Bloodstar: Star Corpsman: Book One (21 page)

Both of those would take too long, I feared, and both were harder to reverse. I needed to drastically slow her heartbeat only long enough for the nanobots in her liver to finish their work, then switch it back on again.

Program 5 switched off the sinoatrial node, which meant the heart muscle’s pacemaking duties would be picked up by atrioventricular or AV node. The heart’s ventricles will keep on beating with their own inherent and much slower rhythm. This rhythm, called nodal or junctional rhythm, usually comes in at a rate of around thirty to fifty beats per minute.

Almost at once, the numbers for her heart rate and blood pressure began plummeting. I had two main questions at that point: Was the drop in time, and was it going to be too much?

The fresh nano reaching her belly was reinforcing the original ’bots now. The framework of artificial blood vessel walls was reforming, knitting itself together, first as an open framework, then filling in the spaces between until they created a solid tube anchored deep within the natural vessel walls.

Heart rate 35 . . . deep in nodal rhythm. Blood pressure . . . shit, I wasn’t getting any blood pressure. Zero over zero.

At this point, Joy’s brain was being starved of blood; we had about three minutes before irreversible damage set in. Some of that might be corrected through surgery, including transplants of newly grown brain tissue, but when parts of the brain die off and are replaced, the new brain is different.

The person is
changed
, usually forever.

I looked up at Joy’s face through her transparent visor, so I could see it, her eyes still closed, her skin a pasty, scary white.

I was thinking about Paula Barton, damn it.

You see, for the past year, ever since she’d suffered that stroke off the Mount Desert glacier, I’d been thinking of Paula as
dead
. It was easier that way. . . .

The truth was a lot tougher to deal with.

P
aula
had
been dead when the med-rescue lifter had hauled her body up out of that sailboat and flew her back to Portland Medical. They’d hooked her to an artificial heart during the flight, but by that time she’d been dead for a good twelve to fifteen minutes. Life support, yeah, but no life to support.

But what that really meant was that the brain had started starving when her heart stopped. By the time blood flow had again been restored, large areas of her brain were dead, some from the direct effects of the stroke, some from the inevitable results of no heartbeat.

At Portland Medical, they’d used surgical nano to carve out huge, dead chunks of her brain, and they’d filled them in with new tissue grown from Paula’s own stem cells. A few months of physical therapy and heavy reprogramming of her in-head hardware had gotten her walking and talking and thinking again. They’d brought Paula Barton back from the dead.

Only . . . she didn’t remember me. She didn’t remember the years we’d had together. She was perfectly healthy . . . and she was a different person.

I’d met with her once. She didn’t want to have anything to do with me—a common-enough response when the doctors are telling you that this stranger beside your bed is the guy with whom you spent several years of your life.

Having a stroke can change a person’s personality, change the way she feels about others, even rewrite memories.

And it’s even worse when half of your brain has been regrown.

You can see why it was easier for me to think of her as dead.

T
hree men came around the side of the wrecked crane, and for just an instant I thought they were three Marines. Then I saw the clumsy leather armor, the bug-faced goggles and breather masks, and I knew they were Salvationists. My immediate question—were they from the faction that was with us, or the one that was with the Qesh?—was answered immediately when one of them raised his cable-bound laser to his shoulder and fired at me.

The pulse of coherent light was absorbed by my armor, and I rolled back into place behind Joy’s plasma gun. They were almost on top of me, so close, I hardly even needed to aim; I squeezed the trigger and the blast of white-hot plasma burned through the leader’s center of mass and kicked him back off his feet and squarely into the two behind him. I triggered the weapon twice more; all three Salvationists were down, portions of their leather on fire.

I could hear the comm chatter of the Marines over the combat channel as they tracked targets and brought them down.

“Over there. On the right. Two Impies!”

“Tracking . . . firing . . .”

“Good shot!”

“There’s another. Twenty degrees west of the first!”

“Got him!”

“Bring that cannon around! Give him some cover!”

“Aye, aye, sir!”

“Range two-five-oh! On the way!”

Something slammed into the other side of the crane body, sending metal fragments hurtling into the sky, then raining back to the ground in plinks, clanks, and thumps.

I kept monitoring Joy. The restructuring of her hepatic portal vein was complete now, and the repair on her hepatic artery very nearly done as well. Fifty seconds had passed since her blood pressure had dropped to nothing. She probably had more than the three minutes of the deadline I’d given her; her heart
was
beating, and blood
was
flowing to her brain. But I didn’t know how to calculate a safety margin for this procedure. Hell, I’d never done it before, not even in simulation. I’d read about it in one of my Hospital Corps download texts, but I’d never slowed anyone’s heart before, not like this. There were so freaking many variables and danger points—the problems of too much pressure, of too little, of nanostruction in a high-volume flow, of shock, of exsanguination, of renal failure, of stroke, of cardiac arrest . . .

The list seemed to go on forever.

But the vessel repair was complete. It was time to bring her heart rate back up to speed.

If
I could.

I reprogrammed the nanobots clustered over a particular spot on the wall of her right atrium, giving them the signal to fire a minute electrical charge into the tissue and trigger her SA node. I saw the feedback from the jolt, but nothing happened. I reset, then fired it again. And yet once again . . .

Her SA node responded, firing her heart muscles in unison, and then her heart was beating harder and faster as her SA node took over from her atrioventricular node, her heart rate swiftly rising from thirty-five to fifty . . . to seventy . . . to ninety . . .

I had a BP on her again!

Correction: I had her systole, the first number in a BP reading, but I wasn’t picking up the second number, the diastole.

Systole is a measure of the highest pressure inside the arteries, at the moment the heart contracts and forces blood out into the body. Diastole is the lowest pressure, measured between the heart’s contractions. I was getting a systole of thirty and a diastole of nil. Not good, not good by several hundred light years, but a hell of a lot better than a flatline zero over zero. At least I had something to work with now.

And the pressure was coming up. Heart rate at 103, BP 45 over 20.
Come on!

I wasn’t sure what to shoot for as an endpoint. Joy had lost a hell of a lot of blood, and I might not be able to get her pressure much above, say, 100 over 50. But if I could at least get it
stable
, that would be something.

While I was waiting, I engaged the CAPTR software in her armor, uploading the data to the Marine network, essentially giving it into the care of the platoon AI. If Joy died in the next hour or two, at least something might be recovered.

I also did something I should have done earlier—upload the data I’d pulled from the Salvation computer to the platoon net as well. That was to ensure its survival in case something happened to me, a distinct possibility with the firefight swirling closer and closer around me.

And then something slammed into my left side, knocking me away from the Marine. What the hell . . . ?

A Qesh warrior had emerged from the ruins fifty meters away, to my left and behind me. His plasma bolt had struck rock directly beside me, the shock slamming into my armor and kicking me to the side. I couldn’t reach the plasma gun; my laser carbine was on the ground where I’d dropped it, just within reach. I scooped it up, twisted around, dragging the targeting cursor projected into my in-head display across the Qesh’s body and triggered three quick rounds.

I hit him below the helmet and just above the upper arm, saw the bolts, with all of the explosive power of a firecracker’s snap, absorbed. Damn!

The Qesh fired again; I managed to not be where the bolt was by rolling to my left, and when I brought the laser up again, I tried to target the enemy’s optical sensor strip. Again and again, I mashed down the trigger button, slamming pulses of coherent light into that walking tank as fast as I could. I couldn’t tell if I was hitting anything vital or not, and shifted my aim to the Jacker’s weapon, hoping to buy myself some time by disarming him.

His helmet blossomed open, metal and ceramic torn and half melted. But a second Qesh was emerging from behind the crane’s fallen cab, and my carbine was warning me that I’d drained its capacitors, that it would be a few seconds before the battery packs could recharge.

I tossed the carbine aside and scrambled back to Joy and the plasma gun resting across her thighs. An enemy shot grazed my left leg, a savage shock. I ignored it and grabbed the weapon, swinging it around and opening fire. The second Qesh ducked back behind the crane wreckage.

It looked like sheet metal, crumpled and propped up by a part of the crane’s framework. I took a guess at where the Qesh might be hiding and put a bolt through the sheet. A half centimeter or so of corrugated iron offered about the same resistance to hot plasma as silk to a Marine nanoknife. The sheet sagged, glowing red-hot around the hole melting through the center, and the Jacker behind twisted and fell with the impact.

Joy’s heart rate was at 120, her blood pressure 90 over 30. The hepatic vessel repairs seemed to be holding, and her heart was solidly back into its normal sinoatrial rhythm.

I took a close look at her spine, sending some of the remaining free nanobots into her back to outline the broken bones and tissues on my N-prog display. It was clear that the T-11 and T-12 vertebrae had been displaced far enough that her spinal cord was torn apart, and that alone was damage that I couldn’t even think about addressing here. Maybe, back on board a ship with a decent surgical suite . . .

The most serious problem that I could do anything about was the possibility of doing more damage. I had to move her, and when I did, those bone fragments—especially those jagged lengths of broken rib—might puncture something else. It looked like another rib fragment was pressing up against her diaphragm; if it shifted, it might punch right through that thin sheet of muscle, and go on to puncture her right lung.

Programming the nano from my N-prog, I directed them to form ligatures—slender but tough threads insinuating themselves through damaged tissue, binding bone to bone, holding the fragments in place. I was tempted to try doing the same for the two severed sections of her backbone, but the damage was too severe. Instead, I popped open her suit controls and keyed in some coded instructions. The torso of her combat armor was damaged but still functional enough that the central torso section could tighten around her waist, then lock itself into rigid immobility.

Her combat armor would serve as a kind of rough-and-ready body cast, immobilizing her spine while I tried to move her.

Tried
to move her. That was the operative phrase.

I was up against a major logistical problem now.

Joy massed 64 kilos; her armor massed 25. That was what they would weigh on Earth. Here, together, they weighed nearly 165 kilograms.

My normal weight on Earth comes in at around 90 kilos; here, and wearing full armor, I weighed almost 213 kilos.

I was faced with hauling a total of over 378 kilograms across 200 meters of open ground, much of it rugged, broken, and uphill.

I would have been hard-pressed to pull off that kind of feat back on Earth. Even on Mars our combined weights would have been only a little less than 80 kilos. Combat armor compensates somewhat, of course, and the exoskeleton bracing, legs, back, and arms would have let me get away with it.

But my exo-unit was useless, the right side removed to jack up the wreckage that had landed on me earlier, the left side shredded by a Qesh plasma bolt. There was no way in hell I could carry Joy out of there, not on my own legs. I needed a quantum flitter . . . or a spin-repulsor sled or stretcher. I had neither.

Briefly, I considered removing her exoskeletal unit—the legs, at least—and putting them on me, but that wasn’t an option, not a good one. It would take time I didn’t have, and those units are carefully balanced to provide a constant overall support, with feedback from the armor itself. That kind of gear wizardry was a job for a Marine armorer or a Navy roboticist, not for a simple Corpsman.

Even so, I had to try.

Simplest would have been just to drag her—preferably feetfirst, which would have put less pressure on her injured spine. The ground was rough enough, however, that I wouldn’t be able to drag her far, and once I started trying to make it up the rough and stone-strewn gully, it would be hopeless.

Joy was on her back; I stretched her arms out to the sides, then lay down beside her, on my back, on top of her left arm. Grabbing her left hand in my left, I reached across her chest and grabbed her right wrist with my right hand, then rolled to the left, coming to my knees as I did so. Once I was on my knees, I held her wrists at my throat with my left hand, supporting myself on my right. Her weight was draped over my back, her legs hanging down limp over mine.

I started to crawl.

I wouldn’t have been able to make it ten meters if it hadn’t been for the armor. Even without the exoskeletal support, the armor on my legs adjusted to the stress and the pressure, and helped brace me—but each meter forward was a slow agony, the pain shrieking in my lower back and shoulders.