The Romulan War_ Beneath the Raptor's Wing (Book 1) - Michael A. Martin [19]
Phlox stepped to one of his worktables and reached into a small glass box he kept between the self-contained habitats in which his prized Pyrithian bat and his Regulan bloodworms lived. A moment later he stood beside the new patient, the wriggling, warm pulsations of a clutch of small alien life-forms dangling from his hand. As he brought the medicinal creatures toward the woman’s abdomen, her eyes opened and she drew a single deep breath that she promptly converted to a single sharp scream and a quick stream of terror-stricken words.
“What the hell are those things?” the woman said as she tried to sit up before the large but gentle hands of Corporal Ryan and her own pain dissuaded her. “They look like leaches!”
“Not leaches, ma’am,” Phlox said, using his most soothing tones. “Osmotic eels.” Very gently, he laid the eels directly on the worst of her abdominal wounds and began another scan, preparatory to attempting to remove the largest pieces of shrapnel embedded in his patient. “They should stop the worst of your bleeding very quickly, and may speed up the restoration of your core temperature. Once we’ve taken care of that, we can begin the process of removing...”
His voice trailed off as he noticed that the touch of the osmotic eels seemed to have caused the woman to faint dead away. A quick scan revealed that her vital signs were steady, though still faint.
Phlox soon moved on to another wounded patient, whose blood-spattered bandages were being changed by Ensign Malvoy. The ensign’s dark blue Starfleet duty uniform was almost equally bloodied, though from without rather than from within. I came here as a researcher and an observer, Phlox thought, sighing. Not to become a battlefield surgeon.
The notion made him feel like just another piece of ordnance in somebody else’s war. He suddenly felt no more enlightened than those of his countrymen who allowed themselves to be drawn into ugly conflicts against the Antarans, Denobula’s traditional enemy.
That is most definitely not what I signed on to Enterprise to do.
The sickbay doors opened again.
“Doctor! More incoming!” shouted McKenzie. Phlox caught a glimpse of something black, red, and glistening following immediately on her heels.
He closed his eyes once more, then opened them again, relying on the brute force of his intellect to restore and maintain his focus. He told himself that now was not the time for recriminations or regrets.
It was time to save as many lives as possible, for as long as the captain he had sworn to serve needed him to continue doing it.
As the time of his appointment in the captain’s mess drew near, Archer stepped into the bridge turbolift, T’Pol following only a few paces behind.
“I have confirmed that our guests are ready to meet with us, Captain,” T’Pol said.
Archer nodded, though he continued to stare quietly at the moving lights that marked the turbolift’s rapid descent from A deck to E deck.
During almost the entirety of the rescue and recovery operation, Archer had remained on the bridge, coordinating shuttlepod and transporter operations from the captain’s chair through the gamma-shift bridge watch. But although the constant stream of firsthand reports he’d received from T’Pol, Reed, Mayweather, O’Neill, and MACO Master Sergeant McKenzie had prepared him intellectually, nothing could have braced him for the emotional impact of what awaited him beyond the turbolift doors.
A heterogeneous group of at least a hundred ragged men, women, and children stood in lines or leaned against walls or sat on the deck all along