IF ONLY SHE HAD RIBS
1563 4D
“Don’t move.” At the words, Marra froze by the wall of the passageway. Eluding the relocation roundup, she and Deen and Engel and Frei had crossed through Rumchi Zone’s lower levels and found their way through Sobi to the bottom of the South Power Complex.
Engel spoke to the unseen voice. “We’re trying to get away from the Rumchi reloc.”
The voice, resonant and mid-toned, said, “You and a few thousand other people. What do you think this is, a refugee camp? We’re still fighting here.”
“Two of us are healers,” Engel said. “They can do some amazing stuff for your wounded. They fixed me up after some bugboys stabbed me and hit an artery.”
“That’s another story. Step out here where I can see you all, and latch the door shut behind you. Leave any and all weapons by the door back there. I want to see all your hands.” They came out of the dark shaft access corridor into a bright street. From each side, two helmed figures in dark-brown coveralls, blast visors down, pointed long beam guns at them. “Against the far wall, hands on the wall above your heads, please.”
A brief but thorough search, then, “All right. Who are the healers?”
A nudge from Engel. Marra said, “I am.” Deen echoed her.
Does this mean I have to work again? It’ll mean I’ll need food.
Marra frowned. She couldn’t mutter anything at Aoriver right now. She nodded her head slowly in a furtive acknowledgement.
A woman’s voice from a helm. “What do you do? Surgery? Burn reduction and regen? Anesthesia? Where are your medkits? You look awfully young.”
Marra hesitated. What did these people know or not know?
Deen said, “Primary resuscitation, mostly.” Very good. That silenced the questioner for a moment.
“Methods and equipment? What do you need?”
“We have our own,” Marra said. “We work as a team. Trained in the mountains.”
“This isn’t the mountains,” the woman’s voice said. “Follow me.”
Deen held up a hand. “Wait. We need these two guys for helpers.”
“Whatever you need, as long as you can save a few of us for another turn to fight. Come on.” The woman led them down the street to a lift.
They came from the lift into a rough stony street packed from wall to wall with beds and litters, a hand span separating the lines of beds from each other. The light hung like dusk. Every bed Marra could see had a wounded woman or man in it. Except for an occasional soft moan, and a murmur of orders and acknowledgements here and there, the area lay nearly silent. Marra counted.
You’ve got seventy-eight in sight here, Aoriver said to her. They’re mostly burned.
“These are from firefights near the rail terminus on the outside edge of the Complex,” the woman said to Marra and Deen. “We’ve got them on orphins and pyroseal, for now. They’ll need a lot of regen work in the tanks later, assuming we can ever get tanks for them from the City.” She laughed bitterly. “Fat chance of that. The corps and the City have filled the tanks with their own.”
A white face over a grisly burned neck caught Marra‘s gaze. She thought of Jeddin. “Is that an andro?” she asked the woman.
“Yeah, like you. Why?”
“Why were they shooting andros?”
“This one was fighting for us. There’s a few of them like that now, and more coming. City‘s not happy about that. They’re blaming Arlen for tampering with his andro genemix.” The woman grinned without enjoyment. “Better for us.”
The woman, then Marra and Deen, then Engel and Frei, moved along the rows of wounded. The woman continued, “We had to move everyone out of the central hospital to here. Arlen‘s force attacked and nearly overran the facility with everyone in it. Now we’re stuck with double the numbers and no extra help, and supplies are running low.”
Marra passed face after face, most of them sooted, crisped, the eyes missing. She scanned the shadowed rows further off. “Can we work here?” Marra mouthed softly. So the Lady was here, and they’d get a chance to meet her. At last.
I can’t work without a good meal.
“Oh, wonderful. How am I supposed to do that in front of everybody here?”
Seems as if Allashani gets it done somehow. Ask the woman how she does it.
Marra turned to the woman. “What kind of, uhm, medical supplies does the Lady need?”
The woman frowned at her. “That’s none of your business.”
“It is if you want us to help,” Deen snapped. Marra blessed her.
“Wait. You mean you work the same way?”
“They got us going again,” Frei said. “I’d love to see just how they did it.”
“No,” Deen said to him. “We’ll work in private with just the patients. You two are runners and that’s all.”
The woman said, “Now wait a minute. How do I know you’re going to do this work right? I think the Lady should meet you first.” She beckoned to an aide several beds up the street.
“We’d like that,” Marra said, her mind racing, “But why not just let us try with one? If things don’t work out, you can dump us or whatever. Otherwise we’re wasting time.”
Nothing like putting me and Oortonel on the spot. I don’t like the ‘whatever’ part, and neither does she. And we insist on getting some nourishment.
Marra wished she could jab her elbow into Aoriver‘s ribs, if only Aoriver had ribs. Persisting, she said to the woman, “Can you just set things up for us?”
The woman hesitated, then nodded, and said to the aide at her side, “All right. Give them, oh, I don’t know, 1407, the one just at the intersection up there, the one with a door they can close. Set it up the way we did for the Lady.” The aide ran off; the woman muttered (to herself Marra guessed), “This better work. Allashani‘s missing.”
When Marra and Deen came into the prepared cubby, a long chamber with a high arched ceiling, a carefully-stacked pile of corpses confronted them. Self-powered torches, dangling from the ceiling spine, gave a yellowish cast to the white sheets and the gray stone walls and floor, and heightened the reds and oranges of the bodies’ livid wounds. Two waist-high steel tables, each long enough for a body, stood covered with tempweave. At the foot of each table stood a large barrel-shaped canister, its hinged lid flipped open.
The woman said to them, “From the newly dead, help for the living, right? You need anything else? We’ll have the first wounded in there for you very shortly.” She turned and left without another word.
Marra swallowed. Her stomach turned over, and then settled. The difference between the dead she could save and the truly dead seemed so small. And this would be messy.
Very good. All we’ll need. Aoriver seemed eager.
Frei glared. “You must really enjoy your work, whatever it is.”
Engel took Frei‘s arm. “Leave them alone.” He pulled Frei out and closed the door.
