06-07-2014, 08:25 PM
Torri took the pistol without thought. In a flash she memorized the weapon, acclimated herself to the model, and secured it on her person. Physicians never carried unless in an active warzone, and even then, they were usually at a field hospital isolated enough from the front lines to be given hot firepower. The Geneva Convention forbid firing upon combat medics and physicians, where she was only allowed to fire in protection of herself or her sick. To fire offensively voided any protection of Convention, but given the treatment tonight, Torri was fucking ready to carry. Her reaction to the pistol, unlike Michael's, was certainly one of gratitude. After expressing her thanks, she set to work gathering her things.
Minutes later, the sounds of a plasma gun made Torri looked over her shoulder. The light could be harmful to the eyes, so she didn't watch for long, but the process used by the Legion men was met with an approving nod on her behalf. She quickly went back to assessing her supplies while they ripped apart metal like paper foil.
Sixth generation opioids, early generation anti-inflammatories; she grabbed a wide array of pain-killers; practically all that was stocked in this station. It would be connected to a central dispenser located somewhere in the hospital, one that orchestrated the complex restocking of one of a thousand different tiny vials, but the main cache was inaccessible without digital allowance. That meant Torri pilfered pretty much everything that was kept on hand at the nurses station. Anti-virals, anti-biotics, anti-everything; the broadest spectrum of action went into the bag she was going to carry. Without a Med-level Wallet reader, there'd be no genetic analysis of wound-care infection, so she'd make due with throwing everything she had at whomever was unlucky enough to need her attention this night.
A few minutes later she signaled she was as ready as she'd ever be. A shoulder bag hung across her body; a backpack was slung on her back. But to save time, she put aside one small vial in the pocket of the found white-coat. Once they were moving, and there was nothing else to do, she'd give herself the medication. She dallied on the decision right up to the point of swallowing the pill; whether or not to save it for a patient in greater need of pain relief than herself, but in the end, she knew she had to take care of herself to keep her mind sharp over the next few hours. If she succumbed to the rot of a slow ache, all her patients would suffer, not just herself.
Laden down as she was, she nimbly climbed into the construction truck. The rumble down the road was echoed on both sides by the sounds of detonating ammunition, and low-hanging clouds reflected brief pockets of light glowing suddenly here and there around them. Michael was quiet, as was Torri, and there was very little she could do but sit and wait.
She didn't wait long. At one crossroads they stopped to pick up passengers. The Legion men tried to coordinate the wounded to be sent to the truck she was riding in, but there was a mixup at one point, and Torri decided it would be quicker for her to move between trucks than to bear the burden of wounded moving around too much.
So with a small escort for cover, she darted through the night from one truck, across the danger of an open road, and all but leaped into the back of another truck bed. Where she quickly went to work.
For the rest of the journey, the flash of ammunition was peripheral. The echoing ricochet of gunfire was white noise. She had three men piled against one another, all three shot clean through, and one sprayed with shrapnel to boot. If this were a field hospital, she'd be scanning that last one with a handheld PET, but in the black of the Mecca inner sanctum, she had nothing but her own two eyes to gauge his condition.
His two brothers tried to tell her to tend to him first - Conrad she learned his name was. Of course, if Torri would see to each in their own time, but gravest wounds had priority. If she'd deemed Conrad able to wait, she'd have no problem telling his brothers exactly who they were ordering around. As it was, Conrad was bleeding from a gash that stretched eye to lip. His foot was likely off with his boot somewhere on the side of the road, and his lower jaw was stripped of all skin from whatever blast he'd shielded his two brothers from.
"Hold that light steady!"
she yelled at the medic at her side.
"Sorry Mademoiselle doctor, the road is rough."
He replied with that damn french accent.
She glared at him. The silvered handle of forceps glinted in the tiny beam of light. Their tip held a tiny crescent of steel from which dangled the faintest line of a suture, thin as fishing wire, thinner, actually. "That's what your fucking cerebellum is for, sergeant, Its called compensation. Now fucking compensate!"
The patient moaned under her, and Torri went back to sewing the gape of his eyesocket together. She'd already glued the ophthalmic artery back in place. Being the first branch off the internal carotid, if she hadn't, he'd have bled out from the wound in minutes. That artery supplied sixty percent of all blood to the head. Suffice to say, it gushed like a waterfall when severed.
She finished the final knot that closed up the hole in his skull. It was an ugly line of black stitches, one that would scar horribly because of the crude manner in which she'd closed it up, but she was hurrying, lacking a microscope, and doing this in the back of an open bed truck by flashlight beam. She pat Conrad on the shoulder. "Scars are manly, Conrad. The ladies will love it, you can be a pirate for Halloween."
He made no sign that he heard her behind the drug-induced quiet that kept him still, but either way, she kept her attitude bright for him. "Let's check out that jaw, now."
"Doctor!"
The medic gasped and Torri looked over her shoulder. The first man of the other two who'd "only" been shot slumped sideways, suddenly unconscious.
Torri cursed under her breath. Together she and the medic crawled to him. Tough to do without risking their heads to being exposed on the road.
His buddy was trying to rouse him. "I don't know what happened! He just fell!"
Torri told him to get out of their way. He quickly complied.
She snatched the medic's flashlight to do her own examination while he was stretched him out. The truck was full of riders as it was, so people had to squish together. She hated the close quarters, but it was only a passing thought. A quick test of vitals. Fingers on his throat: heart beat low. Her ear to his nose: breathing shallow. She'd wager his blood pressure was bottomed-out; Mars probably had a higher blood O2 than this kid.
She grabbed his dog tags for a name and leaned close to him, "Adrian! Soldier! Signal if you can hear me!"
Nothing. He'd been shot in the lower leg, lateral to the vessels running between the tibia and fibula. He shouldn't be in this state. When she found her glove came away from his chest way too wet, she inwardly cringed.
She thrust the flashlight between her teeth and ignored the accompanying flash of pain needed to keep her jaw locked down tight. Hands freed, she ripped open the front of his shirt and found the undershirt completely soaked through. "FUCK FUCK FUCK!"
She dropped the flashlight and thrust it at the medic. He already had a pair of scissors ready to trade, ones she used to cut open the t-shirt.
Adrian's chest was a mess of blood. Torri swore at the dumb kid under her breath. He'd lied about his injury and with the more gruesome soldier to tend, she'd passed over doing a full examination, trusting to his assessment of himself. She knew better than that.
She barked a dangerous look at his buddy who had appropriately backed off but was watching in horror. "Did you know about this?!"
She yelled, but the soldier frantically denied such knowledge.
"His pulse is fading, doctor. Down to twenty."
the medic told her; the information disseminated somewhere in the back of her brain. She was wiping the wound away with gauze, trying to clean up the mess to see the real damage. Something, maybe a big wedge of shrapnel was jammed in his ribs. "Unknown chest penetration injury. Depth unknown. Damage unknown."
She spoke calmly like there were dictation software set up overhead recording her every note.
It must have barely nicked something major and at that last road bump, moved just enough to pierce through a coronary; maybe the vena cava; maybe the hepatic vein. She had no way to tell. If he'd said something to her earlier, she might have saved him! But he was slipping through her fingers even as she worked. "Respirations at deux, doctor!"
The medic added and it took a second for her brain to filter the fucking french number. Two breaths a minute! He was practically on his last gasps of air. She ignored her own desperation and willed her hands to move faster.
"Hydroscopic quick clot, sergeant! Not the standard shit!"
She held out her hand and it was immediately filled with a canister.
"This is the only one we have."
He reminded her, but Torri's retort was quick.
"This kid wanted us to see his buddy before him and I'm not going to let him die because of his fucking honor. Now give me the H-QC and don't question my orders again, sergeant."
She grit her teeth, ignored the medic's reaction, and shoved the needle into the wound right down the shaft of the shrapnel. She dared not pull the metal out; he was going to have to live with an extra skewer through his chest than normal. Human kebob.
With one hand on his pulse and her other on the can, her thumb hit the button and the canister deployed its contents. Yellow rivulets of goo, that were molecularly far more complex than the term implied, bubbled out from the now-filled wound. Before she even pulled the needle his pulse strengthened. Who knew how long he'd been bleeding internally.
Torri's shoulders slumped. The can was spent, and she pretty much threw it over the side of the truck. No point littering up her work space.
She was studying his face. "Give him three units of amenadine and clean up the entry wound as best you can. Then stay at his side, I don't want him so much as fluttering an eyelash until we see something of a field hospital Who knows what that thing is rubbing up against in there."
The medic set to work as she said, and she slid down to tend to the more mundane gunshot wound on his leg.
As she did, she spared a glance for the second of the three men just in case he'd decided to be a hero also.
Minutes later, the sounds of a plasma gun made Torri looked over her shoulder. The light could be harmful to the eyes, so she didn't watch for long, but the process used by the Legion men was met with an approving nod on her behalf. She quickly went back to assessing her supplies while they ripped apart metal like paper foil.
Sixth generation opioids, early generation anti-inflammatories; she grabbed a wide array of pain-killers; practically all that was stocked in this station. It would be connected to a central dispenser located somewhere in the hospital, one that orchestrated the complex restocking of one of a thousand different tiny vials, but the main cache was inaccessible without digital allowance. That meant Torri pilfered pretty much everything that was kept on hand at the nurses station. Anti-virals, anti-biotics, anti-everything; the broadest spectrum of action went into the bag she was going to carry. Without a Med-level Wallet reader, there'd be no genetic analysis of wound-care infection, so she'd make due with throwing everything she had at whomever was unlucky enough to need her attention this night.
A few minutes later she signaled she was as ready as she'd ever be. A shoulder bag hung across her body; a backpack was slung on her back. But to save time, she put aside one small vial in the pocket of the found white-coat. Once they were moving, and there was nothing else to do, she'd give herself the medication. She dallied on the decision right up to the point of swallowing the pill; whether or not to save it for a patient in greater need of pain relief than herself, but in the end, she knew she had to take care of herself to keep her mind sharp over the next few hours. If she succumbed to the rot of a slow ache, all her patients would suffer, not just herself.
Laden down as she was, she nimbly climbed into the construction truck. The rumble down the road was echoed on both sides by the sounds of detonating ammunition, and low-hanging clouds reflected brief pockets of light glowing suddenly here and there around them. Michael was quiet, as was Torri, and there was very little she could do but sit and wait.
She didn't wait long. At one crossroads they stopped to pick up passengers. The Legion men tried to coordinate the wounded to be sent to the truck she was riding in, but there was a mixup at one point, and Torri decided it would be quicker for her to move between trucks than to bear the burden of wounded moving around too much.
So with a small escort for cover, she darted through the night from one truck, across the danger of an open road, and all but leaped into the back of another truck bed. Where she quickly went to work.
For the rest of the journey, the flash of ammunition was peripheral. The echoing ricochet of gunfire was white noise. She had three men piled against one another, all three shot clean through, and one sprayed with shrapnel to boot. If this were a field hospital, she'd be scanning that last one with a handheld PET, but in the black of the Mecca inner sanctum, she had nothing but her own two eyes to gauge his condition.
His two brothers tried to tell her to tend to him first - Conrad she learned his name was. Of course, if Torri would see to each in their own time, but gravest wounds had priority. If she'd deemed Conrad able to wait, she'd have no problem telling his brothers exactly who they were ordering around. As it was, Conrad was bleeding from a gash that stretched eye to lip. His foot was likely off with his boot somewhere on the side of the road, and his lower jaw was stripped of all skin from whatever blast he'd shielded his two brothers from.
"Hold that light steady!"
she yelled at the medic at her side.
"Sorry Mademoiselle doctor, the road is rough."
He replied with that damn french accent.
She glared at him. The silvered handle of forceps glinted in the tiny beam of light. Their tip held a tiny crescent of steel from which dangled the faintest line of a suture, thin as fishing wire, thinner, actually. "That's what your fucking cerebellum is for, sergeant, Its called compensation. Now fucking compensate!"
The patient moaned under her, and Torri went back to sewing the gape of his eyesocket together. She'd already glued the ophthalmic artery back in place. Being the first branch off the internal carotid, if she hadn't, he'd have bled out from the wound in minutes. That artery supplied sixty percent of all blood to the head. Suffice to say, it gushed like a waterfall when severed.
She finished the final knot that closed up the hole in his skull. It was an ugly line of black stitches, one that would scar horribly because of the crude manner in which she'd closed it up, but she was hurrying, lacking a microscope, and doing this in the back of an open bed truck by flashlight beam. She pat Conrad on the shoulder. "Scars are manly, Conrad. The ladies will love it, you can be a pirate for Halloween."
He made no sign that he heard her behind the drug-induced quiet that kept him still, but either way, she kept her attitude bright for him. "Let's check out that jaw, now."
"Doctor!"
The medic gasped and Torri looked over her shoulder. The first man of the other two who'd "only" been shot slumped sideways, suddenly unconscious.
Torri cursed under her breath. Together she and the medic crawled to him. Tough to do without risking their heads to being exposed on the road.
His buddy was trying to rouse him. "I don't know what happened! He just fell!"
Torri told him to get out of their way. He quickly complied.
She snatched the medic's flashlight to do her own examination while he was stretched him out. The truck was full of riders as it was, so people had to squish together. She hated the close quarters, but it was only a passing thought. A quick test of vitals. Fingers on his throat: heart beat low. Her ear to his nose: breathing shallow. She'd wager his blood pressure was bottomed-out; Mars probably had a higher blood O2 than this kid.
She grabbed his dog tags for a name and leaned close to him, "Adrian! Soldier! Signal if you can hear me!"
Nothing. He'd been shot in the lower leg, lateral to the vessels running between the tibia and fibula. He shouldn't be in this state. When she found her glove came away from his chest way too wet, she inwardly cringed.
She thrust the flashlight between her teeth and ignored the accompanying flash of pain needed to keep her jaw locked down tight. Hands freed, she ripped open the front of his shirt and found the undershirt completely soaked through. "FUCK FUCK FUCK!"
She dropped the flashlight and thrust it at the medic. He already had a pair of scissors ready to trade, ones she used to cut open the t-shirt.
Adrian's chest was a mess of blood. Torri swore at the dumb kid under her breath. He'd lied about his injury and with the more gruesome soldier to tend, she'd passed over doing a full examination, trusting to his assessment of himself. She knew better than that.
She barked a dangerous look at his buddy who had appropriately backed off but was watching in horror. "Did you know about this?!"
She yelled, but the soldier frantically denied such knowledge.
"His pulse is fading, doctor. Down to twenty."
the medic told her; the information disseminated somewhere in the back of her brain. She was wiping the wound away with gauze, trying to clean up the mess to see the real damage. Something, maybe a big wedge of shrapnel was jammed in his ribs. "Unknown chest penetration injury. Depth unknown. Damage unknown."
She spoke calmly like there were dictation software set up overhead recording her every note.
It must have barely nicked something major and at that last road bump, moved just enough to pierce through a coronary; maybe the vena cava; maybe the hepatic vein. She had no way to tell. If he'd said something to her earlier, she might have saved him! But he was slipping through her fingers even as she worked. "Respirations at deux, doctor!"
The medic added and it took a second for her brain to filter the fucking french number. Two breaths a minute! He was practically on his last gasps of air. She ignored her own desperation and willed her hands to move faster.
"Hydroscopic quick clot, sergeant! Not the standard shit!"
She held out her hand and it was immediately filled with a canister.
"This is the only one we have."
He reminded her, but Torri's retort was quick.
"This kid wanted us to see his buddy before him and I'm not going to let him die because of his fucking honor. Now give me the H-QC and don't question my orders again, sergeant."
She grit her teeth, ignored the medic's reaction, and shoved the needle into the wound right down the shaft of the shrapnel. She dared not pull the metal out; he was going to have to live with an extra skewer through his chest than normal. Human kebob.
With one hand on his pulse and her other on the can, her thumb hit the button and the canister deployed its contents. Yellow rivulets of goo, that were molecularly far more complex than the term implied, bubbled out from the now-filled wound. Before she even pulled the needle his pulse strengthened. Who knew how long he'd been bleeding internally.
Torri's shoulders slumped. The can was spent, and she pretty much threw it over the side of the truck. No point littering up her work space.
She was studying his face. "Give him three units of amenadine and clean up the entry wound as best you can. Then stay at his side, I don't want him so much as fluttering an eyelash until we see something of a field hospital Who knows what that thing is rubbing up against in there."
The medic set to work as she said, and she slid down to tend to the more mundane gunshot wound on his leg.
As she did, she spared a glance for the second of the three men just in case he'd decided to be a hero also.