by Kali Altsoba
“We can’t chance the morphine wearing off.” They back away. “Get this one done, stat. Sterilize him and the table afterward.”
Lee directs Susannah to the mess table that’s now a bloody operating flat, to help hold the boy’s limp body still. With three of the kitchen helpers, she holds him down. Only half aware, he howls the whole time. He sounds like a tortured banshee wailing its torments over a dark Amasian moor.
The surgeon carefully peels back a dark smartdressing that’s wrapped around the wound. He drops the pus-fluid-and-blood cloth into an open bucket. A small bot scoots over and carries the sodden mess over to one of the organic disposals. Whoever slapped on the smart bandage made a big mistake. It’s not the mentally limited AI cloth’s fault. It did its job. It’s the fault of whoever let it self seal on top of an older, hand-torn-and-tied wrap made of ordinary, dirty cloth. Probably the lad’s best mate, doing as well as she could. Not a medic. Someone must have later tied off the wound, tried to get the dirty cloth off, but found it stuck in dried puss and blood. So she dropped the smartwrap on top, hoping for the best, then rejoined her platoon moving into Dark Territory, leaving the boy alone in a crater.
The wound should have been cleaned and foreign matter removed before the smart dressing went to work with multiple pressure sensors, antibiotics and other curatives. Instead, dirty swabs and strips of cloth are encrusted right into the tear. The surgeon tugs gently at them with sterile pincers, ripping off bits of scab and bleeding the wound. The boy howls louder. Nurses swab caked pus and scabrous matter with hot water, to loosen it for the surgeon. He has no choice in the end save to rip off the filthy scab cloth in a single, sudden motion. The boy screams in sudden agony as the wound reopens, letting out a tormented, suppressed wail that hardly sounds human. Then he mercifully passes out.
“It’s a piece of old utes. See? It still shows blue in a few places.” You can see a little blue, beyond the wine red stain and pus white hole in the boy’s arm. The surgeon’s brow is coated in beady, silver sweat. But his hands don’t shake as he puts down the laser scalpel, to reach into a basin of hot water to recover a pair of wicked looking shears.
The skin is jagged all around the wound and looks a wholly unnatural color. Or two or three. A kind of sick yellow-purple-green that has no business anywhere on a human body or in living tissue. It makes Susannah queasy. She has to look away. Then she has to look back. The interior wound is nakedly white. Especially after a nurse washes dried blood away to reveal 30cm of exposed radius bone that curves to its thickest point at the wrist. About the same length of similarly curving and exposed ulna parallels the radius, thickest at the elbow.
Susannah sees strands of frayed and retracted sinew hanging from the ulna and old blood, dark and dry. More dribbles onto the skin of an intact and apparently healthy hand. Fresh streams flow bright red out of the elongated hole the surgeon makes, then probes. The lad’s face has no color at all. He’s semiconscious again, tossing his head from side-to-side in pain and delirium. She sees torn layers of fat and what the surgeon patiently explains is supinator muscle. Also other ripped up muscles whose proper Latin names he relays to her, trying to keep her calm and prevent her fainting as he works around each part. She listens, but the trauma pill means that later, she can’t recall any of the names. Only that she now really hates Latin. Except for swearing. She swears a lot in Latin, under her breath, as shears meet bone with a sound like nails on a chalkboard. The boy only moans low.
Lee walks over to observe, standing intimately close to Susannah. “Hold his arm,” he quietly directs her, placing his right hand softly on her shoulder, gently guiding her to the right place. She takes a firm grip, unable to stop looking into the boy’s face and unwilling to look down at his gouged and bleeding arm while the med team fixes it. Her hands tremble.
“Gently, gently now. Easy does it. Hold it as straight as you can, private. Don’t apply pressure. Let the surgeon do the work.”
The surgeon is really good. He calms everyone with his soft tone and confident cutting strokes, as he works a blue glinting sheers back-and-forth below the elbow. Susannah’s not watching. She thinks he’s doing something else. Fixing it, somehow.
The boy’s fingers twitch in strange, spasmodic jerks before he passes out a second time. Susannah’s glad. She glances quickly over her shoulder at Lee and smiles. Now the doctors will fix the boy’s arm and he’ll wake up later, like she did. He’ll wake in a far distant place and in a dream state, wondering. ‘Where am I? Is my last memory real? Am I really wounded?’
Suddenly, the arm feels lighter in Susannah’s hands. She looks down. It’s not attached to the boy. It hangs in the air above the blood drenched table where she holds it, dripping. Alien and ugly. She doesn’t know what to do or think. She just stands there, growing evermore lightheaded. Lee slightly squeezes her shoulder.
The boy sits bolt upright and screams at Susannah with sudden lucidity. “What are you doing with my arm? Give it back!” He lunges at her, but two of the surly cook’s helpers grab him, push him down. He tries but flails and fails to reach her. He tries again. He can’t grab her. She has his arm.
“Over here,” says an orderly, less gently than the surgeon. “On the pile.” She walks over to a stack of amputated hands, arms, legs and feet. She stops, drops her spongy load on top. It lands with an odd shaking and slapping sound of skin and fat, before slithering to a stop a third of the way down the fleshy pyramid.
It’s the skinny cook’s helper who picks it up and drops it into the suckermouth maw of Organic Waste Disposal Unit #2. Then she helps him drop in all the other abandoned parts. They don’t bother her. She’s seen lost limbs before today. It’s all very human but not human at all. Terribly familiar to anyone on Lemuria, and strange as the night sky on a farfolk homeworld. All at once.
She hears the machine mince then disintegrate the pile of arms and legs, and one coarse and drunken marine’s terribly mangled foot, as if they’re bread crusts and tailings of soup and edible spoons and bowls. The sounds are almost clinical to her. But she’ll never forget that arm. Nor the slurpy, sickly soft grinding sound its yellow fat and red supinator muscle make as they slip between the gears, turn to waste and are incinerated. She hates all the godsdamn Latin muscles and bones and sinews that slither and slurp and grrrr until they meet an industrial laser.
Susannah slumps to the floor, lightheaded and dry heaving. She doesn’t throw up only because she never ate the greasy bowl of soup served to her when Division Mess Tent #3 was still a kitchen, not an emergency battle surgery. It’s the moment Lee walks over, gently helps her rise, and insists that she take a trauma pill and step outside for a minute to clear her head and slow her heart.
***
Above, below and around the emergency surgery are more chalk cavern halls, alcoves and dirtied white staircases. Many rooms are filling with still untended cases from the continuing fight overhead, which is going badly for the 7th. Susannah feels as though she’s walking through a nest of helpless, wounded mice that some giant’s plough gashed and gouged below the surface, unaware or uncaring. Bleeding men and women in sodden bandages look up at her from the floors and doorways as she passes. They have vacant, glazed and mousy eyes.
In one hallway a male nurse is well into a complete psych breakdown, weeping openly in the midst of bewildered and frightened patients that he’s neglecting. He can’t take another moment of their gaping wounds and pain and broken psyches. He has done enough penitence for that woman he murdered back in college, never caught or accused or punished. He sees her face in every patient who looks up at him, imploring with silent eyes as he chokes her life away. A second nurse is quite drunk, shouting into a vacant supply room loud orders that no one hears or obeys. He’s carrying a half-empty bottle of what looks like clear sterilizer, but is really grain hooch from a trench still run by 2nd Company. An empty rests precariously atop crates of plasma and serum, beside stacks of white gauze. He’s talking to a pile of eager smartdressin
gs, who think they’re about to fulfil their design-destiny.
Susannah stops to give two parched patients some water from her canteen. She gently washes the grimed and grimacing face of a third, who looks up at her the way her sister Anya used to when she scraped a knee and Susannah comforted her and told her everything would be OK. But these aren’t a little girl’s scraped knees and there are too many pleas from too many upturned faces. She turns and flees back into the kitchen surgery. She seeks out the skinny kid’s helper for reasons she can’t say or understand. He seems to want to be near her, too.
Casualties keep arriving, laid out in rows or on each of the chalk steps and all around the mess tent walls. Without suspend or even morphine now, many are in terrible agony. The lucky ones are rendered unconscious by pain and shock. Most of these naturally unconscious are burn cases. Susannah has already searched them for IDs, looking under scorched and charred clumps of skin in which their ACU chips were embedded and proud unit tattoos inked. All burned away.
Stoic. Silent. Stupefied. As the last morphine wears off, even burn cases return to awful consciousness. Their groans and rising shrieks alarm then terrify Susannah. It’s not pain that makes them cry out, Lee tells her, trying to comfort the one person he can, but fumbling. “Well, not just the pain.” It’s the sight of their own charred bodies. They look down to see gaping wounds and cracking blackened flesh where a few hours or just minutes ago a healthy limb flexed at their whim and will, and skin was young and clear and beautiful. Most shocking is the way brilliant white smartdressings stand out, in contrast to their startlingly charcoaled flesh.
Susannah remembers the first time she pulled back her patient’s gown on Red Rover and saw her own mangled, missing breast and half-torn heart. She shudders. Lee moves away. Is it her, or does he really have to make the announcement?
“Don’t worry, more morphine’s on the way. And a hundred crates of suspend.” He says it looking at her from several meters distance, but loudly, to reach all the surgery. “I just got off coms with Lian Sòng’s HQ in New Beijing. She’s going to skydrop a standard container of med supplies right behind this sector. Transports are coming in with a full CAP of Wasps overhead, so be confident they will arrive.
“Huzzah! Huzzah!” It’s what he hoped to hear, but no one’s in the mood. He needs to say more. “Help will be here in 20 mikes, no more. Hang on ‘till then. Do what you can. Then we’ll quiet and suspend these poor children.” But the war won’t wait. Not even 20 minutes. War owns the hour. A fully alert, terribly frightened boy is brought into the tent in a reeve sleeve. The prick doing triage at the door doesn’t stop the bearers or ask the kid even one question. He turns and bolts up the chalk stairs. He abandons his post. Lee sees him do it out of the corner of one eye. ‘I’ll see to him later.’
The boy has a fully armed, intact rifle grenade lodged in the middle of his thigh. Its fins are showing above the skin where his blues are sheered off, probably by a combat medic or maybe by one of the bearers. None of the surgeons want to work on him fearing, as he does, as did the slow bearers who took hours to bring this very special case here, that any effort to remove the round might set it off. It would kill everyone at the long operating table and might take out half the surgery.
“I want everyone who can get out, to get out now!” Lee orders. “I’ll work this case. I’ll need two volunteers, to hold him steady.”
“I’ll help.”
“Me too.”
Susannah and the skinny cook’s helper step forward. No one else. As many as can do it, back right out of the room. Patients lying along the perimeter walls tense to the danger, and get small, the way they do under shellfire in an exposed slit trench.
“Hand me that laser scalpel. Yes, that one.” Susannah picks it up and hands it to Lee. Slowly. Carefully. “Now, use those demagnetized clamps to hold the tail section steady while I cut around the warhead. You, what’s your name?”
“Sidney Kowalski, sir.”
“OK, Sid. You hold his leg steady. Yes, the one with the grenade stuck in it. If he kicks you with the other one, you stand your ground. You hear me? Stand!”
“Yes sir. I will, sir.”
“Son,” he says to grenade boy trembling on the table, “don’t you bloody move! I don’t care how much this hurts!”
The spectral boy nods. He grips the table and clamps his eyes shut. Susannah sees tiny beads of sweat trickling over his eyebrows. She looks at Lee. His face is cold and dry. She scents a faint trace of cloves on the air.
The room is breathless. All other operations pause as every set of eyes watches Lee and the boy, and Susannah and Sid, with morbid fascination. Free doctors and ambulatory patients move behind carbyne panel bomb shields brought on-the-triple by a squad of panting marines.
Lee cuts away skin, fat and muscle around the bomb. “It’s loose enough now. Marine, get over here with that container.” A marine in bomb disposal protective gear, looking like a Yeti, moves in close.
“Susannah, grab ahold of that artery clamp, the big orange one. That’s it.” She tightens her grip, her gaze drawn in fascination to the quivering bomb. Yet she noticed that it’s the first time since they reunited that he calls her by name.
“Susannah, you hand the clamp to me the instant you see a high spurt.” She thrills strangely at Lee’s use of her name, despite the odd circumstances. She hides it from him, and the fact that even more, she truly thrills to be again in the close company of Death. She has been looking for Death, stalking Death, ever since that day on Glarus where she first met him, age 22. Now here he is, not an arm’s length away, trying to seduce her into joining him in the eternal Yue ming. She’s not sure who she loves more in this vital moment, Lee Jin or Death.
“OK Susannah, on three. The wound will open, there’ll be a high arterial spurt, and you’ll hand me the orange clamp.” She says nothing, but their eyes lock.
“Sid,” he looks the cook’s helper straight in the eye. “When I say three, you pull the foreign object out and hand it to that marine.” Susannah likes that Lee is such an odd duck, and a committed craftsman in the surgery, that he says foreign object not bomb. As if it’s a pencil or fishhook the boy impaled himself with.
“Ready? One, two, three. Good girl, Susannah! You did it!”
Hey, what about Sid? He did it, too! He’s the one who seizes the rocket and pulls it out! He’s the one one who carefully gives it to a marine sapper in a Yeti suit. In his moment of courageous triumph Lee gives Susannah all the credit, just for handing him a clamp. Well OK, for volunteering. And for being his Susannah.
She swells under his praise as she watches the skinny kid helper, err sorry, watches Sid, carefully place the live ordinance inside a disposal case held up by a Yeti. The experienced specialist removes the fuse from the rocket grenade, seals it inside, and moves sedately from the room.
When they’re done, when the boy’s all sewn up and knocked out under fresh suspend that arrives just when General Sòng promised, Lee tells Susannah and the brave cook’s helper (she no longer thinks of him as ‘the skinny kid,’ but can’t quite manage ‘Sid’) to get out of the surgery and take a break.
“Find a quiet place and rest for at least 20 minutes. Both of you, eat something. A protein K-ration bar, or a sandwich. Drink some water, too. Lot’s of water.” He smiles broadly and looks at Susannah. “Then get back in here. I need you.”
He places a warm, gentle hand on her arm and guides her toward the door. She lets him do it, no longer resistant to his kindness. It gives her real comfort to be touched by Lee, just as it did when she was in recovery on Red Rover and he paid her little, awkwardly sweet attentions. Then he astonishes her. Just before he lets go her arm he leans in and softly kisses her on the lips.
She startles.
She shakes.
She blushes.
She feels a cascading flush of warm, rushing blood and taut, released emotion. It courses from her scalp down to her breasts and into her groin, ending by wobblin
g her knees. She hasn’t felt such a fluttery tightness in her stomach and engorgement down there in ages. She hasn’t flushed about anything or anyone, in a very long time. Not since before a sniper bot tried to kill her on Glarus. In all the time since then, this moment is the first one she feels truly alive.
After her break she slips back into the surgery, trying not to watch Lee alone but drawn to him against her will. The air is close. She smells onions and old soup, blood and iron, bone and piss and pus. And just a hint of cloves whenever Lee brushes past where she’s standing, which he does more closely and often than she thinks he needs to. It’s exhilarating. In the midst of all this pain and horror, she comes alive again. Then she hears the voice: ‘Susannah, I’m still waiting for you.’
***
An hour later, Lee finishes the last case of the day. It’s not an emergency. He just likes to keep his hands wet, literally on these rare occasions when he gets to operate the old way. Not in a virtual cubicle via a REMOTE, but with hands deep and moving inside real flesh, real guts, real blood.
