Shockball (17 page)

“Reever!” I twisted around and yelled at Hok. “Stop this!”

My husband instantly went on the attack, using his blade with precise, calculated sweeps. He cut Milass on the forearm, chest, and forehead before the Indian could even react.

“Yield,” Reever said, but Milass only wiped the blood out of his eye and slashed back.

It took a few more of those soundless, rolling moves Reever knew how to make, but in the end Milass ended up flat on his back on the cave floor, bleeding from a dozen shallow wounds.

“I prevail.” Reever wrenched the Indian’s knife from his limp hand. Hok came over and dragged Milass to his feet. A tribesman I hadn’t seen before joined them, steadying Milass and speaking to him in a low voice.

Kegide put me down as Reever started to walk toward me. Milass came up behind him, and thumped my husband on the back. “Good fight. Too bad you lost.”

Reever went still. Kegide finally turned me loose, and I ran over to him. His face had gone pale and glassy with sweat.

“What’s wrong? Did he…” My voice trailed off as I glanced down. There was a knife sticking out of Reever’s side. Milass was still holding the hilt and turning it, slowly.

I didn’t think, I punched. Milass staggered backward and crumpled. Then I had to grab Reevei as he dropped to his knees. He pressed his knife into my numb hand.

“Use . . this…”

“Oh God.” I was sobbing, clutching at him. “Hold on.” Gently I lowered him to the ground. The tall one came to stand over us, and I brandished Reever’s blade. “Back off.”

“I am Rico, chief of the Night Horse.”

A cold, invisible finger ran down my spine. I shot up and held the knife to his throat. “You’re going to transport my husband to a hospital. Now.”

“You may make use of our medical alcove.” Apparently unconcerned that I was ready to slit his throat, Rico snapped his fingers. Two men appeared, carrying a litter. Before I could blink, he added, “When you agree to join us.”

So the fight had been a setup. I pressed the edge of the knife in, until a trickle of red ran along the blade. “You should be more concerned with your jugular.”

“You have much to worry about, too.”

I felt twin sharp pricks on either side of me. Kegide loomed on my right, Hok on my left. Another tribesman crouched next to Reever, and held a blade to his throat.

Rico simply looked amused. “The whiteskin will assuredly bleed to death before I do. Decide.”

“Okay.” I let go of the knife and let it fall to the cave floor. “I’ll do whatever you want.”

I’d never operated on someone I loved before. The closest I’d come was taking care of Kao, before he’d died, and the surgery I’d performed on Dhreen, when his ship had crashed on K-2. Now, running beside the makeshift gurney Kegide and Hok were carrying Reever on, I faced a surgeon’s worst nightmare.

What if I botch the job?

What if I can’t stop the bleeding?

What if he dies on my table?

I wasn’t perfect. Every doctor made mistakes. Now Reaver’s life was in my hands, and one error on my part could snuff it out. Just like that.

I could hardly think about it. Him, dying. Life without Reever was… unimaginable.

Squilyp’s voice rang out in my had.
You’ve simply never been in a position to worry about your own competency
.

Well, I was now. I wondered what the Omorr would say about that. What Vlaav Irde would say, if he knew how frightened I was?

You are always so confident of success.

I recalled my reply to what he’d said, and cringed at my own arrogance.
We’re surgeons. Success is the only acceptable alternative
.

I had to shut down the voices, and the doubts, or I’d freeze up. I knew that; I’d seen it happen to other surgeons. Reever wasn’t going to die. I didn’t fumble instruments, I didn’t make mistakes. I was the best. I’d find the damage and fix everything, and the man I loved would live.

And if he didn’t, then I’d deal with that, too.

Reever regained consciousness for a moment and squeezed my hand.
I
know… you will… my beloved
…

Reading my thoughts again. “Stop that.” I couldn’t let him know how frightened I was. “I bet you’re just congratulating yourself for marrying a surgeon.”

Hok gave me an odd look, and I realized I’d spoken aloud.

I laced my fingers through Reever’s.
It’ll be okay. I’ve done plenty of kidney work in the past. Relax and let me take care of you, okay
?

It is… difficult…

I knew Reever didn’t even like watching surgery—it made him physically ill.
Trust me, please
.

He slid back into unconsciousness, just as we crossed over the threshold of a man-made alcove in the rock wall and into a makeshift treatment room. There were no air replacement units; it was cluttered with junk, and everything was filthy.

As soon as I met their “cutter,” I was going to kill him.

I directed the men to carefully set Reever down on the floor, and grabbed the first scanner I saw.

“You.” I pointed to Kegide. “You’re officially my assistant for the next hour. Clean that refuse off the exam table.”

Kegide looked at me, then at Hok, puzzled.

“He doesn’t understand,” Hok said, and tapped the side of his head. “He’s not right here.”

“Great. Then you’re elected.”

Hok shrugged and began to move the dusty boxes from the ancient exam table. I leaned over Reever and scanned the wound site. The blade had penetrated his kidney, which lay skewered on the end like a choice tidbit.

“Looks like you’ll be running on one from now on.” Automatically I scanned the opposite side of his abdomen, saw the readings, and swore. Reever didn’t
have
a second kidney to spare. I felt like slapping him. “Damn it, what did you do with the other one?”

There were no scars to indicate he’d had prior surgery—I knew that, just from living with him. His vitals were weakening, though he hadn’t lost much blood. If I’d pulled the knife out back in the cave, he might have bled out before I could have gotten him prepped. I looked over at Hok, who had stripped off the stained linens and was wiping down the table with a strong-smelling liquid antiseptic.

“I need to operate on him. Get me whoever can handle assisting me, an air replacement unit, sterile field generators, full-spread thoracic setup, a lascalpel rig, and a whole blood synthesizer.” Hok merely stared at me. “Do you have a brain problem, too?”

“Our cutter can assist you. We don’t have many instruments and no laser array. Our synthesizer isn’t very reliable, but you’re welcome to use it. What is a sterile field?”

I could have screamed. “You people actually expected me to work on your athletes? Under these conditions?”

Hok shrugged. “Our cutter never complains.”

“Your cutter never graduated medtech. He should be locked up.”

A tall, thin Caucasian male walked in. His physician’s tunic was covered with stains and had a shabby, frayed look to it. His close-set eyes widened when he saw me.

I imagined mine were doing the same thing. He had the same long, oily hair and cheesy smile that he’d sported when we were in school.

“Heard Milass cut him a whiteskin.” He grinned. “Cherijo Grey Veil. So the psycho little dwarf pulled it off after all.”

“Wendell.” I could have wept, but I was too angry. “
You’re
their cutter.”

Wendell Florine was quite possibly the most inept medical student I’d ever had the misfortune to brush shoulders with at medtech. He was a drunk and a gambler, and had cruised through classes relying on his dubious personal charms and his father’s money to obtain passing grades. He’d nearly killed a patient in our last year of internship.

I turned to Hok. “You assist me.”

“Don’t be a bitch, Cherijo.” Still grinning, Wendell shuffled over to the exam table. “Quasimodo here doesn’t know a clamp from a rib spreader. I’ll give you a hand. It’s what the chief wants me to do, anyway.” He cocked his head to one side as he looked at Reever’s wound. “What did he hit? The liver?”

I turned to Hok again. “You’re assisting me.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

«
^
»

Choices

W
endell objected again, long enough to give Hok a chance to escape, so I ended up stuck with him. It took a few minutes to stabilize Reever enough to put him under. Instead of intravenous sedatives, I had to resort to inhalant chemicals to knock him out.

“Liquid antiseptic. Liquid anesthetics. What kind of a slaughterhouse do you run here?” I slammed down the container of inhalant. “This stuff is completely unreliable.”

“It’s all we could get.” Wendell looked around. “What did you do with all my books?”

“For God’s sake, he could wake up in the middle of the procedure—what are you talking about, books?”

“They were in boxes on the table.” Wendell yawned. “Stop complaining about the inhalant, will you? If he regains consciousness, I’ll just pour more over his mask.”

“Go scrub,” I told him. “Before I douse you with some myself.”

I catheterized Reever, infused him with an auto-transfuser, which would pump the blood he was losing back into his body, then laid out the instruments to soak in a pan of antiseptic. I eyed the stacked boxes lining the walls of the alcove.

“You’ve really got books in here?”

“Couldn’t get my hands on a medsysbank. A couple of the Indians found some kind of old storage vault when they built this place. I got all the medical volumes out of there.”

“You’ve been treating patients using books.” It was unheard of. “Real books, made of paper?”

“Yeah. Down here, you work with what you can get.”

“Uh-huh. And these books are
how
old?”

“Couple of centuries. They survived in pretty good condition, actually. And some of the procedures and illustrations in them are just hilarious.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. A practicing physician who had never made it to residency, treating patients using ancient texts he thought were funny. It was a wonder he hadn’t wiped out the entire tribe.

The old-fashioned titanium scalpels Wendell had unearthed for me gleamed, cold and menacing. I’d been trained to cut with a blade as well as a laser, and once I’d even been forced to resort to using a chunk of razor-sharp tooth to perform surgery.

But this was Reever. I wanted only the best for him. And I’d ended up stuck with the worst.

Quickly, I scrubbed up beside Wendell, who was whistling as he leisurely used an old brush on his grubby nails.

“Tell me, Florine, how did you end up down here with these Indians?” I asked him. It was better than beating him over the head with a torso brace.

“I met Rico through the shockball junta. I, uh, owed them a bit of creds for some games I bet on.”

“Why didn’t your father bail you out?”

Wendell assumed a pained expression. “Dad sort of got tired of my hobbies. We parted ways a few years ago. When Rico came to me, we got to talking, and he said he needed a cutter. Said he’d pay off all my debt chips if I worked for him. So here I am.”

“Rico got a raw deal,” I muttered, but Wendell heard me.

“Well, not all of us can be top of the class, slave-until-you-drop Cherijo the Goddess Grey Veil, you know.”

I ruined my sterile scrub by grabbing the front of Wendell’s none-too-clean tunic and pulling him close. “Listen. That’s my husband on the table over there. You’re going to be top of the class today, or I’ll excise your lungs with a rusty spoon, minus inhalant. Got it?”

“Sure. Sorry.” He glanced over at Reever as I let go of him. “You positive you want to do this yourself?”

“You’re not touching him.” I scrubbed again, furious at myself for wasting precious moments on someone as slimy and self-interested as Wendell. “Hurry up. I want to get started.”

We went to the table and I cut Reever’s tunic off, then sterilized his abdomen.

Wendell noticed the knife, still buried in Reever’s side, and scanned the wound. “We’re doing a, uh, nephrectomy, are we?”

“No, you idiot.” I checked the infuser lines, then Reever’s pupils. “He only has one kidney, we can’t cut it out.”

“The renal trauma looks bad—his ureter has been severed, and there’s extensive damage to the cal— cal—”

“Calyces.”

“Right. And the glomer— glomer—”

“Glomeruli.”

“That’s it. Are you sure you can repair it?”

I glared at him over my mask.

“Stupid question, right.” He took position by the instrument tray.

I held out my gloved hand. “Scalpel.”

My hand shook a little as I placed the sharp edge of the instrument against Reever’s skin. Blood welled up as the tip sank in.

Oh, God. I was cutting open my husband’s body. Not a patient, not an anonymous collection of organs to be repaired. Reever. I was cutting into Reever with a knife.

I can do this
.

The trembling disappeared, and I made the long, straight incision.

“Uh, Cherijo, shouldn’t you remove the weapon from the wound before you do that?”

“Shut up, Wendell. This isn’t a teaching class.”

If I’d had a scope, I could have repaired most of the damage without cutting Reever open. As it was, I laid open the tough inner muscles of his abdominal cavity and spread his ribs out of the way.

The kidney itself lay tucked under his liver, a tiny organ only five inches long. It appeared in worse shape than I thought; it should have been enlarged to make up for the missing kidney. Instead, it appeared to be slightly withered.

“The renal artery’s been nicked. Suture laser—” I closed my eyes. There were no lasers. “Suture silk.”

“We’ve got Vicrol synthetic or PDS. Take your pick.”

“What? That stuff hasn’t been used since the turn of the century.”

Wendell smirked. “PDS lasts longer, but has double the absorption rate and doesn’t handle as well. I recommend the Vicrol.”