I looked around the room. There were another eleven figures, presumably in the same state as my sister. Could we just leave them here, to whatever god-awful fate to which all this was a prelude? If not, what else could we do? There were enough people, if you included the DED troopers, to carry them all, but that meant all but one of us would be loaded down with a body if we had to fight our way out. There was more to it than that. I checked my watch: it had taken Hawk and Rodney almost ten minutes of intense work to free Theresa from the umbilical. Assume they'd get better with practice, so call it an average of eight minutes. That meant it would take one and a half hours to free them all. I couldn't believe that we'd be left to our own devices for even a quarter that long.