The Disaster Controller’s voice chanted the countdown in his ears. He didn’t dare look up when the voice announced defenders on the attacker’s tail. He’d gained such momentum that he had to concentrate on staying over his feet.
An oddly detached corner of his mind worked Newton’s Laws, calculating his stopping distance, and impact force if he didn’t stop in time, a freshman final exam problem. This isn’t going to work! But the crowd seemed to be bounding along in nightmarish slow motion, and no one dared slow down even when the narrow opening in the dome gaped before them. It led into a small garage, still floodlit inside. The first arrivals skidded onto the smooth paving, yelling frantically when they realized they would hit the far wall hard. Way short of the door, Titus slowed, yelling for others to do the same despite the instinct that screamed, run!
Then the ground jerked from under him as something hit his back. He sprawled, chin first, momentum driving him on. In front of him, others fell, knocked over the staggering who piled into the fallen, who slid with relentless momentum into a tangled jam in the doorway. Then molten fragments of metal rained down. Screams filled his earphones.
Swimming in squirming, suited bodies, Titus struggled forward to throw himself across one man’s slashed leg, trying to keep air and blood in. It was a mindless act, but it saved his life. Where he had been, a large wedge of hot metal sliced into the man who had been under Titus. It stood quivering, its pointed end skewering the writhing body, its upper end glowing red hot in shadow. Panic drove others forward despite the pile of suits jamming the doorway, burying Titus in squirming humanity. Many of those on top died, suits holed by hot missiles floating down under lunar gravity, or plunging down with the energy of explosion behind them. However, most explosion debris hit escape velocity.
The eerie thing, the most frightening thing, was that it all happened in such utter silence. Spacewar movies always had sound effects. All Titus heard was the screaming. He had not even heard the ground rumbling because his boots were too well insulated.
For a long time, he lay buried under a mass of dead, injured and dying, pinning other dead, injured and dying to the ground with his own mass, and all afraid to move for fear of holing their suits on sharp fragments. At least I don’t have to smell the panic and the blood. After a while, his suit radio ceased working, so he was even spared the patient Disaster Controller’s voice instructing them not to move and not to panic to conserve air.
Eventually, people came and pulled the pile of bodies apart, heaping the stiffened corpses for identification and burial, setting the survivors onto their feet in the awkward suits. Those too injured to walk were carried off, and the others were told to report to the infirmary only if there were signs of concussion or serious injury.
When Titus was at last extricated and set up on his feet, one leg numb from lack of circulation, a small suited figure that had been attaching oxygen hoses for those still trapped, turned toward him, froze, then flew at him, almost knocking him over again.
Across the helmet was written, I. CELLURA. Through the faceplate he saw sweat on her forehead and her lip quivered. He let her support him all the way back to the airlock, because he didn’t trust his leg, and because it felt so good to hold her, but he made it clear that he was fine.
When it was his turn to be cycled through the lock, Inea reluctantly returned to her work, and he entered the corridor leading from the suit dressing rooms to the airlock.
Abbot and H’lim both were inside, helping survivors off with gear while others supplied drinks and first aid. All at once, Titus remembered the transmitter in his leg pocket, the reason his circulation had been cut off.
They pushed Titus down on a crate and H’lim pulled the exterior, insulating boots off him. Abbot hovered over him, cutting out other helpful corpsmen, and ostentatiously used a penlite to check if his pupils dilated properly, making notes on a medical pad as he worked. Along the line of dazed survivors, the four Brink’s guards who usually shadowed H’lim were wrapping sprained ankles and bandaging facial cuts.
“Thanks, Abbot, I can manage now,” said Titus, heart pounding as Abbot worked over him. He struggled to his feet to shed his suit. “Go help someone who needs it.”
“What were you doing out there,” hissed Abbot.
“My job, what else!” snapped Titus. In a very non-regulation move, he pushed the suit’s torso down to dangle over the legs, as if it were a pair of wholly flexible overalls. Abbot began to object, but H’lim tugged at his sleeve, moving off to help clean up someone who had vomited.
With a scowl directed back over his shoulder at Titus, Abbot went, but cloaking his words, he added, “It doesn’t matter what you were doing. The probe’s gone now.”
Watching them, Titus was struck by the way H’lim’s ministrations were accepted. He sat back down, pulling his feet out of the suit’s attached boots. He’d worked his right foot up to the knee when the lock opened and a woman was brought in on a stretcher, stifling screams. It was the electrician Titus had relieved in the probe.
Her leg was broken. Two corpsmen converged on her to cut the suit away and start an IV. All the suitcutters were in use, so they employed powered metal snips, awkward and dangerous if she moved. She bit the rim of her suit collar and tried her best to remain still, but it wasn’t good enough, and nobody had come yet with medication.
After their third failure, H’lim plunged across the room and lifted the snips from the corpsman’s grasp. “Let me,” he said, without Influence.
The electrician readily accepted his help, but she was unable to remain still. H’lim reached for her face, Influence gathering about him like a rising sun. Titus almost came off his crate, one leg in his suit, the other bare, but swallowed his protest when the room fell silent. H’lim murmured, “Let me take the pain away. Please, we’ve got to stop the bleeding or you’ll die.”
She glanced at her audience, and Titus followed her gaze to see Colby coming through the hatch. Defiantly, the electrician told H’lim, “All right, but just for a moment.”
Titus was certain that, concentrating as he was, H’lim was unaware of Colby. Though the power H’lim raised was stunning, his touch was delicate enough not to derange the suggestible human nor to disturb Abbot’s work on her.
Her eyes closed and tranquility altered her face to that of a young girl. H’lim wielded the clumsy tool with fine precision, excising her arm for the IV, then exposing the tattered mess, that had been her leg. Everyone there knew what H’lim considered nourishment, and not a one saw a hint of anything on his face but clinical detachment as he wrapped a tourniquet and announced, “It’s not as bad as it looks. Only two breaks. They should be able to save the leg.” To the corpsman who had finally seated the IV, he added, “If the surgeons doubt it, have them call me.
Before he could answer, a nurse arrived with a shot for the patient and H’lim released his hold on her mind. As he turned away, Colby moved up to challenge H’lim. “You are under injunction not to use your power.” The Brink’s guards, who had watched from a distance, snapped to.
H’lim met her gaze unwaveringly. “If my life is forfeit, then so be it. I acted as required by an oath and ethic older and more honored than your Hippocratic Oath. And I did, Dr. Colby, gain her express permission first.”
“As I recall, permission wasn’t a factor in our agreement, nor have you ever represented yourself as a medical practitioner.” Her awareness of the onlookers was clear in her stance and tone.
“The divisions of labor you practice are not universal, Dr. Colby. My field is the integrity of the physical body, in health, in illness, in reproduction, and in trauma, regardless of species or planet of origin. Were it not so, I could not have learned your biological notation system so quickly, could I? But this is the seventieth, or maybe eightieth such system I’ve encountered, and at least the hundredth physiological variant. I could repair that woman’s leg as easily as I could grow her a new one.” His expression hardened. “Therefore, I am not free to ignore her plight”