The level of stress, already considered unbearable, increased geometrically as the Hawking crept toward Emry and a confrontation with far superior Ichton forces. Occasionally a small Ichton force would discover the Hawking, forcing yet another change of course to avoid ambush. Those fighting on the ships or inside the station had nowhere to run and only the prospect of greater danger to look forward to. Under this burden any psychological problem became severe. It was the responsibility of a few members of the medical staff to assist those who need their help the most. Repairing their minds as well as their bodies. But who watches the watchers?
MEDIC
by Mercedes Lackey and Mark Shepherd
Dr. Althea Morgan paused in the hatchway to her office, leaned against the cold metal, and sighed. This job was not something she was looking forward to, but it was better than the alternative.
Thinking.
Although being cramped in that tiny cell of an office was almost as bad as thinking.
It’s a good thing they don’t allow claustrophobes in space.
Her so-called “office” was about the size of a supply closet, and had just enough room for her desk, chair, and terminal—and, if the visitor happened to be the size of your average ballet dancer, room for one other person as well. At least she had a chair. Visitors got to perch on a narrow metal flap that folded down from the desk.
Why did I ever agree to be staff administrator, anyway?
She squeezed past the end of the desk and settled into her chair, steeled herself, and reached for the computer terminal to turn the Cyclopean monster on.
It immediately chided her for not touching it since the Elizabeth Blackwell II hit norm-space by beeping at her. Angrily, she thought. Then it presented her with a flood of memos about how crowded her message-queues were, followed by a directive from the Admiralty about saving queue-memory.
I know, I know. She hadn’t turned the damned thing on because she hadn’t seen the damn office since they hit norm. She hadn’t seen anything except the surgery, the prep room, her room (damn little of that), and the corridor between her room and surgery.
Nominally, she was the director of the medical personnel aboard the Elizabeth Blackwell II. In actuality, she did as much hands-on work as any of her staff, right down to holding bedpans if it came to it. And during the last few weeks, there’d been a lot of hands-on. She’d taken all of the Neuros, most of the Neuro-musculars, all of the Spinals, and even a couple Thoracics.
Or, in the jargon of the no-nonsense first-in surgeons of the Fleet—the Heads, the Hunks, the Backs, and the Chests.
For a moment, she buried her head in her hands, overwhelmed not so much with memories but with a flood of impressions. Things had happened too quickly for memories. The Blackwell served the same function as the old MASH units had for ground-based troops; she was only one of many, but sometimes it seemed as if Blackwell was the only one of her kind out here. All alone, except for the Big Ship, the Stephen Hawking. That was what she called it, the Big Ship; she had not set foot on it for weeks, and to her it was a great deal like returning to Heaven. She had never been there, and probably wouldn’t go there until she died—she sent a lot of people there, though, and none of them ever came back.
Or if they did, she didn’t recognize them.
Blood; that was the primary memory. Blood, lots of it, in all the variations of red. And internal organs. Many kinds, often not human. Sometimes fluids she didn’t even recognize as blood, forms she had never seen before, organs with functions she couldn’t even guess. The medicomp knew, though, good old many-eyed Argus; and the replicator could reproduce the fluids, the organs, from a cubic mil of clean tissue. Nothing fancy; that was for the Hawkins. She just saved them, patched them, and got those all-important clean samples; the Big Ship made them whole again, grew them new lungs and spleens and feshetti, carved them faces that looked like faces and not nightmare-horrors. Whoever had said that combat in the modern world was clean had never been on the Blackwell.
More memories. Operating with one eye on the comp screen and one on the patient. Comp over the table, Eye of God, beloved Argus, that told her and every other surgeon everything she needed to know about her patient, including where her hands were in the welter of blood and God knew what. The comp that guided her hands.
Not the same comp that was bitching at her now, beeping at her, chiding her for her inattention. That was Admin. Cyclops. The Eye she hated.
Well, there was one advantage to not logging on for weeks, even months. There was a lot of crap she wasn’t going to have to deal with. Computer-sent messages have a short life span. Administrative crap had an even shorter half-life.
She typed slowly, cursing the ancient, outmoded keyboard. Anyone over the rank of CPO in the military side had a Voice-Response-System. Anyone with any kind of rank had a VRS. If she had had a secretary, the secretary would have been issued a VRS. But, in the usual FUBAR of the military, because she was an administrative head and should have had a secretary to deal with all this garbage, she didn’t need a VRS.
Never mind irreparable nerve damage that made her hands shake so much that she could stand in for the drink mixer in the ship’s lounge. Never mind that her secretary had been co-opted to man guns somewhere on the Big Ship. Never mind that somewhere, without a shadow of a doubt, there was a friggin’ closet full of VRSs doing nothing on the Big Ship. There might even be one hidden somewhere on the Blackwell. No VRS for Admin personnel. End of story.
Thank the Deity-of-Your-Choice for mass queue-purges.
First mass purge: all social notes. Not that there were a lot, but there was no point. Somewhere there was a reg that said that on so-called noncombat ships there must be regularly scheduled social events for the purpose of crew morale. So Cyclops scheduled them and reminded everyone to attend; probably even programmed the ship’s mess for refreshments that no one came to eat, then sent bitchy notices about food wastage.
Second purge: all ship-to-ship general notices older than yesterday.
That freed up a lot of queue-space, and mollified the damn Cyclops enough so that it stopped beeping at her. Now all it was doing was issuing reminders every five minutes or so.
Now selective purges. Anything personal older than a week ago. Most of the personal notes were stupid; residue of interstaff quarrels and infighting, reminders of things that she would never have forgotten anyway, and if she didn’t remember them, they hadn’t been worth remembering. Requisition orders older than a month; if someone hadn’t chased her down for her thumbprint in person, they’d found a creative way of solving the shortage.
In general, that was how things got taken care of on the Elizabeth Blackwell, you either chased Morgan down for the print, found something else that would do, or did without. There were some ingenious jury-rigs on the Blackwell.
That took care of the nonsense. Now came the work.
The only part that she cared for were the personnel files of new staff. Not that she hadn’t met them all by now, but buried in the files were the little things that made a face into a person. That Trauma Spec Jharwat Singh Rai was a near concert-level violinist. Or Sanders, the head ward nurse, was the champion Swords and Spellcast player in the Fleet. Or that Orthopedic Surgeon Ledith Alsserth from the Indies collected old Earth jazz recordings, even though his people had never so much as seen a saxophone. She wasn’t even certain one of his race could play a saxophone.
So she left those until last, as a reward for good behavior. It was amazing how much paperwork accumulated whenever they docked with the Big Ship; the transfer orders were enough to fill twenty megabytes alone, and that was in compressed mode. Why do the stuff in triplicate, when “paperwork” didn’t exist in hard copy anymore?
Never mind. She could fill them out. It didn’t matter. As long as she kept busy, she wouldn’t have to think. Think about how the ultimate weapon the Fleet had built, the Stephen Hawking, the battlestation that was never supposed to see close combat, had just been throu
gh the trash-masher. How there was an even bigger enemy armada than the one that had trashed them coming down the Throat right now. Straight for them.
How the cavalry was not coming over the hill. Not out here, back of beyond of anywhere. Not when they already had all of their eggs in one basket.
No. Better not to think. She would take care of her job; let the ones in charge try to think of a solution. She had plenty to do. If work on the Blackwell ran out, she could volunteer for reconstructive surgery on the Big Ship. There was plenty of that. There was always plenty of that.
More crap to wade through; complaints. The Blackwell had taken some scrapes and minor hits, and systems were cranky. Very cranky, Minor malfunctions all over the ship—including, predictably, the mess hall, reducing the already minimal palatability of the food down to the flavor of flour paste. Not that she could do anything about that, but she got the complaints from her staff anyway.
Just hope nothing major breaks loose before the overhaul crew can get to us.
By the time she had waded through the last of the muck, her trembling hands and wrists ached, and she was only too glad to be able to simply page through the files without having to type anything.
It would be nice if she could have a pair of StediGloves in here—but those required the medicomp to operate.
And of course, since there were no requirements to extend Argus’s all-seeing Eye into the office, there was no way to get the Eye in here. Administrators had no need for the Eye—what, was she going to do surgery on the desk?—and neither did secretaries.
So, Eye, no gloves, no steadying influence on her hands. Have a nice day.
“Hell, even chaplains have VRSs,” she muttered, and called up the first of the files.
Working from bottom rank up; nursing staff first. As always, she heard the voice of her mentor in her mind’s ear. Good old Doc Glock. “Nurses. Get to know them well, girl—they’re your lifeline, your extra hands, your other eyes. Got three things going wrong at once; put your ops nurses on two of ’em. Chances are they’ll do as well as you. Need a third eye, put your nurse on the comp and have her read the damn thing back at you. Let ’em close when you’re done if there’s another on the table waiting for you, let ’em do what they can. Let ’em do any damn thing if they’re capable, and to hell with regs. This won’t be Saint Simeon’s; there won’t be anyone looking to book them for practicing medicine without a license, or to sue you for malpractice. Let ’em work right up to the limits of their capabilities, and thank ’em afterward. You won’t be any less a doctor. Those boys and girls and whatevers are gonna be damn glad they’re still alive when you’re done with ’em, and they won’t care who or what did the work. . . .”
As she called up pictures, file (usually from graduation) and current, she didn’t get many surprises. Other than the usual—how the trim and ultra-proper loosened up; the young and shiny and eager got some of the shine rubbed off. How the ones so sure they were God Almighty you could see it in their eyes learned they were mortal after all.
Nothing like getting the shit scared out of you a dozen or so times to get rid of those anal-retentive tendencies. The Blackwell had gotten a fair share of close calls, and even a few minor hits. That’s why the Blackwell was armed—and had the best legs in the Service.
Now Althea was well into the smaller corps of surgical doctors and trauma specialists. New chest-man; that was good. Even better that his specialty was Xeno. That was probably why she’d only seen him over coffee in the lounge. She was human Neuro; for Xenos, even with neurological damage, a chest-man with Xeno specialty was a better choice than a human with no Xeno experience. She tagged him mentally for call-up when the time came; two sets of experiences sometimes saved a “kid” of whatever race that one alone couldn’t. Not if, when. For the time would come that she would need him, as night followed day.
There were no surprises until she came to the last file, highest rank. The new Chief of Surgery. File image; bright, cheerful, new-and-shiny. Laughing eyes. Nice girl.
Whom she did not recognize.
What the hell?
She called up a recent image; it was like seeing images of two different people, and this one she knew. Except that she’d had no idea this was her CoS. For a moment she toyed with the idea of a ringer—though why anyone would try and place a ringer on the Blackwell she couldn’t imagine—but the tissue typing done just last week matched the one in the file that went with the graduation image.
Two different people. And the second one was a nonentity. No expression. Hair cut to a short little fuzz. Nothing in the eyes.
That was why she hadn’t thought the woman was even a full doctor. There was nothing about Celia Stratford that was remarkable. The file was a blank. No hobbies. No interests. No friends. . . .
Fifteen transfers in fourteen years.
What?
Her first thought was that the woman was a major troublemaker—or attracter. But there were no discipline hash marks against her in the records; nothing, in fact, but glowing commendation after commendation. All the transfers were voluntary. Requested.
The longest she’d stayed in any one place was two years; the shortest, six months. She’d been on the Big Ship until the hookup before this one; she’d requested transfer again, and she’d gotten it. Then the fluke—because she had an outstanding record, and because Althea’s old CoS had gotten conscripted elsewhere, the computer threw her into the CoS slot with an automatic upgrade.
Fifteen transfers in fourteen years. A nonentity. A mystery. A puzzle to solve, to stave off thinking.
Just what the doctor ordered.
She ordered a copy of the file—and any others that Celia was mentioned in—transferred to her Pers area. Later, she could warm up the terminal in her cabin and look it over lying flat on her bunk.
She gazed once more into the eyes of the nonentity on the screen, before dismissing the image. There was a person in there, with a reason for all those transfers. And Althea Morgan was going to find her.
Ready or not, Celia, here I come.
Still groggy from the jump, Celia wove her way through the breakfast crowd in the mess hall. She shrugged and stood in line, wishing she could be invisible. Over the years, through trial and error, she perfected her body language to effectively broadcast, to a wide area, stay away. All except the most imperceptive individuals could read her posture, the folded arms, the hostile look, the stance that turned slightly inward. She was more comfortable being by herself, and made no secret of it to the world.
It’s better this way, she thought, waiting in the incredibly slow line. It’s better to have no friends than lose the ones you have to those damned intelligent grasshoppers. If I never see another insect again, it will be too soon.
The cafeteria, if one could call it that, was small and cramped, like everything else on the ship. There were perhaps thirty people in here, mostly medical staff in their traditional whites, with a few ship’s support in green coveralls thrown in to keep the eye from going snow-blind. The ship’s captain, whom she had met briefly when transferring from the Stephen Hawking, along with the higher ranking doctors, would probably be taking meals in the officer’s mess. She couldn’t help but laugh, remembering the XO orderly’s expression when he told her she had that option, and she had declined it. Apparently nobody ever did that.
I’ll be more invisible with the larger numbers, she told herself. If I mix with a group of senior staff I’ll be expected to make small talk. Here, I can be quiet without raising eyebrows or questions.
As she had expected, breakfast was the usual dull military fare. All reconstructed soy made to resemble, if you had a vivid imagination, eggs, bacon, and ham. Or for those of other persuasions, oatmeal, bagels, and cream cheese. The coffee more than made up for the pseudomeal; somewhere in the brew’s distant ancestry, there must have been at least one or two real honest-to-God coffee beans. That, or the replicating equipment on this ship was more advanced than the mess on the Stephen
Hawking. Not likely, given the rest of the meal.
It doesn’t matter, she thought, selecting a table (thank God) that was sitting off by itself. As long as I don’t know a soul, I’ll be happy with bread and water. Checking her watch, she saw that she had two hours before her shift officially began. Of course, they’ll expect me there an hour early. Good thing I came when I did. If this is slow for this place, I’d hate to see what it looks like during a rush.
Everyone around her seemed to be in the advanced stages of waking up and not particularly looking for company.
For all intents and purposes, just like her.
Another trick she learned a while back; early breakfasts usually insured privacy.
How long has it been, anyway? she thought, playing with her make-believe bacon. Ten, eleven years? She added the years, surprising herself with how long it had really been. Great Good God, Celia thought, dropping her fork. Fourteen years. My, how time flies when you’re having fun.
She remembered the way it had been, in the early days, shortly after graduation. I was so young, so fresh, so . . . stupid. Janet Walter had been her roommate all through med school and her best friend since their freshman year, so it was natural that they should ship out together, to the same ship’s hospital. Janet could make a good joke out of just about any bad situation, and acted as the perfect counter to Celia’s own unpredictable mood swings, made worse by the nasty little border war they were cleaning up after.
Being a doctor seemed so very heroic then. Working near a war was even more so. Or so all the holos, the books, the newsvids said. Her teachers told them that they were going out to bring life amid death. That they were special. Important.
And it certainly felt important. She had been prepared for the horrors of battlefield surgery; she had spent her internship in a charity-hospital trauma unit. She had been prepared for the chaos, the constant stress.
What she hadn’t been prepared for was that the medical personnel might be a target.
She didn’t even remember who they were fighting. Or where. It could have been any battle in any conflict. It might not even have been the enemy; it might have even been an accident, so-called “friendly fire.” The details were not important; what was important was that up until that moment she had no idea what it was like to lose someone important, someone close.
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