semi-automated gun mount twitch and elevate to its maximum extent. It went full send—a river of ultramarine tracers racing up into the sky. She saw a bolt of flame fall from the night, lighting the clouds as weaving embers danced and fell. The IRBM deployed loitering munitions descended as the main assembly crashed into the DOD High School. The HIMADS twitched and spat death as fast as it could. She heard the explosions. Each shook the hospital a little until there was a louder one—the gun truck fell silent.

There was a series of sequential tremors. She passed another row of windows as they finished readying the MBU. Explosions lined the horizon, and she ducked for cover, but they were hits in the wrong places around Hagåtña. The fuck are they aiming at? The state government?

The hospital lost power. After a second of darkness, the emergency generators flipped on. More ambulances and civilian cars rushed toward the hospital, the red light of sirens mixing with firelight.

The first patients started to appear. They got those that could still walk: a fireman with head trauma and blood-soaked bandages around his hand; a school teacher with a shattered arm, limping, supporting his husband with burns and smoke inhalation; someone’s abuelita deep in shock, with frag sticking out of her shoulder; soldiers that barely look like eighteen.

She sprinted past the windows again with a box of Med-Gel in one hand and a box full of gauze in the other. The sight of a flaming shipping container giving a haircut to the trees surrounding the cliff edge knocked off her feet. The night was not lit by long arcs of flares drifting down from the heavens alongside a stream of flamming alligator-headed creations. A stream that didn’t seem to stop. One decelerated too quickly and fell into the cliffside, sending a wall of flaming debris into the air like it hit a ramp. The doohickies came to a scrapping halt with retrorockets firing. The display had her jaw on the floor.

The side of one of the missiles—whatever it was—cracked open like a Spirit dropship. Men tumbled out of it with all the grace of a toddler tripping on their own feet. They staggered around for a minute, getting their bearings. They looked like they had just gotten out of a tumble dryer.

They weren’t Americans.

The MPs near the entrance started shouting. Then there was shooting. Alvarez wasn’t sure who started it. More pods came to a halt in the parking lot and surrounding area, spitting flares and sparks in every direction. One tore through parked cars like a shark through water. The LT watched a Civic be sent into the air and fall back on its roof.

The skipper came thundering down from Admin, a well-worn-looking M9 tucked into his waistband. “Those fuckers are BKs!” Hell unfolded around them as the assault force unloaded hundreds of rounds into the hospital building.

“What!”

“Fucking baby killers—goddamn Chi-Com SOF. They’re in the fucking kit, and—oh fuck…” He pointed out the window at shapes clambering out of an upturned drop-pod. Metal men. “Can Openers,” he murmured. The Chinese quickly forced the MPs inside of the hospital. “This is a cluster.” The PLA troops groggily stumbled about the lot. Tia and the Skipper watched a trooper in a set of GY-3 “Guan Yu” powered armor vomit dark liquid onto the asphalt. The man, decked out in AFV-grade composite-plate armored full-body exo-rig and carrying a QLZ-171 HMG like a rifle, staggered forward and started shouting. Most of the force turned toward the high school, but two score figures lurched toward the hospital complex, unleashing a whirlwind of lead.

“These bastards aren’t stopping.”

“Tia, I was with Bethesda off Zanzibar during the ‘Punitive Expedition,’ these guys make Prigozhniks look like Mother Theresa,” Skipper answered. He approached one of the landlines and pressed the intercom, “All personnel Cont-Order 42 Delta. Four-Two-Delta.” He took a deep breath and nodded to Alvarez to leave. She had to get our people out. He leaned against the wall and pressed his head to the off-white wall. He pressed a different button: “To the PLA Forces outside. This is Captain Aron Marcus, commanding officer of United States Naval Hospital Guam. I remind you of your obligations under the Law of Armed Conflict and International Humanitarian Law.” His words were drowned out by the gunfire.

He headed downstairs quick as a flash. Alvarez gathered her team and the wounded. There were whispers and whimpers as they started to move people to the evac tunnel. To think they had to use it. It was there to permit the movement of sick and wounded between the CDEC and the hospital, and there was now a motley stream of wounded and stained scrubs headed down the stairwell to the tunnels. The rat lines to the Nimitz Hill Civil Defense Emergency Complex had been built with the rest of the island’s thirty billion dollar civil and active defenses in the wake of First Sino. The first armed attacks against American Soil since 9/11 had opened the purse strings and paved the way for statehood.

There were six dead MPs in the lobby. One dead man’s leg was keeping the main door open. The PLA loomed outside, spitting lead and… wobbling. Are they drunk? One projectile vomited blood through a broken window on the floor. The Americans could only respond with eyes glazed over with bewilderment as they ducked for cover as the gunfire ebbed and flowed. The CO, XO, and DHS were crouched behind some cover with a wounded MP captain. Skipper waved her over.

“XO, Nadine—you’ll go with the evacuees.”

“Sir—” the XO started to protest.

“Captain ought to go down with his ship. I’ll try to stall them.” He looked over at Alvarez. “Lieutenant, you were an HMC before you went Mustang. Saw action in Fourth Gulf, right?” Tia nodded. “Rear loading bay—head there, and then you’ll have to hold them off the tunnels.” She nodded again. He was asking her to die with him. She was okay with that. “And Nadine, Mark… if you see them, tell Shae and the kids I’m sorry.”

Alvarez made a beeline for the loading bay. A train of hospital staff followed her. “Like hell, we’re gonna leave with everyone else,” one of the orderlies hissed. They passed the cart with refills of Isopropyl alcohol. Alvarez and two HM3s grabbed as many as they could carry and kept sprinting.

At the doors to the loading bay, half a dozen MPs with rifles at the ready and a gun team with a not-Minimi M256 squad automatic weapon splayed out on the floor. For a moment, she was worried they were going to shoot, but they waved the stampede of medical staff through. They passed the ramp down to the basement, where a line of stretchers and wheelchairs were heading down into the dark. There was also an LVSR, its bed slick with blood and covered in crates.

Three MPs were feverishly loading ammo into magazines.

“Which fuckin’ idiots brought a truck full of weapons to a hospital?” Alvarez snapped as she went to one of the crates and picked up an M26 PDWS. The dinky pistol caliber carbine felt small in her hands. With a button press, the brace extended.

“They were hauling wounded from the JRM—were about leave when the fucking Percs dropped,” one of the MPs surmised.

“Well, shit,” Alvarez mumbled.

The MP platoon sergeant nodded, “Yeah.”

“Grab what you can. If they try to force their way into the hospital, we hold them until everyone evacuates…” She turned to MP PSG, “That thing have any explosives?” He shook his head. “Shitballs.” She looked at the six-liter bottles of isopropyl alcohol and tore off a piece of her scrub’s sleeve, “Then we’re gonna do some arson.”

The machine gun fire continued. A bullhorn whined and shrieked with feedback. A voice in flawless RP spoke, “To the staff and patients of the so-called United States Naval Hospital Guam, you have committed Acts Harmful to the Enemy under Rule 28 of International Humanitarian Law. Your protection is forfeit. For your safety and the safety of your patients, you must surrender all military personnel immediately along with any known ethnic subversives including—” he started to list various prominent Guamanians—the Governor, members of Congress—the list got more baroque. He rattled off Twitter and NewTok handles.

What isn’t that the name of the Instagram dog lady?

She looked at one of the corpsmen, “Hey, Mikaela—you smoke like a chimney. Gimme your lighter.” The HM3 seemed offended, “Chica, give it.” It was one of those Snoop Dogg/Martha Stewart crossover weed lighters. It would work. Alvarez and a twenty-two hospital staff armed with plastic jugs and PCCs rushed back into the main building as an explosion rocked the hospital and the gunfire drew even closer. The primary lighting died, leaving only handfuls of emergency yellow lights flashing in the dark.

There were dead on the floor. Shots rang out in the dark. Screaming filled the halls. They were shapes in the shadows as they reached the primary stairwell access to the CDEC tunnel. Alvarez knocked, “This door secure?”

“Yes,” a voice meekly answered.

“Good, go secure the CDEC door and haul ass. Rest of the evac’ll go through the back,” Alvarez continued. “Don’t wait on us. Well, give you as much of a headstart as we can. Good luck.”

“Good luck, ma’am.”

Alvarez looked at the floor. Ensign Reynolds and two civies lay in a dark, almost black, pool of blood. There was movement. She and three others tucked into cover behind a reception desk. The whine of servos and thump of heavy footfall drew closer. There was more movement down the hall and the shriek of a civilian. The approaching Can Opener turned. Alvarez lit the jug of iso.

“HEY! SHITASS!”

With the world’s least impressive sidearm pitch, she hurled six liters of 95% isopropyl alcohol at a Perc covered in one-and-a-half-inch thick composite armor plates. The soldier dressed like a JSFcore knight turned and saw the massive Molotov cocktail whirling at him. He raised an arm to shield himself. The plastic container cracked and broke open on his wrist plate, scattering liquid everywhere like a shitty water balloon. The still-burning wick ignited the mass of vapor in the air, and a wall of red-orange flame swallowed the soldier. He started screaming in Mandarin, his voice distorted by his speakers and growing more warped as the fire consumed him.

Her fire teams kept moving as the battle inside the hospital turned even more violent. They directed scattered groups of unarmed medical personnel and patients toward escape. They stumbled across the occasional dead Chi-Com and corpse after corpse of sailors and civies. Blood pooled on sterile tiles and was streaked on the walls. They had no means of communication—but they knew this place much better than Percs.

Two teams ambushed a Perc section outside of OR Two. The crossfire of 7.6x31mmP and lit IV bags filled with Purell was enough to do the job. They didn’t kill them all, but that wasn’t the objective. They just needed to keep the Percs spinning in circles until the Army could arrive—if the Army could arrive. They grabbed ammo and guns as they went. Alvarez grabbed as many Chi-Com grenades as she could find.

Alvarez grabbed the arm of the MP leading a group of insurgents who had taken arms on their own, “You seen the skipper?”

“He took a squad of MPs to the ER to get some trapped folks,” the MP answered.

“Okay, we’re gonna link up with him. You ought to pull back to the loading bay; they’ll need your help holding Winnie off the evac.” The MP was more kid than man. He was half terrified and half furious. “That’s an order, Specialist.” They slinked off into the shadow as machine guns rattled and rifles popped.

They made contact with a fire team of PLA-SOF in a hallway. All it took was a pair of grenades and high-tailing in the opposite direction of where they planned on going for them to punch through the cordon. They were running circles around the PLA assault force, literally. They ran into a group of operators vomiting black-red blood and bright yellow bile onto the floor and shot them.

But she started to lose people. Michaels took a round to the head, losing most of his skull in the process. Andrews lost most of her arm to a buzzard hurled down the hallway after them. She and two others retreated to the exfil. One of her teams got caught and killed outside the west bathrooms.

Her clothes were ripped up, which now included mixed webbing picked from dead PLA-SOF and MPs. Her feet hurt. There was blood all over her. There was blood under her fingernails. She could barely hear out of her left ear despite nearly every weapon in the hospital mounting a suppressor.

At another checkpoint they were jumped by a second fireteam of Percs. Two orderlies were gone in a moment. A grenade killed the main checkpoint element before they could bring their QJY to bear. One of the troopers from the other team lept on her, throwing her into a wall. She put three rounds into his stomach and one more into his chest, but he kept coming, trying to crush her windpipe before his lifeblood escaped. There was hate in his unequally dilated eyes. One of her HM2s was using a drip stand to beat another Perc to death; she reached toward him as her other hand ran down the chest rig of her would-be killer. She felt the pommel of a knife. He realized it, too. She drew the black steel dagger. He tried to move his arm but too quickly—his exo-rig misfired and snapped his left arm in completely the wrong direction, bone sticking out like a spike. She plunged the fighting knife through the side of his neck and ripped it forward, showering herself in blood. She drew the dead trooper’s handgun and dumped the entire magazine into the last remaining enemy.

Then there were three.

They made it to the ER ward. Most of the ceiling was on the floor, and the walls had been hammered with bullets. Drywall and insulation were everywhere—as were the corpses. The Americans were stacked in a pile six high and five deep. There was brass and blood everywhere, streaks of red etched like an abstract mural on the floor; the surviving Percs were drinking water and catching their breath around a hasty command post—circled around their radio radioman. Alvarez saw a corpse in khakis with a silver eagle on its lapel—a face too mangled to make out. It had to be the Skipper.

One of the PLA-SOF figures sat with a straight back, hands resting across his thighs, elbows angled outward like chicken wings. He looked important. Two lines, two stars. Dead motherfucker. He rose from his seat and shouted, revealing the badge of a political instructor. A typhoon of lead followed as the troopers unleashed down at Alvarez and her two last allies. Richardson was torn apart in the fusillade. The sound of actuators and boots thundered in her ears.

Alvarez pulled a pin on the grenade belt she had left and threw the entire thing into the room as she darted across the opening. She saw a very confused senior-looking PLA noncom glaring at her, the belt in his left hand. Alvarez grabbed Mikaela as she went and turned a corner, pulling the HM3 along with her. The explosion filled the hallway with smoke and debris. The two surviving Americans, flat on the ground, turned around and started firing at the mix of heavily armored and normal-looking PLA-SOF. Scrambling for cover, the pair hurled isopropyl Molotovs, catching more Percs on fire.

They traded fire as more of the enemies rushed to the defense of their CP. One of them even fired a rocket launcher, which destroyed a portion of the waiting room for outpatient ortho. Though, by the furious shouting in Mandarin that Alvarez could barely hear, that was not exactly standard operating procedure. They started hurling concussion grenades as one of the soldiers grabbed a fire extinguisher, only to get clipped by Mikaela’s QBZ. Alvarez took two rounds. The HM3 was also bleeding from bullets or fragmentation. Flashbangs finally incapacitated them as the Perc SOF swarmed them. Alvarez rolled on the floor, her vision almost gone—but enough to see the Percs put three rounds into Mikaela. Someone stopped another soldier from doing the same to her.

They dragged her back to the ER ward. They didn’t even bother to bind her hands as they packed the wounds to her left arm and shoulder. There was blood running down her face.

“You look quite frightening, Lieutenant,” the voice from the loudspeaker chided, “So, I will ask you nicely once—where is the bunker?”

Alvarez glared back at him, “What bunker?” She had no idea what he was talking about, but she did spot a flashbang hanging on his plate carrier. She rolled her head around. There a half a dozen men around her. One had directional mines and about a half dozen frags all on his rig. He was a big motherfucker, and his lips were stained dark red—and was pale as a sheet.

“The command bunker, of course,” the political instructor laughed like he was looking through an obvious lie, “The one located underneath this facility.” One of the soldiers had a mass of red splotches all across his face—a mix of frostbite and second-degree burn.

“The what?” She exhaled, “Puto, what are you talking about?”

He extended his hand toward a table beside her seat. There was a beaker filled with scalpels and a blue liquid next to a container of Barbicide. “What is that line?” he laughed again. “We have ways of making you talk?”

“There isn’t a bunker here.”

“YOU LIE! BITCH!” He howled as he jumped to his feet. “We know the command and control complex for your laser weapons is located beneath this facility.” He sat back down after pacing for a moment, allowing his pretense of civility and composure to return. “Tell us, and this need not get violent.” His eyes were bloodshot and red at the edges.

Is this fucker cross-faded?

Alvarez looked toward the corpses stacked like cordwood. “Yeah, that…” She scoffed with disdain. Winnie in Chief didn’t like that. Is he actually on something? She looked at the other guys, and they looked all kinds of fucked up. “There is no bunker,” she insisted with a groan; everything hurt, and the adrenaline was starting to ebb.

The officer’s face turned beet red, “ARE YOU TELLING ME THAT THE WEAPON YOUR GOVERNMENT USED TO KILL YOUR MAJORIE TAYLOR GREEN IS NOT HERE?”

The last time Alvarez checked, that bitch was still alive.

He shouted at her in Mandarin for a straight minute, “CHINA IS NOT THE SHEEP!” and finally ended his tirade.

“Dude, what the fuck are you talking about?” She gasped.

He looked more confused than she did. He looked around as if he didn’t know what had happened but shook it off with the cool confidence of a sixteen-year-old who just tripped in front of his entire class, “We have evidence.” He chuckled, “We know it is here.” He produced printouts of a transcript of…

“A podcast?” It was called The Truth of the Situation. Alvarez recognized the name from somewhere. Oh. That shit. It was a Truth Social production with Bridge Colby, some Heritage ghoul, a Maoist White Nationalist Catgirl whose name she could thankfully not recall, and a natural language model with a Roger Stone Vocaloid.

He looked offended and returned the papers to their folder, “So it is the hard way.” He might’ve been brainpoisoned, but he had a mean left cross. He broke her nose, but he put a little too much force into the punch and was just close enough for something stupid.

She spat a geyser of blood into his face and grabbed him by the throat with one hand. “Hijo de puta!” Two of his soldiers pulled her off the officer almost immediately. An explosive string of curses flowed from her lips as she struggled.

“Fucking Yankee whore,” the lieutenant colonel spat right back into her eye.

She appreciated it as the look of smug superiority across his face melted; she waggled a black metal pin between her fingers. She wanted him to know it. She closed her eyes as he looked down at his vest. The flashbang went off, and she was just about deaf enough for it to only moderately completely-fuck up her shit. She could barely see. She staggered to her feet. She cut her right hand as she wrenched the scalpels from the beaker at the same time with her left hand; she felt up the big guy till she found a grenade and yanked a pin. It came free with a click. A truckasaurus hand grabbed her wrist. She stabbed over her head at roughly where the dude’s head ought to be, leaving about five blades in whatever she hit. The massive hand recoiled as muffled sounds of screaming filled her shattered ears. As a blurry, battered view of the world returned, she saw the Chi-Com half-bird halfway to the floor, struggling to regain his footing. They were all dead, but she would make it count.

The last thing the Zhong xiao saw was the blurred outline of a cluster of scalpels. A dozen hands coated in cold metal were all over her, trying to tear her away. There was shouting in Mandarin like it was from three rooms away. She twisted the bundle as the dead man’s head twitched, warm blood coating her clenched hand.

I hope it bought enough time.

The explosives went off.