The Omega Expedition - Brian Stableford [93]
Another hand, no bigger than Christine’s, gripped my sleeve. “This way,” said a female voice.
I hadn’t seen the woman on the screen, so I couldn’t visualize a face to fit the clutching hand. It pulled me half a dozen paces forward, then to the left. I moved clumsily through another doorway, bumping my shoulder as I went.
When the woman had activated the light switch I saw that we were in a room no bigger than a cupboard. In fact, it actually seemed to be a cupboard, albeit a large one.
We were surrounded by storage racks, some of them crammed and some of them empty. The shelves had numbers on, which appeared to have been stenciled on the gray plastic in black paint. As in the cells and the room into which the cells opened, everything seemed unbelievably old. There were more rivet heads visible as well as hexagonal bolt heads. Most, but not all, of the packages stowed on the occupied racks looked much more recent. The ones that didn’t seem to constitute fresh stock looked very old indeed, stylistically speaking, but they weren’t showing much sign of dilapidation or decay.
The woman who was reaching up to test the damage done to my nose was fully matured, but there was no way of telling how old she might be. Her hair was dark and her complexion had a peculiar bluish tint. Her eyes were blue, but a darker shade than I had ever seen before. She was wearing a smartsuit; it wasn’t fashionably cut, by the standards of my time, but it looked — at least to my uneducated eye — far more like the ones commonly worn in the twenty-second century than the one I’d been fitted with on Excelsior.
“Hold still,” she said, as she rolled back my left sleeve and wrapped something around the bare forearm. It was an elastic bandage made of some kind of smart fabric, connected by bundles of artificial nerves to a box. I didn’t feel anything, but I guessed that it would send feelers into my arm to test the blood pressure.
“It’s my face that needs the treatment,” I pointed out, ashamed of the thickness of my voice and roughness of pronunciation.”
“It’s already been reset, albeit crudely,” she told me. “I’ll put a dressing on it to reduce the swelling and apply local anesthetic, but there’s not much I can do at present to compensate for the blood loss. I don’t have repair nanobots ready to hand — it’ll take until tomorrow, at the earliest, to produce an emergency supply. Fortunately, the blood loss doesn’t seem to have been too bad. The spill looked worse than it was.”
She showed me the dressing she intended to apply. It just about qualified as smart, but it was a kind that had virtually disappeared in my time, even in parts of the world where nobody had decent IT or worthwhile medical insurance.
“That isn’t going to do much for the pain,” I complained.
She picked something up from a nearby shelf and handed it to me. It was a plastic bottle containing pills — perhaps twenty of them.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Codeine,” she told me.
“Codeine! That’s antediluvian. What the hell is this place?”
“We hadn’t expected you to start trying to kill one another as soon as you woke up,” she countered, drily. Her tone changed, though, as she kept talking. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to serve as an example, to warn the others to look after themselves — and one another — a little bit better. If I had something ready to hand I’d give it to you, but I don’t. All that’s presently in the stores is pre-nanotech medical apparatus — whose evolution, as Mortimer Gray will doubtless be pleased to explain to you, virtually petered out as soon as the first IT suites came on to the market. I can get something better, but it’ll take time. Quiet now.”
I shut up while she applied the dressing and unwrapped my arm, but as soon as the local anaesthetics in the patch of synthetic skin began to kick in I was able to concentrate my attention much more effectively.
“I don’t suppose you’d consider telling me who you are and what the hell you’re playing at?” I said, trying to sound conciliatory. “Whatever war you’re fighting, I’m not involved. I only just got here.”