A Call to Darkness - Michael Jan Friedman [33]
Dan’nor had already made trouble for Boron’bak-if indirectly. The other facilitator’s schedule violations would not reflect favorably on the superior who had allowed them to continue. Nor would his own oversights and miscalculations. Just as he had had to assume responsibility for his crew, Boron’bak would have to take responsibility for him.
A couple of seconds before they passed each other, the Conscription Master’s mouth pulled up at the corners. As if to say, “Nothing personal.”
Then he was gone, and Dan’nor tried not to think of what he might tell the Council.
How much time had passed since her awakening? Since her emergence into this… she had no words for this place, no way of truly knowing how long she had been here. It had been a while since she’d had a chance to think about her own problems. Lately, she’d been occupied with a more urgent matter-namely, the flood of damaged beings that had suddenly poured into the med enclosure, carried by other beings only slightly less damaged. In the light of the overhead cylinders, they all looked a pale and ghastly shade of blue.
As hideous as their wounds were, most of the victims might have been saved-if there had been enough meds to go around. Unfortunately, there weren’t. For every two victims they got to, a third lay dying in agony.
It was hard work. Heartbreaking work. There were the faces that went slack even as she shouted encouragements at them. The circulatory organs that refused to respond to the desperate pummeling of her fists.
But Pulaski couldn’t cry over them. There was no time. Because after the first deluge, there were others. Before long, her arms were bathed to the elbows in three different colors of blood.
Where were they all coming from? she asked herself again. Obviously, there was an armed conflict somewhere nearby-she deduced as much from the armor and the nature of the wounds. But a conflict with whom? And over what?
Somewhere between the second wave and the third, the flying machine entered the enclosure. It was about a meter tall, with a distinctly insectlike body made of a dark, non-reflective material. About two-thirds of the way up, a round and slightly convex glass surface protruded like the eye of a living creature.
The machine flitted throughout the enclosure, occasionally coming to hover over one patient or another. Always, it seemed to pick out the most severe cases-but only as long as the screaming went on. As soon as the patient succumbed to death, unconsciousness or an anesthetic, the thing appeared to lose interest.
Pulaski tried to ignore the flying device, but she found she couldn’t. It was like some sort of scavenger, feeding on the miseries of others. Of course, it was only a machine-it could have no such hungers. More likely, she decided, it was recording the suffering on behalf of some living intelligence. But that conclusion only made the thing seem more ghastly than before.
It annoyed her for another reason as well: the level of technology it represented. A certain sophistication was required to build something that could fly at all-much less with the grace and stability that this machine exhibited.
That same sophistication could have been applied to their med facilities. It could have gone toward saving more of these lives. Perhaps she couldn’t remember how she’d wound up here or where she’d come from, but she knew one thing: she had been trained to work with equipment a whole lot more advanced than what was available here in the enclosure.
On the other hand, no one else seemed to be bothered by the flying device. Was it just that they’d gotten used to it? Or was she unique in her resentment of it?
The last straw fell as she was struggling to close a vicious gash in a patient’s gut-before the poor bastard bled to death. It was a race, and a close one. The victim, a large and scaly specimen, was too weak to cry out-but even so, it took three other meds to keep his powerful arms and legs from jerking while Pulaski, only guessing at the locations of his internal organs, tried