Kemal leaned back in his couch trying to remain quiet despite his urge to cry out. The pain was getting worse…he was sure of it. He got his confirmation a minute later when Essa announced he’d managed to get the thrust up to 17g.
Kemal lay back, focused almost entirely on his distress. But in the back of his mind there was a spark of lucidity, a thought and a feeling of urgency accompanying it. We have to get back and report. The Caliph must know about this.
Chapter 17
Sarah Linden was leaning over the med-capsule, her face a mask of concentration. She had her top team waiting – she’d gotten word days before that James Teller was on his way to Armstrong, badly wounded and in medical stasis. She knew Teller well; he was one of Erik Cain’s top officers…and Cain was Sarah Linden’s longtime companion and lover.
“Oh, James. Just look at you.” She muttered softly to herself as she looked down at Teller’s mangled body. She’d known exactly what to expect; all the data on the patient’s condition had been sent to her long before the transport docked. But it was still always a shock to see a human being – especially someone you knew – so gruesomely mutilated.
Her focus was total, but the back of her mind drifted through the years. She’d met Erik when he was brought to her at this very hospital, wounded at least as badly as Teller, and possibly worse. Cain had been exposed to an enormous amount of radiation, and he was so weak he could barely turn his head. But he recovered, and it wasn’t long before he became a nightmare, terrorizing the entire med staff. Except her. He’d had a crush on her from the day he regained consciousness. At first she thought it was cute…he wasn’t the first Marine who fell for her after she’d put him back together. But then she began to realize there was something different about him. She’d never been able to explain it, even to herself. But the two of them were kindred spirits of a sort. She couldn’t keep a tiny smile from her lips as she thought back. It had been more than fifteen years, and nothing had changed. War and duty put distance between them far more often than they wished, but nothing dampened their feelings for each other.
“OK, Andrea, let’s get him into surgery right now.” Sarah was a pleasant, soft-spoken woman in most situations, but when she was dealing with the wounded she ordered her people around as imperiously as Cain did on the battlefield. Sarah was fanatically dedicated to her job, and she’d saved thousands of Marines over the years. She’d always sympathized with Erik about the demons he faced. Her successes, at least, got up and walked out of the hospital. His victories were as bathed in blood as his defeats, and the ghosts that haunted him didn’t seem to care if they’d died in a battle won or a battle lost.
“No significant radiation exposure, right?” Andrea Tuscan was one of her younger doctors, still in surgical training. She was smart as hell, and Sarah had taken her on as a protégé of sorts.
“No.” Sarah was staring at the med-unit’s readouts, confirming what she already knew from the advance transmissions. “He’s in bad shape, but it’s all just physical injuries.” She’d still never had a patient who’d been exposed to as much radiation as Cain had been…at least not one who’d survived. He’d managed to get caught in the open with his armor breached just about as close to a nuclear detonation as a human could be and still survive. Literally. She’d had to regenerate almost every internal organ to replace those destroyed by the radiation. She’d flushed his circulatory system at least ten times, but finally she managed to repair all the damage. He still had some residual effects – she’d treated him for various cancers three times since then. But that was easily cured, a minor inconvenience at worst.
“Surgery unit C.” The med-unit moved under its own power, the medical AI following Sarah’s verbal instructions and directing the hulking, coffin-like capsule. It made a soft hum as it worked its way slowly down the corridor. Sarah followed, reading the display at the end of the unit. There wasn’t much to monitor – the machine was breathing for Teller, pumping his blood, providing nourishment and hydration. He was arguably really dead, the machinery preserving what was left of his body so the medical team could treat his injuries and revive him.
The surgical team was waiting in the unit. Teller would be in surgery for hours. Sarah and her people would repair whatever they could, and they would harvest the tissue grafts they needed to grow replacement organs for those damaged beyond repair. Teller would remain in medical stasis while his new organs developed, and then Sarah would transplant them into his body. After that was completed he would be revived and go through the agonizing process of regenerating an arm and both legs. Then, after some physical therapy, he’d be as good as new. If all went well, he’d walk out of the hospital in six months, maybe seven.
“Seal off unit.” The doors to the surgical theater closed at Sarah’s command. There was a high-pitched whine as the atmospheric system sterilized the room and everything in it. “Prepare to open med-unit.” Sarah took a deep breath and looked over at her team. “Ok people, let’s get started.”
Sarah sat in her office exhausted, still wearing her blood-soaked scrubs. Teller had been in surgery for twelve hours and, despite a few complications, he’d come through fine. Her people were catalyzing the regeneration tanks now…in another few hours they’d begin growing perfect replacements for Teller’s left lung and his liver. The rest of his organs hadn’t been as badly damaged, and they’d been repaired during surgery. Teller would remain in medical stasis until Sarah completed the transplants. Then she’d have a conscious patient to deal with.
Marines were tough to deal with under the best of conditions, but the ones like Cain and Teller were particularly difficult to handle. Men and women cut from that cloth don’t respond well to infirmity or inactivity. Teller didn’t have Cain’s rebellious streak or his fiery temper, at least. She knew she’d been spared the worst of Cain’s fury when he was her patient, and she shuddered to think how hard he’d have been on a doctor he wasn’t falling in love with.
Right now she wanted to sleep. More than anything. Just the thought of her waiting bed was enough to make her weep. But there was work to do. A lot of it. Teller didn’t arrive on Armstrong alone, and Sarah had a legion of his shattered Marines to deal with. Her staff had been working through the night, getting the worst cases into surgery. Sarah Linden took her responsibilities seriously, and she wasn’t about to lose any Marine who managed to get to her hospital. She would make damned sure of that. If it meant no sleep, so be it.
At least on Armstrong she had the resources to properly treat everyone. She’d commanded more than one field hospital where that hadn’t been the case. She closed her eyes as her thoughts drifted back to Carson’s World during the war. They’d been forced into old mining tunnels to avoid the shelling. The wounded came in faster than her people could handle, and they ran out of everything – med-units, drugs, monitors. There were wounded men and women everywhere…laying on the cold stone ground for lack of even a cot. It was a painful memory – she’d lost a lot of Marines there, men and women she could have saved with the right equipment and supplies. The waste of it all was hard to take.
She’d come the closest she ever had to resigning after that nightmare. She’d never told Erik, but she’d actually filled out the forms. But something kept her from submitting them. Everyone she loved was in the service, and if any of them was wounded, she wanted to be there. But it was more than that…she realized resigning would be a futile gesture. Those broken and bleeding bodies would still be there and, without her efforts, more of them would die. Leaving would be too selfish. It would be abandoning her duty, her purpose.