by Ilsa J. Bick
“Yeah, yeah, and eating gravel for breakfast. Look, this guy needs a lung. So you have a better idea? Like I’m supposed to go to all this trouble to stitch up an artery but let him suffocate?”
“I’m just saying. She’s doing her job.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Kahayn said again, exasperated. She blew out. Her blue surgical mask puffed then crinkled back in a papery rustle of accordion folds across her nose and mouth. He was right, of course, not that it mattered much because the patients just kept on coming. The medical complex was short-staffed, nothing new about that either because they were always short-staffed, the casualties streaming in for replacements, and there was never enough to go around. Kahayn felt like one of those rats on a little wire wheel, running and running and running nowhere really fast.
Nothing was getting better either. The air was bad and getting worse, and there were a lot of people with lungs so sooty they looked more like bloody bags of pulverized charcoal. Cancers in the bone, the liver, the gut; eating people alive a piece at a time. The whole thing was so damned futile.
Don’t think. Kahayn stared down at that ruin of a chest, what was left of a man’s lung. Nothing you can do. Just work and keep on working but don’t think.
So she worked steadily like an automaton and was a suture away from finishing with the artery when the surgical tech banged back in, door whap-flapping in his wake. “That was the ER. They want you down there.”
“Uh-huh, well, I’m kind of busy now. Major Arin’s on; he can handle it.”
“It was the major who called.”
“Did he say what it was about?” Kahayn held her hand out again, palm up, and the nurse slapped a needle holder into her gloved palm. Kahayn poked the wire-thin tip of the curved needle into arterial wall, rotated her right wrist counterclockwise until the needle appeared, and then tied off a friction knot in a double-wrap throw followed by a single. She nodded. “Okay, that’ll do it for the artery. Now all we got to do is wait for that lung. We’re just damned lucky he didn’t need a new hose. Arguing with the major about that would’ve been fun.” She looked over at the tech. “Well? What did Arin say?”
“Major Arin didn’t say, exactly.”
“Meaning?”
“Just…he said it was some sort of casualty brought in under heavy guard.”
“So it’s a Jabari? Or some other freak? Whatever it is, Arin’s going to have to harvest this one on his own. But let me know if there’s a good lung. I could use it up here.”
“No, this one’s still alive. Major Arin said he wants you to break scrub; he needs another opinion. He sent Captain Storn up to scrub in for you.” A pause. “Major Arin also wanted you to know that Colonel Blate’s on his way.”
“Okay,” said Kahayn, though it wasn’t. If Security Director Blate was involved, things never worked out well. She’d had a lot of experience with that. With Janel…
Can’t think about that now. Just go do the job.
She peeled off her smeary gloves, then said to the lieutenant, “Wait for Storn, and don’t touch anything.”
On her way down to the ER, she passed Breynar hustling back with a lumpy polystyrene sac full of the lung she’d wanted. He looked a question, but she hooked a thumb over her shoulder and he skedaddled. As she turned right to take the stairs, she happened to glance left down the long hall. She spotted the major marching hard-ass-style and double-quick at the head of a phalanx of administrative types, and as they did a hard left for the OR and disappeared, Kahayn figured she’d just done a whole bunch of really good work for nothing.
Death for breakfast. Death for dinner. She banged open the door to the stairwell. Yeah. Typical day.
Chapter
5
Bashir was screaming; there was blood everywhere, and there were flames. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t get to him; he wouldn’t take her hand, damn him, and then it was too late because she was swept away by black water that was infinitely deep. So she hung there now, alone, just like a diver so far down the world above was a memory, or maybe a nightmare, a very bad dream…
Lense’s eyes jammed open in panic. Her head hurt; there was blood in her mouth; her face was wet. And she couldn’t see. There was nothing. No light. No stars. No clouds. Nothing.
Oh, God! God, no! I can’t be blind, I can’t!
She thrashed and the blackness gave, and that’s when she realized that she was floating facedown and that this was water, or maybe oil because the stuff was dense and viscous and sucked at her limbs. Something was still screaming. But it wasn’t Bashir. It was her suit nagging that she’d better get a move on because her air was nearly gone.
I made it. She remembered Bashir’s bloody face. She remembered churning clouds and a flash as the runabout blew apart and then her stabbing at controls, programming in a descent. Reverse thrusters must have engaged before I passed out. Must have landed in that water. She rolled, and then she was on her back and staring through gooey rivulets more like molten tar than water.
Somehow she made it to shore. The sea was rimmed with brown sand hemmed by gray bluffs of bare rock. She was gasping by the time she pulled herself from the muck, every breath feeling as if she were sipping air through a straw. Then she cracked her helmet, twisted it, dragged it off and hoped like hell her sensors hadn’t been completely whacky. (But, really, she didn’t have much of a choice and there was no way she was suffocating in that suit, no damn way.) She sprawled, gasping like a hooked fish on a dock.
Eventually, she pushed up to a sit. She didn’t exactly feel better, just less horrible. The air stank like rotten eggs, and tasted worse, like something had crawled into her mouth, defecated, and died. She worked her mouth, spat out a gob of rust-brown saliva. The air was loaded with sulfur dioxide; she remembered that from her sensor readings. What else? She tried to think past the roar in her head. Nuclear waste but not lethal in the short term. (Give it a year, two, then she was in trouble. But she sure as heck wasn’t going to be here by then.) Methane, copper arsenicals, crystalline silica, and ozone: all bad. Sensors had said there were mountains north of the sea, so she must’ve beached there. A lot of land around but mottled, almost moth-eaten. A patchwork of parched, dusty brown tracts alternating with barren stands of twisted, shriveled trunks. What looked like a broad, red-brown desert valley; brown and yellow-banded mesa west and east sprouting from the desert like flat-topped mushrooms.
But there was a city to the south. She remembered that, too. An image flashed in her brain: crashing through clouds, rolling away from the fireball of the Missouri and looking south. Spying a dense carpet of metal, glass, and odd jumbles of remnants that had to be buildings. But they were haphazard and set at weird angles, like the blocks of a toy city kicked over by a kid sick of playing games. She remembered that there was one, very big structure, a central hub with four spokes that fed to a large outer ring. Maybe she could get there, blend in, figure what she was dealing with…
Because I’m marooned here. The thought hit like a phaser blast in the chest: an explosion of pain and heat, and her innards scooped out all rolled into one. Her stomach lurched, and her forehead filmed with clammy sweat.
They’re never going to find me. They won’t even know where to look. It could be days before they figure out we’re missing and now I’m never getting out of here, I’m stuck, and I’m never getting out, I’ve got to get out, get out, get me out, let me out…!
“Shut up.” She squeezed her eyes tight. “Shut up, shut up! Don’t panic. Nothing’s for sure. They might find you; they’re probably looking right now, so just shut up, nothing’s certain, absolutely nothing.” But she knew she was lying because there was, of course, one thing of which she was very certain.
Julian Bashir was dead.
Chapter
6
Kahayn smelled the ER before she saw it: a sick, gassy odor of wet gangrene mingling with the full, ripe stink of feces, old blood, and fresh vomit. Stronger than usual today, and when she turned th
e corner down the last hall, she saw a double line of gurneys wedged head to toe along the left and right walls; a patient cocooned under a sheet, a ream of paperwork on a clipboard, triaging each casualty by diagnosis and urgency. (They were all sick, and they were all urgent. Again, typical.)
A lanky man with pewter-gray hair stepped into the corridor. Arin wore blue scrubs that blood had dyed black and a dingy white coat that never seemed to come clean no matter what. Spotting her, he stumped down the hall, favoring that gimp knee of his.
“You took long enough,” he said, jabbing a finger at the bridge of a pair of owlish, steel-rimmed specs that had slid to the tip of his nose.
“Bleeder,” she said as they headed for the triage suite. “Lung rot. The usual. So, what’s all the fuss about?”
Arin blew out, stabbed his glasses back into place again. “All kinds of craziness.” Older by almost two decades, Arin wore glasses because he was a tad old-fashioned. Said he’d keep the eyes, until they fell out on their own; no marbles for him just yet, thanks. She envied him the eyes. They were so…natural. Pupils worked very smoothly; you could see the iris muscles contract or lengthen like some sort of miracle, and the tracking from side to side was phenomenal. So efficient. No glitches at all. “Some casualty that slipped past the guards at the perimeter,” he said.
“Hunh.” She was impressed. “That takes some doing. Guards found him?”
“On patrol, yeah.”
“How’d he get in?”
Arin shrugged. His limp was worse today, and his knee squealed. “They don’t know. One look, though, and they brought it here. Figured they sure weren’t going to get stuck without getting some kind of clearance.”
“So clear him. Shouldn’t be that difficult.”
“It’s really not that simple,” said Arin. “Trust me on this.”
“Why do I feel like the worst is yet to come?”
He eyed her over his glasses and didn’t smile. “Because it is.”
They pushed into the ER, past a knot of nurses and one physician working frenetically over one patient who Kahayn could tell by the blood spatter wasn’t going to make it. The ER was arranged in a long rectangle, with curtained bays lining each wall and a triage station centered at the head. Behind the triage station were two critical-care bays. (A joke: You made it to the ER, you were critical. The staff was so overwhelmed that, anything less, and they just laughed in your face.) Kahayn spotted a quartet of uniforms, three with their rifles at the ready. That was bad. She didn’t like rifles anywhere near the ER.
But it was the man who wore the fourth uniform that told her, instantly, whoever this patient was, he wasn’t run of the mill. The uniform was a bullish man with a neck so thick and short his head seemed glued to his shoulders, and a pair of goggle, walleyes that always unsettled her.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered. “How’d he get here so fast?”
Arin grunted. “Like I said, it’s not that simple. Blate’s people told him about the intruder, and then he showed up just as I was getting started. Since then, they haven’t let me near it. Been making all kinds of noise about taking the patient over to detention. I wouldn’t let them, not unless you ordered me to. Even threatened to call Nerrit over at High Command, and then they kind of backed down. Barely, but enough to buy me enough time to get you down here.”
“This must be some patient.”
“You have this really annoying habit of reiterating the obvious.” An exasperated sigh. Arin flexed his left knee, and his prosthetic clicked and whirred. “Sorry. Dragging you in was the only way I could think of to keep them from taking it out of here.”
“No, you did right,” she said, only belatedly registering that Arin kept saying it. But then she was within earshot of the security director and attempted what she hoped was something bordering on a neutral expression. “Director Blate.”
“Colonel.” Blate’s left eye was especially bad and wandered, giving him a walleyed stare that Kahayn always found disturbing because she was never sure which artificial eye to focus on. She suspected that this was precisely what the security director wanted. Blate said, “I hope Major Arin didn’t pull you from anything important.”
No, no, just a little chest bleed, lung replacement, nothing big. “As I understand it, you’ve kept Dr. Arin from examining his patient.”
“Indeed.” Blate’s right eye zeroed in. “This is not your ordinary casualty.”
“Gee, you can tell all that without an exam?” She nodded beyond the guards at a back bay curtained from view by a gauzy yellow, nearly full-length drape. There was a gap between the floor and the bottom of the curtain, and Kahayn saw the gurney’s black rubber-wheeled castors and the disembodied off-white flats of a nurse crossing left to right. “And I thought that’s what you needed doctors for. If you’re so good, Blate, why the hell do you need us then?”
“Idit,” Arin murmured.
“I didn’t require your assistance,” said Blate. “I still don’t. I ordered Major Arin to stand down. He became belligerent and threatened to call High Command, and then he insisted that you had to authorize release of the casualty to our custody.”
“Damn straight,” said Kahayn. “Now, as I get it, your people brought the patient here. I hate to point this out, but we’re doctors. Yeah, sure, we’re all military, but this is a hospital. We see casualties, only we call them patients. We even treat them. So since this is a patient and we’re on my turf, I have command authority, not you. The only person who can override my authority is the base commander, or Nerrit. You’re welcome to call the CO, but I suspect he’ll side with me. So the faster you let me clear this guy, the sooner your people can get at him. What say you get out of my way?”
Blate raised a hand, his right, the one that clicked when the fingers moved. “It’s not that simple. We need to—”
“Anyone says something’s not simple one more time, I’ll gonna rip out his tonsils.” Kahayn pushed past and yanked at the curtain. There was a rasp of metal; the curtain scrolled to one side. “Now, what…” she began—and stopped dead in her tracks.
Two nurses and a tech hovered uncertainly around a gurney. On the gurney was a biped, lying prone. The fact that the patient was bipedal and had two arms to boot was a relief because, with all that radioactive sludge out there, she didn’t take anything for granted. But she couldn’t tell about the head because the patient wore some sort of soot-stained, off-white suit with a bulbous helmet of a design she’d never seen in her life. There were patches of something rust-red and black smeared on the suit. Red and yellow lights winked on some sort of control panel mounted like a bracelet on the left wrist. There were more red than yellow lights, and that was usually a bad sign. But she didn’t have a clue about what the lights meant, nor could she figure the power source. The helmet probably had some kind of polymer faceplate but whether it was clear or not, she didn’t know because the helmet was seared and sooty as an old filter of an air repurifier that hadn’t been changed in three weeks.
But one thing she did understand. The patient was writhing, restless, pumping his legs in slow motion and getting nowhere fast. She knew pain when she saw it. She knew trouble.
“As I said, Colonel,” said Blate. He stumped between her and the gurney; his right eye tracked in with a tiny whirr. “Things are really not that simple.”
Chapter
7
There was this big joke about S.C.E. Those engineer guys show up, and everything goes terribly wrong. Some kind of cosmic curse thing going. Lense figured she had the S.C.E. curse but good because everything that could go wrong had, and in a really big way. Like now, for instance: stranded God-knew-where with nothing but the clothes on her back, and a bulky EVA suit whose only useful item included an emergency locator beacon. Otherwise, no emergency rations, no tools, no water. No Julian. No nothing.
Tacky with sweat, Lense battled through a thicket of prickles, her arms full of spiky boughs sticky with sap and stinking of resin. She’d stripped to
her black tee, and her arms were crisscrossed with scratches. The branches were from some sort of stunted, indigenous conifer with a gnarly black trunk. Only thing growing besides these damn prickles and a heck of a lot of scrub grass and chaparral. She was headed downhill toward a natural depression she’d discovered near a slow creek slicked with scum northwest of the inland sea.
She was huffing like she was making an ascent. Her dark curls were plastered to her scalp, and sweat trickled down the back of her neck. Maybe it would get cooler when that weird orange sun went down. Then she eyed that sky and figured no way. Maybe four degrees C cooler, and that’d be it. Too many clouds trapping way too much heat, leaving the air hot and turgid as sludge. Her chest was tight, as if a metal band were twisted around it. Her head roared with a headache so bad, she thought her brain was going to dribble right out of her ears. Her gut was doing flips, pushing bile into the back of her throat.
The air was death by slow poison. She had symptoms like making altitude too fast the way pikers did with Everest on Earth, or Vulcan’s Mount Seleya, not acclimating first to make up for the lower partial pressure of oxygen at altitude. Probably she’d get better in a couple of days. But she didn’t want to be anywhere on this rock in a couple of days and so hoped she wasn’t going to find out.
And she was thirsty. Grit crunched between her teeth and her tongue felt glued to the roof of her mouth. Dying of thirst was really unpleasant, but she didn’t dare drink water she hadn’t boiled. For one thing, the water didn’t look that inviting and there was nothing living in it so far as she could tell, except for some scummy kind of sea grass. But she wasn’t ready to die because of desperation either. Not that she thought boiling would do a whole hell of a lot. That water was loaded with contaminants. Residual radioactive ash, polychlorinated phenols, industrial waste. Probably she could boil away the more volatile phenols and other organic carcinogens. Still no guarantee, though, and there was nothing to do about the ash. Maybe filter it through her uniform top? No, that’d take a long time and the uniform was a tight weave, not very porous. Probably more would evaporate away than drip through. So that was a nonstarter.
