Power Play - Anne McCaffrey [43]
“Now what?” Bunny asked in a brave voice that had only a slight tremor in it.
Yana scratched at her shoulder, in an unobtrusive gesture toward where the alarm pad had been. Surely there’d been enough time to trace their whereabouts—that is, if they were on the station, as Bunny felt they should be. And where was the unseen eye that Marmion had mentioned in her launch that would be watching out for their safety?
She started coughing again. Bunny handed over the water, but Yana couldn’t stop coughing long enough to take a sip.
“Dinah? Dinah O’Neill?” Bunny cried, rising and pounding on the hatch with both fists. “The colonel needs a doctor. She’s coughing blood! Damn it! Answer me!”
The hatch was hauled open so abruptly that Bunny lost her balance; then she lurched back away from the angry faces that looked in at them: the two men who had brought the “food.”
“Let’s see the blood,” one of them demanded.
Yana was barking so hard and painfully that she was bent over her knees, trying to ease the spasms that racked her belly. She was hoping that coughing wouldn’t provoke a spontaneous miscarriage. That thought made her clasp her belly protectively as the compulsive tickle kept up its irritation and she kept up her coughing.
“You see! You see!” Bunny cried, outraged. “Get her a doctor. She’s no good to you dead!”
The hatch shut with a resounding clang.
“She’ll be all right?” Diego asked, his voice taut. “She won’t lose the baby or anything?”
Yana shook her head, denying that to him as well as to herself. And kept right on coughing, gasping for breath, her ribs aching from the exercise.
“We must be able to do something!” Bunny cried pounding on the hatch. She had pounded twice when it opened again and a soulful face, long and aristocratic, framed with silvery hair and a well-trimmed beard, looked in briefly. He was pushed aside by Dinah O’Neill.
“What’s this? What’s this? Blood?”
“She can’t stop coughing from all that gas you poured into us,” Bunny said angrily. “Do something.”
“This is Dr. Namid Mendeley,” Dinah began.
“I’m a doctor of astronomy, not medicine, Ms. O’Neill,” he said contritely. “But your infirmary must have some sort of linctus. Even pirates get coughs . . .”
“Privateer,” Dinah O’Neill corrected primly. She spoke over her shoulder. “Bring the first-aid kit.”
“That’s for injuries—”
“Get it.”
“Codeine stops the cough reflex,” Diego said helpfully. “Most first-aid kits have something of that sort in them. Mild. Useful.”
“What she needs is to get back to Petaybee, and Clodagh’s syrup,” Bunny said.
“Ah, yes,” Privateer Dinah O’Neill said brightly. “Well, we can see our way clear to do that, after certain basic arrangements have been made.”
“Ransom demands, you mean,” Marmion said stiffly. Dinah O’Neill twinkled at her as if she’d said something very witty. “First, we really must do something to stop that coughing, or we won’t be able to get her to agree to anything.”
Yana violently waved both arms, trying to indicate that despite her coughing she wasn’t about to agree to anything. Then the guard returned and was thrusting the first-aid container, a sizable one, too, at Dinah, who sidestepped so that the box went to Dr. Mendeley.
“Please,” Bunny said, supporting the weakening Yana against her. “Find something!”
“I’m really an astronomer, not a medical—”
“Anything!” Bunny’s anguished cry was punctuated by Yana’s painful barking.
“Ah, codeine!” Namid Mendeley held up a vial in triumph, and then his expression changed to one of doubt. “But how much?”
Marmion held out her hand for the vial, then looked at it. “The spray,” she said authoritatively. When she had received that, she filled it and then released the drug into Yana’s throat. Almost magically, it seemed to everyone in the small room, the paroxysm eased and Yana lay, exhausted, against Bunny.
“And look, an herbal linctus?” Mendeley passed that over to Marmion, who also read its label.
She broke the seal on the cap, opened the bottle, and passed it