Earth Afire (The First Formic War) (37 page)

“The damaged section of the intestines will have to be cut off and removed. The bowel will then need to be stitched back together to reestablish the continuity of the digestive tract. The wound must be properly cleansed and treated for infection. The abdominal wound must then be stapled and treated for infection as well. The patient will need to be under general anesthetic the entire time. I can help watch the patient’s vitals and coach you through the process.”

“How long will it take, knowing that we’re completely untrained and have no idea what we’re doing?”

“Anywhere from four to twelve hours.”

Bingwen was quiet.

“Well?” said the old woman. “What did it say? Is this something we can do?”

Bingwen looked at them. They were ready to give up. He could see it in their faces.

“Yes,” he said. “We can absolutely do this. It won’t be hard at all.”

*   *   *

Kim hated status meetings. They felt like a complete waste of time. She had gone to school to be a doctor, to help people, to save lives, not to sit around a conference room and look at spreadsheets and due dates and discuss the minutiae of every project. That was an administrator’s job. That’s what managers did. Doctors got their hands dirty. Doctors rushed to bedsides, giving comfort, cheating death. Meetings like this
were
death, slow and painful and mind-numbingly boring.

“Kim? Are you with us?”

She looked up. Everyone around the table was staring at her. She had been doodling on her holopad, making swirls all over the spreadsheet. She blinked and sat upright. “Yes. Sorry. Go on.”

The group went back to it, chattering away about some production issue: the manufacturers in China who were assembling the most recent round of Med-Assists weren’t going to meet their deadline; the workers weren’t coming into the plant.

“Can you blame them?” said Kim. “There
is
a war on. Alien civilization. People dying. I wouldn’t want to go into work either.”

“Business must go on, Kim,” said one of the project managers. “There’s no telling how big this could get. The military might deploy troops. If New Zealand gets in this fight, we need to be ready with the Med-Assist.”

He was right, Kim knew. She had seen all the statistical reports; the Med-Assist reduced combat casualties by as much as sixty percent in some studies. Yet even so, it struck Kim as absurd that they would sit here and discuss something as frivolous as labor disputes while thousands of civilians died in rural China. There were aliens out there, for crying out loud. Malicious, highly advanced aliens. The world had changed overnight. They were fretting over a burning tree while the forest blazed all around them.

But she said none of this aloud. Instead she smiled politely and pretended to listen as the meeting continued and the discussion moved on to other production issues.

This had never been in the job description, she told herself. They had said nothing about her helping to manage logistical concerns or labor disputes. And yet here she was, enduring another mindless meeting on those very subjects.

She had tried to get out of them, she had pled to upper management that they excuse her from all management duties, yet her request had been denied. She knew every function of the Med-Assist. An issue in another department might affect what she was doing. She needed to stay in the loop, she needed to be aware.

For the hundredth time she questioned if coming to New Zealand had been the right decision. They had promised her that she would be helping more people through the device, and technically that was true. But now those words felt like a misleading promise. She was helping more people, yes, but she never got to
see
any of them; she never got to give their hands a reassuring squeeze before surgery, or watch their faces light up when she told them all would be well. They were numbers, not names. All the humanity and thrill and reward of being a doctor were missing. It was the work of saving lives, but the work felt lifeless.

Mazer had made it tolerable. When they were together she had ignored the doubts about the job. All the mindless meetings and administrative crap was bearable if it meant having him at her side.

But now even that was gone.

Mazer. She couldn’t think of him without four different emotions assaulting her at once. She was angry still, of course. Furious even. How could he think that what they had could be snipped in two and so easily ended? Had it meant so little to him? Then there was the sorrow and the empty loneliness of it all, the vacant feeling she couldn’t seem to shake.

But most of all was the worry. The fear that he was dead somewhere in China. He was right at the center of it. Of all the places in the world to go, the Formics had landed there. And not just one lander, but all three.

She had seen him pull the boy from the mud. The press was still playing it over and over again. When she heard that the Formics had landed in China, it was as if her heart had dropped out of her chest. She had glued herself to the feeds, hoping to see something that would reassure her that he was all right.

And then there he was. Right on the screen. Right in front of her. Right there in the mud and thick of it, right at the epicenter. And she had burst into tears.

That had been twelve hours ago, and since then no word. She wasn’t sure what she expected. A call from him? A message of some sort, reassuring her that he was all right?

Her wrist pad vibrated. She was getting a call, and for an instant she thought it might be him. Then she looked at the photo and saw that it was the front desk. She considered letting it go to her message box, but then she realized it was her ticket out of the meeting. She got to her feet, smiled apologetically, and left the room.

Outside in the hall she put in her earbud and tapped it. “Dr. Arnsbrach,” she said.

The voice on the line said, “Sorry to bother you, Doctor. It’s Marnie at the front desk. I’ve got another one of those misdirects on the line. It sounds urgent. What should I do?”

Kim sighed. Misdirects were calls intended for doctors but which were misdirected to company headquarters instead. Early versions of the Med-Assist device were to blame. They had included a feature that the company couldn’t sustain: If the Med-Assist saw that it needed outside help for a procedure, it would make a sat call to a switchboard. That switchboard would then connect the Med-Assist to a real doctor within the Med-Assist network. The doctor would then stay on the line with the soldier who had the device and help him complete whatever dicey medical procedure he was trying to perform.

The problem was, the contracts to build the network of doctors had fallen through at the last minute. So there were no doctors taking live calls. There was nobody.

The company had removed the sat-call feature from subsequent releases of the device, and an update of the software had erased that feature on those devices that had originally had it. Yet every so often an old Med-Assist device surfaced that hadn’t been updated. And when it tried to contact the nonexistent network, it failed and called headquarters instead.

“Where’s the device?” asked Kim.

“The boy says he’s in China.”

Great, thought Kim. China. That meant it was probably a device that had made its way to the black market. The company didn’t have a contract with the Chinese military. What else could it be?

“Should I tell him we don’t offer that service? He’s a kid. He’s clearly not military.”

“No,” said Kim. “I’ll take the call. Patch him through.”

Technically she had no responsibility for whoever was on the line, and there were all kinds of shaky legal issues here. But it was a living, breathing person who needed help. And wasn’t that what she was missing?

“Hello?” said a small voice.

“Hello. I’m Dr. Kim Arnsbrach. Who I am speaking with?”

“My name is Bingwen.”

“You have a Med-Assist, Bingwen?”

“Yes. I found it. You have to help me. My friend is hurt. We’ve been following the instructions, but we had a problem and it called you.”

“How old is your friend, Bingwen?” If the patient was a child, Kim would alert one of the pediatricians on staff and get them involved.

“I don’t know,” said the boy. “Does it matter?”

“Is there an adult there I can speak with?”

“I’m the only one who speaks English.”

“Where are you?”

“In a farmhouse. South of Dawanzhen.”

That meant nothing to her. “Okay, Bingwen. Maybe I can help you.” She was moving back to her office. “I’m going to talk to the device now for a minute, all right? I’m going to download some information from it and see what the problem is. Stay with the device. I’ll be with you in a minute. Can you do that?”

“Yes. But hurry. He’s hurt bad. No one thinks he’s going to live.”

Kim’s fast walk became a jog. This was more serious than she thought. She reached her office and put her wrist pad on the holodesk. All of the information from the Med-Assist appeared in front of her. Images, video, steps completed.

It was a small bowel resection. Kim swore. She had expected a skinned knee or a broken bone perhaps. A child’s injury. This was full-on invasive surgery. How old was this kid? He didn’t sound older than seven or eight. It was lunacy. She waved her hand through the holofield and made a call. A man’s head appeared. “Itzak,” said Kim, “I need you up in my office immediately.”

He didn’t ask questions. “On my way.”

He was the best gastroenterologist they had on staff and a brilliant surgeon. He was in her office less than a minute later. He quickly scanned the information in the air in front of him. “They’re halfway through the surgery,” he said. “Who are these people?”

“Not soldiers,” said Kim. “The kid’s the only one who speaks English. None of them has any medical training.” She had read the boy’s responses to all the questions the device had asked. “Can we do a shadow surgery?”

He looked unsure. “Maybe. I don’t know their skill level.”

“They have no skill level. But they’re already halfway through it. We have to try.” Kim took the line off mute. “Bingwen, can you hear me?”

“Yes. I’m here. I thought I had lost you.” He sounded afraid.

“No, Bingwen. I’m here. I have another doctor with me. We’re going to try something. It’s called a shadow surgery. Dr. Mendelsohn and I are going to show you exactly what to do. We’ll have a holo of your friend here in front of us. We’ll perform the rest of the surgery step by step and the person on your end just has to mimic everything we do. You’re very close. You’ve been doing wonderfully.”

“The woman here who’s doing it wants to give up. She doesn’t think she can finish. She’s been going for hours.”

“She
can
do it, Bingwen,” said Kim. “You have to convince her to keep going.”

“I’m trying. She’s not listening.”

Itzak spoke quietly. “I need a visual.”

“Bingwen,” said Kim. “I need you to point the pad over the wound for me and hold it there.”

“Okay.”

Itzak moved his hands through the holofield, and a holo of a man’s midsection appeared on the table. Kim had never gotten used to this part: performing surgery this way, without scrubbing up first, without a wall of equipment and monitoring devices around you.

“Good, Bingwen. We can see your friend now,” said Kim. “What’s the name of the woman who’s helping you?”

“Mingzhu.”

“Is Mingzhu ready to begin?”

She heard him speak in Chinese. A woman answered. Kim could here the stress in the woman’s voice.

“She says she can’t go on.” The boy sounded panicked.

“We need to get moving on this,” Itzak whispered. “There’s some light hemorrhaging here.”

“Bingwen,” said Kim. “Listen to me. We need to do this right now. Do you understand? Tell Mingzhu that if she doesn’t act now your friend is going to die.”

She heard Bingwen speak in Chinese again. But this time, he said a word that Kim
did
recognize, not a Chinese word, a name. It froze her heart.

“Bingwen,” she said, her voice suddenly shaky. “What did you tell her? Give me the exact words you just said.”

“I told her that if she didn’t help Mazer would die.”

It was like the floor had dropped out beneath her. This couldn’t be. It was impossible, and yet completely possible.

“Bingwen,” she said slowly. “What is your friend’s name? His full name.”

“Mazer,” said the boy. “Mazer Rackham.”

CHAPTER 19

MOPs

Wit stood in front of the Chinese lieutenant’s desk at Khunjerab Pass, watching the lieutenant study Wit’s passport. The lieutenant was young, fresh out of officer’s training school probably, which was bad for Wit because it meant the kid would likely try extra hard to prove to his superiors that he was a capable commander of the border crossing. And what better way to prove his abilities than to arrest forty special-ops soldiers posing as civilians and trying to sneak their way into China?

“You are American,” the lieutenant said. It wasn’t a question, so Wit didn’t respond.

The kid’s English was good. A slight accent, but that was to be expected. Well educated obviously, and the perfect cut of his hair and the immaculate state of his uniform suggested a life of discipline. Wit figured he was probably the son of some well-to-do high-ranking officer or perhaps the nephew of some party official. A kid with connections. Someone had put in a good word and gotten him a decent command position right out of school. Not that Khunjerab Pass was any Shangri-La. It wasn’t. It was barren and cold and isolated and completely uninteresting. There were no forms of entertainment whatsoever, nothing to keep a soldier occupied after hours. There was the gate, there were the trucks that passed through the gate, and there were the mountains. The only break in the monotony was the occasional mountain goat sighting.

But it was a command position. It might be a crappy one, but big careers had to start somewhere.

“Why are you traveling into China?” the lieutenant asked.