Eternity Row (5 page)

“Is he making you hand him the tools?”

Beautiful dark eyes that had been adoringly fixed on Dhreen’s oversized feet flashed toward me, and filled with feminine suspicion.

“No, patcher. I offered to help.”

We weren’t friends, Ilona and I-more like uneasy allies. After Jericho had nearly beaten her to death for betraying his underground to the League, I’d saved her life and hid her from my clone-brother. She and Dhreen had subsequently become lovers, but I secretly doubted there was any love on her side of the arrangement. Ilona Red Faun had been raised to do whatever it took to survive, and evidently she thought that required belonging to a man.

Oh, knock it off, Cherijo
, one of my inner voices chided.
Like you and Reever are role models for normal relationships
.

“You’d better watch him-he’ll make you work overtime.”

“I will remember that.” The graceful Indian girl rose to her feet. She’d traded her customary two-piece Navajo
biil
garments for a pilot’s flightsuit, and had looped her two long dark braids into a gleaming, woven crown. Dhreen’s promise-to-marry earring, according to Oenrallian custom, sparkled at the top of her right ear, where she’d pierced it through the auricle. “What brings you here?”

“I need Dhreen for a minute, if you can spare him.”

The Oenrallian was already crawling out from under the shuttle. Like Ilona, he also wore a flightsuit, but grime and some kind of blackish fluid spattered his. Short, pumpkin-colored hair stood on end around two short, red nubs that served as his ears. Sort of. He had pallid skin with the faint, yellowish tinge of good health, and big, innocent-looking amber eyes. A less-sparkly, male version of Ilona’s ear bauble encircled one of his almost-ears. For some reason, every time I saw it, I thought it should be looped through his nose.

Dhreen grabbed a cloth as he got to his feet and wiped his hands, but his spoon-shaped fingers needed a thorough scrubbing. “Hey, Doc.” He flashed a grin. “What’s developing?”

“I need to discuss the situation on Oenrall with you.”

His grin faltered for a moment, then he scanned the area. There were a handful of other crew members working around us. “We should chat in my accommodations.”

A need for privacy. Not promising. “All right, but if this is another song and dance, Dhreen, I’m going to strangle you.”

“Give me another blip. I have to cap off this beam emitter. Ilona, go inside and shut down the power cells.” He crawled back under the hull. “Doc, would you hand me that hand welder?”

I looked down at the pile of tools beside his footgear. “What’s a welder?”

“It looks like one of your suture lasers.”

I picked up a black-handled tool that vaguely resembled the medical instrument and bent to show it to him. “This thing?”

“That’s it.” He reached out to take it, his spoon-shaped fingers closing around mine.

Without warning, the ship destabilized, and the tilt threw me forward against the shuttle. Something blew, then a burst of light and heat swept up my arm as Dhreen shouted. Smoke poured out from under the shuttle, and Ilona staggered out just as the ship righted itself. I was flung backward onto the deck.

“Healer, shut it off!” she shouted.

The tool in my hand was busily burning a hole into the shuttle’s hull, but before I could react, the beam shut off by itself. I put it down, then saw a narrow stream of orange blood seeping from under the shuttle.

“Dhreen!”

Ilona crouched down beside me. “What have you done to him?”

“Nothing. Something exploded.” I crawled under, coughing on the smoke. Dhreen wasn’t moving. “Come on, help me get him out!”

Between us, we managed to drag him out onto the deck. The front of his tunic was smoldering, so I tore it open, and found a two-inch entry wound in his right lateral chest. Dark-orange arterial blood pumped out onto his abdomen and formed a spreading pool under his shoulders. “Signal Medical-hurry!”

“You shot him!” She jumped on me instead, wrapping a strong arm around my neck and jerking my head back by the hair. “I’ll kill you!”

Having my air cut off made protecting Dhreen’s body and breaking her hold a challenge. “It… was… an accident!” I dug my hands in, breaking the choke hold, then pushed hard with my legs. It threw us both backward, with me landing on top of her.

I scrambled up, panting and furious, and when she launched herself at me again, I grabbed her by one braid and slapped her as hard as I could. By that time the launch bay crew had rushed over to us. “Somebody take her and signal Medical for me!”

She held a hand to her face and muttered vile things in Navajo as one of the engineers led her away.

I went back to work on Dhreen. In the background, I heard a voice say, “Medical, emergency, central launch bay. Pilot Dhreen has been wounded.”

One of the other pilots knelt beside me. “How serious are his injuries, Healer? Shall we transport him to Medical for you?”

“Really bad, but wait for the team.” I pressed my ear to his chest. Judging from the gurgling breath sounds and the irregular cardiac rhythm, whatever had blasted the hole in his chest had also punctured the Oenrallian’s lung/heart on the right side. I kept one hand jammed down on the wound as I rolled him onto his side. From the size of the exit wound, it must have nailed the right hepatic lobe, too. “Signal Medical again. Tell them to prep a cardiothoracic team.”

“You’re not operating on him,” Ilona hissed from several feet away. “You did this to him!”

“Someone had better, and soon, or he’s not going to make it.”

The Senior Healer and a medevac team got to the launch bay at about the same time I’d slowed the bleeding with makeshift pressure dressings on either side of the wound.

Squilyp bent down to help me transfer Dhreen onto the gurney. “Gods, Cherijo. How did this happen?”

“Something hit him with a point-blank pulse blast to the lower lateral chest with a thirty degree up angle. Massive cardiopulmonary trauma and liver damage. Scan him.” Beneath the fingers I had pressed to his throat, I felt Dhreen’s pulse fading. “He’s flagging. Move it, people!”

Ilona abruptly went nuts, and flung herself at me again. “You’ve killed him!”

One of the engineers dragged her away. Then the Omorr and I pushed Dhreen’s gurney out into the corridor. On the way to Medical, I initiated the infuser line as Squilyp continuously scanned his vitals.

“Extensive residual pressure damage in the soft tissue and viscera of the upper torso,” Squilyp said, and handed me a syrinpress. I injected Dhreen with adrenalisine to help his traumatized lung/heart keep pumping. “What was he working on?”

“Some emitter thing under a shuttle, but I was handing him a laser tool when the ship rocked. It may have accidentally gone off.” We guided the gurney around a corner and through the main entrance panel to Medical. “Surgical team prepped?”

“Scrubbed and waiting for you.”

“Us. I can’t patch up this many holes by myself.” Sweat stung my eyes. “We’ve got to work fast, too.”

“Go scrub.” Squilyp nudged me toward the cleansing unit. “I’ll get started in surgical and trans him to the machine.” He paused. “Put your cortgear on. We need to make a record of this.”

“Your students can read a text.”

“It’s not for my students,” he said, then hopped away.

As I passed my hands under the sterilizer port, I was shocked to see them trembling.

I thought of OverSeer FurreVa, the Hsktskt guard who had become my friend during my days as a slave doctor on Catopsa. I’d lost her to the same kind of injury, after she’d taken a blast meant for me.

No way was I letting Dhreen go that way.

I remembered the cortgear and clamped the unit over my head as I rushed into the surgical suite, where the team had the Oenrallian on the procedure table. Squilyp was transitioning Dhreen’s body from his own lung/heart to the machine which would perform the same functions for him while I repaired the damage.

He looked so damn young, lying there. Like a little boy. And I could smell him-that not-quite pineapple mixed with chocolate smell filled my head. I clenched my hands into fists for a moment, then gloved. “Report.”

“Hypoperfused but prominent jugular venous distention,” the Omorr said. “I can’t get him over on the machine.”

I stopped feeling guilty and became furious. “He’s going into cardiac shock.
Goddamn
it.” I yanked the table scanner over his chest. “Compression’s coming from the pericardium. Great. Cardiac tamponade. Just what we needed.”

“Fluid bolus?” the Omorr asked me.

“No time. Number four chest aspirator.” I held out a hand, and the instrument nurse slapped the big needle onto my palm. With a hard push I stabbed it through the wall of Dhreen’s chest until I penetrated the smooth membrane surrounding his lung/heart. Immediately the aspirator’s empty reservoir began to fill up with bloody fluid. So much had accumulated inside the pericardium that the membrane was literally crushing the organ that it was supposed to protect.

Once I finished the aspiration, I withdrew the needle. “Make sure we’ve got plenty of Oenrallian whole blood synthesized; we’re going to need it.” I looked toward the head of the table. Vlaav was manning the anesthesia rig. “Status?”

“He’s leveling, Doctor, but his vitals remain borderline,” the Saksonan said.

“Can’t be helped. Squilyp?”

“Almost there.” The Omorr finished inducting the arterial lines that would supply Dhreen with oxygen and pump his blood. “Ready.”

I powered up the lascalpel rig and made the initial midline incision with one stroke. Every order I gave was clipped with impatience. “Clamp. Get those ribs out of my way. Suction.”

Once the blood and tissue fragments had been cleared from the chest cavity, I stopped Dhreen’s cardio-pulmonary organ and switched him over to the lung/heart machine, then inspected the damage. A large, clean perforation ran straight through his liver and into his lung/heart on the cardiac side. Because Oenrallians breathe with the same organ that pumps the blood through their bodies, he had in essence collapsed both lung and heart.

“Dhreen, you’d better not die on me,” I told his unconscious face, “because you still owe me a hundred credits for that last whump-ball game I won.”

My boss took a position on the other side of the table and studied the mess. “Acoustic inhomogeneity refracted the blast wave, judging by the tissue displacement.”

“We’ll deal with that later.” I carefully suctioned the pooled blood out of his delicate cadiac sacs and began removing several bits of scorched tunic that had lodged in the wound. “You’d better get that bleeding in the liver under control. Cauterize and suture if it’s clean.”

Plugging the holes in his lung/heart wasn’t enough. I had to piece back together the internal bronchial structures that had been ruptured by the point-blank shot first. He’d lost too much tissue for a normal repair job on the cardiac structures as well. “I’m going to have to use a pericardial graft to fix the ventricular sacs and install a triventricular assist device for the interim.” I glanced down at Squilyp’s membranes, which were busily sewing the two halves of Dhreen’s liver back together. “How’s it look?”

“The shot exited the liver through the hepatic flexure.” He tossed aside a suture laser and asked for suction. “I’ve debrided and litigated the enterotomies. Left lobe is intact and functional.” Squilyp peered into his scope. “I can’t resect the flexure.”

“You’d make a defect the size of Texas if you did. Anastomose with the primary and tertiary hepatic vessels.”

The Omorr lifted his face from the viewer. “The ternary’s too narrow.”

“Damn.” I finished removing a piece of the smooth membrane surrounding Dhreen’s lung/heart for the graft and set it on a sterile procedure tray before stepping around the table to look in the endoscope myself. “Do it anyway. We’ll find a way to keep it functional until I can clone a new liver.”

Behind his view lens, one dark eye narrowed. “That is very risky.”

“Have you got any other options?” I flung a hand toward the open cavity. “I mean, show me what
doesn’t
have a hole blasted through it!”