What had she endured? he wondered. Had she seen her parents die? Had she found their corpses as Bingwen had? Or had she been spared that? Maybe she and her brother Niro were merely separated from their parents. Maybe they clung to the hope of reuniting somehow.
"So where are you from?" asked Bingwen.
"What do you care?"
"I'm from Dawanzhen. Or a village near there anyway. My family farmed rice."
"Yeah, you and everyone else. So what."
"How long have you been here?"
"This isn't an interview, Stick. Stop asking questions."
"Sorry. I haven't seen someone my age in a while. I guess I'm kind of hungry for conversation."
"Well the rest of us are hungry for food. So unless you've got some in that pack of yours, keep your questions to yourself."
"Get used to questions. That's how the device makes a diagnosis and determines what to test. It asks a lot of questions."
Her scowl softened. "Like what?"
"Like how long has your brother been hurting?"
She looked worried again. "Since last night. It started as a stomachache, but now he can't bear it. I stole some pain pills from the med closet, but I wasn't sure how much to give him. Bug said if I gave Niro too much, his heart might stop." She opened the palm of her hand to show him four white tablets. "What do you think?"
"I think we need to hurry and charge this."
Pipo saw that he was serious, grabbed his wrist, and pulled him to the front of the line. She pushed the girl aside who was using the charger and gave it to Bingwen, who immediately started gathering juice into the device. People in line objected, some cursed. A woman threatened to intervene, but Pipo gave her a look that would melt stone and told her that they were charging this for Mama Goshi who needed it immediately and if the woman didn't like it she could go take it up with Mama Goshi herself. Then the Med-Assist was ready, and Pipo and Bingwen were running off.
Back at the cots, the children gathered around when Bingwen booted up the device and placed it over Niro's stomach.
"This isn't going to hurt him, is it?" asked Pipo.
"No," said Bingwen. "Just have him lie still." He tapped through the commands, typed in the symptoms, and listened to the instructions.
"What language is that?" said one of the boys.
"English, bonehead," said Pipo. "What does it say, Bingwen?"
"It says I need to prick his finger and check his blood."
For a moment he thought Pipo would object, but then she gripped her brother's hand and nodded for Bingwen to continue. Bingwen swabbed Niro's fingertip, retracted the disposable needle prick, and stuck the boy's finger. Niro cried out and Bingwen placed a drop of blood on the scanner. "He has an infection," Bingwen said once the results came in. "And now it's telling me to press on his stomach."
"No!" said Niro.
"You said you weren't going to hurt him," said Pipo. "So far that's all you've done."
"This is how the device works," said Bingwen. "I do some tests. The more results it has, the more accurate the diagnosis. This is exactly what a doctor would do."
Pipo hesitated again. Niro clung to her. The other boys looked uneasy. A few adults had gathered to see what the commotion was about.
"I can't advance unless I do this," said Bingwen.
Pipo bit her bottom lip a moment then held Niro tighter. "Do it quickly," she said.
Bingwen set the device aside. "What hurts worse, Niro, when I press down on your belly or when I release?" He didn't need to wait for an answer. Niro cried out when Bingwen released the pressure. Bingwen checked the appropriate box and placed the device over the stomach. "Now hold still. It's going to take a series of images. This part won't hurt at all."
Tears had welled up in the little boy's eyes, and Pipo looked on the verge of crying as well. Several adults had heard Niro cry out, and a crowd was slowly gathering around the bed. When the results came in, the device said it was 97.5 percent confident of the diagnosis.
"His appendix is about to burst," said Bingwen.
Pipo's eyes widened. "Burst? What does that mean?"
"It means we need to find a surgeon immediately. They need to remove it."
Pipo sprinted to retrieve Mama Goshi, and the old woman arrived a moment later, puffing and irritated at being disturbed. She scowled and gestured at the gathered crowd. "What's all this?"
"Niro's stomach is going to burst," said one of the boys.
"His appendix," said Bingwen. He showed Mama Goshi the device. He could tell from her expression that she couldn't read English or understand the scans she was looking at. But she did seem to understand Niro's moaning and the worry on the faces of the gathered adults. Mama Goshi unclipped her communicator from her hip and called the doctor. She tried explaining the issue, but she couldn't answer the doctor's questions or properly pronounce the terms Bingwen keep feeding her. Finally she gave up and thrust the communicator into Bingwen's hands. "You tell her."
Bingwen read to the doctor the full diagnosis: acute pain localized to the right iliac fossa; elevated white blood count; rebound tenderness and guarding in the right lower quadrant of the abdomen; he shared the numbers for hemoglobin, hematocritin, blood sugar; he described the results of the ultrasound and CT scans, which had identified an inflamed appendix with pus, fibrin, and congested blood vessels on the surface. Bingwen didn't know many of the English words and thus what their Chinese equivalent would be, so he simply pronounced them in English and hoped the doctor understood.
When he finished, the doctor said, "How old are you?"
"Eight. But I don't understand most of what I'm telling you. All I know for certain is that Niro needs surgery immediately. Can you come?"
"Yes. I'll send someone to get him right away. You did good."
Two soldiers arrived minutes later with a gurney and took Niro away. Pipo insisted on going with him, but the soldiers wouldn't allow it. When they were gone, the crowd dispersed. Bingwen could see the adults whispering to each other, passing the news.
Pipo stared at the exit where Niro had gone, and Bingwen tried to reassure her. "The doctor sounded kind. When I told her it was appendicitis, she didn't seem nervous. I'm guessing she's done that surgery many times before."
Pipo turned to him, and for an instant he saw the girl she had been before the war, small and afraid and delicate.
Mama Goshi asked to see the Med-Assist device again. "Where did you get this?"
"From a soldier," Bingwen told her. He didn't want to tell her it was Mazer's and that Mazer was somewhere in the facility. He worried she might try to return it to him.
She gave it back to him and said, "Come with me."
Bingwen followed her to the nurses' station where a boy lay on a cot.
"He says his ears and jaw hurt," said Mama Goshi. "Can your doctor pad tell us why?"
Bingwen looked at the boy, and the two nurses seated around his cot regarded Bingwen curiously. They were not real nurses, Bingwen saw. They were mothers and grandmothers from farming villages, simple people, doing as best as they knew how, which medically wasn't much.
Bingwen set up the device and followed the instructions. Soon the device asked that he attach an otoscope head to the camera lens. It showed him a picture of one, and he asked the nurses if there was such a thing in the medical supplies. One of them left and returned with a few options. Bingwen attached one as best as he could and continued. The boy had a severe inner ear infection, and the Med-Assist recommended the appropriate dose of antibiotics and pain medicine.
Mama Goshi had him scan other people next. A woman had a ruptured disc in her neck. A man had a sinus infection. A crying baby had acid reflux. A pregnant woman wanted to know the sex of her unborn child. Some of the people he could help; others he couldn't. Sometimes they had ailments the device couldn't identify. FURTHER LAB WORK REQUIRED, it would say. Or ADDITIONAL TESTS NEEDED. Or PLEASE SEE A DOCTOR FOR FURTHER ASSISTANCE. Other times it prescribed medicine that the fac
ility simply didn't have.
Word of the failures didn't spread nearly as quickly as the successes, however, and soon people from Fang, Fire, and Wings were coming for a diagnosis, forming a line that stretched down the tunnel.
Bingwen pulled Mama Goshi aside. "What you're having me do is rather dangerous," he said. "I'm not a doctor. The device is for emergencies in the field, when a real doctor is inaccessible. It's a last-resort option. It can be wrong. These people need a real doctor."
"We don't have enough," said Mama Goshi.
"Then we need to get some," said Bingwen. "Can you take me outside the facility?"
"Why?"
"The Med-Assist can't get a sat connection this far underground, and I know someone who can help."
She announced to those waiting in line that they were taking a break. Then she took him up a service elevator to the garage. Bingwen had retrieved his radiation suit, and he slipped it on once they reached the main door. Two soldiers guarding the exit stopped them when they approached.
"He needs a moment outside," Mama Goshi told them. The men looked at each other, shrugged, and let Bingwen out.
"Knock twice to be let back in," said one of them.
"And don't let the Formics eat you," said the other.
They closed the door behind him. It was night out. Bingwen walked a short distance away until he got a strong signal. He checked the time. New Zealand was four hours ahead. It was the middle of the night there, closer to dawn. She had told him to call at any hour, however.
She answered on the third ring, her voice groggy. "This is Kim."
"It's Bingwen," he said. "The boy. From China. I'm sorry to wake you."
She was instantly alert. "Bingwen. I've been so worried. Are you safe? Where are you?"
He hardly knew her. He had never even seen her face. She had helped him perform the surgery on Mazer, and he had learned afterward that she and Mazer had been ... what? Not husband and wife yet, but whatever came before that. A couple? And yet despite this brief tenuous connection she and Bingwen had shared, he felt as if he did know her, that she was someone special to him. A friend, yes, and maybe even more than that. Not a mother, no. But like a mother. A half-mother. A woman who knew him and valued him and worried over him. He would never say as much to her, of course, and he had never even thought such a thing prior to this moment. But it felt so wonderful to be fretted over, thought about, remembered, that he found himself smiling.
"I'm safe," he said. He told her everything then, all of it spilling out of him. About the base, the conditions, Mama Goshi and Pipo and Niro and Hun, the fourteen-year-old driver. He told her about the cocky Lieutenant Li and the sick people in Claw and Fire and the other barracks. He wasn't sure why he was divulging every detail, but it felt like such a release to talk to someone. Mazer was fine, by the way, he told her. He had healed. He was healthy. He could run and move. It was as if he had never been hurt.
She broke down at that point. At first Bingwen didn't realize she was crying. There was only silence on her end, and for a moment he thought he had lost the connection.
"Dr. Arnsbrach?" he said.
"I'm here," she said, her voice shaky.
He felt like an idiot then. Mazer was her first concern. He had lost the connection with her shortly after Mazer's surgery when the device's battery had depleted, and Kim had not yet heard how Mazer had recovered. She had been sick with worry all this time, and Bingwen had just yammered on and on about trivial things when it was Mazer she wanted to know about.
When she collected herself, she apologized and blamed her emotions on the lack of sleep and told him more than once that under no circumstances was he to tell Mazer that she had cried. "Promise me, Bingwen."
He promised.
She asked him where Mazer was now.
"He's here at this underground facility. He's helping to lead the soldiers from here. It's some big operation. I don't think they're sending him out to fight. I think he'll stay here where it's safe."
The line went quiet again.
"Are you still there?" he asked.
She sniffed. "Yes, I'm just ... relieved."
Bingwen was suddenly angry. "He should have called you and told you all this himself."
"It's complicated, Bingwen."
"No, it isn't. It's good manners."
She laughed. "Oh Bingwen. I hope you and I can meet in person someday."
He remembered why he had called. "I need your help. We need doctors. There are thousands of people here and hardly any medical staff. I know you can't send doctors. This is a war zone. The skies aren't safe. But would you or any doctors you know be willing to see patients via the nets? Through holos? You can't treat them obviously. At best you could partially examine them and diagnose them. People here could conduct whatever tests you needed, assuming we have the equipment for it. We'd be your hands. None of us have any medical training, so we wouldn't conduct any procedures or surgeries if they were needed. We would leave that to the real doctors here. That would be their focus. Instead of spending time examining patients, they could dedicate all their time to performing procedures only they can do. So we identify the emergencies, they address them. More people could be seen that way, and we could hopefully avoid what almost happened with Niro."
When she spoke again, the worry in her voice was gone, replaced with steel-hard confidence. "Bingwen, I'm going to my office right now. There are several nonprofits that do this sort of thing. I'll get our people on it immediately."
"What's a nonprofit?"
"A charity. A group of people who help for free. In this case, doctors. There are some charities in the U.S., Europe, South America, two in Africa. Give me a few hours to contact them. We can probably find several who speak Chinese. In the meantime, we need equipment for the transmissions and numbers for the uplinks."
"I've seen some holo equipment here on site," said Bingwen. "I'll work on that."
"Should I speak to someone in charge?" asked Kim. "A commanding officer? Get the military's help?"
"I don't even know who that is. I'll ask around. If we can't find out who to ask, I say we do it without permission and ask for forgiveness later."
He could hear the smile in her voice. "Bucking authority for the good of the people? I think Mazer is starting to rub off on you, Bingwen."
Bingwen beamed. It was the greatest compliment anyone had ever given him.
CHAPTER 15
Reunion
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
Re: El Cavador
Rena Delgado and others from El Cavador are no longer here. They left almost two months ago aboard a salvage ship named Gagak. Captained by a Somali named Arjuna. Sorry. No additional information.
The message was projected on the wall-screen in Lem Juke's office, and Victor read it a second time as a mix of emotions welled up inside him. Mother? On a salvage ship? Victor couldn't imagine it. Why would she get on a salvage ship? And with a Somali, no less.
"If she got on a ship, I'm sure she had a good reason," said Imala. She and Lem were standing behind him. They had all seen the message.
Victor turned to face her. "You don't know Somalis, Imala. They're vultures. Pirates. They strip derelict ships to the bone. Sometimes with the crews still inside them. They don't care. They rape, kill, and then they'll rob you."
"That can't be who these Somalis are," said Imala. "It says she left on a salvage ship. If she had been abducted, the message would have said so. I take this to mean she went voluntarily."
"Imala's right," said Lem. "If this Gagak were a crew of vultures, they never would have reached the outpost. The WU-HU defenses would have pulverized them before they got within ten klicks of the place."
Victor glowered. "What do you know about it?"
"Plenty. WU-HU is a competitor. We know their operations inside and out. Those outposts are fortresses. They're engineered to fend off pirates. And speaking of which, not all So
malis are pirates. There are crow crews as well. They live by salvage law. They hate vultures as much as anyone, maybe even more so because vultures give Somalis such a bad rep."
"It doesn't make sense," said Victor. "Why would they leave? They would have been safer at an outpost."
"Apparently your mother didn't think so," said Imala. "If she left, she had reasons. She had women and children with her. Maybe these Somalis offered them passage somewhere."
"Yes, but where? My mother and aunts have nowhere to go."
"We have the name of the ship," said Lem. "We'll find it and contact it directly."
"They're a salvage ship," said Victor. "They're not going to have an account with Luna. They won't likely be in the network. We may not be able to reach them until they dock somewhere. That could be months from now. And if they do their trade off the market, as most salvage crews do, they won't register when they dock. Which means we may never find them."
"Leave that to me," said Lem.
By late the following day, Lem had located them. He approached Victor in the warehouse and handed him the coordinates on a portable datascreen. "They're near an asteroid called Themis in the outer rim of the Belt."
Victor flipped up his welding visor and stared at the datascreen. "But ... how did you find them?"
"Black magic. You'll also be happy to know they're on the network. And since we know they're near Themis, we know their relay route. There are probably a dozen to twenty stations between them and us, so at best it will take several hours to get a response, and that's assuming all the switchboards are operational and the laserline gets through clean. But hey, it doesn't hurt to try."
Victor looked down at the datascreen and then back up at Lem, feeling sheepish. "I can't afford to send a message through that many relays. I have some money that my family gave me, but it's probably not enough."
"I'll cover the expense," said Lem. "Whatever it is, and for however long you talk. I owe you that much."
"Thank you."
They found an empty office in the warehouse filled mostly with boxes of junk and broken equipment. Lem cleared the desk with his arm, knocking most of the items onto the floor and kicking up a cloud of dust. Then he set down the terminal and made a sweeping gesture with his hand. "It's not a luxury suite, but it's private at least. And maybe the only quiet place in the warehouse. I won't tell anyone where you are. I set up a laserline account in your name. It's there onscreen. Take your time."
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