Eschaton 2 - THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY

CHAPTER FORTY

For Daisy Fennell it was the worst night of her long career with the Bureau, and it went on forever. Dr. ben Jayya dithered uselessly over the casualties, protesting that he was a research M.D., not a caregiver, but someone had already called the paramedics.

They were there in five minutes, three cars of them, screeching past the startled UN guards with their siren going. It took them a lot longer than that, though, to figure out what to do once they got there. The leg of the wounded guard was all in a day's work for them. So was the lobe of Dannerman's ear, which he had nearly lost to Tepp's spray of fire. For Hilda Morrisey the big problem was stopping the bleeding from her throat, and getting her into one of the ambulances on the very faint chance that she would still be alive when she got to the emergency room.

And there was nothing at all to be done for either Tepp herself or for the one of the Docs who now lay doubled-over on the floor and exuding great amounts of a pinkish fluid, beyond doubt well and truly dead.

It was the other two extraterrestrials that were the problem. Tepp's shot had caught Dopey in his great, colorful fantail. And, though he was complaining bitterly about the agony he was suffering, he had allowed Camp Smolley's medics to dress the wound as best they could. The surviving Doc was another matter. He had taken three of Tepp's rounds. Two were in his left major arm and, though whatever he had for a tibia had been shattered, those wounds didn't seem immediately life-threatening. It was the one that had struck his chest that worried the medics. The bullet was still in there, and he was mewing softly in pain as he lay flat on his back on the floor, with Pat Adcock-Pat One-comfortingly holding one of his lesser paws.

The head medic looked up from where he was bent over the golem's torso, his face grayish. "That bullet has to come out," he informed Daisy Fennell. "Do you authorize us to do it?"

Fennell hesitated, wishing she could buck that question to somebody higher up, like the deputy director. She couldn't. She temporized. "Do you know what you're doing?"

Pat Adcock spoke up. "Of course they don't know what they're doing," she said scornfully. "Why don't you get that Walter Reed doctor out here? She's the only one who knows anything at all about Doc Anatomy."

"Dr. Evergood? But all she did was take a bug out-"

"Do you have any better ideas?"

And, of course, she didn't. When they got Dr. Marsha Evergood she looked tousled and sleepy and pretty damn mad. "Have you stopped the bleeding?" she demanded. "Applied broad-spectrum antibiotics? All right, then get him over to Walter Reed right away; I'll meet you there."

"We thought maybe you might want to come out here," Daisy offered, aware she was sounding uncharacteristically humble.

"Think that one over again, lady. Bring the dead one along, too; I'll use the cadaver for a quick anatomy course. Now."

No matter how much Daisy Fennell tried to hurry him along, Dr. ben Jayya was being a pain in the ass. No laboratory specimen, he was insisting firmly, should ever be transported anywhere until it was stabilized, preferably by soaking it in formaldehyde first, Fennell overfirmed him. "Shut up," she said, and turned her back on the biologist to beckon to Colonel Makalanos.

"Get some ice," she ordered. "Pack him up and let's get the two of them the hell out of here."

The trouble with that was that the medevac chopper was barely able to cope with the weight of the two extraterrestrials, one in his plastic body bag filled with ice cubes, the other with the head medic standing by with spare compresses if needed on the way. Daisy and the Dopey had to wait for another helicopter to be summoned.

Reverend Portman Denies Responsibility

At the headquarters of the Christian League Against Blasphemy, their spokesman, the Reverend Alec Portman, declined to be interviewed but issued this prepared statement:

"We deplore the actions at Camp Smolley. If it is true, as has been alleged, that the woman who committed these vile crimes was associated with some members of our organization, she has done our cause no good. It is our belief that these alleged creatures from space are indeed evil, and may be incarnations of the Devil. However, we are nonviolent. We accept no responsibility for these alleged acts. If these creatures had been returned to the Hell they came from, as has been in our prayers ever since they arrived, none of this need have happened."

– The New York Times

When she finally got to Walter Reed the two Docs lay side by side in the operating room. Evergood had already slashed the corpse's torso open and an assistant was severing ribs-what looked like ribs, anyway-with a power bone saw.

It was more than Daisy Fennell wanted to endure. She fled. In the nearest ladies' room she locked herself in a cubicle and sat. She was breathing hard, and most of her thoughts were not about the surgery going on a few dozen meters away.

The subject uppermost in Vice Deputy Fennell's mind was her career, and whether she was still going to have one by this time the next day.

Of course, the whole damn screwup was Hilda Morrisey's fault. Hilda was the one who had taken this Merla Tepp on as her aide and thus given the woman access to biowar.

But Hilda was not in a condition to be put on trial, at least for now, and neither was the Tepp woman. Permanently. That wasn't Fennell's doing; she wasn't the one who shot Tepp dead.

But she was the senior officer present, and so she knew who the responsibility would belong to. She shuddered.

It was bad, but it would get a lot worse if the deputy director arrived and caught her screwing off in the crapper. She stood up, marched to the washstand, splashed water on her face, looked at herself in the mirror, shuddered again and resolutely went back to the operating room.

To her surprise, she was allowed inside, but not before one of the other doctors stopped her with orders to scrub up and put on a surgical mask. When Daisy protested he snapped, "Right, the Docs didn't bother with asepsis, but we're going to do it Dr. Evergood's way. Use that washstand, and plenty of soap."

The Docs hadn't bothered with anesthesia, either, and there wasn't anything Dr. Evergood could do about that; she didn't dare try putting her patient out, or even numbing the immediate vicinity of the wound. The patient seemed to accept that. The mewing stopped. He lay immobile, eyes closed, and the only sign that he might be feeling pain was the trembling of his lesser arms while Evergood cautiously widened the entrance wound and probed for the bullet. It took her a while to navigate through the unfamiliar architecture of the Doc's muscles and blood vessels, but when she finally extracted the round she breathed a sigh of relief. She doused the whole area with broad-spectrum antibiotics and stood up wearily, regarding her patient.

Who opened his eyes and gazed at her for a moment, then turned to Pat One, miming writing something with his lesser arms.

"He wants to draw some more pictures," Pat guessed. "Can I let him?"

Evergood shrugged. "Why not? Make sure you give him clean paper and a clean pen, and don't let him touch the dressing. Fennell? Let's go talk."

Daisy Fennell was glad enough to get out of there; she hadn't been willing to leave while the operation was going on, but the smell of the Doc was getting to her. They found the deputy director outside, snapping orders to his portable screen in Colonel Makalanos's office, but he switched it off when he saw them.

Evergood got right to the point. "The bullet s out, I've stopped the bleeding and now we have to watch for infection. I'm hoping there won't be any. If there are any disease organisms around, they're probably terrestrial ones, and the antibiotics should deal with them. Of course, we'll have to do something about that arm."

"Thanks," he said, and remembered to add, "A fine job, Dr. Ever-good."

It was a dismissal, and the surgeon took it that way. Then he turned to Daisy Fennell.

"Jesus, Daisy," he remarked. "You let things go pretty sour, didn't you? Tepp dead, Morrisey close to it. The Dopey and one of the Docs wounded-and we can't get the other one to care for them, because he's dead, too. Well. Let's get the facts. We'll have to have a court of inquiry, but for now, start talking."