Starship: Rogue

Chapter Two

The hospital at the Army base on Hosk was sterile and silent, but all that changed when Carter burst in with the medics and their charges. She, Hisashi and a group of others ran the lieutenant and his sergeant past the ER and into two different operating rooms.

Carter got Sergeant Rowan situated on a sterile, white operating table and changed the portable oxygen mask with a hospital-issue one that connected to a ventilator, instead of a pre-stored air supply. Then, she switched the IV out for a fresh one, before fitting the nodes of a heartbeat monitor to her patient's chest.

A group of surgeons burst into the room, dressed in white coats, gloves and masks. Carter nodded to them and kept working, stripping off Rowan's boots, armor and clothes. When she was done, she bundled them in her arms and carried them over to a shelf in the corner of the room. Then, she shucked her bloodstained uniform and changed it for surgical gear. She washed her hands in the sink in the corner and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder.

One of the surgeons, a former teacher of Carter's, Dr. Piper, had begun cleaning the areas around Rowan's wounds, while the others were still preparing their surgical tools.

Carter slipped over to Dr. Piper and took the bowl of hot water she was using. "Thanks, Carter," the doctor said, dipping the sponge she was using in the water, the wringing it out. The discharge was bright red with blood and full of grit, dirt and ash. "I just want to say," Doctor Piper added, sponging down their patient's leg. "You and Hisashi did very well stabilizing her. She wouldn't be here now if you had found her even a few minutes later."

Carter's hands tightened around the metal bowl. Hadn't she been thinking that already? Dr. Piper wiped away a cluster of gravel and grime from the wound in Rowan's knee, and both she and Carter hissed in shock when they saw what was beneath.

The dirt had been covering up the worst of the bleeding, and, with it wiped away, the wound began bubbling with blood. It filled up fast, but not so fast that the two women couldn't see the mess the shot had made of their patient's kneecap. A good chunk of it was shattered and the wound was bone-deep.

The blood began pooling onto the table, and Rowan's stomach wound, which had been bleeding sluggishly, began to reopen with every breath she took.

Carter swore and reached for the gauze pads that would slow the bleeding. She slapped one over the knee and held it down, pressing firmly. Within seconds, it was soaked through. She swapped it out for another, vaguely noticing Dr. Piper doing the same for the stomach wound. Again, the same result repeated itself. The bleeding wasn't slowly. The beeps from the heart-rate monitor that sounded out every heartbeat began to slow.

"We need to patch up the stomach wound now!" Dr. Piper all but shouted. "If we don't, we'll lose her in a minute."

Carter moved out of the way, keeping pressure on the knee wound, and let them get to work. She applied a blood clotting cream to the wound, but it didn't do much. From what she could see, the kneecap fragments were causing more damage to the inside of the wound.

The doctors swarmed around their patient's midsection, none of them paying any attention to Carter down at the other end of the table. She knew she would have to do this herself.

She selected a scalpel and a pair of tweezers and set them up next to her work space. Her gloves were slick with blood, so she changed them out for a clean pair, just to be safe. She pulled out a glass dish and set it next to her tools.

A quick glance around the room showed that none of the other surgeons seemed to have a problem with what she was doing, so she knuckled down, carefully removing the bone fragments and setting them in the bowl. She alternated between that and sponging blood from the wound. Dr. Piper was right. Sergeant Rowan had lost too much blood. One of the wounds needed to be patched up.