The hospital at the Army base on Hosk was sterile and silent, but all that changed when Carter burst in with the medics and their charges. She, Hisashi and a group of others ran the lieutenant and his sergeant past the ER and into two different operating rooms.
Carter got Sergeant Rowan situated on a sterile, white operating table and changed the portable oxygen mask with a hospital-issue one that connected to a ventilator, instead of a pre-stored air supply. Then, she switched the IV out for a fresh one, before fitting the nodes of a heartbeat monitor to her patient's chest.
A group of surgeons burst into the room, dressed in white coats, gloves and masks. Carter nodded to them and kept working, stripping off Rowan's boots, armor and clothes. When she was done, she bundled them in her arms and carried them over to a shelf in the corner of the room. Then, she shucked her bloodstained uniform and changed it for surgical gear. She washed her hands in the sink in the corner and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder.
One of the surgeons, a former teacher of Carter's, Dr. Piper, had begun cleaning the areas around Rowan's wounds, while the others were still preparing their surgical tools.
Carter slipped over to Dr. Piper and took the bowl of hot water she was using. "Thanks, Carter," the doctor said, dipping the sponge she was using in the water, the wringing it out. The discharge was bright red with blood and full of grit, dirt and ash. "I just want to say," Doctor Piper added, sponging down their patient's leg. "You and Hisashi did very well stabilizing her. She wouldn't be here now if you had found her even a few minutes later."
Carter's hands tightened around the metal bowl. Hadn't she been thinking that already? Dr. Piper wiped away a cluster of gravel and grime from the wound in Rowan's knee, and both she and Carter hissed in shock when they saw what was beneath.
The dirt had been covering up the worst of the bleeding, and, with it wiped away, the wound began bubbling with blood. It filled up fast, but not so fast that the two women couldn't see the mess the shot had made of their patient's kneecap. A good chunk of it was shattered and the wound was bone-deep.
The blood began pooling onto the table, and Rowan's stomach wound, which had been bleeding sluggishly, began to reopen with every breath she took.
Carter swore and reached for the gauze pads that would slow the bleeding. She slapped one over the knee and held it down, pressing firmly. Within seconds, it was soaked through. She swapped it out for another, vaguely noticing Dr. Piper doing the same for the stomach wound. Again, the same result repeated itself. The bleeding wasn't slowly. The beeps from the heart-rate monitor that sounded out every heartbeat began to slow.
"We need to patch up the stomach wound now!" Dr. Piper all but shouted. "If we don't, we'll lose her in a minute."
Carter moved out of the way, keeping pressure on the knee wound, and let them get to work. She applied a blood clotting cream to the wound, but it didn't do much. From what she could see, the kneecap fragments were causing more damage to the inside of the wound.
The doctors swarmed around their patient's midsection, none of them paying any attention to Carter down at the other end of the table. She knew she would have to do this herself.
She selected a scalpel and a pair of tweezers and set them up next to her work space. Her gloves were slick with blood, so she changed them out for a clean pair, just to be safe. She pulled out a glass dish and set it next to her tools.
A quick glance around the room showed that none of the other surgeons seemed to have a problem with what she was doing, so she knuckled down, carefully removing the bone fragments and setting them in the bowl. She alternated between that and sponging blood from the wound. Dr. Piper was right. Sergeant Rowan had lost too much blood. One of the wounds needed to be patched up.
It was hard to find the splinters beneath the blood, so Carter set the tweezers aside, glad, for once, that her hands were small and slender. She reached into the wound, feeling her way around the kneecap, looking for any other bone fragments. Normally, she would have used an x-ray for the same job, but there wasn't time.
The sensation of blood and tissue beneath her fingers made her stomach turn, but she forced herself to keep working. She had to find every shard or internal bleeding could prove fatal.
She felt the girl's heartbeat slowing under her hands; she felt the blood begin to circulate more and more slowly. "Uh, doctors," she said, glancing pointedly at the heart-rate monitor, realizing now that its beeps had slowed. She tried to ignore the fact that she was practically wrist deep in gore. She looked down at her white scrubs and coat, only just noticing the blood smeared across her front and up to her elbows. She tasted blood around her mouth, and, catching sight of her reflection in a metal tray, realized that the cloth mask she wore had a bloodstain across one side. She must have wiped her sleeve across her cheek at some point.
Doctor Piper straightened at Carter's warning and yelled to one of the nurses waiting away from the chaos around the table, "I need a crash cart! Now!"
Now slightly more confident that she hadn't missed any bone splinters, Carter resumed pressing gauze against Rowan's knee, even more aware, now, of how much blood her patient had lost. She looked up at Doctor Piper, whose face was pale behind her mask, and said, "We're going to need a transfusion. Does she have any next of kin?"
Doctor Piper's gaze seemed to snap into focus. "Not sure," she said. "Carter, you change into something less... bloody, and go see if anyone's waiting outside. One of the nurses will take over for you."
"Yes, ma'am," Carter said, stepping aside and shucking her gloves. In a corner of the room, she changed out her coat for a clean one and tossed her mask aside, ignoring her bloody scrubs. There wasn't anything she could do about them without stripping in front of the other doctors for the second time that day.
When she looked back at the operating table, she saw that two nurses had taken up her station, and she did as Doctor Piper said and left the room, feeling as though she was walking away from her duty. Still, orders were orders, and someone needed to find someone to give a blood transfusion.
Out in the waiting room, Carter found five people, all of them battered and weary, wearing the black Rangers' uniforms. Closer inspection showed that their injuries had been treated. One of them even sported a clean, white cast around his leg.
One of them, a girl somewhere around Carter's age, with white-blond hair set against surprisingly dark skin, stood, her dark eyes flashing. "Is there any news?" she asked, her voice trembling.
Carter straightened, trying to convey reassurance to these people. "Are any of you acquainted with Sergeant Rowan?" she asked.
A man who looked about twice the girl's age–so, about forty–and bore on his chest the insignia of a Ranger Captain, stepped in front of the girl. "We all are. I'm her C.O., and these are some of her squad members."
Carter looked around, beginning to panic. "No next of kin?" she asked, her voice tight with worry.
The girl blanched and one of the young men still seated swayed slightly. "Does this mean she's gone?" the girl asked faintly.
Carter shook her head vigorously. "Not yet," she said, and she saw the line of the girl's shoulders soften. "But she will be soon, if we don't perform a blood transfusion, which works best if we have a next of kin as a donor."
The Captain placed a gentle hand on the girl's shoulder. "Rowan is an orphan, and she has no one but the man you brought in with her, Lieutenant Stark. He's been a bit of a mentor to her, but he's no blood family."
"Right," said Carter, trying to sound more confident than she was. She glanced at the chart hung on the door to the operating room. "Her blood type is A negative, yes?" Rowan's squad members would know. "Would any of you happen to have the same type?"
The girl stepped forward. "I do," she said. "And so does Slate, here," she added, nodding to the young man with the cast on. Carter appraised them both. The boy called Slate was the most battered, and she worried that he might not be strong enough to put up with her taking blood without some sort of trauma. She was relieved, at least, that there was someone with the same blood type as Rowan, especially since A negative wasn't the most common type.
"All right," she said to the girl, who met her gaze steadily. "Would you be willing to donate some of your blood?"
The girl nodded. "Of course," she said, without hesitating. "What do I do?"
Carter gestured to a vacant exam room across from the operating room. "We go in there, I draw blood, and we use it to save your friend," she said with more confidence than she felt. "Come on," she added, making her way into the exam room, the girl hot on her heels. "But first, why don't you tell me your name?"
The girl took a seat on the exam bed without being asked and began to roll up her sleeve. "Operative Ripple Ellis," she said. She looked up at Carter, her black eyes steady. "Let's do this."
Carter had to smile. She liked Ripple's determination. "Right," she said, wetting a cotton swab with rubbing alcohol. She cleaned the area around Ripple's vein with deft strokes, well aware of the urgency of the situation. She primed the syringe and looked Ripple square in the eyes. "I'm not going to lie, this is going to hurt like hell." As an afterthought, she added, "Maybe you should look away. Some people get squeamish."
Ripple set her jaw and didn't look away. Carter took a second, to give Ripple a chance to change her mind, but the other girl stayed steadfast. Quickly and adeptly, Carter slid the needle of the syringe into Ripple's arm, seeing the girl's muscles flinch, but keeping her eyes on the blood flowing into the syringe, then through the tube it was connected to, and into a glass vial.
When the vial was full, Carter pulled the needle out of Ripple's arm. The Ranger looked pale, but she barely winced as Carter wiped off her arm, bandaged it, and took up the vial. "Don't stand up too soon, or too quickly," Carter advised. "And eat something sweet. It'll help with your blood sugar."
Ripple looked up at her. "Thanks," she said. Carter ducked her head and moved to the door. "I mean it," Ripple went on. "Not just for me, but for Rowan, too."
Carter smiled at her. "It's what I do," she said, clutching the vial of Ripple's blood in her sweaty palm. "And I should be the one thanking you," she added. "Not everyone would have done what you did."
***
Adlai Fletcher stared at the massive tele-screens that hung above the city center on Lares, feeling the shock that resonated in the crowd. The Robot Wars were over; a Ranger starship had tracked the robots' power source to the fringe industrial planet of Hosk, a place much like her home world, and had decimated the plant. According to the news anchors, most of the robots had keeled over right then and there, as soon as the power was cut off. The rest had been relatively easily subdued, as had the cyborgs that had sided against the humans.
It was over. The war was won. Decades of fighting had finally paid off. Adlai looked around, taking in the sight of thousands of shocked people. When the workday had been interrupted by the alarm sirens, everyone had thought that the robots had attacked Lares. The news that Lares was safe, in fact, that the robots had been defeated and there was no more threat, had shaken them all.
Nearby, Adlai heard an old woman–at least eighty years old–murmur, "I know there was peace before the war, because I was born in it, after the Second War was won. Now, this one's done, and they say there won't be another. Maybe, now, people will know the true meaning of peace."
Adlai felt a frown creep across her face. Peace, in a galaxy where humanity was just learning it wasn't alone, and that there was other intelligent life on other planets? Fat chance. Now that this war was over, there would be some other conflict that would come to light. Hadn't history proved that?
Adlai turned around, frowning in earnest, now, and scanned the row of dilapidated shops across from the tele-screens. She wondered if, with the war done, it would still be there. Yes, there it was, stuck between a supermarket and a hardware store, with a faded and peeling sign that read, "Colonial Network Army Recruiters."
She pushed her way through the crowd, ignoring people's outraged cries when she accidentally stepped on a foot or elbowed someone in the ribs. She'd been considering joining the Rangers ever since she'd turned fifteen. What was there for her on an industrial planet like Lares? But she'd never passed wartime recruitment standards. Well, maybe now that would change, especially now that there wasn't a war on to motivate patriotic sentiment.
She reached the storefront and pushed open the warped, wooden door. Inside, the recruiter looked up from behind his desk, his eyes narrowed. He wasn't the same one who Adlai had met before, but a stranger, only a few years older than her.
"How can I help you?" he asked, his tone bored. Adlai squinted through the gloom and read his nametag and rank.
"I'd like to enlist, Lieutenant Ramsey," she said calmly. If her guess was right, they'd need people more than ever to fill up their depleted ranks, and recruitment would be done now that the war was over. "If the army will have me."
***
With the vial of blood in her hand, Carter returned to the operating room. When she entered, Doctor Piper looked up, and Carter quickly took in the scene. At this point, the doctors had switched from trying to patch Rowan up to just trying to keep her alive. Beneath the elaborate twists of the tubes and wires connected to her body, the Ranger looked tiny and frail.
Carter held up the vile of blood. "No next of kin," she summarized quickly, "but one of her squad members is the same blood type."
Doctor Piper took the vial of blood from Carter. "Good thinking," she said. "I need you to fill in the chart with the donor's name, blood type and relation to the patient. Got it?"
Before Carter could reply, she heard the heart-rate monitor go silent, then begin to wail. "On it," she said. Piper dashed back to the table, shouting for the crash cart.
Carter unhooked the chart from the door and wrote in Ripple's details in a box marked 'Blood Donors.' As she worked, she watched the doctors administer an adrenaline shot to their patient, then prepare a defibrillator.
Carter finished writing, put the chart back, and watched, feeling helpless and impossibly small, as the doctors pressed the pads of the defibrillator to Rowan's chest. Her body jolted with the shock, but the monitor kept on wailing. The doctors turned up the voltage, and applied the pads again. This time, the monitor began beeping again, agonizingly slowly. But, gradually, Rowan's heartbeat sped up, and Carter heaved a sigh of relief.
Doctor Piper administered the blood transfusion as quickly as possible, and, for several minutes, nobody did anything but make sure their patient remained stable, breathing and, above all, alive. Finally, finally, the beeps from the heart-rate monitor evened out, and Carter could have sworn that the entire room let out a sigh of relief.
Carter put on a fresh mask and gloves and got back to work, slotting into the space beside Doctor Piper. The surgeons worked in subdued quiet, mending the internal damage to Rowan's stomach and monitoring her vitals.
Once a pair of doctors began stitching their patient's stomach wound closed, Doctor Piper drew Carter aside. "You did well, getting the blood and managing the knee wound on your own."
Carter bowed her head, wondering where this was going. Was Doctor Piper going to reprimand her for doing a full-fledged Medic's job when she was just a trainee? She sincerely hoped not. "Thank you," she said hesitantly.
Doctor Piper's eyes crinkled like she was smiling, though Carter couldn't see her mouth beneath her mask. "I mean it," the doctor said warmly. "You were one of my best students, Carter. I'm surprised you haven't been promoted, yet. I want you to know that, when this is over, I'll put in a good word for you for the post of your choice."
Carter felt her cheeks flush with pleasure. Having seen Doctor Piper in action, now, she knew that her former teacher was one of the best. To have her say what she did meant so much. "Thank you, ma'am," she said softly.
Doctor Piper squared her shoulders, all business now. "Tell me about the knee wound," she said brusquely, but kindly. "You spent the most time tending it."
Carter took a breath and told her what she'd seen. "The shot hit her right in the side of kneecap, shattering the area nearest to the impact. I picked out as many of the bone fragments as I could, but we'll need to do an x-ray to be sure. The wound is deep and covers a lot of surface area. When it heals, the scar tissue will be extremely painful, and she'll never regain full use unless we give her a bionic outer layer. The muscles and tissue below the kneecap and around the actual injury are undamaged, so it would be unnecessary to completely replace the knee." Then, realizing she had just given a diagnosis she wasn't expected to give, she added. "From what I saw. I could be wrong."
Doctor Piper smiled at her. "Don't underestimate yourself. Come on, let's take a look."