Hannah felt overcome by a sudden atavistic fear at the sight of the construction robot crouching in the corridor with bloodstains on its cowling. When she saw Saul slumped in front of it with his back propped against the wall, she assumed it must have attacked him. Then she noticed the Caduceus symbol on the door he was resting beside, and logic triumphed. She stepped over the cleanbot that had guided her here, and rushed over to kneel before him.
‘Smith . . . got away,’ Saul managed.
Those were definitely not the words she wanted to hear. She stared at the blood plating the outside of his spacesuit, dried out and turned oak-brown by vacuum. ‘Where are you wounded?’
‘Side.’ He gestured with one blood-smeared glove.
Hannah peered at the mess of suit sealant that had boiled out of there. ‘Can you move?’ A weak shake of the head. ‘I’m going to need Braddock,’ she decided.
After a pause Saul replied, ‘He’s coming now.’
Braddock arrived in double-quick time, armed and looking for a fight, but as soon as he saw Saul, his face turned white. Was that because without Saul their chances of survival became precisely nil?
‘The prisoners?’ Hannah enquired.
‘I locked them in the toilet,’ Braddock told her.
‘Okay, help me.’
They carried Saul as carefully as possible through the door and into a surgery prep room.
‘Get his suit off,’ Hannah instructed, as she herself frantically began checking the cold stores and equipment cupboards ranged along one wall. It was good that the level of gravity lay as close to zero as made no difference, otherwise Braddock’s task would have been much more difficult. By the time she had found trauma dressings and a pair of scissors, Braddock had removed the spacesuit to expose the blood-soaked undersuit. Whilst he held Saul in place Hannah cut away the undersuit, and soon located the wound. She then affixed a trauma dressing, which quickly formed itself over the wound while infusing it with coagulants. After that they loaded Saul on to a special gurney which closed pads securely over his arms, legs and forehead, before rolling him through the clean lock leading into the operating theatre.
‘What about Smith?’ Braddock asked.
‘He got away,’ she replied bluntly, trying to stamp down on her fears. She just had to be pragmatic; no use wondering when Inspectorate enforcers would come piling in here to drag them away, no use thinking about what lay in store if Smith managed to get to them.
‘So we’re fucked,’ replied Braddock, equally blunt.
She quickly stripped off her spacesuit and undersuit, hardly noticing Braddock’s embarrassment as he turned away. She then propelled herself through into the surgeon’s lock, quickly donning surgeon’s whites and forgoing the decontamination process. Now in utterly familiar surroundings, she connected up a pressurized blood feed to her patient, before administering a general anaesthetic through it. While Saul was relaxing into unconsciousness, she began sifting through the tools she required, picking up a wound ring of the appropriate size.
‘We need him awake again as quickly as possible,’ warned Braddock, from the other side of the isolation window, having obviously located the intercom. ‘If Smith discovers he’s out of it, his people will be down on us in a second.’
‘No, really?’ said Hannah, sarcastically.
She stripped away the dressing to expose the weeping hole in Saul’s side, then folded up the wound ring and inserted it into the gash, before opening it out to leave a neat round hole into his body, out of which oozed black, jelly-like blood. Next she swung over the microsurgery unit and positioned its slow-worm head in the mouth of the wound. The head pushed its way in, tentatively exploring inside the patient’s body, suction pipes slurping as they cleared out yet more congealing blood or leaking fluids, while sensors mapped out the internal damage to its screen, for her inspection.
The knife had penetrated his side, slicing straight through his liver and pancreas, and, just missing the splenic artery, had twisted upwards and into the lobe of one lung. The comprehensive damage ended only a couple of centimetres from his heart, but, even so, the lesser vena cava had been nicked. Starting with that vein, Hannah began repairing the damage, working the microsurgery head gradually back out, cauterizing and gluing on its way. Most of this repair work could be left to automatic programming now the damage was mapped into the machine’s processor, but she did pause it a couple of times to inspect the situation more closely. This was all wrong, she soon realized. Some of the damage within Saul had already begun to heal up, and checking his bloodwork, she found it flooded with unassigned stem cells and other elements she just did not recognize. And she felt renewed awe of the man he had once been.
The work continued until the slow-worm head slipped obscenely out of the wound carrying the wound ring with it. Micro-manipulators then drew it closed, the astringent smell of wound glue arose, then a brief sound like that of a fingernail being run along the teeth of a comb as the surgical head stitched in a neat row of staples just to make doubly sure.
‘I’m done now,’ said Hannah.
‘That was quick,’ remarked Braddock.
‘Left untended, a normal person would probably have died quickly,’ she explained fatly as she folded the microsurgery head back down into its sterilizer. ‘He was already beginning to heal up.’
‘Heal up?’ Braddock echoed, puzzled.
‘His predecessor’s nano-viral fix.’
‘Nano-viral fix?’ asked Braddock. ‘Predecessor?’
‘It’s a long story,’ she replied.
‘Right,’ Braddock snarled, obviously annoyed. ‘So what happens now?’
‘You think I know?’ Hannah spat back.
