by Ian Douglas
Hancock led the way through the door, bent low and running as fast as his exoskeleton-braced armor could drive him, firing his weapon as he ran. Hutchison followed, the two of them zigzagging across the plain, making their way toward the gully in the ridge perhaps fifty meters away. I heard a loud clank behind us. The inner airlock hatch was closed, but someone was hammering at the other side. More Salvationists, probably.
Gregory exchanged a look with me and Leighton. “Who’s next?” he asked.
“You,” Leighton told him. “Then you, Doc. I’ll bring up the rear.”
“Now wait a minute—” I began, but No-Joy cut me off.
“Just shut the fuck up and do it, e-Car!” she yelled. “You have the stuff you downloaded off the Bloodworld system!” She patted her plasma weapon. “And I have Betsy! So I bring up the rear!”
I’d never known she’d named her weapon. “Yes, Sergeant,” I said, angry. Women have been serving with the Corps since Nancy Brewer on the U.S.S. Constitution in the War of 1812, though no one at the time realized it. I was well aware that chivalry has no place in the military, that I was supposed to see Joy Leighton as a Marine, not a woman. But, damn it, I didn’t want to run and leave her behind.
Another explosion rattled the building, bringing down a section of the overhead and eliciting yells and screams from the bound prisoners. Someone was still hammering on the inner hatch; they would have to take care of their own people.
I gave my Mk. 30 carbine a quick check, gripped it in both gloves, and ducked through the outer hatch and into the open. The sky was almost at full light now, though the sun wasn’t visible yet. Or maybe it was being blocked by the wreckage around the Salvation starport. The Roc still hung in the sky overhead, looming and terrifying, and I could see three tiny turrets in its belly tracking back and forth as they poured fire out against the ridge and the building both. A brilliant flash lit up the craft’s belly, followed closely by a second; those had been 100-megajoule plasma cannon rounds. The Qesh had destroyed the one we’d brought to the OP on the other side of the mountain, but Baumgartner had two more. He must have set them up on the ridge, and was using them to engage the Roc. I could see some gaping holes in the Roc’s belly now, and one of the weapons turrets had been knocked out of action.
I stopped watching the sky and focused on running. I ducked around the corner of a ruined starport structure—a wrecked crane, I think it was—and came face-to-face with a Qesh warrior.
It was one of those frozen-time moments—like being on G-boost and A-Time together, with your thoughts racing like lightning while your body was frozen by the chains of physics. I brought my carbine up, trying to aim, but my arms were moving so slowly. The Qesh was moving too, trying to twist its torso around, trying to bring its own weapon to bear. . . .
I started snapping off rounds even before I had the carbine lined up with the Jacker, but I continued dragging the weapon up and over, trying to aim for the helmet. I’m not sure I was thinking things through at that point, but I knew on an instinctive level that the helmet was vulnerable. Qesh helmets, like ours, didn’t have visors that were always transparent, but they did have a black strip that was probably an optical sensor of some sort. A half-meg pulse might not pierce that body armor, but burn out its optics and it would be blind.
The Qesh triggered a round. It missed, slamming into something at my back, the blast propelling me up off my feet and to one side as I continued to mash down the firing stud on my carbine, continued trying to align my weapon with the armored monster’s helmet. I landed on my side in the dirt at the same instant that the Qesh’s helmet flashed, the optical strip exploding with the thermal shock of my last laser pulse.
I scrambled to my feet. The Qesh, holding its weapon with its upper arm, used its front two leg-hands to reach up and pull off the blinded helmet. Maybe it thought I was dead. I wasn’t, and my next shot burned through the Jacker’s unprotected face between its two upper eye turrets.
“Come on, Doc!” Hancock yelled. “Quit playing with the neighbor kids and get your ass up here!”
I stood, looked around for Sergeant Leighton . . . and saw her armor crumpled on the ground halfway between me and the airlock, perhaps ten meters away.
“Marine down!” I yelled. And then the world around me exploded in nova light and raw noise.
Chapter Eighteen
The Roc was falling.
Its two remaining belly turrets continued firing, plasma bolts slashing across the ruin of the starport and up the face of the ridge. That last blast had been a round meant for me, but it had hit the wrecked crane instead, toppling the length of metal struts and girders, sending them crashing to the ground. A beam struck me as I tried to get up, knocking me onto my back. From that vantage point, I watched the Roc sliding past overhead, one wingtip dipping low . . . and then it slammed into the center of the port’s landing field a few hundred meters away, erupting into white flame, burning fiercely in Bloodworld’s oxygen-rich atmosphere.
I was pinned. I had to get up. I planted my hands beneath the girder and pushed, but couldn’t budge it. I wasn’t hurt, but the high gravity was working against me.
Adjusting my position, I managed to reach down and trip the release contacts for the exoskeleton embracing my right leg. It was awkward, working in a tight space like that, but I managed to pull the part free, then wedge it in between the ground next to my hip and the underside of the girder holding me down. I checked to make sure the power feed was still connected. Normally, the exoskeleton operated automatically, picking up my natural movements and amplifying them, but this time I thoughtclicked an icon in my in-head, switching the right leg to manual, then ordered it to flex and straighten.
I kept it braced with both hands, feeding extra power to the unit. I heard the servomotors shrilling, and then, as I flexed it once more, felt the girder shift slightly to one side.
That left me just enough time to edge out from underneath. Free!
The exoskeleton servos in the knee appeared to be blown, but I didn’t care. I could manage to move around in the higher gravity without having both legs braced, so long as I was careful not to come down hard on the unprotected side.
Joy Leighton was lying nearby, unmoving. Picking up my carbine, I jogged toward her immobile form, my gait thrown into an unsteady limp. My right leg hurt with the effort, and I had to be careful not to tear something in my knee, but I made it to her side, dropping flat. “No-Joy!” I yelled. “Hey, Marine! Can you hear me?”
No response.
I switched her opaqued visor to see-through. She looked like she was asleep—deeply unconscious. I fired a jolt of nananodyne pain blockers into her carotid artery just in case, though, followed that with a large dose of nanobots, then began checking her suit.
Not good. There was a ragged tear in her armor, on her right side just above her waist, and the edges were still hot. There was a hole the size of my fist there, and fragments from her armor had sprayed through, burning into her flesh. There wasn’t a lot of blood; the wound had been cauterized by the white-hot plasma. But just looking at it I knew there was bad damage inside.
How bad? I jacked into her armor and called up a full scan. CDF windows opened in my in-head, showing a thermal image of her entire body.
She had a reverse pressure leak going, of course, the thicker atmosphere outside seeping into her holed suit. The higher O2 in the atmosphere was good, the CO2 and sulfur compounds not so much. I checked to make sure her neck seal had triggered and that nothing was forcing its way up into her helmet. Good.
She was bleeding from a deep, incised wound in her side and back, the hot spot stark on the thermal image. Heart rate 168, thready and very weak, BP 96 over 44 and falling, respiration 35, quick and shallow, with elevating adrenaline and noradrenaline. Cooling at the extremities as blood started pooling in her core; she was already deep in shock. I told her suit to manage that—kicking on the internal heaters. The fact that the seal was closed at her neck might restri
ct the blood flow to her brain slightly—not a good thing. I decided that she could handle a little sulfur dioxide and elevated CO2 in her breathing mix, that good circulation in her brain was the more critical factor of the two.
Pulling out my N-prog, I ordered the nanobots in her system to diffuse through her torso. I needed to see the deep extent of her injury. Within a few seconds, shadows began to form, then to solidify, outlining her bones, internal organs, and major muscle goups.
Oh . . . shit!
Her spine was broken, snapped clean through between T11 and T12—the eleventh and twelfth thoracic vertebrae, both of which were cracked and broken, and with the four floating ribs dislocated. There was a hell of a lot of internal damage. Her right XI rib had been snapped in two, and half of it driven down into her liver, and there was extensive bleeding—probably from the hepatic portal vein, though it looked like one or more of the major hepatic veins had been severed as well.
I had a few minutes at most to save her life.
The internal bleeding was the most immediate problem. The hepatic portal system isn’t a true vein, because it doesn’t carry blood directly to the heart. Instead, it drains blood from the whole gastrointestinal tract and from the spleen into the liver. The hepatic veins, by contrast, drain from the liver into the inferior vena cava, which takes the blood straight back to the heart. You can bleed out faster if you take damage to a major artery like the aorta or the femoral, but not by much.
Using my N-prog, I began programming the diagnostic nano in her torso, switching it to radical emergency hemostasis. It was her only chance.
“Doc!” Hancock’s voice called. “How is she?”
He would have seen on his in-head display that she’d been hit.
“Not good!” I called back.
“Can you get her up here?”
“Not without fucking killing her!”
Some millions of nanobots were converging on No-Joy’s liver now, riding the currents of blood feeding into her hepatic portal system. When they hit the ruptured area, they found intact blood vessel walls and latched on, forming a lattice framework upon which more ’bots could latch on. I could see the framework growing, thickening, strengthening, on the N-prog screen. The question was whether the microscopic robots could fight the current of blood rushing into her abdominal cavity, and find the other end of the vein in order to join the two severed ends together.
The ’bots were having trouble getting around the fragment of floating rib still lodged in her liver.
Once, battlefield emergency first aid was enormously simpler. You stopped a major bleed-out by applying pressure, lots of it. If you could see the bleeder you could pinch it off with a hemostat, or between your thumb and forefinger if you had to. There’s a story on record of one Army medic who closed up a spurting femoral artery with safety pins.
And if the bleeding was completely internal, like this, you applied pressure to the abdomen, treated for shock, and hoped for the best. Whether or not the patient survived depended mostly on how quickly they could be transported to a well-equipped field surgical unit, and then back to a hospital stateside.
Nowadays, we had a lot more tools at our disposal. The bad news was that the line between emergency first aid and surgery was now very fuzzy, bewilderingly so. Medical technicians had lots more ways to save a wounded Marine’s life than in the old days, when their medical kit held some gauze, a few lengths of roller bandages, morphine and antibiotic powder, some pins and hemostats, and not a hell of a lot else. Corpsmen then, as now, still had to balance their available tools against the situation. Could you physically transport the patient back to a safe area in the rear? Would the patient survive the trip? Were you actually under fire while you tried to save the Marine’s life? How quickly could you stabilize the wounded Marine’s medical situation?
One fact had not changed between the old days and now.
Time was everything.
I kept following the progress of my nanotechnic surrogates. I had two options that I could see. I could order the ’bots already attached to the ends of the veins to link together and close off, essentially sealing the bleeders shut. Joy would probably lose her liver, but she could grow a new one easily enough once we had her back in civilization, and the endcaps on her vessels would stop her from bleeding out. The other option was what I was trying to do now—to actually reconnect the severed ends, creating an artificial bypass across the damaged area.
The first option—capping off the flow—was faster and more certain if it worked, but those swarms of one-micron ’bots in there were up against an almost insurmountable problem—Joy’s blood pressure. The blood was still coming through her hepatic portal system so fast and hard that the nanobots simply couldn’t hold against that surging tide. Her heart was still beating—her heart rate was up to 190 now, trying to keep up with her rapidly falling blood pressure. As her BP continued to drop, the ’bots would be able to complete the pinch-off, but by then her pressure would be so low that she would be looking at serious brain damage on top of everything else.
And so I’d decided on the slightly longer option—rechanneling the flow through a nanobot bypass, literally growing a centimeter or so of artificial blood vessel to keep her blood flow contained.
Had I made the right choice? The ’bots were struggling, fighting the current as they tried to complete the linkup. This sort of work was a lot easier with smaller blood vessels.
Almost there . . . yes! The nanobots made the connection.
The latticework now formed a complete tube . . . and then I watched the structure dissolve again as a few tens of thousands of the ’bots lost their hold against the tide.
They were failing. Heart rate 205 . . . blood pressure 70 over 30.
I had one more option, one more thing to try, but it was hellishly dangerous.
“Doc!” It was Hancock again. “Doc, heads up! You’ve got bad guys moving toward your position!”
As if I didn’t have enough to worry about. “Where?”
“On your left. Fifteen meters!”
I looked. The body of the wrecked crane was there, providing some shelter but blocking my view. Well, if I couldn’t see them, maybe they couldn’t see me. . . .
I could hear the sounds of the firefight all around me, the lightning-bolt crack of lasers superheating tubes of air, creating miniature thunderclaps as the vacuums collapsed, the deeper whoosh-bang of plasma bolts. The Marines up on the ridgetop were firing at everything that was moving down on the spaceport, but they wouldn’t be able to keep it up for much longer. The Roc had been swept out of the sky, but more and more enemy troops were converging on the area, and before much longer the Marines would have to withdraw.
“Doc!” That was Baumgartner. “You need to get out of there. Now!”
“I can’t move my patient, sir,” I replied.
“Capture her then, and get her out of there!”
“Not fucking yet, damn it!” I shouted back.
Shouting obscenities at your commanding officer is never a good idea, not if you want a healthy career in the military illuminated by good quarterly reports and a lack of non-judicial punishment. On the other hand, he was up there, while I was down here.
A Qesh trooper came around the side of the ruined crane, coming straight toward me. I think he was more surprised than I was, because he came to an abrupt halt when he saw me, fumbling with his weapon.
Dropping the N-prog, I rolled half a meter to my right, scooping up Leighton’s plasma weapon and dropping it across her legs as I took aim and triggered it all in one motion.
The bolt of charged plasma slammed into the armored giant right at the level of his upper arm, shattering his weapon and peeling open his armor in a blossoming flower of raw energy and vaporizing plastic and metal. The Qesh tumbled to the side and collapsed, dirty smoke pouring from the charred crater punched into his plastron.
I left Joy’s weapon braced across her legs and went back to work on her wounds. Despite her
falling blood pressure, I needed to further reduce her BP so that the nanobots in her side could finish their work. Short of letting her damn near bleed to death, there was only one way I could think of to do this quickly enough to make a difference. If I could just manage to switch off her heart . . .
Well, switch it half off, anyway.
The heart is an amazing organ. It keeps on beating completely independently of any and all nervous influences and hormone shifts with what cardiologists call intrinsic automaticity. Those heart-muscle cells with the fastest rate of electrical depolarization capture the depolarization rate of every other cell in the heart’s muscular walls, causing all of them to contract, relax, and contract again in perfect synch. The pacemaker for the entire system is the sinoatrial node, or SA, located in the right atrium. It’s this patch of cells that responds to signals from the autonomic nervous system or to certain drugs like adrenaline or halothane to change the rate of the beating heart.
I reached into my M-7 pack and pulled out a fresh vial of nano. I clipped it into the receiver on her left shoulder, snapped the panel shut, and fired it into her neck.
I keyed Program 5 into the N-prog, limiting the input to about half of the new nano. The rest I sent down to her liver to help out the ’bots still struggling to stem the bleeding.
Program 5 sent a few hundred thousand nanobots straight to Joy’s sinoatrial node, following the currents of bioelectricity playing across her heart membranes.
There were other tricks I could have tried. You can slow a patient’s heart drastically by stimulating the vagus nerve, which causes the heart rate to decrease, a condition called bradycardia. You can also suppress the signals coming from the sympathetic nervous system, which also induces bradycardia, or I could just wait for her blood volume to drop enough that it triggered her Bainbridge reflex, which drops the heart into bradycardia naturally.
Both of those would take too long, I feared, and both were harder to reverse. I needed to drastically slow her heartbeat only long enough for the nanobots in her liver to finish their work, then switch it back on again.
