“Is Druid’s ship ready to depart?” I asked as soon as we were out the door and on the way to the nearest lift.
“I believe so, Sir,” Gants said and I could almost hear him exchanging glances with Hierophant behind my back.
I was still surprised at the unholy amount of maneuvering that had gone on behind the scenes to be the first Captain—or, in this case, Commodore—to take a battleship out on an independent patrol. It had almost made me reconsider the notion. However, the patrol was needed too much to back out now. Not only the nascent little Border Alliance, but the worlds we were directly recruiting from, needed to see a powerful Confederation presence before they started slipping away.
“How’s Spalding doing?” I asked starting to feel light headed but the lift was only twenty feet away, I could make it twenty feet. You could never let them see you sweat. I had to make it.
“Still busy working on getting one of those hulks with power so he can convert it to a carrier of some sort,” Hierophant repeated—it was information I already knew, but I was running out of amazingly clearheaded questions to ask to show how very unaffected I was by all the battle damage and blood loss.
“Good,” I gasped, “he’s back to his old self and working mechanical magic as usual. I never dou—doub-doubted him.” I stuttered, finally crossing the threshold of the turbo-lift. “We’ll beat our detractors together,” I said or maybe I only thought it as I listed to the side and collapsed against Gants.
I was ready for that medical treatment now…I think.
Chapter Forty-eight: Medical Mistakes and Malpractice
Flashes of light…a near constant pain…and the sensation of movement as he was drug out of the room by his arms and tossed onto a hover pallet.
God of my people…I have failed you, thought the fallen warrior before the final darkness fell over him, for the last time…
Those were the last relief-tinged thoughts before all that he was and all that he had been was swept away.
“Blast. We couldn’t get to him in time,” a cold, uncaring medical voice spoke from beside the hover pallet. “I’m calling it,” he said, not even bothering to attempt resuscitation.
“Both heartbeat and brainwave activity have flat-lined,” the second medic agreed his voice said with patent disgust. “Honestly I don’t understand why we’re even pretending to treat these traitors. Attacking a superior officer is a spacing offense.”
“Medical Tradition; we treat all sides in any conflict,” said the first medic, “they may hang later, but they’ll do it in as close to perfect a health as we can get them to before then.”
“Heck of a way to run a fleet,” the second medic sighed.
The first was silent as they continued to push the hover-pallet down the corridor and into the lift.
When the last natural chemical reaction inside the patient’s brain finally came to a halt, something odd started to happen. The medic’s didn’t see it, because they didn’t have their scanners out—and even if they had, they would have needed to be looking very carefully for it—but millions of microscopic organisms, composed of more than mere organic tissues, started to migrate from the rest of the body and into the dead man’s ruined head.
****************************************************
*Beep... beep…. beeeeeeeep!* chimed the portable scanner unit as yet another patient finally flat-lined.
“Lady of Mercy take his soul, but we’ve just lost another one,” sighed Doctor White. Pulling off his non-permeable medical gloves, he wadded them up and tossed them into a nearby recycling unit set there for just such instances. “Take him to the cooling room; we’ve got another one for the morgue,” he instructed wearily.
“Right on it, Doctor,” said the orderly rolling the deceased man onto a stretcher and pushing him out of the room.
“I hate it when I lose a patient,” White said dishearteningly.
“Did you do the best you could?” asked Presbyter, coming out of the operating theater opposite White’s.
“Of course,” the other Doctor said, stung by the question.
“Then shake it off; you’ve got nothing to feel ashamed of,” the grey-haired doctor advised calmly. “Besides, if it helps, the future prospects of our current patients aren’t going to be all that bright even if by some miracle we manage to save them.”
White nodded unhappily. “I just object to them dying on my table, is all,” he said shortly.
While the doctors were conversing, the orderly whistled under his breath as he rolled the next corpse into the cooling room for storage, where they would remain until they could be fully processed into the morgue.
He pushed the stretcher carrying the latest deceased person into the room and turned away, filling out the virtual paperwork on his slate when one of the dead men in the front row suddenly arched his back and drew in a long, terrifying gasp.
With a crash, the orderly dropped his slate onto the floor and stared at the supposedly dead man as he took another gut clenching breath of air.
“Doctor White!” he shouted through the still open door before scooping the slate off the floor and tearing up toward the front of the line furthest away from the entrance into the cooler. “I’ve got a live one in the cooler!” he cried out.
There was a momentary pause from outside the cooling room, and then the running of feet and the orderly frantically started pulling the stretchers between him and the patient out of the way.
“What the blazes is going on in here?” White demanded, storming into the room.
Trying to hold the injured man with one hand—keeping him down enough so that he didn’t flop onto the floor with the violence of his seizures—he pulled up the man’s file.
“What is this man doing in the cooling room?” Doctor White asked hotly.
“He was marked down as DOA by the medics, Doc!” the orderly cried, “a routine scan when they entered sick bay confirmed it. All records show he had no life signs when this man hovered into our facility!”
“Well, for a dead man, he seems far too active to me,” snapped White pushing the orderly out of the way. “I need a scanner and two vials of emergency heal! And someone sterilize my operating room before I get back in there; we’ve got a live one!”
“Let me get that, sir,” the Orderly exclaimed, taking the other end of the stretcher and helping to rapidly wheel the patient out of the cooling room.
“Putting a live person in the morgue,” shouted Doctor White, “heads are going to roll for this! We’ll all be lucky if we get out of this one without a medical malpractice lawsuit.”
Seeing a live person thrashing around on the stretcher, Doctor Presbyter came running out of his operating room, changing his gloves as he came.
“What have we got here?” he asked.
White pulled out his slate and waved the medical scanner slipped into his other hand by a nurse over the patient at the same time.
“I’ve got one…Nikomedes—list of former names and aliases include Nikomedes Minos—shot in the head with a blaster at close range,” White reported in a rapid-fire, clinically-trained voice. “Trauma to the right eye, right parietal lobe, negative heartbeat and absent brain activity registered, and supposedly confirmed, upon entrance into our facility more than two hours ago!”
“This man shouldn’t be alive,” barked Presbyter, “your information must be wrong. I don’t see how he could have survived these injuries—let alone survived for two hours in the cooler before we noticed him. Are you sure he didn’t just come in?”
“He’s listed as the first patient to hover into our facility. Records show you performed the admission process yourself,” White accused.
“Impossible,” Presbyter appeared shaken.
“What the Murphy!” choked White.
“What’ve you got?” Presbyter asked, clearly falling right back into forty years of professionalism. Everyone in that room knew that blame could be assigned later—for right now, they had a man’s life to save
.
“I’m showing a partial reconstruction of the damaged areas of the brain. It’s almost like he’s spontaneously…regenerating,” Doctor White said with patent disbelief.
“Are you sure the medics didn’t hit him with a dose of combat or emergency heal before calling the code?” Presbyter demanded.
“These crazy Tracto-ans, gene-engineered to within an inch of their lives, the whole lot of them,” cursed White.
However, while both men were mystified by the spontaneous neural tissue regeneration, they failed to notice the odd-looking energy pattern that showed up on the initial brain scan.
More interested in saving their patient than researching anomalous readings that ceased to show up after the first scan, they can perhaps be excused for failing to investigate that, as well as the slightly elevated concentration of rare earths and metal alloys diffused throughout the patient’s brain—in particular, in the damaged orbital cavity and parietal lobe.
But they would likely never get another chance to confirm the concentrated presence of those minerals.
Chapter Forty-nine: Spalding’s Departmental Plan
“Where are those blasted lightweights? They should have been here by now,” raged a certain, increasingly irate, old Engineer.
“Reports are the last shuttle is just clearing the docking bay now,” Parkiney reported.
“You tell Bostwell that I don’t just want reports of where they are at. I want him to get them over here—now!” bellowed Spalding.
“They’re moving as fast as—” Parkiney ceased speaking in the face of the ugly expression on Spalding’s face. “On it, Chief,” he stopped and said instead.
“Well alright then,” Spalding said walking over to the wall and turning away from the other man. He would just stare at the wall for a bit and remind himself that the others were not the problem. No the ones coming here were going to be part of the solution.
A minute later, Lesner, Merk and Bourgon stepped into the room. They were followed by several other department heads and their respective seconds.
“This meeting is for department heads only,” Spalding glared.
“Alright,” Lesner nodded, and the other followed his lead sending their hangers on out.
“What about him?” one of the men—Head of Supply, if Spalding recalled—asked, pointing to Parkiney.
“He’s with me,” the old Engineer said flatly, “he stays.”
Looking like he wanted to protest, but deciding better, the other man backed down.
“Have a seat, everyone,” Spalding said indicating the table.
“Why did you call us over to this wreck of a battleship to have a meeting—like some kind of conspirator cabal in some kind of bad holo-vid?” the Supply Chief demanded irritably.
“You’re all here because something has to be done about those mutinous blighters in the Contingent,” Spalding said flatly.
“You mean the Lancers?” asked Bourgon—an, irritating Brigga-worshiper from over in Environmental.
“And who else would you think I’d be talking about?” Spalding said shortly.
“We can’t deal with the Lancers!” said Supply.
“Is this the recycling committee?” Spalding asked as if by saying this, the answer was self-obvious. That’s because it was—to him.
The other men exchanged looks, and Spalding looked at the Supply Chief blankly.
“Come on, you all know what the recycling committee is for,” Spalding said with irritation.
“Uh…repurposing useless byproducts,” Supply said, and Spalding could see other heads nodding in agreement.
“We’ve got the head of every major ship Department in the Fleet here on this committee; surely you fools didn’t think all the recycling committee did was re-purpose used metals and plastics,” he said belligerently.
Embarrassed looks—even from those who he figured should have known better—appeared on the faces of the assembly.
“What? You thought you blighters were just humoring crazy old Spalding when he up and decided to have a meeting about marginal byproducts?” He threw his hands in the air and scowled. “Look here, you lot,” he leveled a finger, “the head of every major ship department is always a part of the recycling committee, because only committee members have the override for the biological lockout protocols on the waste recycling units. As department heads, it’s our job to manage our departments how we see fit. But when a problem comes up that goes outside of your departmental mandate—one that might need recycling,” he said exaggerating the R word, “then you come here to the committee and present your case. No one is allowed to operate the override without the consent of the full committee but, by the same token, no one wants to have to take lower deck business to the upper deck unless it genuinely needs doing.”
“So when you say ‘recycle’…” Supply looked horrified.
“How the blazes do you think we kept crew purges down back during the reconstruction without the ability to recycle the problems that occasionally cropped up,” Spalding stared at them, dumbfounded. Any fool knew that military discipline was predicated on the naked use of force, but this gaggle seemed oblivious to the simple facts of human nature! “I won’t tolerate a few bad apples ruining the whole barrel for lack of a little recycling,” Spalding pressed on, hoping the slower-than-average group would start to catch up. “That way leads to mutiny and chaos.”
“I refuse to be part of any extralegal activities!” Supply stood up indignantly. “I’m leaving.”
“Sit yerself back down in that chair before I put my foot through you,” Spalding snapped. “You can vote ‘no’ and no one will care too much one way or the other, so long as you’re not rude about it, but you’re in this till the end. So fear not: you’ll swing with the rest if you squeal.”
“How does this help us deal with the Lancers?” Lesner asked, obviously trying to help steer the meeting along in the right direction.
Spalding gave him a relieved look and nodded in thanks. “I’ve got a couple kilotons worth of problems the committee needs to seriously consider addressing,” he said gravely, and by that he meant they’d better well support his plan or heads would roll—unless of course they came up with a better idea, in which case he’d be all ears.
Blank looks were all that met him, however.
“Really?!” Spalding demanded jolted out of his reverie and starting to become frustrated because of it. “You don’t know we go by the kilogram weight measurements in a man’s jacket to single out problems without using names!? Although…” he stopped to consider, “in this case it’s the whole blasted Lancer division, so I s’pose really there’s no point in getting cute about it.”
“I knew about the committee, and some of what went, on but I’ve never been in an actual meeting before,” Lesner said guardedly.
“What I want to know,” Supply burst out, “is just how we know that this ‘recycling’ business isn’t just another made-up tradition foisted on us in the attempt to push us in a direction we should never even be contemplating moving toward!” Then, seeing Spalding was about to burst a blood vessel, he lifted a hand and continued, “But even if it’s a real, genuinely historical thing, I believe my point still stands on its own merits. What in the galaxy are we doing here? Shut it down, men, before we open a spoiled can we can’t close back up!” “Coward!” Spading raged, shaking his fist at the nervous nelly from Supply and then pounding the desk for emphasis. “The Little Admiral settled this business for the moment—temporarily. Now, he says it’s not, mutiny…and that’s fine since he’s the Admiral. But this is the lower deck council! I ask you: when have cultural differences ever been a cover for more than twenty marine officers and top enlisted men strapping on power armor and trying to kill a Fleet Commander?!”
That seemed to put a few of the officers who had been wavering, or leaning toward Supply’s ‘hands off’ attitude to pull back.
“They even waited to pull their happy little homicidal antics until I wa
s knee-deep in the innards of an unstable fusion generator, else this meeting would be going a lot differently, let me tell you!” he declared.
“Or maybe never even have happened in the first place,” Supply muttered to his seatmate, “wouldn’t that have been a happy day?”
“Listen up,” the old Engineer said sharply, “I say no one in this room would have been let off scot-free if it had been our department that suddenly up and decided it had the right to kill off unwanted fleet officers.”
A sudden chill swept through the officers, as the connotations of lower deck men being free and able to attack—and kill—anyone whose orders they found disagreeable were processed by the room’s occupants.
“That’s why it’s time to teach this bunch of happy-handed killers that upper deck business and lower deck business are separate—and never the two should meet,” a vein started throbbing on his head, “if we stand back and wash our hands of it, I ask you…how long until we’re all dead from the exact same cause and the Fleet is swept with chaos and anarchy? We’ve got to step on this and do it hard—before others start getting ideas and think maybe it’s time they changed leaders.”
“You think this could actually happen in my department?” Supply looked shocked and dismayed, as if the thought of the people under him trying to kill him never occurred before.
“I see,” Lesner said grimly, “you’re thinking it could adversely affect the Fleet if an example isn’t made—and you think we’re the ones to make it?”
“We’ve got to draw a line in the sand,” Spalding said flatly, “we need to remind that rogue department there’s a reason you come to speak with the rest of the lower deck departments before taking the matter to the XO—or, as Murphy is my bleepin’ witness, making a blasted move to remove a ship’s commander!”
Spalding was flat-out offended by the gall of it. You just didn’t remove a ship Captain from his command; it was an inviolate rule of cold space. How much more did that go for a Fleet Commander?
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