Alliance: The Orion War

by Kali Altsoba

  Actually with a joystick. The real scalpel on Glarus is wielded by a cyber-surgery bot called REMOTE (Robotic Emergency Medical Operating Technician, Eclectic). That last bit means it can do all sorts of surgical repairs. It looms squid-like over the operating table, seeming to grow organically out of the walls and ceiling of the larger Pod. It can move in any direction over a net of sterile magrails circumnavigating the interior. Eight titanium effectors extend from its stocky core, ready with whirling black-diamond cutters, probes, cauters, clamps and saws.

  One holds a photonic filament so fine it’s unseeable by the unaided eye. It’s inserted inside damaged veins to guide a tiny camera-laser at the tip, letting Lee observe and burn away blood and fatty-clots and seal off ruptured vein walls. Another minute probe reconnects nerves with micro-injections of a liquid-metal alloy made of gallium, indium and selenium. The alloy stays liquid at body temperature. After tissue regeneration, it’ll be removed with a micro-syringe.

  REMOTE is the Trauma Pod. It deals with most wounds Robobear brings home to its care. It replaces torn muscle, carries out amputations, sews up ripped and dangling arteries in ragged stumps, grafts larger folds of skin from a big bio-printer lodged in the ceiling, resets any broken limbs or makes whole-limb reconstructions, building muscle and sinew around fresh-grown ceramic-bones lathed to fit a hollowed-out arm or leg. It does all such routine military surgery with skill and ease. It’s a true professional. And hugely proud of its ability and record.

  To its chagrin and irritation, more advanced operations such as heart repair on a patient suspended seconds from death are handled by a human physician linked to its Trauma Pod. The surgeon might be in a field-hutch at a forward Triage Base or, like now, in orbit on a hospital ship. Doesn’t matter. REMOTE accedes to overrides and control and surgery protocols, but it doesn’t have to like it. It’s sure it could handle all these ‘hard cases’ just as well as any doctor.

  ‘Surgeons’ egos, right? What’s an advanced surgical robot like me gonna do? Like every other good soldier, just fucking say “Yes sir!” and get on with the damn job, I suppose.’ It gives a wispy metallic sigh only it can hear. It learned how by listening to a dying patient. It learned basic grunt-speak from another, and swearing all the time from just about everybody it knew.

  A central programmer puzzled over these idiosyncrasies but left them all in place. They amused him. “Besides mate, REMOTES are complex AI-machines. If they ain’t broke I don’t fuck with their programming. And this one here saved a mate of mine five days back. So you leave him alone, too. He’s a real good REMOTE, he is.”

  Lee Jin finishes his diagnostic review of Susannah’s vitals, provided via a microfluidic lab‑on‑a‑flake injected by the company medic along with the suspensor dose he sprayed into her jugular. He orders REMOTE to print a swatch of cardiomyocytes mapped from DNA and heart samples he’s pleased to see the medic ordered taken when Susannah was strapped in. Lee thinks that’s what happened, but it’s not. The medic forgot and rushed back to the two wounded boys. It was REMOTE that took the samples on its own. It’s used to taking combat-zone initiative.

  Bioprinting is an ancient technology not much advanced or changed from the time of the First Ritter Crusade and Coalition Wars, when First Wave colonies finally used force to sort out their borders into political configurations that later became the empires that trouble Orion still. So standard and unremarkable bioprinters are warmly humming as Lee finishes his assessment.

  Lee Jin is graceful and brilliant, eloquent and forceful. And demanding. He insisted that bioprinters and the new Trauma Pods be assigned to every combat unit down to company level. He knows that under battlefield conditions, as with any trauma, response time and stabilization are the critical survival factors. Every major trauma and combat med study in the history of war confirms it. So the persuasive, and powerfully politically-connected, Lee demanded Pod-triage as Cyber-Surgical Corps basic doctrine. He has real influence with the JSC, and some with the twin governments on Kars and Caspia. So ACU conceded and issued portable bioprinters to company medics and bought a helluva lot more Pods. All were in place a year before war broke out. No other army has such superb field-medical capabilities. ACU troopers owe a lot to Lee Jin.

  In five minutes the fresh muscle is ready, held just above the damaged area by one of REMOTE’s eight articulated effectors while another artificial arm braces to orgo-glue it into place. Lee starts the graft from the top of the wound, laying in tissue like a baker lays down a raw white crust on an oozing blackberry pie. He works with the twinned effectors as though they’re his own arms and hands, which is exactly what they feel like to him at 400,000 klics distance.

  As he finishes the graft the Trauma Pod lands at Forward Triage on a broad salt-flat at the edge of a Glarus desert, now home to two battalions of the 7th or Enthusiastic Division. A big Robobear, as huge as a great Kodiak on Nunavut, takes Susannah in a hand-off from its smaller Pod mate, who looks likes its cub in comparison. Kodiak carries her and three more patients past the Mobile Army-Navy, Cyber-Surgery hospital gate, rolling right into a waiting medical shuttle, pushing past bot and human guards on the personal authority of the Chief Surgeon on Red Rover.

  Susannah Page is boarded with 87 other motionless, frozen patients. All serious and all hailing from the 7th. They’re today’s worst cases heading up to a hospital ship or evac by med transport leaving the system for the Calmari homeworlds. Many more are in the Mobile Hospital on the base, mostly ‘patch-them-up-and-send-them-back’ types. As the unconscious 22-year old is strapped into a surgical cubicle Lee calls over one of 12 REMOTEs built into the shuttle.

  “Right. Let’s start by replacing missing sections of shattered rib. We’ll also begin routine mammoplasty before she gets to Red Rover. I’ll rebuild fibrous tissue first. Then refreeze her. I’ll finish up later, rebuilding the lactiferous ducts, glands, areola and nipple.”

  Susannah Page will live, after all. Best change her entry! Go ahead, major. Scratch “KIA” and write in “WIA.” No, leave the next number. He’s really dead. Nice kid, but he has no head.

  Susannah will live, but not so many of her mates in the company she left on the edge of a Glarus desert. The unusually irked and irritable REMOTE that brought her in to medivac to Red Rover is already burning back to retrieve her companions from a second fight that just broke out.

  It leads a V-wing of eight Pods drawn from every company in 1st and 2nd Battalions. Reports are streaming into HQ that an inexperienced captain barged his whole company into a second ambush 15 minutes after it left. Despite one dead and three wounded in a meeting with a bot-gun, the captain made no adjustments to his scouting protocol. He just swapped out squads.

  It’s still unclear to Battalion HQ if the first incident with the sniper-bot was caused by careless scouting or command error, but the second incident sure seems to be the green captain’s fault. No time to worry about that now. A company is in a vicious firefight and real bad trouble.

  ‘Maybe this time they’ll let me operate on my own’ ponders the professionally jealous and prideful REMOTE, spurring thrusters a little harder at the thought.’ Probably not. Doctors’ egos, right? Big as a nebula, dense as a fucking neutron star. Well, whatcha gonna do? Do your job, is all, boyo.’ It starts to hum a little song it wrote. Just to pass the time on the way back.

  Scotch

  Patients loaded into hospital ships get more surgery onboard before transporting to rear systems for psychological treatment and long-term recovery. It’s well known that waiting until after physical repairs to wake a ‘suspend’ who has traumatic injury is a bad idea. Patients need to deal with psychological effects of their physical trauma, not just repair-and-refit and go back. So anti-suspensor is infused before full recovery, with wounds open and natural healing underway.

  Most find it easier to deal with being wounded while the ugly look of physical injury is still obvious. Otherwise last thoughts would be of an appalling wound to a helpless body, then waking
as if normal and fully-healed in a hospital ship quantum-jumps away from that last real memory. The disjuncture is just too much for brain and psyche to handle. Since the Med Corps is principally interested in sending repaired soldiers back into combat stat, or those permanently disabled back home and the hell out of its clogged-and-busy ground hospitals and hospital ships, most doctors deal with physical and mental trauma together. It’s a tested system and it works.

  That’s why Lee Jin takes a week and seven sessions to finish all cosmetic repairs to Susannah Page’s torn heart and torn-off breast, waking her after each surgery then putting her back under while he works on other patients. Or so he tells himself. He can’t admit that there’s something else, quite indefinable, drawing him back to her again and again. Today he finished all reconstructive work he started in orbit around Glarus, laser-sealing surgical seams and invisible skin grafts. He left orders to call him when the young brunette wakes from suspend in six hours.

  ***

  When Susannah awakens she’s pale and confused. She opens then closes her bright green eyes just once and quickly, shutting them tight again, not daring to look at what she imagines is the black-and-gray and ragged stump of her burned-off breast. Thinking she’ll see the great lump of pus and yellowed-gauze she saw the first time she woke. Then she senses a presence near.

  Lee is standing by her bed, ready to talk about her injuries and healing. He starts right in. “Full physical recovery is guaranteed,” he says with a broad smile. He doesn’t say that complete psychological and spiritual recovery is up to her, a matter of letting her deal with all remaining issues with whatever resources a 22-year old girl might possess. He doesn’t know much about all that, so he just says: “You need to keep doing what we’ve started here.” Whatever that means.

  He pulls down the top of her gown, exposing her naked breasts. Susannah is startled and hugely embarrassed, until she notes that his dark brown, almond eyes give her a purely clinical exam. She lets him trace his finger along the cruciform scar tissue that runs down the center of her chest, left red and raw and still showing for now, to help with psych-adjustment.

  “This central scar-ridge will disappear in a month or two,” he informs her with real pride. “All that will remain is a hair-thin white line. Unless you sun-bathe and darken the skin around it, it won’t be visible at all. Not even to you.”

  He tucks his palm under her new breast, lifting it up and back, talking excitedly about how he rebuilt it and all the repairs he made to her heart muscle underneath. He’s oblivious to her vulnerability and distress. Doesn’t realize the embarrassment he’s causing an exposed young woman, startled and confused enough by her recovery in this odd, sterile, white place. And now an odd little man is touching and manipulating her breast?

  When he moves his index finger to trace fine scars still visible around her repaired areola and nipple, she reaches up and pushes his hand away. Gently yet firmly.

  “That’s alright, doctor. I can see that myself, later.”

  It’s Lee’s turn to be surprised. And to blush. For the first time, consciously at least, he notices that the breast-repair patient he worked on and has worried about isn’t just another case of highly successful surgery. She’s a vivacious, green-eyed vixen who steals his breath as their gazes meet. He realizes with a deep startle that she’s a beautiful young woman. He knows now that he’s been drawn to her since she came out of the shuttle and into his surgery. He realizes that she’s looking up at him, half-smiling and half-laughing at his obvious discomfort.

  “Umm, sorry.” He mumbles awkwardly, looking away, then back, now trying not to focus on her perfect breasts, which he’ll never again see merely as a repair case. He can’t look away, not entirely. He sees her breasts and Susannah for the first time as more than a medical issue to solve. She let’s his gaze linger for a just a second or two, then modestly pulls up her gown.

  “I only meant ... Well, of course you can do it later. On your own. Good, good. I’ll check back later then, perhaps tomorrow? Get some rest now.”

  He strains his eyes upward, ostentatiously reading the name on the blue patient chart glowing softly in the ship’s overhead, low above her bed. A name he already knows. “You rest now, Susannah … errr, I mean Private Page. Well, I must go. Patients to see. Work to do.”

  She wants to laugh, only inwardly at first. Then she can’t help it or hold it in. A giggle escapes, then a light laugh as Lee hurries off, saying nothing, deeply embarrassed, hoping the nurses didn’t see. Feeling her laughter in his back. Wanting to bury himself in his study with a large scotch and never come out. Feeling all of fourteen-years old. He can’t believe it.

  Susannah finds herself thinking about his startled innocence as she’s falling asleep, without suspend for the first time. ‘What a kind, sweet man.’

  ***

  Today’s been a good day for the Medical Corps and for Lee Jin personally. So he returns to his private quarters for an earned-rest. He’ll imbibe a first-rate scotch, sipping it quietly in his small but warm, wood-lined study attached to the Chief Surgeon’s Berth. It’s two days later and he’s still having trouble forgetting how flushed and embarrassed he felt coming from Susannah Page’s bedside. He’s having even more trouble forgetting her laughing green eyes and her pretty face. Yes, also her perfect breasts. Probably because he doesn’t really want to.

  It’s a comfortable room, dark with real Torun-teak panels. Not the fake ones you find in too many officers’ and bureaucrats’ homes, the pride of spouses with high social aspirations but neither the income nor the cultivated taste to match. He settles into a favorite, deep chair. It’s not standard, either. Another luxury smuggled onto Red Rover with its captain’s indulgent say so.

  He pours a half-glass from a nearly-full decanter of dinkum scotch, from Baku. It’s one of the finest blended whiskies distilled anywhere. He picked up a taste for this particular bronze liquor while finishing his officer-training course at the Naval Graduate School on Baku. That was before he headed off to Caspia to complete medical training, at the Armed Forces Medical School in Van Hook Arm. That’s a small city about 800 klics north of Lowestoft‑on‑Stamos.

  Lee only drinks Baku blends these days. He loathes snobby single malts, especially the exaggerated smoky-types with far too much burnt scent and a flavor of peat left in, a bit of the bog to trick rich and gullible off-worlders that a harsh medicinal taste of raw distillates is in fact “exquisite, unique, marvelous.” Worth paying a small fortune to take up the Baku elevator in a carry-on bag, boasting with every step of high disposable income and purchased style and taste.

  It’s the grand tradition of the best blended whiskies that art and age and subtlety surpass cold distilling science. And that quality and flavor is in the blend, not the malt. That’s true of the rich Baku-bronze he pores carefully into a fine Helvetic-crystal goblet. It’s crafted from a recipe over a millennium old. He finds amusing the near-slavish devotion absurdly priced single malts inspire among his more pretentious colleagues, in what he knows is perhaps the most bumptious of all the professions. Ranking with those fake-teak rooms so many spouses overbuy.

  ‘You can have your raw-malt liquors fobbed off on rich tourists and dull-wit, whiskey-snob poseurs as the “best of the best.” I’ll bet a month’s wages some rich distiller is laughing long and deep over the trick he pulled! I’ll take a Baku-blend like this old bronze every time.’

  He smiles as he tinkles the scotch-and-ice in his glass. The sound reminds him of a fellow med student at the Van Hook school. Snana Ojinjintka was a handsome but too arrogant Sioux from the vast Lemurian prairie north and east of New Beijing, on Lee’s homeworld of Amasia. Lee became a merciless teaser of his fellow student once he learned that ‘Snana’ means “jingles like little bells” in the original Sioux. Then he turns to thinking about Susannah Page, now awake and nearly recovered. He thinks about her as a man, not as her doctor. His thoughts surprise him.

  He’s savoring the first pleasure burn
of the bronzed liquid as it slips from the crystal like a seductress wearing silk and nothing else, caressing the flat of his tongue and curling down the back of his throat. He imagines Susannah’s breasts barely covered by a black-silk negligee, then pressed against him as he kisses her. He thinks of falling into her vibrant, green eyes, and more than his throat feels a rising warmth. Then the ship’s coms sound in his study, calling him back.

  “Attention on-call surgeons: incoming casualties. We have major trauma cases: 36, make that 42, incoming MTCs. More on the way. Will update. Duty surgeons move now to designated areas. All surgical-cubicles, standby. Off-duty surgeons are elevated to on-call status. Remain at-the-ready for second status upgrade. REMOTEs are coming into contact, planetside. First upload in 10 minutes. Cubicles reset to dynamic time-lag, this position. Attention cyber surgeons…”

  The message repeats three times, then stops. He calculates that he can finish his drink, as there are more than enough fine doctors on duty on Red Rover to handle this case load without him. MTCs or not. Unless it really heats up on the Glarus surface in the next half hour or so.

  Then Lee’s personal-com lights up with a signal from First Commodore Felipe Mendez, an old Navy Graduate School friend and good drinking companion. Though it’s more important at this moment that Mendez is also Head of Fleet Intelligence and his personal-com is flashing a red urgent signal on a code-secure line.