The Fleet-Book Four Sworn Allies

by David Drake (ed)

  Laing was neither a geologist nor a paleontologist. He had never been on Earth. His scientific education naturally involved some study of man’s ancient home, but mostly, afterward, he forgot.

  Today his duplicate mind has total recall.

  Christina is a rolling white brilliance before it. Perhaps half a minute remains till atmospheric penetration. That is ample for a computer. In thirty seconds the Laing mind can think the thoughts and fed the anguish of thirty human years.

  It breaks radio silence. The maser beam spears back toward Belisarius. “I cannot murder an entire future.”

  Its engine comes to life. The meteoroid veers, shudders. Pieces break off under the acceleration. Those drop harmless into the air, shooting stars. The death machine leaps from orbit. Outward it speeds, faster and faster, until by the time its fuel is spent no ship of the Fleet has any hope of overtaking it.

  Thus far my reconstruction. I do not care to guess what the Laing mind thought while it flew straight into the sun.

  The dawn mists, were faintly red, as if the oncoming light washed them with blood. They hid the bay, but jungle on the shores hulked sullen above them. We were the last in Wang Fang’s. Madame herself had gone to bed, and her parrot hunched asleep on its perch. She’d sold us the rest of the bottle we’d been working on before she locked up the bar. The boy hadn’t come in yet to clean spilth, ash, stubs, and tobacco juice off the floor. Enough smoke hung around to gray the air and make it bitter. Already through its coolness I felt the day’s heat inbound.

  “The same thing happened on Earth,” La Balafre Triangulaire said. His voice was dull with weariness. Stubble covered sunken cheeks and darknesses rimmed bloodshot eyes. “At the end of the Cretaceous period, when the dinosaurs were in their glory, an asteroid hit. It threw up such dust and steam that for decades Earth was shrouded, most sunlight reflected off and twilight laid on the days. A winter that went on and on. Plants died, ashore and in the seas, plankton, the animals that fed on them and the predators that fed on those. Three fourths or more of living species became extinct. They included the ammonites, that had been around since long before the dinosaurs—and the dinosaurs themselves, except for a few reptiles and the birds.”

  “I know,” I said. “That gave the mammals their chance. Many of them survived. They’d been insignificant, but now they blossomed, and so we came to be.”

  Balafre nodded. “True. That wasn’t inevitable by any means, though. Humans weren’t foreordained. Any of a million accidents could have stunted the development of the hominids, and Earth would have borne only plants and beasts.”

  He raised a bony forefinger. “Do you know also, my friend, that there in the late Cretaceous, the dinosaurs were working on intelligence? They weren’t sluggish lizards. Many of them had well-developed nervous systems. Some were warm-blooded. Among the advanced types were the dromeosaurs, bipeds, about man-size, with large brains and the beginnings of hands.”

  “You’re telling me that the antimatter bomb would have had the same effect on Christina,” I said.

  He nodded again, and again, and again. “Right. That has got to be what the electronic mind meant. I computed it for myself, given the hint. Same energy release as for an asteroid impact. Same pulverized rock turned into dust, water turned into steam, and fireball air currents to carry them into the stratosphere. If anything, the result would have been worse, because the explosions would have been scattered more widely. And radioactivity as well. Fimbul Winter. Mass extinction. Oh, the calculations indicated that smaller, more primitive life forms would persist. But the amadei, everywhere they were on the planet, they couldn’t have.

  “Don’t mistake me,” he added jaggedly. “The Fleet commanders aren’t monsters. Not like the Khalia, not at all. They didn’t think about the meteorology, because as far as they were concerned they’d simply kill off a lot of animals along with the enemy—regrettable, but better than the losses they’d otherwise have to suffer.”

  “That they did suffer,” I said.

  He slumped and stared down at his hands, which encircled his almost empty glass. “Yeah. They did.” Lifting his head, for a moment, voice cracking: “But that ghost of me, it saved a whole future!”

  The Fleet had not appreciated the act.

  I picked my words with as much care as the liquor in me allowed. “Ghost of you, you say. Not you. Why did they blame you, then? What were you guilty of?”

  “Nothing, “he said into the air. “I was as shocked as anybody. My superiors filed no charges. But it had been my other mind. How could they trust me? How could they keep me safe from fellow personnel, once our men began to die by the tens of thousands?

  “Have you ever been among people, your own people, who won’t speak to you? By the time they handed me my ‘undesirable’ discharge, I didn’t care. I was glad, in a burnt-out fashion, to get away. I went home. My wife had left me. So here I am.”

  “And you ask whether you got justice,” I murmured.

  “Yes. I don’t know, myself. I didn’t do the thing. But would I have? I don’t know, I tell you. 1 never will.”

  We fell mute for a while. I couldn’t think what to say, until at last: “Some people believe in a God who can judge us. Now, sorry, I’m worn out and have got to sleep. Busy time ahead of me.” I lied. “Good-bye. Good luck.”

  I rose and went into the sunrise. Fog eddied about my shins. Beyond the bay, ocean shone steely under a sky turning hard blue. Everywhere around me lay silence.

  Auro stared at the cube. Inside was recorded, so Buchanon had promised, all that any Fleet officer needed to know. It contained only two records, Allison’s Rules of Command and the Standing Orders. All, at least, he, would need to know to pass the lieutenants exam and make his brevet commission permanent.

  Depressing keys on the side of the cube, the young officer began to study the text that hovered a foot in front of him. It was a page from the five-hundred-year-old classic guide to command that had been the final legacy of Admiral Allison, hero of the Cluster Wars and father of the modern Fleet.

  To the recent cadet’s relief, he saw that he had finally gotten through Allison’s mathematical analysis of combat that had revolutionized war centuries earlier. Instead, Allison was now dealing with the softer issues of morale and medical support.

  Admiral Dav Su Allison, retired

  Rules of Command

  14.246M3

  Morale/Medical/Final Determinations

  For Fleet personnel to function effectively in a combat situation, one where they have virtually no control over their own lives, it is necessary to give them as much control as possible of those factors that they can affect.

  Perhaps the most significant factor that is within the control of combat personnel is their treatment in the case of severe or debilitating injuries. The wide variety of religions and life styles found with the Alliance further demonstrate the necessity of leaving life and death medical decisions in the hands of the personnel affected.

  While, like many of the rules of war, to allow trained personnel to perish when they might be saved may seem wasteful, this is not the case. Analysis (see appendix 54) demonstrates that the improvement in functional ability of such self-determined troops far exceeds the additional losses likely to be incurred in any but the most desperate battles.

  “I DON’T know if we can do anything with what’s left of sleeping beauty here,” Jessup said pityingly.

  “What?” Bardie Makem looked up from the Jefferson militiaman who had bled to death. She wondered why the corps-mech couldn’t read its own monitors. Except that it was supposed to return any remains. Families always preferred to know their relatives had been duly buried-somewhere. Even space was more acceptable than MIA. With a sigh for him, she consigned the militiaman into the organ-removal slot of the triage area.

  Then she craned her head over to Jessup’s gurney and caught her
breath. The face inside the helmet was of a very handsome man: tri-d handsome, though the strength of mouth and chin suggested character as well as looks. She rubbed muck and char off the helmet plate. Pilot, Bonnie Parker? Headhunter troop carrier?

  “You know, Bard,” Nellie Jessup went on as she continued her evaluation, “I think those new pressure suits actually work. This one’s managed to control his bleeding, even if the limbs are mangled. The medikit is drained dry but I’ll bet that’s why he’s still alive. Whaddaya know! Science triumphs over slaughter!”

  Moving swiftly as she noted his vital signs, Bardie Makem fed his ID into the hospital ship’s main banks. They must have fixed the glitch that last Khalian missile had done to the internal system, because the terminal printed up large and clear.

  “O’Hara, Roger Elliott Christopher.” An O’Hara? She ignored the service garbage and scrolled down to the medical data she’d need, blood type and factors, latest jabs, previous injuries—and he had a fair number—good recovery from all repair jobs.

  “Another thing, the Genital Cap worked, too, dented but the AI’s all there.” AI being Nellie’s alphabet for “all important” when dealing with male patients. “Jeez! It’s his own face,” Jessup remarked, amazed, as she noted, the, medical log on Roger O’Hara. “Only the one scar: gives his face a roguish look. But, Stitches, I don’t think you can reassemble all the parts of him.

  “What’re the cerebral functions like?” Bardie reviewed the medical data.

  “Not bad,” Jessup said, scanning the gurney monitor. “Must be a tough mother. Left arm is hanging on by a skin flap just below the elbow, but whatever it was missed the joint. Most of the bicep is gone and, the shoulder joint, left knee crushed, thigh broken in nine places, yeah, and his left foot’s off. Left side of the rib cage is smashed, sternum cracked, lung puncture. Right fingers gone, right arm . . .”

  “Damn,” said Bardie, aka Stitches for her exquisite skill with the micro-suturer and flesh glue-gel, and grimaced with disgust at O’Hara’s records. “Clearly stated that he’s not a brain donor; though he did sign a permit for organ use.”

  “Hell,” Nellie said with vehemence, “there’s more of him still working outside than inside. Spleen’s ruptured, pancreas sliced, punctured lung, one kidney, most of his liver’s minced, guts are scrambled but they’re easy. Eyes are okay!” Jessup liked to be positive.

  “We can replace those,” Bardie said, sighing heavily. “But he wants out . . .”

  “Shame to lose a guy looks like that. How come you can’t just transfer the head?”

  Bardie appreciated team support but Nellie had a ridiculous notion that her superior could do anything. She glowered at Jessup.

  “You know the rules about that as well as I do, and even if we could, there hasn’t been a whole body in here all day. His head is legally out of bounds.” She had been watching the vital signs monitor for the pressure suit had been hooked into it, thus saving any unnecessary manipulation of the injured man. Once again Bardie shook her head in amazement. “He’s one tough fella. He should be dead from the trauma of such massive injuries.”

  “The suit did it. That’ll look good in the report.” Jessup smiled kindly down at the unconscious man; Bardie was surprised to see the tenderness on the woman’s face. Nellie Jessup had developed the necessary tough outer callous objectivity essential in triage.

  “He’s just not giving up without a fight. “ His BP was low but steady, the heartbeat was weak but working.

  “He deserves a chance, doesn’t he?” Jessup was eager, her brown eyes imploring Bardie.

  “I know I shouldn’t listen to you, Nellie . . .”

  “But you’re going to!” Nellie Jessup’s face radiated approval.

  “Let’s get to work.”

  There were twenty teams of highly skilled surgeons and surgical nurses on this theater deck, one of five on the hospital ship Elizabeth Blackwell, though all the teams constantly bitched about being understaffed when the flood of wounded arrived from the latest assault on the Khalian position. At the team’s disposal were the most advanced, and sometimes experimental implements and procedures available to martial medicine.

  Bardie Makem was serving her compulsory two-year term as a combat surgeon and was going to be very glad indeed when her stint was up in two weeks’ time. She’d had enough of battle gore for the rest of her lifetime. Nellie Jessup was on a ten-year contract—if she survived. She had already been wounded twice riding up the MASH courier shuttles.

  Now Bardie and Jessup walked their patient to the stripper, a machine programmed to remove anything not flesh, bone, or sinew attached to a body. Its anti-grav cushion managed mangled flesh as delicately as a spider weaves a web. Its sensors also examined hard and soft tissue, sending the results to the theater hood; weighed and measured the patient; retested blood, bone, and tissue type, and could color dye the circulatory system to, pinpoint punctures or embolisms. The speed with which the injured were prepared for surgery often made the difference between life, half-life, and death. They walked him through the sterilization beams that sanitized surgeon and nurse as well. And on into the surgical unit where Bardie began hooking up the heart-lung machines, the auxiliary anesthetizer, while Nellie slipped a shunt into the relatively undamaged right arm to start the flow of supplements into his bloodstream and to service his bodily fluids. She kept up a flow of vital-sign information until the wrap screens in the theater hood took over. By then the pertinent damage was also visible.

  “Not quite as bad as it looked,” Bardie remarked, assimilating information and making decisions as to what delicate repair to undertake first. It was her speed in assessment that made her the valuable surgeon she was. She seemed to have an uncanny instinct that had saved many almost irreparable bodies. She slipped her hands into the glove dispenser for much of her work would involve the highly, adhesive glue-gel, or gg. The joke was, “Adhere to proper procedures. Stick with the patient, not to him, her, or it.”

  “Organ replacements?” She raised her voice to activate the theater wrap system.

  “Ready,” said a disembodied voice. And it was, for the intelligence that managed the organ bank had once been a senior surgeon.”

  “Red? Got a bad one here. Give me the whole nine yards. O’Hara, R.E.C., spleen, left lung, left kidney, liver, new left shoulder joint, left elbow, wrist, knee, ankle . . .”

  “He belongs down here, not up there,” Red answered, but already the chill-shute signaled arrivals, sacks bathed in the fluids that maintained, the organs. Jessup began the anti-rejection procedures that would assure that each replacement adapted to the new environment. The catch-as-catch-can procedures of the late twentieth century were considered barbaric, cruel, and inhumane. But it had taken the science of several species and several horrific space wars to perfect such repair for the humans who fought them.

  “He didn’t want his head on a plate!” Bardie said.

  “What’s so special about his head?”

  “You’re no longer in a position to appreciate it, Red,” and Bardie shot a glance at O’Hara’s classic profile.

  Jessup had glued the thin face laceration shut while Bardie replaced the lung—but his own heart would manage after the rest they’d give it—so the lung lay flaccid in the chest cavity. Well, this sleeping beauty was also humpty dumpty so they’d better put the rest of him back together again. They both worked on the shoulder joint, the arm, and the battered sacrum and remolded the crushed ribs with bone-set gel. Liver and kidney, spleen, pancreas. He didn’t need the gall bladder. Now they both began reassembling the intestines, repaired the rip in the stomach wall, glued the skin back in place across the lacerated abdomen.

  “Nicely hung,” Jessup remarked all too casually. “Unusual in a tall man.”

  Bardie merely grunted. It did not do to encourage Jessup’s earthiness. She could go on quite irrepressibly, with endless va
riations on the theme.

  “Me, I’ve always preferred short men.” Today Jessup was incorrigible. “BP picking up. Hey, he might make it yet. If one of those ET germs don’t get him. “

  “He might at that,” Bardie said, then began work on his left leg.

  There were many servo-mechs, robotics, and other computer-assisted surgical machines but, as every human being was slightly different from any other, even the most sophisticated machine could not duplicate the instinct of a human surgeon. Even the most gifted of the non-humans didn’t quite have the same knack with this species. Machines did what Jessup called the grunt work, but nothing replaced a human on the work at hand.

  By the time they had finished putting Roger Elliott Christopher O’Hara back in one glued, stapled, renovated piece, they were both exhausted. The monitor told them in its implacable voice that they were to log off immediately. Their efficiency levels were dropping, below permissible levels for surgical procedures. It had taken four intensive hours of flat-out surgical skill and decisions to effect the resurrection, and O’Hara had not been the first patient of the shift for Bardie and Nellie.

  An orderly came forward to move O’Hara’s gurney from the theater, but Bardie and Jessup followed, one on either side, through the sanitize green light bath and out into the broad corridor.

  “Officer?” asked the orderly.

  “Yup!” Bardie said, the adrenaline- leaving her slightly light-headed. She was clinging to the body cart.

  “I can do it. Don’t you gels trust me?”

  Bardie grinned. “No, Naffie. I don’t. Not with this one.” Naffie looked peevish because he had taken a very long look at the unconscious O’Hara.

  “Oh, have it your own way. You always do. Not that he’s any use to anyone for a while! Bay 22, Bed 4.” The two weary women turned to starboard. “Monitor says he’s unattached. How can you be sure it’s you who can attach him?”