Chapter
6
Kahayn smelled the ER before she saw it: a sick, gassy odor of wet gangrene mingling with the full, ripe stink of feces, old blood, and fresh vomit. Stronger than usual today, and when she turned the corner down the last hall, she saw a double line of gurneys wedged head to toe along the left and right walls; a patient cocooned under a sheet, a ream of paperwork on a clipboard, triaging each casualty by diagnosis and urgency. (They were all sick, and they were all urgent. Again, typical.)
A lanky man with pewter-gray hair stepped into the corridor. Arin wore blue scrubs that blood had dyed black and a dingy white coat that never seemed to come clean no matter what. Spotting her, he stumped down the hall, favoring that gimp knee of his.
“You took long enough,” he said, jabbing a finger at the bridge of a pair of owlish, steel-rimmed specs that had slid to the tip of his nose.
“Bleeder,” she said as they headed for the triage suite. “Lung rot. The usual. So, what’s all the fuss about?”
Arin blew out, stabbed his glasses back into place again. “All kinds of craziness.” Older by almost two decades, Arin wore glasses because he was a tad old-fashioned. Said he’d keep the eyes, until they fell out on their own; no marbles for him just yet, thanks. She envied him the eyes. They were so…natural. Pupils worked very smoothly; you could see the iris muscles contract or lengthen like some sort of miracle, and the tracking from side to side was phenomenal. So efficient. No glitches at all. “Some casualty that slipped past the guards at the perimeter,” he said.
“Hunh.” She was impressed. “That takes some doing. Guards found him?”
“On patrol, yeah.”
“How’d he get in?”
Arin shrugged. His limp was worse today, and his knee squealed. “They don’t know. One look, though, and they brought it here. Figured they sure weren’t going to get stuck without getting some kind of clearance.”
“So clear him. Shouldn’t be that difficult.”
“It’s really not that simple,” said Arin. “Trust me on this.”
“Why do I feel like the worst is yet to come?”
He eyed her over his glasses and didn’t smile. “Because it is.”
They pushed into the ER, past a knot of nurses and one physician working frenetically over one patient who Kahayn could tell by the blood spatter wasn’t going to make it. The ER was arranged in a long rectangle, with curtained bays lining each wall and a triage station centered at the head. Behind the triage station were two critical-care bays. (A joke: You made it to the ER, you were critical. The staff was so overwhelmed that, anything less, and they just laughed in your face.) Kahayn spotted a quartet of uniforms, three with their rifles at the ready. That was bad. She didn’t like rifles anywhere near the ER.
But it was the man who wore the fourth uniform that told her, instantly, whoever this patient was, he wasn’t run of the mill. The uniform was a bullish man with a neck so thick and short his head seemed glued to his shoulders, and a pair of goggle, walleyes that always unsettled her.
“Oh, hell,” she muttered. “How’d he get here so fast?”
Arin grunted. “Like I said, it’s not that simple. Blate’s people told him about the intruder, and then he showed up just as I was getting started. Since then, they haven’t let me near it. Been making all kinds of noise about taking the patient over to detention. I wouldn’t let them, not unless you ordered me to. Even threatened to call Nerrit over at High Command, and then they kind of backed down. Barely, but enough to buy me enough time to get you down here.”
“This must be some patient.”
“You have this really annoying habit of reiterating the obvious.” An exasperated sigh. Arin flexed his left knee, and his prosthetic clicked and whirred. “Sorry. Dragging you in was the only way I could think of to keep them from taking it out of here.”
“No, you did right,” she said, only belatedly registering that Arin kept saying it. But then she was within earshot of the security director and attempted what she hoped was something bordering on a neutral expression. “Director Blate.”
“Colonel.” Blate’s left eye was especially bad and wandered, giving him a walleyed stare that Kahayn always found disturbing because she was never sure which artificial eye to focus on. She suspected that this was precisely what the security director wanted. Blate said, “I hope Major Arin didn’t pull you from anything important.”
No, no, just a little chest bleed, lung replacement, nothing big. “As I understand it, you’ve kept Dr. Arin from examining his patient.”
“Indeed.” Blate’s right eye zeroed in. “This is not your ordinary casualty.”
“Gee, you can tell all that without an exam?” She nodded beyond the guards at a back bay curtained from view by a gauzy yellow, nearly full-length drape. There was a gap between the floor and the bottom of the curtain, and Kahayn saw the gurney’s black rubber-wheeled castors and the disembodied off-white flats of a nurse crossing left to right. “And I thought that’s what you needed doctors for. If you’re so good, Blate, why the hell do you need us then?”
“Idit,” Arin murmured.
“I didn’t require your assistance,” said Blate. “I still don’t. I ordered Major Arin to stand down. He became belligerent and threatened to call High Command, and then he insisted that you had to authorize release of the casualty to our custody.”
“Damn straight,” said Kahayn. “Now, as I get it, your people brought the patient here. I hate to point this out, but we’re doctors. Yeah, sure, we’re all military, but this is a hospital. We see casualties, only we call them patients. We even treat them. So since this is a patient and we’re on my turf, I have command authority, not you. The only person who can override my authority is the base commander, or Nerrit. You’re welcome to call the CO, but I suspect he’ll side with me. So the faster you let me clear this guy, the sooner your people can get at him. What say you get out of my way?”
Blate raised a hand, his right, the one that clicked when the fingers moved. “It’s not that simple. We need to—”
“Anyone says something’s not simple one more time, I’ll gonna rip out his tonsils.” Kahayn pushed past and yanked at the curtain. There was a rasp of metal; the curtain scrolled to one side. “Now, what…” she began—and stopped dead in her tracks.
Two nurses and a tech hovered uncertainly around a gurney. On the gurney was a biped, lying prone. The fact that the patient was bipedal and had two arms to boot was a relief because, with all that radioactive sludge out there, she didn’t take anything for granted. But she couldn’t tell about the head because the patient wore some sort of soot-stained, off-white suit with a bulbous helmet of a design she’d never seen in her life. There were patches of something rust-red and black smeared on the suit. Red and yellow lights winked on some sort of control panel mounted like a bracelet on the left wrist. There were more red than yellow lights, and that was usually a bad sign. But she didn’t have a clue about what the lights meant, nor could she figure the power source. The helmet probably had some kind of polymer faceplate but whether it was clear or not, she didn’t know because the helmet was seared and sooty as an old filter of an air repurifier that hadn’t been changed in three weeks.
But one thing she did understand. The patient was writhing, restless, pumping his legs in slow motion and getting nowhere fast. She knew pain when she saw it. She knew trouble.
“As I said, Colonel,” said Blate. He stumped between her and the gurney; his right eye tracked in with a tiny whirr. “Things are really not that simple.”