Omega Games (20 page)

crater is filled with black crystal.”

“Don’t look at it again,” I warned. “Walk away from it and go back to
Moonfire
.” The image on my screen remain fixed on the scout but began to shake. “You don’t have to run. It can’t chase you.” “It can’t,” Reever said, turning his head to show me four surface terrain vehicles barreling toward the

scout. “But those STVs can.” Static crackled over the audio as pulse fire shot out from gun turrets on top of the STVs. The beams

smashed into the ground all around
Moonfire
, sending the engineers scrambling for cover. The four vehicles split apart, moving to surround the scout as they continued to fire on the helpless engineers. My screen image turned to a forty degree angle as Reever dove behind a pillar of crumbling basalt and

landed on his side. “We are not armed,” he said over an open channel. “Cease fire.” Several Gnilltak dressed in battle gear jumped out of the vehicles and seized one of the cringing

engineers. “I claim this ship as my property,” a familiar, pleasant voice said. “You will repair it now.” Posbret. I used my wristcom to send a signal to Cat. “Posbret and his raiders are attacking Reever and some of

Drefan’s engineers out on the surface. They want our ship, and they’re prepared to kill them to take it. Can you send help out to the crash site?”

“Drefan’s dome is closer,” Cat replied. “I’ll relay an alert to him.” I felt helpless as I watched the raiders pull the engineers out from their hiding places while Posbret boarded
Moonfire
. No one had seen Reever yet, but the raiders fanned out around the crash site, obviously searching.

“There is no place to go,” he said, “except the crater.” “No, stay away from it.” I saw the red flash of a tracer beam move across the screen. “Incoming.” A pulse rifle fired, and the screen image went wild as Reever rolled to avoid the blast. A second blast

sent a slow-moving shower of rock and dust over the screen, and I heard a distinctive hissing sound. The sound of his air supply, escaping the envirosuit. “Duncan, are you hit? Did they breach your seals?” “No. I landed on a sharp stone, and it pierced one of the suit seams.” “Don’t pull it out.” “I have nothing to patch it.” His voice sounded thin, and he panted his next words over a peculiar

rumbling. “Something’s coming.” The images shifted as he sat up, and I saw one of Drefan’s massive

drednocs coming up fast behind the raiders. “Jarn. Prepare for multiple casualties.” The drednoc’s mode halo widened, and then sent a strange arc of purple light sweeping through the crash site. As it passed over the raiders, the power cells on their weapons turned black, as did the emitters on all of their vehicles. The energy wave had almost dissipated by the time it reached Reever, but then the image on the screen vanished, along with the audio.

I ran out of the treatment room and into Cat, who caught me with all three arms, and pinned me against his nearly bare chest.

“Hey, where’s the fire?” For a dreadful moment I thought I would blurt out what had happened in the solitude room. But I had not meant to intrude on his and Mercy’s privacy, and I didn’t have time to feel embarrassed, anyway.

“I need to get to the crash site,” I told him. “I’ll need a pulse weapon, the fastest surface vehicle you have, and some spare O
₂
tanks.”

“It’s all right,” the Omorr assured me. “Drefan’s drednoc stopped the raiders.” “Reever’s suit is damaged and leaking oxygen. I have to get to him now or he’ll suffocate.” I slipped out of his grip and ran in the direction of the exterior air lock.

By the time I reached the suit lockers someone was already coming through the air lock. I saw it was Drefan’s battle drone. It carried two limp bodies under each extensor arm. One of them was wearing a raider’s gear.

“Duncan?
Duncan.
” I pounded on the plas panels separating us, and then the control panel, but the locks

would not release. None of the bodies the drednoc carried moved. “It won’t until the pressure equalizes and the biodecon is complete,” Mercy said as she joined me. She studied my face. “Well, at least you’ve stopped blushing. That’s progress.”

“Bypass the decontamination cycle.” When she hesitated, I added, “Or I will.” Mercy heaved out a breath and began reprogrammingthe air lock controls. “If I lose my skin because we didn’t scan them, I’m going to come back and haunt your scrawny little ass forever.”

“Right behind you.” She rolled an enormous, flat-topped cart into the air lock. To the drednoc, she said, “Put them on here.”

The drone carefully lowered all four bodies onto the cart, and then gripped the handle as it pushed them into the suit chamber.

“Follow me,” I told it, and hurried down the corridor toward the treatment room.

Mercy kept pace with me. “Cat is setting up some beds for them. What else can I do?”

“You can assist me.” I glanced back to see if the drednoc was keeping up. “I’ll need a clean, empty space that I can isolate and use as an operating room.”

“I’ve got an air lock for cargo deliveries on that side of the house,” she said. “You can do ten or twenty surgeries in there, all at the same time, if you want.”

I was hoping I wouldn’t have to perform any. “In here,” I said to the drednoc as I rushed into the treatment room. Cat was waiting, along with Ekatarana and four of the beds from the pleasure rooms.

At that point I would have put Reever on the floor. “Transfer the men to the beds,” I ordered the drednoc. “Carefully, one at a time.”

The drone complied, and as soon as the first one was transferred I took out my scanner and began triage.

“Unconscious, mild concussion, vitals are stable, ” I recited as I read the results displayed. “This one can wait.” I moved to the next body, one of Posbret’s men. The raider had taken a severe blow to the abdomen, and was slowly hemorrhaging. “This man needs surgery. Mercy, get that cargo air lock ready for me.”

The third man was Reever, and I ripped his suit open to find the source of his bleeding. I knew that if his injury was not as severe as the raider with the ruptured spleen, I would have to delay his treatment. If it were equally serious, I would have to choose between them. Among the Iisleg it was a matter of rank: The male most important to the tribe was given preference. Among Terrans, the male judged most likely to survive had priority.

The man I loved, and a man who had tried to kill him. It was not going to be a hard choice to make.

Reever’s eyes opened to slits. “Jarn.”

“Be still,” I told him. “You are bleeding from somewhere.” Or he had been, for the blood on his skin was now half dried. Something hard and sharp brushed my hand, and I found a jagged rock lodged in the side seam next to his rib cage. “Here is the culprit.” I pulled it out to show him, but he had slipped into unconsciousness again.

I passed my scanner over the area, but it showed no open wound or internal hemorrhaging, and only some minor bruising around the ribs.

I dropped the scanner, tore apart his tunic, and wiped the congealing blood away, looking for the wound I knew had to be there. He had lost at least a pint of blood. Yet all I could find was a pink scar that I knew Reever’s body. The scar had not been there this morning.

I passed the scanner over him twice more, but it showed no other injury. Somehow his wound had healed between the crash site and the dome.

Reluctantly I put aside my shock and the rest of my feelings, and moved to the last man. This engineer had several proximity burns on his appendages, but none of them were life threatening. I moved back to the raider with the ruptured spleen.

“This one needs surgery now, but the rest can wait.” I grabbed my case, took out a syrinpress, dialed a dosage for painkillers, and handed it to Mercy.

She took it the same way she might a pressure grenade. “Why are you giving me this? I’m no healer.”

“You’re my new ward nurse. If he wakes up”—I pointed to the engineer with burns—“give him an injection. Try to rouse the one with the concussion, and keep him awake if you can.”

“What about your husband?” she asked.

“He’s fine.” I looked at Cat, and tried not to remember how he had kissed Mercy/me. “Are you as good with your hands as . . . Mercy says you are?” He nodded. “Come with me. You’re my surgical assistant. ”

Eleven

The cargo air lock proved to be an excellent emergency operating room. I used the biodecon to sterilize the air, me, Cat, and the patient, and then set up a manifest station as an instrument stand. I laid out everything I needed and identified each for Cat so he would know what to hand me when I asked for it. We gloved and put on two of the disposable surgical shrouds from my case, and I injected the raider with a powerful sedative that would have to serve as general anesthesia.

“What if I drop something?” Cat asked.

“I stop operating and stab you in the chest.” Why did Cherijo’s words burst out of me whenever I was operating? I glanced at him. “I apologize. I’m kidding.”

He eyed the instrument stand. “I hope so.”

I had no blood with which to transfuse the raider, so I rigged a syrinpress and some tubing to both provide suction and autoinfuse the patient with his own blood.

“What is making him bleed like that?” Cat asked as I enabled a lascalpel and made the necessary incision to get under the patient’s ribs.

“He took a hard blow to the belly,” I said as I used the rib spreader to open up the cavity, and several sponges to soak up the blood oozing out of the spleen. “Drefan’s drednoc must have hit him. The blow made a tear here, see?” I pushed aside part of the stomach loop to expose the rupture in the spleen. “In humanoids, this organ filters out old blood cells and produces lymphocytes, which make antibodies. It’s always filled with blood, and bleeds badly when damaged, so I have to seal the tear or it will kill him.”

“He tried to kill your husband,” Cat reminded me. “Maybe you should return the favor.”

Cat squinted at the raider’s insides. “Do I have one of those?”

I glanced sideways at him. “Omorr have two, as it happens. One on either side of your body.” I remembered how much of Cat’s body I/Mercy had seen and touched, and quickly turned back to the patient.

“Your face is turning a strange color,” Cat said. “Should I adjust the air temperature in here?”

It took two hours for me to repair the damage to the raider’s spleen, which thankfully proved much more resilient than most humanoid species. Cat remained silent and moved only to hand me the instruments I needed, for which I was grateful.

“That’s it,” I said as I finished closing. “I’ll need to keep him on close monitor for the next day, but barring complications he should survive.” I pulled down my mask and saw how the Omorr’s gildrells poked out from under his. “What is wrong?”

He pulled the bloodied gloves from his membranes and dropped them on the table. “Nothing, except that you just came here, cut open that man, and rearranged his insides like you do it every day.”

“During the rebellion, I did at least two or three splenectomies every week. I think I could do them blindfolded.” I realized how callous I sounded and gave him a rueful look. “I am sorry. I should have warned you about the nature of field surgery. It can seem quite brutal.”

“Brutal? You saved his life. None of us could have done it, even if we’d wanted to. I am beyond impressed.” Cat regarded the state of my surgical shroud. “Yours is a messy business, though, Doc.”

Now that the raider was no longer in danger of bleeding out, I could go back and deal with the others. I instructed Cat on how to use the drednoc to bring my patient back to the treatment room, and then headed there myself. But as I stepped out of the air lock, I saw my husband, pale-faced but standing on his own, waiting beside the control panel.

“What are you doing here?” I went over to him and found myself in his arms.
“Duncan.”

“I am all right,
Waenara
,” he assured me, kissing the top of my head. “It’s been a long time since I’ve watched you being a surgeon.”

“I am putting you in restraints the next time you are wounded,” I snapped. I turned and tucked my arm carefully around his waist. “Come back to the treatment room. I barely had time to look at you properly. Are you in pain?”