This syster wasn’t wearing a full suit, just a harness and mask. It stared at me like the last cat I tried to teach algebra to.
I mimed giving an injection and pointed in the general direction of the pharmacy. The tech—which looked like a very alert feather duster with tufted owl ears and plumed moth antennae—focused all its sensory apparatus on me for one tense moment. Then it tipped down at the reader, back up at me—and whisked away in a puff of reaction jets.
I mimed hand-washing to one of the two remaining medics—both of whom were fully engaged in keeping pressure on the patient’s injuries—and sprinted with ringing magnets and aching knees across to a disinfection booth. I climbed in, suit and all, and let it blast me.
The decon stations were near the private unit I’d sneaked into the previous dia. I found myself glowering at the closed doors while my suit was rinsed and flash-dried. Why weren’t those staff out here helping?
The moment of rage was washed away by a flood of gratitude toward the rest of the hospital staff. Here we all were, side by side, up to our elbows in a dozen colors of gore. They were rewarding my faith on this terrible dia.
I’ve said that I’ve never been somebody who had faith. Not in the religious sense, and not in the secular sense of unequivocal reliance on the trueness of some premise or person. Not the way some people do. Except for my job, and my community.
And in that moment, I felt a faith and a connection to my community and their purpose that I imagine equaled any religious epiphany in its intensity. I was a part of something, and the thing I was a part of served a mission and a purpose that mattered as much as anything can matter in a vast and uncaring universe.
This was where I belonged, and this was what I ought to be doing.
Take that, Alessi.
My ex-wife used to tell me that the problem with our marriage was that I didn’t believe in anyone or anything. In retrospect, I had come to believe that her actual problem was that I hadn’t believed in her.
For the first time, I found myself wondering whose failing that had been.
The nature of battlefield epiphanies is that you don’t have the time to appreciate how profound they are—or are not—at the time. Thirty standard seconds later, I was back in the treatment bay. I held my scrubbed hands out in that weird broken-elbowed way that hospital people instinctively know to avoid, no matter what appendage is being dangled awkwardly away from contaminated surfaces. I wasn’t sure why I was bothering; there was literally nothing sterile about these circumstances.
I guess points for trying?
Staff were administering the meds Sally had recommended when I returned. They acted fast. The patient didn’t lose consciousness, but their pain-tense body relaxed against the stretcher. Beads of what I assumed was sweat dewed grayish skin. The stentorian panting softened. They were getting oxygen now. Tourniquets had been applied to the wounded limbs so I could work without groping through a sea of blood. That had to have been contributing to the pain: tourniquets hurt. Somebody had draped our makeshift surgical field.
This is what people who know what they are doing and aim to save lives can accomplish even when they can’t effectively communicate.
Somewhere behind me, I heard screaming. Human, possibly. I could have treated that patient competently without an ayatana, but I didn’t have time to worry about it now, already being in the middle of my own primitive surgery. Somebody less qualified would have to deal with it. I tuned my racing heart back: my current patient could not wait until we had appropriate facilities, until we could grow grafts and perform the surgery while they slept painlessly through it. Right now, we didn’t even have an anesthesiologist. Just a lot of sedatives.
I held out my hand on an arm that was too long and too short and not flexible enough and very squishy, and realized that I couldn’t ask for the forceps precisely as one of the blood-spattered medics laid them in my hand. I wanted to smile my gratitude, but the mask would have hidden my expression, and anyway very few systers take teeth-baring as a friendly gesture.
So I said “Thank you,” out loud, hoping that if I said it a few times the sound would acquire meaning for my colleagues, and bent down to bathe my hands in the blood of the wounded.
I clamped and stitched and cauterized, somehow finding myself in a zone of total focus where the noises of half a hundred different species trying to make themselves urgently understood seemed distant, unreal. By any standard from the current millennian, the work I did was horrifically crude. There wasn’t enough skin to stitch across the stumps. It didn’t matter, because the limbs would be replaced with grafts eventually, but all I could do right now when I’d stopped the bleeding was to seal the raw ends with synth.
When I finished with that patient, somebody grabbed my elbow and walked me to decon, and then to another casualty. I almost understood some of what it was telling me—almost. Could I use the ayatanas for translation purposes, if I had the right ones?
No time to find out, currently.
Somebody else brought me an external battery for my suit, which was when I realized I ought to charge my exo from the suit, too. In an emergency, keep your batteries close and fully charged.
There was another patient after that one, and another. I looked up once and found myself assisting Rhym. That was good, because Sally could translate for us. And the mere fact of being close to my surgeon friend made me feel 50 percent less anxious that something would go horribly wrong.
However horribly wrong it went, Rhym could handle it.
Another time, I
