The doctors attempt surgery under extreme conditions and St. Cloud makes a friend.
Coming up: Team Fortress 2 Engineers have nothing on a pissed-off Darkknell tech.
Chapter 15:
A girl. It was impossible to tell for certain; the child’s face was in shadow, but the long, stringy clumps of hair made St. Cloud think the figure was female. She was wearing something that could only roughly be considered clothes; a bundle of fabric hung off her like a burlap sack with ragged holes cut into it for her head and arms to stick out. She was barefoot.
And, of course, she was holding a very big knife.
How the hell had she come here? Primal hadn’t had any kids on board. Was it possible that she was a stowaway? Or was she a survivor from one of the other ships that come here? Worse yet was the possibility that she had been born in this place. Majesty, there are people here. How many? The thought of a child growing up on this wrecked station sent something cold and jagged twisting through the mercenary’s guts.
“Hi, honey,” Jeremy said. Even at the best of times, he was not a man well-suited to offering or giving comfort. Too many years as a drop trooper, too many times watching others die. He cared for the men and women under his command, but he could never be a shoulder to lean on for them, or anyone else. Even though he’d left his broken and useless helmet behind, he doubted that an over-muscled man in body armour holding a gun was adding anything to his rough, deep voice’s best attempts at a soothing tone. Anything positive, anyways. “What are you doing out here?”
Watch it, idiot. She’s got a knife and might be just as bugged as the rest. No, he wasn’t about to get too close. Hernandez had led by example here.
The girl took a step back, her head coming up and she blinked against the light from St. Cloud’s torch. Her skin was pasty and smudged with dirt. Her eyes were hazel.
“Is anyone with you?” St. Cloud said, sweeping Betsy back and forth across the hall, the ceiling, straining to hear the sounds of movement as he ran down a mental checklist of any place a potential ambusher could be lying in wait. Hiding in the busted elevator. Lurking in the vents. Just inside the substation. Further down the stairs. “Are you all alone, honey?”
She took another step back as he continued to approach and raised the knife, baring her teeth in a hiss of warning.
“Okay,” St. Cloud said, stopping where he was. “Okay. It’s okay. I’m not going to hurt you.” Unless you come at me. Then they’ll have to scrape you off the walls, honey.
The girl remained still, neither retreating nor approaching as she evaluated him warily, slowly lowering her knife. The pair continued to stare at each other for a few moments. When she spoke, it was so abrupt that St. Cloud almost jumped. “Are you still alive?”
~
“You want us to operate... in here?”
Abigail looked over her shoulder at Emily. “What? What’s wrong with it?” Emily hoped the mercenary was being sarcastic.
Where do I start? The petite doctor took another look at the medical bay, aghast. The lighting was working, but she thought she might have preferred that it wasn’t. Cabinets were left open, broken syringes, boxes and bottles crunching under every step. The medical complex was the size of a small hospital, with a waiting room scarred by weapons fire, the seat cushions ripped up and stained with hundreds of years’ worth of bodily fluids. The reinforced glass of the receptionist’s station had long since been broken in, a faded stain in one corner where someone had sought futile refuge, cowering until the moment they’d been killed.
The IMSIS room had sent off the mercenaries’ rad-counters; counterpointing the pinging rattles of their sensors had been the warning that someone had been kind enough to spray-paint on the door – a simplified version of a radiation warning symbol, three triangles around a circle. Several other rooms had been welded shut, some doors broken off their hinges. There were gouges in the walls: craters caused by projectile weapons, scores burnt by energy fire, pockmarks created by some noxious chemical splash. Emily was almost positive that she could hear something stirring in the still-sealed rooms. She tried to tell herself that it was just nerves, but that didn’t make it easier to listen to the rasp of something that she could swear was in there, scratching at the door and wanting out.
On the walls were more prayers and blasphemies, desperate pleas, riddles and twisted jokes. Without access to the station’s computer - at least, no reliable access – this was the only way the stranded crews of DROP 47’s visitors had to leave messages. That didn’t mean it was any less unsettling.
One floor down, there were a pair of sentry guns, of a design that Emily had never seen before – they were cobbled-together affairs with exposed wiring and systems, surrounded by empty shells – crude, thick power cables from the guns snaked up through the ceiling, leading back into the ward where Emily and the others found themselves.
The room that they were was one of several intended for patients whose injuries or conditions necessitated a hospital stay for observation and/or treatment, but were not serious enough to warrant transfer to the larger complexes in the station core. Four beds, each of which was spattered with blood and other bloodily fluids. Emily could smell the odour of fetid tissue, fuzzy blossoms of mold and fungus sprouting off the stained bunks. The mattresses were new; they had to be off Primal, since anything older would have rotted completely away by now. Even synthetic fabrics would have disintegrated after prolonged neglect like this.
The surgical suite was completely unfit for any sort of work at wall; the stench emanating from its closed doors had filled the corridors and the stiffness in Shannon and Hutchin’ bodies as they’d hurried Emily, Salvador and Louis past that part of the hospital made the doctor both wonder just what they’d seen in there, and grateful that she didn’t have to experience it.
Haven taken in the room a second time, Delphini shook her head again. “It’s completely unsanitary.”
In something red, gooey and clumping, someone had splashed I AM WATCHING YOU across one wall. Emily didn’t think it was blood. It wasn’t attracting the flies the way the mattresses were, a swarm of buzzing insects flitting through the air, thick-bodied maggots and egg cases squishing underfoot.
Abigail shrugged. “It’s all we’ve got.” She moved to the least-disgusting mattress and flipped it over; the underside had been soaked through, but it was... somewhat... cleaner than the top. “We’ve checked the systems out,” the mercenary continued. “Most of the automeds are working. I’m not sure I trust them, but that’s beside the point. The sterilytic field is good, though.” She pointed at an extremely unsafe-looking serpent’s nest of cables, including those from the sentry guns, that ran over the floor from exposed maintenance hatches to a pair portable power generators; those were from Primal, too. “Someone jury-rigged it pretty decently. Give me a couple minutes and I can get it up and running. That should clean off the worst of it.”
“The worst of it...” Emily repeated, sharing a dismayed glance with Salvador. They were expected, without any assistance, to perform surgery on Hernandez. Without it, he’d die. They couldn’t keep moving him, but this... she covered her eyes with her hand for a moment. It was just a little thing, the expectation that just because she was a doctor she could work miracles. Here, the miracle would be Hernandez not picking up some kind of infection.
“You can’t be serious!” Ramone blurted, punctuating Emily’s observation. “This place is a sewer.”
“Funny story,” Abigail replied. Coming through her helmet’s speaker, her voice was almost completely flat. “Had to fight in a waste-treatment plant before. Couple of the squad took hits and Hayes patched them up.”
“Then get her to do it!” Salvador demanded.
“You’re the doctors,” Shannon said from behind, carrying a reeking crate. It was covered with something that Emily didn’t want to identify, but under the grime, she could see the Hadley-Wright corporate sigil on it. The corporal set the box down beside one of the uglier mattresses. “This is the only unopened one I could find in Surgery.”
Abigail nodded, kneeling beside one of the opened maintenance panels, pulling a few small tools out of her belt pouches. She tinkered with the machinery for a moment, before moving to the generator. “Okay. I can’t turn them on individually. It’ll be all or nothing.” At Shannon’s nod, Hutchins activated the generator. Above the beds, the sterilytic field generators hummed and coughed to life. The third one flickered on and off, and the second occasionally dimmed or briefly shut down, but the ones over the bed Abigail had flipped and Shannon’s box were constant, bathing everything below them in an anti-microbial field. The box steamed as the rotten film on its surface was burned away, the flies caught beneath the field flashing incandescently into ashes, or dropping from the air as their seared wings gave out.
“That’s a little too powerful,” Shannon mused. “We want clean, not sunburnt.”
“It’s just that one. At least as near as I can tell.”
“Okay, let’s get Louis up.”
It took all four of them to get the injured mercenary on the bed. He coughed, blood spraying up on his lips and leaking out around the synthskin Shannon had put on his neck and from the tube in his chest. “Bitch r’lly took a piece ou’ of m’, huh?” he laughed weakly.
“You’re here and she isn’t,” Abigail said. “I’d say that counts for something.”
Louis’s laugh devolved into another bloody cough. Hutchins clapped him on the shoulder. “You’re going to be all right, dumbass. You’ve got three medics here, with enough gear,” she nodded in the direction of the medical supplies that Shannon had found, “to patch up an entire battalion.” She put one finger on the middle of his forehead. “And since the sarge isn’t here right now and the corporal doesn’t go in for it, that means I’m going to have to be the one to kick your ass for not wearing your helmet. And if you cheat me out of that by dying, I am going to find your pansy ass in the afterlife and really fuck you up.”
“H’ abou’ jus’ fucking m’?” the injured mercenary slurred.
“Do something about the drool and we’ll talk.”
“An’ her?” Louis tried to point, but whether he was intending to do so at Emily, Shannon or both of them was unclear.
Abigail chuckled. “No promises. But if it gets you through this, you can fantasize about all three of us. Dumbass.”
Shannon pulled the filthy, steaming crate open – the seal had held and its contents were uncontaminated by... what had happened in the surgical wing. She held her gauntlets into the sterilytic field, letting it burn them clean before reaching into the container, sorting through its contents. It had been intended for the first expedition’s medical pavilion; by luck of the draw it held mostly first aid supplies. Well, not that lucky, since Primal’s own medical bay supposed to be for any serious injuries; Hadley-Wright’s pavilion was supposed to be more of a field station. “There should be enough to work with in here,” she said. Not everything, but enough.
Emily nodded as she and Ramone snapped on their gloves. “You said the automeds are working?”
“They’ve got power,” Shannon said. “I don’t know if I’d call them working.”
“But – Ab-Private Hutchins said... This would be a lot easier with them.”
“Emily,” Shannon said. “Look at them.”
The petite doctor did. One of the auto-surgeon’s scalpel-holding arms was covered in more blood than it should have been. The doctor’s mind was already on the conclusion: error, a fault in the machinery was one explanation. But... Imperial technology or not, Primal’s crew and expedition team would have been idiots to use the automeds without checking them first. Either they’d missed something or...
She looked over at Hayes. The other woman nodded in confirmation. “Someone’s been playing with them.”
Just like the doors. Emily suppressed a shudder. They’d expected DROP 47 to be abandoned. Instead... They must have tried to use the automatic systems, Emily thought, imagining reprogrammed robotic limbs cutting and cutting, frantic personnel trying to shut them down... or had it even been that way? An injured survivor laying on the cot, trusting the ancient machines to save their life...
This place is a tomb.
Louis groaned as Abigail and Shannon managed to get his cuirass off, the medic taking a pair of scissors and cutting open his shirt. Both mercenaries looked expectantly over at the doctors. Ramone and Emily shared a glance. “We can do it,” Delphini said, as much to her partner as to the soldiers. “We can do it.” She took a breath, holding out a hand. “Sedative.”
~
Emily felt a hand on her forehead, mopping away sweat and she felt a flush of relief. As a nurse, Shannon was one of the best she’d had. Neither doctor seemed able to complete a request before the mercenary was there to fulfill it. You’d make a good doctor, Delphini thought absently as she inserted a syringe into Hernandez’s throat, giving him another shot of hi-ox. Once he’d been put on his back, blood had starting to pool in his airway, leaking out of his damaged blood vessels.
Why won’t you heal?
It wasn’t just moving him; the bite was still bleeding. They’d given him 15% more than the normal dose of coagulants, and barely slowed it. There’d been something in the woman’s bite, some agent that was refusing to lay down and die. Emily had no idea what it was, but she remembered other organisms that were just as tenacious.
Hutchins was off to one side; she’d found a working computer and was playing with it, trying to find something useful. Every so often, she’d shoot a glance towards Shannon; Hutchins was good with hardware – Emily remembered that from her dossier, but Hayes had a better grasp of language, math and the computer systems themselves. Emily bit her lip; she wanted to know what was in that computer, but couldn’t very well tell Shannon to leave Hernandez. It would have to wait; not for long though – it seemed that they were finally getting Hernandez’s bleeding under control.
Lucky little shit, Emily thought to herself as she nodded at Salvador. “Okay. I think we’ve just about got it.”
Abigail barely heard the doctor’s admission, working instead on suppressing a series of profanities. The computer was slow, continually freezing and filled with corrupted files, but there’d been some effort made at upkeep and there were a few sectors that were still running. Hm. Looks like this was hooked into the hospital’s surveillance grid. She keyed through the various views, trying to figure out where the cameras were and what sections they were looking into. Between the sentries and the surveillance grid, this place wasn’t a half-bad strongpoint. Of course, there was Surgery... Wait; that view was from the entryway and-
The mercenary jumped out of the chair, grabbing her carbine. She was at the power generator that the guns had been hooked into, checking the feeds and cursing as she slammed a fist against the machine, still not getting the results she wanted. Power’s good; problem at the source, then. Shit! Abandoning it, the mercenary was almost out the door before Shannon turned towards her.
“What, what’s wrong?”
“Company’s coming,” Abigail said, spinning around, barely breaking stride as she did so. “I’d hurry with that.” Then she was pounding down the corridor towards the stairs, hoping she could make it to the sentry guns in time.
Spoiler
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