The buggy’s headbeam lit the way as she steered down dark corridors. Jane, Sian and Ghost jogged behind, keeping pace as best they could.
Medical. Rye restored power. The white room lit up.
They laid Rawlins on the examination table. Rye re-angled the light canopy above him.
‘There’s a convection heater in my office,’ said Rye. ‘Get it going.’
She put on a mouth mask and goggles. She wriggled on a pair of surgical gloves.
‘Okay. You folks better get in the office and stay there.’
They sat in Rye’s office and watched through an observation window.
Rye took scissors and forceps from a drawer. She snipped through the foil blanket that sheathed Rawlins’s arm and peeled it back. Blood dribbled on the floor.
‘Treat every drop of that shit like AIDS,’ advised Ghost, via a wall-mounted intercom. ‘Scrub it. Bleach it.’
Rye scattered swabs on the floor to sop the blood.
‘And be careful with his arm,’ said Ghost. ‘Don’t touch it, whatever you do.’
Rawlins’s hand had turned dark, skin mottled like a bad bruise.
‘Frostbite?’ asked Jane.
‘No.’
‘Are you sure? Looks like Simon’s hand when we pulled him off the ice.’
‘Look closer.’
The flesh bristled with needle-fine splinters of metal.
‘My God.’
Rye sliced away Rawlins’s clothes with trauma shears. She plucked dog-tags from his neck.
‘O neg.’
She wriggled on a double layer of gloves and canulated Rawlins’s left hand. She took a bag of O neg from the fridge and set it to feed.
‘His heart rate is high,’ said Rye. ‘His breathing seems unimpaired. So what actually happened?’
‘We opened the capsule. Frank crawled inside. There was a body, an astronaut. Frank tried to take off his helmet. Next minute he was screaming and bleeding.’
‘An astronaut?’
‘Some kind of cosmonaut. He was dead. Way dead. Then he woke up. He grabbed Rawlins. They fought. I hauled Frank out of there and torched the whole thing.’
‘His fingers. That looks like a bite mark.’
‘Yeah. Frank said something about teeth, metal teeth. I don’t know. Frank wasn’t making a lot of sense. Like I said, I didn’t investigate. I didn’t climb inside. I hauled Frank out and threw a grenade.’
Rye took tweezers and tugged at a metal spine.
‘These filaments seem to be anchored in bone.’
‘It’s spreading. It started at his fingertips. Now it’s reached his wrist.’
Rawlins woke. He licked his lips.
‘How are you feeling, Frank?’ asked Rye, leaning close.
‘Don’t take my arm.’
‘You’ll be okay,’ she soothed. ‘We’ll fix you up.’
‘It tastes funny,’ said Rawlins, and passed out.
‘Right,’ said Rye. ‘You three. Get your coats off and scrub up. I need you in here.’
They lathered their hands and forearms in Bioguard scrub.
Rye unlocked a cupboard. She took out a tray of surgical instruments and slit open the vacuum-sealed plastic. She unwrapped a surgical saw and laid it on the surgical trolley.
‘What do you have in mind?’ asked Sian.
‘You’re going to help me amputate his arm.’
‘Don’t you have anything more high-tech than that?’ asked Jane, pointing at the saw.
‘I’ve got an electric blade but I don’t want to spray blood everywhere.’
They gave Rawlins a shot of morphine and strapped him to the table. Rye intubated his throat. She wheeled a heart monitor to the table. She pasted electrodes to Rawlins’s chest and set the machine beeping.
‘Watch the screen,’ she told Sian. ‘If that figure drops below thirty-five, yell.’
She took saline from the refrigerator and hung it from the drip stand.
‘Keep an eye on the bags,’ she told Jane. ‘Let me know when he needs a refill.’
She swabbed Rawlins’s arm just below the elbow.
‘Ghost. Keep hold of his shoulders, okay? He could buck. Right. Everybody ready?’
Rye sliced into Rawlins’s arm with a scalpel and clamped his arteries. Yellow globules of subcutaneous fat glistened like butter.
She sawed his arm. She worked through bone in short rasps like she was sawing through a table leg.
‘Think he will be okay?’ asked Jane when they had finished.
‘I’ll give him another shot when he wakes. After that, it’s aspirin.’
‘So what about you, Doc? What if we need to fix you up?’
‘Anything happens, shoot me a spinal and I’ll talk you through it.’
Rawlins’s face was pale and slack. Jane instinctively moved to wipe sweat from his forehead. ‘No,’ warned Ghost.
Husky exhalations through an airway tube. Steady beep of the cardiograph.
‘Done that before?’ asked Ghost. ‘Cut off an arm?’
‘Snipped plenty of fingers,’ said Rye. ‘Standard oil-field crush injury.’
‘Reckon he’ll make it?’
‘Normal circumstances I would expect him to recover from the amputation, as long as the wound doesn’t become infected. This disease, though. Never seen anything like it.’ Ghost thumbed through Rawlins’s medical notes. ‘Stress. Depression. Prostate trouble. Poor bastard. Should have cashed out of this game years ago.’
‘Put that down,’ ordered Rye. ‘That stuff is confidential.’ They stuffed Rawlins’s shredded clothes into a red body-waste sack. They bagged bloody swabs and dressings. They slopped bleach on the floor.
Ghost picked up the sacks with gloved hands. He held them at arm’s length.
‘Throw that shit over the side,’ ordered Rye. She used forceps to pick up the severed arm. She dropped it into a plastic box and sealed the lid. She handed the box to Jane.
‘And get rid of that fucking thing, will you?’
Jane called Punch on the intercom. She asked him to fetch a can of kerosene and meet her on the ice.
They walked from beneath the shadow of the refinery and stood at the water’s edge.
‘How is he?’
‘Out for the count,’ said Jane. ‘He might live. He might not.’
‘So who is in charge now?’
‘Fuck knows.’
‘This isn’t a democracy. If we vote on every little fucking thing it will be a disaster.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Somebody better step up. If Nail and his compadres start calling the shots we’ll be dead within a week.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You actually cut off his arm?’ asked Punch.
Jane peeled the lid from the box.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘How did it happen?’
‘We won’t know for sure until he is awake and talking.’
‘Swear to God, I won’t let that happen to me.’
They put the box on the ice, doused it in kerosene and set it alight. It burned with a blue flame. The hand slowly clenched as it cooked.
Medical.
Rye checked on Rawlins. He lay on the examination table draped in a sheet. The stump of his arm was
