The attack began in an almost leisurely fashion, Conway thought as he watched it through the observation panel. The main defense globe seemed barely disturbed by the three minor attacks launched at widely separate points on its surface. All that was visible was three tiny, confused swirls of activity-moving points of light that were ships, missiles, counter-missiles and explosions-which looked too slow to be dangerous. But the slowness was only apparent, because the ships were maneuvering at a minimum of five Gs, with automatic anti-gravity devices keeping their crews from being pulped by the tremendous accelerations in use, and the missiles were moving at anything up to fifty Gs. The wide-flung repulsion screens which sometimes deflected the missiles were invisible as were the pressors and rattlers which nearly always stopped those which the screens missed. Even so this was merely an initial probing at the hospital’s defenses, a series of offensive patrols, the curtain-raiser.
Conway turned away from the view-port and began moving toward his post. Even the unimportant skirmishes produced casualties and he really had no business being up here sightseeing. Besides, he would get a much truer picture of how the battle was going down in the wards.
For the next twelve hours casualties arrived in a steady trickle, then the light, probing attacks changed to heavy, feinting thrusts and the wounded came in an irregular stream. Then the attack proper began and they became a flood.
He lost all sense of time, of who his assistants were, of the number of cases he dealt with. There were many times when he needed a pep shot to clear the fatigue from his mind and hands, but pep-shots were now forbidden regardless of circumstances-the medical staff were hard pressed enough without some of them becoming patients. Instead he had to work tired, knowing that he was not bringing everything he had to the treatment of his patients, and he ate and slept when he reached the point of not being able to hold his instruments properly. Sometimes it was the towering bulk of a Tralthan at his side, sometimes a Corpsman medical orderly, sometimes Murchison. Mostly it was Murchison, he thought. Either she didn’t need to sleep, or she snatched a catnap the same times as he did, or even at a time like this he was more inclined to notice her. It was usually Murchison who pushed food at his unresisting face and told him when he really ought to lie down.
By the fourth day the attack showed no signs of diminishing. The rattlers on the outer hull were going almost constantly, their power drain making the lights flicker.
The principle which furnished artificial gravity for the floor and compensated for the killing accelerations used by the ships also lay behind the weapons of both sides-the repulsion screen, originally a meteor protection device, the tractor and pressor beams, and the rattler which was a combination of both. The rattler pushed and pulled-vibrated- depending on how narrowly it was focused, at up to eighty Gs. A push of eighty gravities then a pull of eighty gravities, several times a minute. Naturally it was not always focused accurately on target, both ships were moving and taking counter-measures, but it was still tight enough to tear the plating off a hull or, in the case of a small ship, to shake it until the men inside rattled.
There was a lot of rattler work going on now. The Empire forces were attacking savagely, compressing the Monitor defense globe down against the hospital’s outer hull. The infighting which was taking place was with rattler only, space being too congested to fling missiles about indiscriminately. This applied only to the warring ships, however-there were still missiles being directed at the hospital, probably hundreds of them, and some of them were getting through. At least five times Conway felt the tell-tale shock against the soles of his shoes where his feet were strapped to the operating room floor.
There was no fine diagnostic skill required in the treatment of these rattled men. It was all too plain that they suffered from multiple and complicated fractures, some of them of nearly every bone in their bodies. Many times when he had to cut one of the smashed bodies out of its suit Conway wanted to yell at the men who had brought it in, “What do you expect me to do with this. . .