LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Corpsman!” Thomason yelled. “Marine down!”

      I was also getting environmental warnings, and a station Klaxon began sounding an alert. Some of the rounds that had missed Morrisey had punched through the facility’s outer hull. The station’s external nanomatrix would seal the holes, but that would take a few moments, and the air pressure was dropping precipitously in the meantime.

      That wouldn’t hurt us, of course, but it put the station’s crew in danger.

      I kicked off the bulkhead and glided across the compartment to Morrisey. His right arm was missing below the elbow, the armor there was a tangled mess, and blood was spurting from the wreckage in a bright orange-­red arterial stream that was breaking off into darker gobbets as it spiraled with his rotation. I collided with him and stabilized his spin, then jacked into his armor for a direct readout.

      The magnetically accelerated slug had sliced through his elbow with kinetic energy enough to shred armor and amputate the lower arm. Normally, Marine armor will guillotine shut above a serious leg or arm wound, stopping the bleeding and, more important, stopping the suit from venting its air into vacuum. That last might be a problem in another few minutes, but right now the cabin pressure was high enough that the armor’s slice-­and-­seal function hadn’t triggered. Morrisey’s brachial artery was pumping out blood fast; he would be dead in a few minutes if I didn’t stop the bleeding.

      I did a quick scan to make certain he didn’t have any head trauma—­it looked like it was just his arm that had been hit, but you never know—­then thoughtclicked a key directing Morrisey’s suit to autoinject a jolt of anodynic recep blockers into his carotid artery. Heart rate 155 … BP 149 over 90, respiration 36 and gasping, rapidly elevating levels of both adrenalin and noradrenalin.

      Morrisey stopped screaming as the nanoanadynes started shutting down the doloric receptors in his thalamus and the insular cortex, blocking the pain signals as they reached his brain. “Jesus, Doc!” he said. “I can still feel it! It feels … weird!”

      “That’s because your pressure receptors are still firing. Don’t worry. You’re going to be fine.”

      I hoped. His extremities were already starting to cool, which meant he was already shocky. I ordered his suit to clamp down on his upper arm to reduce the brachial artery flow, then raise its internal temp slightly and relax the external pressure on the arteries leading to his head to interrupt the shock response.

      I had to make a quick decision, though. The armor clamp would slow the bleeding, but wouldn’t stop it by itself. I could cram a packet of skinseal into the injury, and let that seal off the wound … or I could order his suit to slice off what was left of his arm well above the bleeding stump. The guillotine at his elbow, obviously, was smashed; the next working blade was eight centimeters up, midway up his humerus. The nanonarcs would block the pain, or most of it, but he would still feel it, and that would increase the risk of shock.

      Shock or not, I elected to cut. Skinseal is great stuff, but it’s better for minor bleeding. And if the mining station’s outer hull didn’t seal off the leaks, Morrisey would have other problems in a moment if he started losing air.

      I again checked his nananodyne levels, then thoughtclicked through the link to trigger the suit’s chopper. Another chunk of his arm came off, a squat cylinder encased in black armor, but the bleeding stopped at once.

      “God,” he said. “I’m gonna be sick… .”

      “No,” I told him. “You’re not.”

      Vomiting inside a space suit is very serious business, and can lead to drowning. Morrisey’s armor was already firing antiemetic ’bots into his carotid artery, but it wasn’t enough.

      The vomiting reflex is triggered in the area postrema, a tiny nub on the floor of the brain’s fluid-­filled fourth ventricle snugged up against the cerebellum. There are a number of different chemical pathways leading to emeses triggers, but most involve a neuropeptide called substance P, or SP, which is found in both the brain and the spinal cord and which is associated with inflammation, pain, and shock.

      I pulled my N-­prog from my M-­7 medical kit and thought a quick series of commands into it. The device, in turn, reprogrammed some of the nananodyne bots now circulating through Morrisey’s brain, ordering them to block out the SP … and also to shut down the cholinergic receptor input from his inner ears, since his vestibular system—­reacting to zero-­G—­was also screaming at him. The reprogrammed ’bots would add to the suit’s antiemetic response, helping to stifle Morrisey’s nausea before he vomited inside his helmet.

      “Yeah,” Morrisey said. “Yeah … that’s … that’s better, Doc. Thanks.”

      I gave his readouts a final check. His BP was stabilizing at 125 over 70, and his respiration was a bit slower now. “You’ll be fine,” I told him. “Some time in sick bay, and we’ll grow you a new arm, better than the old.”

      He nodded inside his helmet. “I know.”

      I sent him back to the doughnut to await a medevac. Now that we had our foothold on board Zeta, more Marines were on the way in, along with support vessels and transports to haul away the wounded. I made my way toward the second breach in the bulkhead, slipping through and into the compartment on the other side. The fighting appeared to be over—­here, at least. There was a seething mob of ­people in brown utilities, more spacesuited bodies, Marines, and a lot more drifting globules of blood, a tangle too confused for me to count. Marines were moving among the rescued hostages, cuffing their hands with zipstrips. Until we were absolutely sure of who was a tango and who was a hostage, we handled them all as potential terrorists. There was a bank of link-­in controls along one bulkhead. I saw one deeply padded seat with a dead tango strapped into it, his hands still on the palmpads on the chair’s arms. He’d probably been the terrorist commander, running the station’s defenses by jacking in at this secondary control center, but the ugly crater in his spacesuit’s chest showed that a Marine had taken him out with a laser rifle.

      “Corpsman, front!”

      I homed on this new call, pushing my way through the milling civilians and Marines. Gunny Hancock was waving to me from an open hatch in the bulkhead beyond. “In here, Doc! On the double!”

      Drifting through the opening, I entered a small and bare compartment—­probably a storage locker. There were two M’nangat drifting inside, and one of them looked like it was hurt. Another dead tango floated near the overhead, a MAW pistol still clutched his hand.

      I drifted over to the alien. “What happened?” I asked.

      “That guy shot him,” Hancock said, “just as we came through the door. Is it bad?”

      “It’s not good.”

      The M’nangat are surprisingly like us biologically—­carbon-­based oxygen breathers, with metal-­chelated tetrapyroles pumped through an enclosed circulatory system by a pair of two-­chambered hearts working in synch. They even use DNA for genetic coding rather than one of several other xenobiological possibilities, but that’s where the similarities stop. The being was a ­couple of meters long, resembling a pale, blue-­green pillar of thick, tightly twisted tentacles like a tree’s trunk, which then spread out from the creature’s base like the roots of a tree. At the top end was what looked like a half-­meter cluster of grapes—­though each grape was the size of an orange—­translucent, and shot through with flecks of red and gold. The wounded one had a savage puncture in one side of its leathery trunk, and blue-­green liquid was jetting in spurts from the wound with enough force to paint one bulkhead and drive the being into the other like a small rocket. Slits beneath the grape cluster representing mouths and breathing apertures gaped and pulsed, and the being uttered a startlingly human-­sounding groan.

      “You’ll be okay, fella,” I said. The reassurance was automatic; I didn’t expect the creature to answer. But a link switched on within my in-­head, and the words “Thank you” wrote themselves out on an inner window.

      I’d not realized that

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