“Corunna,” said Ian, moving aside. “This is more in your line.”
He was right. As a captain, I was the closest thing to a physician aboard, most of the time. I moved in beside her and checked the wound as best I could. In the general but faint starlight it showed as merely a small patch of darkness against a larger, pale patch of exposed flesh. I felt it with my fingers and put my cheek down against it.
“Small caliber slug,” I said. Ian breathed a little harshly out through his nostrils. He had already deduced that much. I went on. “Not a sucking wound. High up, just below the collarbone. No immediate pneumothorax, but the chest cavity’ll be filling with blood. Are you very short of breath, Amanda? Don’t talk, just nod or shake your head.”
She nodded.
“How do you feel. Dizzy? Faint?”
She nodded again. Her skin was clammy to my touch.
“Going into shock,” I said.
I put my ear to her chest again.
“Right,” I said. “The lung on this side’s not filling with air. She can’t run. She shouldn’t do anything.
We’ll need to carry her.”
“I’ll do that,” said Ian. He was still angry—irrationally, emotionally angry, but trying to control it. “How fast do we have to get her back, do you think?”
“Her condition ought to stay the same for a couple of hours,” I said. “Looks like no large blood vessels were hit; and the smaller vessels tend to be self-sealing. But the pleural cavity on this side has been filling up with blood and she’s collapsed a lung. That’s why she’s having trouble breathing. No blood around her mouth, so it probably didn’t nick an airway going through. ..”
I felt around behind her shoulder but found no exit wound.
“It didn’t go through. If there’re MASH med-mech units back at Gebel Nahar and we get her back in the next two hours, she should be all right—if we carry her.”
Ian scooped her into his arms. He stood up.
“Head down,” I said.
“Right,” he answered and put her over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. “No, wait—we’ll need some padding for my shoulder.”
Michael and I took off our jerseys and made a pad for his other shoulder. He transferred her to that shoulder, with her head hanging down his back. I sympathized with her. Even with the padding, it was not a comfortable way to travel; and her wound and shortness of breath would make it a great deal worse.
“Try it at a slow walk, first,” I said.
“I’ll try it. But we can’t go slow walk all the way,” said Ian. “It’s nearly three klicks from where we are now.”
He was right, of course. To walk her back over a distance of three kilometers would take too long. I went behind him to watch her as well as could be done. The sooner I got her to a med-mech unit the better. We started off, and he gradually increased his pace until we were moving smoothly but briskly.
“How are you?” he asked her, over his shoulder.
“She nodded,” I reported, from my position behind him.
“Good,” he said, and began to jog.
We travelled. She made no effort to speak, and none of the rest of us spoke. From time to time I moved up closer behind Ian to watch her at close range; and as far as I could tell, she did not lose consciousness once on that long, jolting ride; Ian forged ahead, something made of steel rather than of ordinary human flesh, his gaze fixed on the lights of Gebel Nahar, far off across the plain.
There is something that happens under those conditions where the choice is either to count the seconds, or disregard time altogether. In the end we all—and I think Amanda, too, as far as she was capable of controlling how she felt—went off a little way from ordinary time, and did not come back to it until we were at the entrance to the Conde’s secret tunnel, leading back under the walls of Gebel Nahar.
By the time I got Amanda laid out in the medical section of Gebel Nahar, she looked very bad indeed and was only semi-conscious. Anything else, of course, would have been surprising indeed. It does not improve the looks of even a very healthy person to be carried head down for over thirty minutes. Luckily, the medical section had everything necessary in the way of med-mechs. I was able to find a portable unit that could be rigged for bed rest—vacuum pump, power unit, drainage bag. It was a matter of inserting a tube between Amanda’s lung and chest wall—and this I left to the med-mech, which was less liable to human mistakes than I was on a day in which luck seemed to be running so badly—so that the unit could exhaust the blood from the pleural space into which it had drained.
It was also necessary to rig a unit to supply her with
reconstituted whole blood while this draining process was going on. However, none of this was difficult, even for a part-trained person like myself, once we got her safely to the medical section. I finally got her fixed up and left her to rest—she was in no shape to do much else.
I went off to the offices to find Ian and Kensie. They were both there; and they listened without interrupting to my report on Amanda’s treatment and my estimate of her condition.
“She should rest for the next few days, I take it,” said Ian when I was done.
“That’s right,” I said.
“There ought to be some way we could get her out of here, to safety and a regular hospital,” said Kensie.
“How?” I asked. “It’s almost dawn now. The Naharese would zero in on any vehicle that tried to leave this place, by ground or air. It’d never get away.”
Kensie nodded soberly.
“They should,” said Ian, “be starting to move now, if this dawn was to be the attack moment.”
He turned to the window, and Kensie and I turned with him. Dawn was just breaking. The sky overhead was white-blue and hard, and the brown stretch of the plain looked also stony and hard and empty between the Gebel Nahar and the distant line of the encampment. It was very obvious, even without vision amplification, that the soldiers and others in the encampment had not even begun to form up in battle positions, let alone begin to move toward us.
“After all their parties last night, they may not get going until noon,” I said.
“I don’t think they’ll be that late,” said Ian, absent-
ly. He had taken me seriously. “At any rate, it gives us a little more time. Are you going to have to stay with Amanda?”
“I’ll want to look in on her from time to time—in fact, I’m going back down now,” I said. “I just came up to tell you how she is. But in between visits, I can be useful.”
“Good,” said Ian. “As soon as you’ve had another look at her, why don’t you go see if you can help Michael. He’s been saying he’s got his doubts about those bandsmen of his.”
“All right.” I went out.
When I got back to the medical section, Amanda was asleep. I was going to slip out and leave her to rest,’ when she woke and recognized me.
“Corunna,” she said, “how am I?”
“’You’re fine,” I said, going back to the side of the bed where she lay. “All you need now is to get a lot of sleep and do a good job of healing.”
“What’s the situation outside?” she said. “Is it day, yet?”
We were in one of the windowless rooms in the interior of Gebel Nahar.
“Just dawn,” I said. “Nothing happening so far. In any case, you forget about all that and rest.”
“You’ll need me up there.”
“Not with a tube between your ribs,” I said. “Lie back and sleep.”
Her head moved restlessly on the pillow.
“It might have been better if that slug had been more on target.”
I looked down at her.
“According to what I’ve heard about you,” I said,
“you of all people ought to know that when you’re in a hospital bed it’s not the best time in the world to be worrying over things.”
She started to speak, interrupted herself to cough, and was silent for a little time until the pain of the tube, rubbing inside her with the disturbance of her coughing, subsided. Even a deep breath would move that tube now, and pain her. There was nothing to be done about that, but I could see how shallowly she breathed, accordingly.
“No,” she said. “I can’t want to die. But the situation as it stands, is impossible; and every way out of it there is, is impossible, for all three of us. Just like our situation here in Gebel Nahar with no way out.”