by Sara King
“No,” Quad babbled, overwhelmed by the questions, unable to think.
“Well?!” the man demanded. “You gonna open the doors, kid, or am I gonna stand here in the hallway with my thumb up my ass while your friend supposedly bleeds to death?”
Because the sound of the man’s irritation locked up every muscle Quad had, he hit the button to open the door in a spasm of horror. As the doors started to slide open, revealing an impatient, balding man on the other side, Quad panicked and pushed himself to another corner of the Outer Bounds, then left the galaxy altogether.
CHAPTER 25: Modern Medicine
5th of June, 3006
The Junkyard
Fortune Orbital, Daytona 6 Cluster, Outer Bounds
Doberman woke to the sound of a bone saw. He sat up and looked around, simultaneously doing a sonic and thermal scan of his surroundings while prepping his armaments.
Anna was stripped down to her skin lying on a table, a surgeon cutting open her chest. The room itself looked as if it were made for the task, however, so Doberman left his guns where they were.
The surgery was definitely a part of some large man-made structure, likely a very large interstellar spaceship or the Fortune Orbital. Since Doberman knew not enough time had passed for them to make it to the Orbital—his log showed less than four minutes from the strange shutdown of his body to the time he had awoken in the operating room—he had to assume they were on a Coalition spaceship. As far as he knew, the rebellion didn’t have any spaceships this big.
And yet, if they were trying to save Anna’s life so they could interrogate her later, they had made a gross error in leaving Doberman functional. Perhaps they thought his mysterious shutdown had been permanent? Or perhaps they didn’t realize he was a robot…
“You must’ve just bumped your head,” the surgeon said. “Lucky you. I couldn’t have fixed both of you at once, and I always fix the kids first. Next time you see your Cobrani friend, tell the little chickenshit not to bail when he’s got someone bleeding out with a severed lung.”
Doberman approached the table and peered into Anna’s chest cavity with a sonic scan. Indeed, Anna’s right lung had been more or less sliced in half by the knifelike piece of shrapnel that had lodged into her vertebrae.
“You got any medical training?” the doctor demanded, dropping the bone-saw to the table.
Doberman thought of the manuals and textbooks that Anna had insisted he download before their little ‘project’ with Tatiana Eyre. “Some,” he said.
“Good. Grab the rib spreaders. This is gonna get messy.”
“Where should I wash my hands?” Doberman asked, glancing around. The sink was stuffed full of boxes of medical supplies. It obviously hadn’t been used in a while.
“Wash your hands?” the man asked, frowning. He wiped his nose on his arm. “Why?”
Doberman blinked that a man of his profession could be ignorant of the current epidemiology studies. “Even with first degree nannites, there’s a point-two percent chance of a nannite counter-strain taking hold in a wound if the surgeon does not adhere to traditional ablution techniques before operation, including standard electrical shock cleansers.”
“I hate those,” the man said, sniffing and wiping his nose again. “Tingle makes me jittery. Besides. My place is clean. No contranites here.”
“I’d like to wash my hands,” Doberman said. “I have a higher chance of carrying them due to the high metal concentrations of my body composition.”
“And I’m Geo Thane with ruby eyes and crystal hair,” the man snorted. He gave a disdainful laugh. “Don’t be a pussy and grab the spreaders. You get squeamish on me, your kid’s gonna die.”
…your kid… Doberman was surprised that the man couldn’t tell he was a robot. Sure, he’d been making certain upgrades as Anna slept, but it was actually somewhat…satisfying…to be overlooked as non-human. He noted that in his log, deciding to try and pass for human from that moment on, rather than robot.
“And what did my Cobrani friend have to say about our emergency?” Doberman said, picking up the rib spreaders. He put them into place and cranked them down.
“Nothing,” the surgeon grunted. “Just called me up, woke me from a dead sleep, saying his friend was bleeding out. He didn’t mention her lung was cut in half.” Bare-handed, he reached his arms into Anna’s chest and yanked out the offending piece of platinum shrapnel, which was razor-sharp, actually cutting himself as he pulled it free. “Aanaho!” the man cried, tossing it aside. “What attacked her, a Nephyr?” Sticking a bloody thumb into his mouth, he went back to rearranging her internal organs with one hand, then cemented them with a spray-on nannite adhesive.
“We were caught in an explosion,” Doberman said. “Did you get a good look at who brought us here?”
At that, the man hesitated momentarily, looking back up at Doberman with something akin to concern. “I—think I did.”
Doberman applied pressure to a gushing artery as they waited for the nannites to take hold. “‘Think?’”
“Well, shit, it was the weirdest thing,” the surgeon said, applying a nannite paste to the inside of Anna’s chest cavity around the torn flesh and splintered rib the shrapnel had left her. “One minute, I was talking to the little shit over the intercom, but for some reason he’s not opening the door. The next, the door slides open and I think I see him one instant, but he’s gone the next. Like one of those after-images you get after someone shines a light in your eyes, you know? I search the whole room—waste like thirty seconds on the little prick—but he’s gone. Flat gone. No way in or out of the room.”
Doberman cocked his head. Over the last week, he had thought he had caught glimpses—only momentary—of a boy on sonic or thermal spectrum scans before he disappeared again, almost like he could sense the scan and fled before Doberman could react. Doberman had written it off as a programming error because visible spectrum analysis never showed anything, and the Babies’ newly-designed cuttlesilk upgrades blocked thermal and sonic resonances as well.
With someone else having made a similar sighting, however, Doberman rewound the appearances in his mind, picking good thermal and sonic images of the boy he’d been seeing and comparing them to that of the one time he’d seen the child in visible light.
The images were identical. By his estimates of bone structure, a six-year-old Cobrani with blue eyes and a white patch of hair, stunted like Anna.
“Where are we?” Doberman asked, beginning to suspect it was not a Coalition ship and he was not actually going to have to rampage through the medical wing once the surgeon had assured Anna’s survival.
“Junkyard,” the doctor said, giving him a sideways glance. “And that’s all you’re gonna get. Nobody’s supposed to come to this place—haven’t for like ten years. I go to you. That’s the arrangement. Only reason the kid is even here is because somebody pre-paid, and I’m a man of my word.” He flicked blood from his hands and grabbed a rag—which was covered in blood and viscera from previous operations—to wipe his fingers.
Doberman blinked, reassessing the time difference in his head. To be on the Orbital was…impossible.
The man blew his nose into the bloody trash can, then wiped it with a relatively clean spot of towel. “Stupid cold,” he muttered in explanation. Then he gestured at Anna with the rag. “So in a couple hours, when your little friend’s good as new, you guys are getting hooded and led out of here in the dark so you have no idea where this place is. I treat some extremely important people, and this place has gotta be free if they need it. As soon as she’s breathing on her own again, she’s outta here. My place is sure as hell not gonna be monopolized by some seven-year-old beggar kid when we’ve got war-wounded coming in.”
“I don’t see the need in being hooded,” Doberman said. Indeed, he could see twelve walls—and all the junkies, panhandlers, and tube vendors they contained—in any direction, and had isolated their location on the Coalition’s map of the Junkyard.
“You’re getting hooded,” the man said, yanking the spreaders free and slapping Anna’s chest back into place. “She’s gonna have trouble breathing for a few days. Not sure the nanos will fix that lung entirely—might be short of breath the rest of her life. If she is, she probably won’t be working a pitchfork or shovel for the colonists anytime soon. Not that it really matters. Those dumbass collies are gonna be knocked back into the Stone Age before long anyway. Geo’s already got it under control.”
Doberman cocked his head. “He does?” As far as he knew, Geo Thane had promised the rebels fifty ships to take Rath.
“You haven’t heard?” The man snickered as he spread more of the white nannite paste across Anna’s chest. “He’s gathering smugglers, paying them a sack of Yolk apiece to fly for him. That’s each day. Gonna launch a counter-attack on that idiot Runaway Joel and his motley crew. Something about Joel killing his son.”
Doberman was aware that Magali Landborn had killed Martin Thane in the bowels of Yolk Factory 14, but to tell the surgeon so was to give away his position as an insurgent. If there was anything he had learned from Anna, it was how to lie by omission. “Sounds like fun. He need an extra hand?”
“You’ve flown ships?” the doctor asked, looking over at him dubiously.
“I have that training,” Doberman said. Though he had been happy to cede that position to Mona Rohrer, the Babies’ official ‘pilot’. Though the thirteen-year-old’s forte was ship construction, theory, and aerophysics, she’d already piloted her tiny, hand-built interstellar craft around the system and back. Alone.
“Well, I’m sure they’d take you. Geo wants to make a statement to those idiots down there disrupting the Yolk trade. Show those collies who’s pulling the strings around here.”
“By flying against Magali Landborn,” Doberman said, knowing that Geo had already offered to back Magali and the Fortuners—that he was doing the opposite was indeed news to him.
The surgeon snorted. “By obliterating her. They’re sending everything they’ve got at that gun-toting tramp. You know she’s actually ‘prophesized’ to lead Fortune to freedom, right? By an imbecile with the Wide, I hear.” He cackled, then hawked up a glob of phlegm and spat it in the trash beside the operating table. “Geo wants the woman alive, if we can manage it. A whole bag of nodules to anyone who can bring her in. Word is he’s gonna take her home and make her his pet.”
From what Doberman knew of Magali Landborn, he didn’t think that would end well for Geo. “So when do they need me?” Doberman offered.
“Tomorrow,” the doctor said. “I overheard a couple of them talking in the diner. They’ve got over two hundred smugglers together. The Coalition’s giving them guns—then they’re gonna hit those collie idiots with everything they’ve got.”
“I heard there was some issue with comm…” Doberman offered.
The doctor gave him a frown. “Actually, yeah. There’s calls coming in all over the Orbital that people are acting nuts or just fell over dead. I actually thought that was what happened to you guys—you just got in line and paid quicker than everyone else.”
“Mind if I see those payment records?” Doberman asked, thinking he could possibly use that information to track down their mystery rescuer. And there was no doubt in Doberman’s mind that the kid had saved both of their lives. The blast would have incinerated Anna and quite possibly wiped all of his programming, if not melted his circuitry.
The doctor, however, gave him an extremely suspicious frown. “Why would you want that?”
“Just curious which account he used,” Doberman said.
“Then ask him,” the doctor said, flipping Anna’s cut-open shirt back over her chest. “And when you see him again, tell him it’s double for drop-offs.” He picked up his bloody rag again and wiped the rest of the gore from his hands. “It’ll take maybe ten, fifteen minutes to figure out if she’ll pull through. If she does, you’ve got another hour before I want you outta here. I’ve got other patients to treat.”
“And if she doesn’t?” Doberman asked.
“I dump her body in the trash and you leave a lot sooner,” the doctor replied.
Doberman, who was currently monitoring Anna’s biometrics, knew she had a high chance of survival, unless the nannite cream that the doctor had used was composed of sub-par technologies. He magnified on the cream, then blinked when he realized it was composed of only third-degree nannites—the kind used to seal small cuts on hands, elbows, and knees.
“You didn’t use first-degree nannites,” Doberman commented.
“You think the guys who come in here have the kind of money it takes to pay for top-grade nannites?” the doctor snorted. “It’s a colonist kid. Who gives a shit about a beggar kid? Of course I gave her the third-degree stuff.”
“My friend paid for the best,” Doberman said, taking a leap.
The man snorted and shook his head. “I only give the good stuff to Geo or his lieutenants. They’re the only ones who pay in Yolk.”
Interesting, that their mysterious benefactor seemed to be hooked up with smugglers. Doberman decided to look into that later, once he was certain that Anna would survive.
Five minutes passed, then ten, and Anna’s biorhythms did not stabilize. At fifteen minutes, her remaining respiratory functions began to degrade.
“Do you have any of the good stuff on hand?” Doberman asked, watching Anna begin to turn blue. “First degree wound technology? Preferably injectable?”
“It’s always on hand,” the doctor scoffed. “But you don’t have enough money to buy even half a dose of—”
Doberman raised his arm and unsheathed all sixteen of his guns, grenade launchers, and lasers in an unmistakable bristling of metal and weaponry, all clearly aimed at the surgeon’s face.
The man swallowed.
“Immediately, if you would be so kind.”
The surgeon stumbled over to his shelving unit, face fixed on the armaments that followed his path across the room.
“This century would be nice,” Doberman said, as his friend’s heart began to stutter. “If she dies, you become paste.”
“Shit,” the surgeon said. “Shit!” He fumbled through his jars and vials, dragged one of the more expensive-looking ones out, ran over to another storage unit, grabbed a syringe, and filled it with the whitish solution. Then, dashing, he ran across the room, found Anna’s arm, and jabbed the needle into a vein, plunging the nannites into her bloodstream.
Which would have worked, had her heart been beating.
“Shit!” the man cried, floundering around like a panicking whale. “I can’t give her CPR—I’ll punch right into her chest. He started haphazardly pawing at the bloody instruments on the table beside her.”
“Excuse me.” Doberman bodily lifted the whimpering man up and set him aside. Then, with precise, directional shocks, he re-stabilized her heartbeat, which pushed the higher-grade nannites through her system, which immediately began to close the wounds that their inferior cousins hadn’t quite conquered. Once she was breathing normally again, he found the doctor’s needle and thread and began stitching up her cut-open shirt—he knew she wouldn’t want to leave the room naked.
When Anna opened her eyes, she groaned and immediately sat up, holding her head. Within an instant, her brown eyes found the doctor huddled against one side of the room and hardened. “Let me guess,” she wheezed, “the bozo used a shitty, third-degree nannite cocktail before deciding to mend the error of his ways and give me something stronger, which only made the competing bots fight each other as much as mend my wounds, leaving me feeling like I’m the site of World War VI.”
“That is correct, Anna,” Doberman said. “You were suffering from a badly damaged lung and a rapidly-progressing tension pneumothorax, but his choice of nanotechnology was not cleared for anything more complicated than a six-inch incision in a major muscle group less than an inch deep.”
“Listen, I have a practice to run,” the man said. “The girl
is obviously going to live. If you don’t mind…” He gestured towards the door pointedly. “I have other people needing attention.”
“What, so you can screw them over, too?” Anna slid off the bench, groaning. Her breath, Doberman noticed, was ragged. “What the hell did he do to me?” She glanced down at her shirt, which Doberman had stitched back together. Frowning, she pulled up her shirt to reveal the pink scar that went from groin to sternum. Then, lifting her head, her eyes fell on the dirty rag, then the previously-used implements, frowning. “Dobie, how bad was the lung damage?”
“A third of it was severed on the right side,” Doberman said.
“You’re telling me he cracked my chest open and my lung was cut in half and he gave me third-degree wound nannites.”
“Yes, Anna.”
Anna cocked her head. “Dobie, crack open his chest, remove a third of his right lung and then administer his third degree nannites. If he lives, allow him to re-administer first-degree fleshbinders.”
She started towards the door, then paused to glance back. “Oh, and make it fast. Since we’re already in the Junkyard, I wanna have a chat with Geo.” Then she departed, never bothering to listen to the doctor’s screams as Doberman complied with her requests.
“Who’s the little shit, and why did you bring her tiny germy body into my office?” Geo slapped his holoparch down on his desk in disgust, already pissed that he couldn’t get into contact with half his pilots for the upcoming raid on the colonists. It was almost like everyone within range of a working comm system had simply vanished. Add that to the fact that this unarmed, dirt-covered moron had somehow gotten past security and he felt like stabbing something. Even worse, the grimy scavenger’s equally filthy child was completely covered in fresh blood, and it was probably leaving smears of Junkyard urchin disease all over his personal chambers.
Typical tube vagrants. They were probably going to ask him for money for nannites to cure their ailing wife and mother, then go spend it on booze… Geo reached for the button for his guards.
