Lizzie cried so much, she felt like her whole body was drying up. But never in front of the soldiers.
Momma combed her hair, told Lizzie how proud she was. “But you have to get the Doc to work faster, Lizzie,” she said. “They have to be out the next day.”
Lizzie hated letting down Momma, but if she rushed Doc Ventrager then people died. When she was alone, she squeezed her fists tightly enough to leave half-moon cuts in the palms of her hands.
After a few months of surgical assistance, the Doc handed off the minor operations to Lizzie. The Doc made it clear that even though she was doing doctor duties now, any profits from her surgeries went to him. That was better; surgery was like any other repair work. You took care, and measured twice before cutting once. The fact that she’d spent four hours a day in surgery for the past five months helped—and now she could go at her own speed.
Still, the soldiers always panicked when the twelve-year-old girl hooked them up to the anesthetizer. She reassured them that this was nothing, just removing a slug buried next to a lung, she’d done it twenty times before. And if they struggled against the straps, their fellow soldiers laughed and said, hey, man, haven’t you heard about the Angel of Sauerkraut Station? Settle down, man, she makes miracles.
But no matter how busy things got, every night Momma brushed Lizzie’s hair.
“Those ships are deathtraps, Momma,” she complained, anguished. “There’s no supplies; they get cooped up in there, stew in their own disease. Why don’t they just build one big ship with a medlab?”
“One atomic bomb would take it out,” she said. “Or heck, one kamikaze run. Spaceships are fragile, interconnected—like bodies, really. The more chambers you add, the more possibility that one hit ripples across all of them.”
“But…”
Momma pursed her lips in disapproval. “Little ships are easy to churn out, Lizzie. They let you land soldiers across a wider area. They’re built cheap and disposable, to carry cheap and disposable cargo.”
A thought occurred to Lizzie. “We’ve had ships full of Web soldiers,” she said. “And ships full of Gineer.”
Momma smiled in approval. “You noticed.”
“But never at the same time.”
“Interstellar ships are very slow,” she said. “The chances of two enemy fleets showing up on the same day are slim.”
“But if they did?”
Momma kissed Lizzie on the head. “Why do you think I’ve been riding you so hard to get everyone out of the station?”
That thought kept Lizzie up at nights. But not for too long, because between the surgeries and the sauerkraut and the hydroponics, Lizzie was working eighteen-hour days. She slept deep.
She couldn’t sleep long, though; the station was so packed with folks that their groans kept her awake. They slept fitfully in the hallways, with their heads on their backpacks, and when they woke it was always with a scream. And when she woke, startled, Lizzie smelt the fresh stench of infected wounds, body odor, and—yes, there it was—sauerkraut wafting through the vents. Its briny scent was stark against all the other recycled smells.
The Doc was right. Sauerkraut Station did smell. She hated him for revealing that. And she hated the way he kept raising his prices.
“I possess a mere two hands,” he said after sending another Web soldier back to her doom. “As such, my time’s at a premium.”
“It’d take you one hand and three minutes,” Lizzie shot back. “All that girl needed was a proper implantation of bowel sealant.”
Lizzie was surprised at how blunt she was with Doc—but she was doing half the work these days, and most of the trickier stuff.
Doc just looked irritated. “Why shouldn’t I make it worth my while?” he asked. “I’m an old man. War’s the only time I can fill my coffers.”
“I have to tend to the hydroponics,” Lizzie said, snapping off her surgical gloves. She made her way down to the lounge where the wounded Web soldiers keened. Their sergeants fed them watered-down painkillers—which wouldn’t stop their ruptured bowels from flooding their bodies with infection.
They were all bald, dark-skinned. It was like seeing a row of Thembas, sweating in agony.
“Hush,” she said, kneeling down, taking the stolen hypodermic of sealant out from under her shirt. “I’ll fix you.”
The look in their eyes was so pathetically grateful that it would be worth Momma’s anger.
The Doc had dragged Lizzie to the comm tower by her ear.
“The girl’s undercutting me!” he cried to Momma. “She’s working for free! The Web soldiers are waiting for her to treat them!”
Lizzie stood tall, ready for the slap. Momma had only hit her twice in her life, both times for being careless around vacuum—but she’d never disobeyed anyone so flagrantly before.
Instead, a curl of a smile edged around Momma’s mouth.
“It’s free work,” she said. “She’s an apprentice, no?”
Doc’s face flushed. “Yeah—but…”
“She’s getting extra medical practice in. That’s why I brought you on board, you remember—to teach her?”
“Not at my expense! I didn’t come here to get into competition, goddammit—I arrived with the intent of a monopoly!”
“I never promised you’d be the only doctor here,” Momma said coolly. “I promised you free room and board as long as you served as a doctor. Check your contract.”
“That’s letter of the law,” the Doc snapped. “That’s planetary talk. I deserve better than—”
“I’ve been quite happy with your service here, Mister Ventrager,” Momma said, cutting him off. “But if you’re not satisfied, there’s no time frame to your contract.”
Doc Ventrager’s hands twitched, as though he was thinking of taking a swing at Momma. Momma’s hand dropped to her taser.
“Fine,” he said, biting down so hard on his cigar that it snapped in half. “I hereby proffer you my summary resignation.”
“Best wishes, Mister Ventrager,” Momma said pleasantly to the Doc as he stormed out of the comm room.
Lizzie stepped forward to wrap her arms around Momma, but Momma looked suddenly solemn. “Well, Lizzie,” she said. “You’re the ship’s doctor, now. Are you ready?”
Lizzie wasn’t sure. But she realized she hadn’t left herself another choice.
The irony was that within weeks, Lizzie was charging prices as bad as Doc Ventrager’s. But that wasn’t her fault; there just wasn’t the medicine.
The trade routes had dried up. The freighters told her that pirates and privateers were running rampant. Both Web and Gineer officials complained bitterly whenever the pirates struck—but everyone knew that the pirates were only allowed to operate if they gave a cut to their sponsoring government, and the privateers carried brands authorizing them to steal.
Thankfully, after what Great-Gemma had done to them long ago, the pirates wouldn’t touch Sauerkraut Station. But Momma wondered how long that age-old story would keep the pirates at bay—especially now that things were getting desperate.
Meanwhile, Lizzie bargained hard on the rare occasions she found a merchant with a case of Baxitrin or Rosleep. She got it for what passed for a good price these days. Lizzie hated sending poverty-stricken soldiers off with untreated wounds, but Lizzie found it was easier to set a price and refuse anyone who couldn’t pay. When Lizzie chose who to subsidize that week, it made her responsible for the dead.