Breath Control

Scene 2

Five hundred metres didn't sound very far until you had to walk through forest to cover it, and path had been a generous word for Ensign Kolchak to use. Once they left the little clearing they'd materialized in, game trail might have been more accurate for the first couple of hundred metres. A different beam down point would have been nice. But, true to Kolchak's word, the trail did cross an actual, apparently well-trodden path wide enough for two of them to walk abreast. The path curved a little bit, and Chapel thought she caught a glimpse of a building in the distance, something she suspected was either a barn or a warehouse of some kind, but she forgot all about it when she saw the body lying in the middle of the path.

Trusting her security team to look out for any non-medical dangers, Chapel ran towards the body, tricorder and hand scanner out before she'd covered half the distance. She dropped to one knee and began to wave the scanner across what part of her mind registered as a teenage girl. "Fluid buildup in the lungs. Respiration slow and shallow. Heartbeat barely forty beats per minute. Temperature thirty-nine point nine Celsius. Brain activity... less than half of normal. Blood oxygen level—" She held out a hand. "Two ccs of cordrazine."

Taking barely long enough to set the hypospray, Tashar dropped the device into Chapel's hand and she pressed it to the girl's neck. Still scanning, she watched for increased brain and heart activity, passing the scanner over to the Vulcan when she got it. "Monitor her vitals, please." She didn't look up. "Ensign Martinez."

"Ma'am?"

"Get to the colony's edge. Find someone and get them to bring a stretcher or a set of agricultural floats. Anything we can use to move her, get her to something a little more like a bed than lying in the middle of the woods." What was the girl doing out here anyway?

"Understood." Footsteps moved quickly ahead, but she kept her eyes on the medical tricorder readout, looking for something that didn't belong, but she'd already figured out she wasn't going to get anything without a blood sample.

"Prep a broad-spectrum antibiotic and antiviral shot, please, nurse."

"Yes, doctor."

Chapel scowled at the readouts. "Her body is losing against some kind of infection, and fast, but nothing is coming up on the tricorder." She really wanted a fully equipped sick bay right at the moment, but she'd take whatever medical facilities the colony had. Might as well wish big when you weren't going to get anything anyway. The Yorktown had left orbit within seconds of the transporter beam fading. They were on their own until they had the transmission power to call home.