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Authors: Rory Harper

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Sprocket Goes International

by Rory Harper

Lady Jane almost died before we got to Venezuela.

The entire trip on the oil tanker
Pertwee
took only six days, and the sea was smooth as glass all the way, but when we were forty-eight hours from Caracas, she started showing symptoms of the casing crud. The human equivalent is terminal constipation. That may sound humorous, but it ain’t.

Sometimes a casing critter will form an obstruction in one of their pipe tubes, backing up all the raw material that they’re converting into casing. Usually, the critter can pass it out of her system, but not always. If the obstruction isn’t removed or dissolved, their internal organs can rupture. Sometimes medicines work, sometimes violent massage will move the lump to where you can get a cable around it and yank it out. Sometimes not.

We spent the last twelve hours at sea with her tied down to the deck with braided steel cables to minimize her thrashing about. She was trying to be good, but she hurt too much. The problem was, the obstruction had formed quickly, and farther than usual into her excretory tract, between her secondary stomachs and the pipe tubes. Nothing we tried knocked it loose. We even flushed her guts with 19 Baume
-
A hydrochloric acid, which was the strongest we had on hand and the strongest we could safely put in her system. It didn’t reduce the obstruction noticeably. She needed major surgery, which we weren’t equipped to do.

The obstruction swelled and elongated as her tract filled with all the material that she digested. We pumped her stomachs empty, of course, to keep from
feeding it more. Me and Star together climbed into her mouth and forced the hose down her throat, but there was already too much in the pipeline, as it were. The obstruction kept growing.

The sky was steady overcast for most of the trip, which prevented shooting the sun or stars to get the
Pertwee’s
precise location. Sunspots had interfered with radio triangulation, too, so the best the captain could tell us was that we’d get there ‘real soon now’.

Star and Sabrina had about decided to cut into Lady Jane as the best of a bad set of choices, when the coast floated up on the horizon. We had originally been scheduled to land at Puerto La Cruz and head straight south from there to Anaco, but with Lady Jane sick, the captain had convinced us we would get better help sooner if we put in at La Guaira, a port town about a dozen miles north of Caracas.

When the
Pertwee
got close enough for line of sight broadcasting and reception, Sparks radioed ahead that we had a sick critter on board and needed a vet and an escort to the nearest hospital that could handle her, via the shortest route. Whoever was on the other end got back with us after a few minutes and let us know that they would have an army detachment quayside to take care of us when we arrived.

Two hours later, the tanker moored at the industrial district’s docks, on the southern edge of the refinery complex. The captain had arranged to pick up his oil shipment there instead of at Puerto La Cruz. The oil was all owned by the Sisters anyway, so there wasn’t much problem there for him.

I had expected some sort of mickey-mouse outfit down here near the equator, but the refinery system looked as large as the one at Pasadena, and just as modern. I figured maybe things weren’t so backwards as we had been led to expect. Then our army escort thundered up alongside the ship.

Eleven guys on horses.

Good-looking horses, mind you. Somehow, though, I hadn’t expected that Lady Jane would literally have the cavalry riding to her rescue.

By the time a couple of the mooring lines were attached, two of the men, one in military uniform and one in blue jeans and work shirt, had dismounted, climbed into a work basket, and were in the process of being swung by crane from the dock to the deck of the
Pertwee
.

Doc had stayed inside Lady Jane with Sabrina and Star, so I greeted them.

“You fellas speak English?” They nodded. “Great. I’m Henry Lee MacFarland, pleased to meetcha, c’mon thisaway, hurry your asses,
por favor
.” I shook their hands quickly while I was talking. So much for the social amenities. Both of the men had heavy saddlebags slung over their shoulders.

“You the vet?” I asked the one in the blue jeans as we walked back along the deck.

He nodded. “Paco Benitez.”

“Great. Think we can move any faster?”

All the critters had made the trip on the
Pertwee’s
deck, since there wasn’t much point in stuffing them down in one of the empty holds.

Lady Jane was strapped down in the center of a circle made up of Sprocket, Big Red, a mud mixer named Candygirl, and a fuel tanker name of Bloat. We had come prepared to make a well all on our own in case the Sisters tried playing hardball with us.

For the last hour, she had been spasming uncontrollably, so we didn’t try to go in through her mouth, but instead climbed a ladder we had bolted to her side and dropped through the hole on her back into Sabrina’s room. The sphincter that surrounded her topside hole flexed and trembled, but was held open by a couple of thick iron barrel hoops that we had found in a cargo hold, welded together, and installed in the opening.

We had to force open the flesh curtain that separated Sabrina’s room from Lady Jane’s central hallway. Her floor shivered and danced like we had our own private earthquake going. Lady Jane’s internal bio-illumination warts flared and dimmed erratically. Her walls sweated a clear, foul-smelling liquid. A thin, high scream whistled through her body constantly, seeming to grow louder each moment.

The obstruction had pushed up the floor about four yards behind the rear of Lady Jane’s head.

Doctor Benitez sucked his breath in when he spotted the waist-high lump. “
Madre!
I have never seen one that large.”

“I have,” Sabrina said grimly. She and Star hadn’t slept for a day and a half. They sat leaning against the hallway’s wall. They looked like hell and their cigars were both out, just ashy stumps stuck in their mouths.

“I remember,” Star said. She pulled out the stump of cigar, stared at it for a second, then put it back in her mouth. “Casing Critter name of Wonder Bunny, right? She died. You bring some petrocaine or carbocodone, Doctor?”

Benitez nodded. “Petrocaine. Titrated with benzodiazepine to relax the muscles.” He dropped the saddle-bag to his feet and started opening the straps. He pulled out half a dozen plastic quart jugs. “She must be jammed up all the way back to her crushing-gullet.”

Lady Jane screamed, the sound echoing flatly inside her hallway. The doctor and the military guy jumped, but none of the rest of us did. We’d heard it too often today. He motioned for the military guy to give him the other knapsack. “I cannot safely cut it out here. It’s obviously too big. I will need X-rays and a general anaesthetic with extensive life-support equipment.” He pulled open the knapsack and yanked out an air pistol. “We must get her to the hospital immediately. Let us relieve her pain first.”

He slapped a compressed air cartridge into the gun, then used a length of rubber tube to connect the gun to one of the plastic jugs. He punched a six-inch-long, 2-gauge needle onto the end of the gun. He motioned us to step back and started shooting painkiller into Lady Jane.

He injected her with the petrocaine and benzodiazepine all around the actual obstruction. Used up two quarts that way. Just a little bit of that would have put a human into a wheelchair, or a coffin, but Lady Jane’s spasms merely began to slow and weaken. Then he tracked all the way up her hallway to her gullet, switching to a flexible titanium needle about two feet in length to get into the areas he needed to, deeper in her flesh. A dozen bottles littered the hallway before he called it quits.

“Quickly, now,” he said. “She will be without pain for ninety minutes at most.” He looked at the guy in the uniform. “Tonio, you know the way. I stay in here. I am going to do a preliminary series of accordion-pleat cuts to try to relieve the immediate pressure on underlying organs. This is too close to her primary heart.”

***