to live with it.
After another hour, I couldn’t sit still any longer. I ordered the turnip that had once been a corpsman named Carlson brought to the chamber. I had them bring up Sandra in her life-support coffin as well.
Marvin and I soon cooked up a scheme. We would use the coffins themselves as immersion vessels. They were already equipped with circulatory systems for that very purpose in case the occupant was undergoing decompression, or otherwise needed a liquid environment to survive. We hooked up oxygen masks.
Lieutenant Marquis left, but the med-tech named Ning came to investigate. “What the hell are you doing to my patients, Colonel?” she asked severely.
I gave her a half-smile. “Submersion therapy,” I said.
She looked at me as if I were crazy, so I explained the situation to her and showed her my foot and Kwon’s limbs. We’d used a nanite-balloon to make separate tanks for his arm and leg. It had taken a mass of raw hamburger to feed the microbes. I finished up explaining that our marines would have to go without fresh meat for the rest of the journey after I was through regrowing every injured marine’s body.
When I was done, Ning still stared at me as if I was crazy. “If you didn’t have the end of your foot back on, fresh and pink, I would never believe it,” she said.
“We aren’t killing this new batch of microbes, either. They are already fifty percent resistant to the byproduct toxins.”
“Fifty percent?” she asked. “You mean half of them still die?”
“Yes,” I said. “But as I’ve learned more about it, I’m not as upset. In order to exist on Earth at all and feed on our proteins, they will have to undergo this difficult therapy to cause the proper mutations. In addition to that, their normal life span is only a few days in any case.”
“How can they learn anything in such a short time?”
“Well,” I said, “in a way, they don’t learn anything. That’s like asking how a single neuron in our heads ‘learns’ something. They each have part of the group’s knowledge. Their chemical interconnections are how they think. Any given puddle of them operates like a single living organism. The way our cells are all alive individually and can die, but operate as a whole together. Think of them all as one being, but without being welded together inside a sack of skin, the way we are.”
Ning made a face. “Such a lovely way with words. But accurate. What can they do for the turnips-ah, extreme cases?”
“I’m not sure yet. But they are perhaps our only hope.”
Some hours later, Kwon was finished healing. Marvin then took a batch of his microbial soup and transferred it into Carlson’s coffin, who was next in line as per my instructions. I didn’t want to try anything on Sandra that hadn’t been tested at least three times. Marvin left tubules connected so the fluid would slowly drain out from one vessel to another. There were still tubules leaking fresh microbes into Kwon’s bags, then from there to Carlson’s coffin. Being at the bottom of the plumbing system, his face slowly submerged.
“What’s the plan here?” I asked Marvin. “You are reusing the microbes?”
“Yes, the most resistant are going on to the new task. Fresh microbes are being pumped into the mix to extend the useful life of the materials.”
Materials, I thought. That was really what we biotics were to any of these machines. It was hard to like Marvin, but it was hard to hate him, too. He was completely alien, but he was helping us.
Another hour passed. I had a ham sandwich brought up so I could replenish my biotic system. As I ate, I could not help but think of all the trillions of tiny bugs that had lived and died inside my own body every hour of my life. I tried not to get sick about it, but it was hard to watch sludge bubbling around regrowing limbs and such without doing so.
“We’ve got more than enough materials to pump them into Sandra’s tank now,” Marvin said.
“Yeah, but I haven’t seen any signs of life from Carlson yet,” I said.
“You wish to see movement?”
“What are you going to do, shock him?”
“No. He has been kept in a somnolent state since his recovery, due to his submersion.”
“Are you telling me the repairs are finished on him?” I demanded.
“Yes.”
“Well, wake him up and get him out of there!” I ordered. I called Ning back to the laboratory to help with the resuscitation. I stood up, hands on my hips, and directed Marvin to connect the last tubule between Carlson’s tank and Sandra. As I watched the liquids bubble and churn, I noted they’d gotten darker and thicker with each transfer. I was reminded of dirty motor oil overgrown with algae.
“We need a small amount of fresh biochemical compounds,” Marvin said.
I looked around. We were out of hamburger patties. I looked down at last to my half-eaten ham sandwich. With a sigh, I pulled the ham out and laid it down in the growing puddle of soup near Sandra’s head.
“It’s all right honey,” I said to her pretty face, which was now encircled with what looked like hot mud. “I was having a hard time eating it all anyway.”
Ning ran in with an extra piece of meat in her hands. I frowned at it. “Is that fish?” I asked.
“It’s all we’ve got left that’s thawed.”
“Okay, I hope we don’t screw this up.”
She added all of it before I could stop her.
“All she has in a brain injury,” I said.
“I’m sorry, sir.”
“We don’t need that much mass.”
“Will it matter?”
I shook my head. I had no idea.
Kwon shook the last goop from his new leg and arm. He couldn’t walk yet, however. In fact, he cursed at anyone who came near him. He didn’t want to be touched. He was in that same overly-sensitive state I had been, except far more of his body had been affected.
Carlson came awake soon after we’d lifted him from the coffin. He had a surprised look on his face, to say the least. His first sight consisted of my eyes staring into his.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Colonel?” he said, looking around fearfully. His body dripped with slime. “What happened?”
“I killed you-then changed my mind,” I told him.
Ning gave me a dirty look and clucked her tongue. She led Carlson out of the laboratory speaking softly to him.
I crouched by Sandra’s coffin, staring at the shallow spot over her face. I could still see some of her features under that churning liquid.
Kwon hopped and cursed over to me. “Do you think she’ll make it?” he asked.
“I have no idea.”
“She will,” Kwon said after a minute. “Carlson seemed fine.”
“Yeah,” I said.
I stayed there a few minutes, tensely staring at Sandra’s covered face. This was it. Would she stir? Carlson hadn’t moved. She had an oxygen mask tightly fitted to her face. Air bubbles rose up with each exhalation. The glass porthole into the coffin fogged up lightly.
“Marvin,” I said, “is she responding to the treatment? Is she going to wake up or not? Tell the microbes not to keep her sleeping once the treatment is done.”
Marvin and I were soon the last two in the room, besides Sandra herself. I was nervous, trying very hard not to get my hopes up. If she didn’t respond after all the success I’d seen, I knew I would have a fit of grief and pain. I even thought about firing up the old electrode to fry these little guys so they didn’t dare to fail me. I didn’t do it, of course. I wondered why I put myself into these horrible situations. If this failed, I knew I would wish I hadn’t bothered, that I had just let her go.
The fish around Sandra had partly dissolved. What were they doing in there?
“Colonel? This is Major Sarin.” Her voice cold and her words were clipped.
I heard her in my headset and knew right away it was bad news. Sarin became even more severely controlled when things were going wrong.
