I had to pass by Records on my way, and—with the help of my datapad and some bad machine translation—got them to upload a few ayatanas into my fox. Ox breathers of various anatomies; every little bit of information would help. Even if I had the wrong ayatana for a particular species, convergent evolution and biological convenience were still useful.
I walked out with my feet squishing strangely and my body shambling oddly. Well, we’d get used to each other. And I was definitely going to need their medical knowledge before the dia was out.
Most of the injuries to staff were relatively minor ones, which was good because I didn’t have ayatanas for every person who’d banged their head—or whatever the topmost part of their body was—against the ceiling when the spin gravity cut out. And without coms, I couldn’t call a doctor or nurse of an appropriate species for backup.
They were probably all busy in their own sections, dealing with human patients whose contusions and gashes and fractures would be quite as much a mystery. I couldn’t even ask my own patients what was wrong except by typing and machine translating on a datapad—hilarious—so we communicated mostly by them shoving the affected area under my nose, and me spraying a biologically appropriate sealant over the wound.
I made my way back to Casualty, stopping to help injured people along the way. I left the patients still in rooms alone unless there was a crisis: they were as safe where they were as they could be anywhere, and their own care teams would have the relevant ayatanas.
And the hospital staff, once the initial confusion settled, started pulling together and cooperating with surprising efficiency. We couldn’t communicate complicated concepts, but we knew our jobs. And with long practice, you get a sense of when somebody is going to ask for a hemostat.
Casualty—the Emergency Department—had been nearly vacant and understaffed since the quarantine went into effect, because there was nobody coming in. Now it was a mob scene. And a mob scene under emergency lighting—at least the emergency lighting was working, here—in zero g, with people clinging to the deck with mag boots (like me) or zipping around, their trajectories narrowly avoiding collisions with one another, or occasionally not avoiding those collisions at all. I ducked under a cloud of drifting feathers from one such incident and made my way toward the admin desk, looking for somebody to tell me where I could be most useful.
My exo was at seventy percent, and I was sore but not in terrible pain. It wouldn’t have mattered if I was, under the current circumstances.
A team of three guiding one of the new grav stretchers sailed in alongside me. They were all suited, using their jets to navigate and push. The stretcher’s grav technology maintained its attitude with respect to the deck despite the lack of rotational acceleration. I was impressed. I hadn’t known they did that.
One of the medics pushing the stretcher noticed me standing there and squeaked demandingly through nasal slits. I jumped out of the way. It hissed like a deflating balloon and wrapped a suit-clad tentacle with a spatulate, arrowlike end around my wrist, tugging more or less gently.
It squeaked again.
The patient needs assistance, Sally said.
I glanced down at myself. My suit was covered in Well knows what, and nothing about my person was scrubbed and sterile. But it had picked up my identification codes from my fox, and there on my breast was my name in several sets of symbols—and my specialty.
Trauma doctor.
I stepped up to the stretcher and leaned in.
It was bad.
I wasn’t sure what species the patient was, but they bled the same hemoglobin pigment as me. I assumed that the rattling swell and release of atmosphere through spiracles into the tube-like body was desperate respiration: blood loss or pain. Two of the medics were applying manual pressure to savage-looking wounds. I didn’t need an ayatana to know the patient was bleeding to death.
I might need that ayatana to stop it from happening.
The patient made noises and gestures of dismay and distress that I didn’t need a translator to understand. They were probably feeling exactly as I would have felt, had our positions been reversed. They looked to have lost several pieces of their body: part of a locomotion limb, and an upper-body manipulator. The edges had the ragged look of an industrial accident, not the neat severing of a decomp door. The patient was wearing a maintenance uniform, and I imagined it must have been operating a piece of heavy equipment when the gravity went off. A floor-polisher or loader or something worse.
I couldn’t even request a surgical room. By the time I made myself understood, the patient would have bled to death.
I wanted to stick this patient in a cryo tank and wait for a specialist. I didn’t even know what meds I could give it for pain without killing it. I—
It was as if I weren’t in the hospital at all, but on a rescue mission outside somewhere, unable to communicate well and with only my own crew for support.
Wait.
Wait! Sally! Can you tell me what this syster is, and what I can give it for pain and shock? Does it do shock? And can you reach its fox and tune the pain down? The automatic response doesn’t seem to be working.
She read me a list of medications and a synthetic transfusion base as we were guiding the patient into a treatment bay. Then my next problem became finding a way to communicate those requirements to the pharmacy. I had handed back all the datapads I’d borrowed along the way… but I still had the reader I’d stowed in my thigh pocket. It was inside the suit, but I wiggled it out, inputted Sally’s list, and handed it to
