Amasia

by Kali Altsoba

  All bearers have carbon micro splinters in their fingertips, and deeper cuts from steel wire wound around splitting wood to keep handles whole and together. The wire and the weight of wounded men cuts their hands to pieces, until they’re a mess of blisters, calluses, open slices and scar cracks. Yet the work goes on, and on and on. They’ve been told to get along with the wooden poles until a load of durable carbon litters makes it planetside via the next convoy, or maybe arrives on a privateer blockade runner charging New Beijing extortionist prices for every kilo its captain runs past the Kaigun and DRN patrols.

  ***

  The surly, unshaven, greasy cook resents everything about the override order he received just before Susannah stomped off, leaving her best filthy look hanging in the air. He’s actually arguing with Lee.

  “Yeah, I got your call ahead. I already got started boiling your water, sir. But now you want me to leave? You takin’ over the whole tent?”

  “That’s right. So pack up all this kitchen shit and get it out of here now. You were told that by my orderly over coms. Why isn’t it done already?”

  “This is an official Division Mess, sir. It’s Mess Tent #3. I can’t just shut it down because you say so. The troopers gotta eat, don’t they? I won’t do it!”

  ‘He doesn’t give a damn about the troops. This is all about not surrendering his ship.’ Susannah edges closer to imbibe every second of the cook’s perspiring discomfort and coming humiliation. She laughs out loud when Lee shouts back at the caustic malcontent, placing her hand over her mouth to muffle the sound.

  “That’s enough! Shut up! Stand at attention!”

  He does, popping off his incongruous blue belt because straightening his back suddenly protrudes a very large belly. He tries to salute, managing only to poke himself in his eye with a ladle he forgot he was holding. Gray, soupy lumps from the scoop slowly dribble down his face.

  “Now you listen to me, kitchen sergeant or chief cook or head bottle washer or whatever your rank is under that filthy apron. Patients come before potatoes!”

  Susannah has never heard Lee be so authoritative. Not in this way. Not so very loud and pulling rank and all, as if he’s actually military. It’s thrilling.

  “Yes sir, I understand.”

  “I don’t think you do. I’m amending my order. The equipment stays. Move it to the left back corner. You and your helpers stay, too. We need extra hands. You work the gurneys, after you boil all the water I ordered. In fact, double it. I want a nile of boiling water before we’re done!”

  “Yes general.” “Yes general.” The cook has realized his error. Or as Susannah thinks about it, ‘he finds himself tacking into a gale force wind of Lee Jin in anger.’

  “Incinerate that apron and change into fresh whites. You’re a distinct infection danger to my patients. And you’re disgusting looking.”

  “Captain?” Lee calls over the stretcher bearer unit commander. “Tell your men they're relieved, but to leave their litters and gurneys here. You’ll have to stay to show these kitchen helpers what to do in their place.”

  It’s a nice thought and the captain relays it to his command. But not one bearer leaves or gives up his rolled up stretcher. The captain leads them and 10 kitchen workers topside to start carrying down the train of wounded. The kitchen guys gather lots of extra litters and four gurneys from wall racks along the way.

  ***

  The room reeks of onions, potatoes and mockmeat stew, not disinfectants and starchy nurses. Lee tells his worried doctors. “We’ll deal with special infections later, in recovery. Right now priority is to keep our people alive, anyway you can.”

  “So, nothing elaborate, general? Just ‘patch and pitch’ kind of thing?”

  “Right, it’s all about triage and quick cutting today.”

  “I thought they did the triage upstairs, sir? Aren’t we here to handle secondary and tertiary wounds, the more complicated cases? We are surgeons, not medics.” The doctor who objects over this ‘misuse’ never met Lee before a half hour ago. If he had, he wouldn’t be asking. He wouldn’t even be talking.

  Lee glares at him. “Normally, they do as you say: medics make the first triage judgments and triage specialists do more sort-and-separate up those stairs, sending skilled doctors like you the most advanced cases and complicated surgeries.”

  “Yes, general. That’s what I meant by…”

  “But not today! Today, you’ll see it all, from minor burns to major trauma. I don’t give a godsdamn about your medical specialty or your big summer house back on your homeworld. You will do whatever is necessary today, treat whatever comes down those stairs. Understood?”

  “Yes, general. My apologies, sir.”

  “I don’t have time for your apology, doctor. Just do your damn job.”

  “But why basic triage sir?” It’s one of his staff surgeons, just seeking clarity.

  “There are too many wounded headed down, doctor. Sorry, but you have to accept that this is battlefield surgery, not some cyber cubicle on a state-of-the-art hospital ship. You will work hard today, but especially, you will work fast. Cut it out or cut it off, and move on to the next soldier who needs your attention.”

  “Umm, yes sir. Sounds grim, sir. But yes, I think I understand. Yet, if I make a suggestion? Why not set up a triage specialist at the door to this surgery? It could save time, it could even save lives, if we have some sorting process down here.”

  “Excellent suggestion, doctor. Orderly, make it so. Alright, doctors. It’s going to be hot and dirty real soon. That’s just the way it is. Trust your training and we’ll make it through this.” They still look uncertain when he’s done.

  The chastened, but still scowling, cook dumps the last gallons of tepid, gray soup into Organic Waste Disposal Unit #2. It makes a distinct slurping sound as potato lumps and ill looking mockmeat are ground by steel teeth, then incinerated by lasers. It’s set to total disposal, not hooked into the pipes that would turn today’s old soup into tomorrow’s edible spoons.

  The cook pulls off his stained blue belt and filthy cover all and pulls on a new, all white apron from a crate in the corner. There must be a dozen more inside, all impeccably white. Already, his kitchen helpers have been dragooned by Lee’s lieutenants to serve as sterilizers, bearers, and general gofers and dogsbodies. The cook stomps over to the stoves to supervise his last forlorn assistants, marooned on a treasureless island bereft of ship or sheet. They look at him like so many Tom Morgans, as if Captain Flint himself is come to murder them, too, and lay out their bleached white bones to show himself the way back.

  They swab tureens with scalding liquid from a military microwave that boils 500 metric gallons of piped in groundwater. Boiling is better than nothing, a bare minimum when major trauma cases present from fighting in the zig-zag trenches clawed in the block of thick white chalk overhead. Normally, surgical sterilization is done neatly by special medical lasers or, in a pinch, with fine aerosol chemical dust. This is an ersatz CSH, a combat field hospital. It doesn’t have that shit.

  Without lasers or sprayers, Lee resorts to procedures out of ancient texts. He knows that immersing cutters in boiling water is hardly sufficient. Superbugs are adapting fast on Lemuria. After all, if you’re an eager and opportunistic bacterium food supply conditions are perfect: rotting flesh is everywhere. But it’s all he has, so just about everything goes into boiling water.

  Lee carries no medical bag, but nine surgeons empty bags they carry at all times. More is added to the assessment pile by the ambulance captain and three medics. In an instant, all kinds of cruel and wonderful surgical instruments are dropped into tureens of madly boiling water: 28 metal scalpels, 12 rib spreaders, 107 hemostatic clamps, 52 arterial forceps and other surgical graspers, 7 kinds of retractors, 4 types of distractors, 3 dilators, 9 specula, 6 bone drills, and 5 standard dermatomes. Ten laser scalpels and a single ultrasound tissue disruptor will never make direct contact with contaminated flesh. They don’t require sterilization
. They’re laid aside. It’s not much of a collection for the hard task that’s coming. “It’ll have to do, and it will,” Lee says to the skeptical surgeons and nurses.

  Susannah watches him. She knows he’s worried. She sees two big tureens of steamy water swashed and swaddled over eight long mess tables, scalding and cleaning operating-surfaces-to-be. Filthy water with bits of bread and soup in it washes onto the floor, imperceptibly sloped to drain into a central, grill covered pipe. Good thing the covered drain in the floor has a micro laser disposal inside, for incinerating bits of trampled food and half eaten spoons. Both tureens are hurriedly refilled and brought to a full boil with powerful military microwaves. Lee designates one tureen as “reserved for cleaning dirty wounds.” Two of the doctors have no idea what he means. They’ve only ever used lasers and controlled radiation to do that. The last is set aside at lower heat, below scalding. It’s to be used to wash away an expected torrent of blood and damaged and discarded flesh..

  Lee still hasn’t acknowledged that he recognizes Susannah, though she’s sure he does. It’s odd that he doesn’t smile at her, like he used to aboard Red Rover. He pays her no special attentions at all, as if she’s just another orderly or stretcher bearer he commandeered. She waits and waits for him to signal awareness of their special connection. Finally, it’s too much to bear. She approaches, stands before him and salutes. Then she asks to be relieved of a personally uncomfortable task in the only way possible in an active combat zone.

  “Sir?” She has his attention at last, but skips all personals, refusing to say his name when he won’t say hers. “There’s a fight on above our heads and my unit’s in the thick of it. I need to be up there. Permission to redeploy topside?”

  “I understand, private,” Lee says, ignoring her total lack of deference and especially, ignoring her indifference to the pressing wants of the medical moment. “But you’re needed more urgently down here.”

  ‘He doesn’t say ‘I need you,’ just ‘you’re needed, private.’ What a pōdex!’ She’s really furious. And frustrated, and embarrassed as hell.

  Then Lee leans forward awkwardly and adds, sotto voce. “I could have you transferred to Medical Services on a permanent basis, if you want. You could be an orderly under my command.” He doesn’t mean anything dirty, like she should become his mistress. He just wants to protect her and thinks she’d be good with patients, after what she went through. He has thought about asking her for months.

  “No thank you, sir,” she snaps, misunderstanding and blushing bright pink. She adds, with quick and certain defiance of his rank and him. “I belong with my mates. They’re in a fight, sir. I need to be with them. Again, requesting permission to rejoin my company.”

  He’s stung by her rejection.

  It’s an almost childish pose.

  No, not almost. It really is.

  “OK, if that’s how it’s going to be, suit yourself, Private Page. After we’re done here I’ll get you back to your unit. But you don’t leave this surgery until I say so, not until we’re finished here today. Got that, private?”

  He’s never pulled rank before.

  He’s ashamed to do it now.

  ‘What else can I do?’

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.” Inside, Susannah is shaking with disappointment and seething with umbrage. Things couldn’t have gone more badly than this. She never once thought they would, not in months of daydreaming about their reunion.

  Lee swivels, calling out a half dozen confident orders to his busy team before he gets 20 paces. He spins away from her, back into a more comfortable role as head of a surgical unit. If Susannah notices the hurt look that crosses his face she makes no sign of it. She’s too busy hiding her own feeling of hollow ache.

  ***

  Two hundred klics away, three field surgery teams are heading for a CSH back of First Trench when they’re spotted by a hunting Jabo. They're dead in an instant, consumed by a flash of heat and light they never see coming and probably don’t even feel. In scorching desert flats of southern Lemuria, where Enthusiastics hold 86 klics of dunes and fieldworks hanging on the arid lip of the Yue ming, where scrub reserve infantry fill in Second and Third Trenches behind, shit like this just happens. The med teams were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or were they? The AAR is going to say their escort fucked up, left them exposed on the surface when they should have been moving by subterranean maglev as priority targets. But who the fuck really knows? Do you really trust the guy who writes the AAR?

  Enthusiastics are down 14 doctors, three full combat medical teams, and one operational CSH that never gets set up. And a battalion level fight is deteriorating fast, maybe soon to become full division vs. division. It’s worse than that. Jabo nightfighters are helping repulse Argos 7th Assault’s night raid. The op goes badly wrong as a battalion of Enthusiastics stumbles into uncharted and hardened locust strongpoints. The battalion comes under fire from six fixed bot gun positions, ten auto directional flamethrowers, and 1,800 crack RIK infantry in flank support. It’s official now: they're Gross Imperium, the very best Rikugun has.

  “Warning: All medical personnel: DELUGE.” Ten minutes later, medics and triage units get hands on the first of hundreds of lightly wounded and moderately wounded then a whole lot of severely wounded streaming back from a fucked up raid. They're sifted according to severity behind the first parapet, then carried by bearers to existing cutout levels in the chalk above and below Lee’s ersatz surgery.

  Sorting begins. Triage specialists walk among laid out litters, asking: “Who will live, regardless of what the surgeons do? Who will die, regardless of what treatment they get? Who can be helped best right now, right here? Who should be patched and swaddled, carried back to a rear area trauma hospital? Who do I say to freeze and ship offworld, to heal or to die in a far off place?” Anyone who dies before they make it into surgery will have ID numbers added to 220+ KIA raiders already counted by Division HQ. Those bodies that could be recovered are heading for quick rear area incineration. Those left behind in the black are being minced by shells falling into the Yue ming.

  There are way too many in bad shape up there. Too many to be handled by the division’s medics alone, not without the three missing surgery teams lying dead in the desert. Seventy plus major trauma cases, at least 20+ with terrible burns from flamethrowers or plasma, are being rushed down to Lee’s makeshift surgery. They’re on the way, even as the soup tureens are swabbed and the mess sterilized with high pressure steam and vats of scalding water. Lee is getting the overflow, along with all the real hard cases First Triage normally passes to the rear. There’s been a miscommunication about that. Triage thinks, reasonably enough, that with the best collection of surgeons in Orion down inside the chalk, what the fuck? An especially hard case is on the way in from DT. Six bearers are moving unusually slowly, even gingerly, with a very special case they carry in a reeve’s sleeve.

  Standing stiffly beside the stubbly and ill tempered cook, Susannah watches the arriving wounded. At the entrance, a male nurse seconded from First Triage takes down IDs and dictates wound descriptions into the surgical log. It’s a matter-of-fact recording of severe physical injuries that prewar would be considered so grievous and so rare that each and every one must dominate some local memex broadcast for a day or more.

  Girl badly burned in fire.

  Man loses arm in industrial accident.

  Woman falls on slopes, impaled by own ski.

  That kind of thing. Newsworthy to local editors and nightly gawpers. But not in wartime. That kind of injury is routine in Dark Territory, or when a barrage lands on an open trench. Or when a general fucks up a battalion scale raid.

  Some of the overflow have simple injuries that are easily fixed, yet require a surgeon’s attention. A twenty something girl limps in with a shiny sliver of ultrasteel shrapnel embedded in the back of her dark brown hand. Another slice passed clean through the fleshy part of her thigh. Walking wounded like her are the first to arrive, ho
bbling along on a damaged foot, holding up a gashed arm, or with disfiguring facial tears that strip them of dignity or an ability to speak. Like the boy rapido gunner with a gaped open jaw who can only hand signal his name and squad number. Susannah sees how those with lower face wounds watch other wounded eat or drink field rations lifted from a combat pocket, envious not of the food or the drink but of the ability.

  Only a few of the walking wounded have a mate alongside to help them to the surgery. There’s a bigger fight building topside as two angry divisions expand first contact into a real battle. So squad or platoon buddies stop at the mess tent door, hand off their best friends to businesslike orderlies and other strangers, hurriedly say goodbye, and head back up to join the spreading fight. One rapido loader is painted in wine dark blood up to her waist. It’s not hers.

  Susannah looks into the haunted eyes of fighters with filthy rags over gaping holes, or bits of torn flesh hanging down. They’re tagged by priority, positioned along the walls and told to wait. Arriving wounded include men and women holding red wrapped stumps where fingers or whole hands or feet once lived, until a rocket fragment or mine or uncaring bot sniper cleaved them off. They’re nonpriority, after bleeding is stopped by medics up above with injections of weak suspensor directly into the wound. One young woman holds a bloodsoaked cloth to what remains of an ear. Another youth shows off a chunk of shrapnel jutting from his neck, a second stabbing up-and-out of his shoulder. They give him water and leave him be in his tender agonies.