Practically all the staffers in the vast room were on their feet and raising a multi-species din while gesticulating with arms, tentacles, or whatever, towards a table close to one wall, where he saw a sight that he had hoped he would never see in Sector General: an all-out, no-holds-barred, mixed-species fight.
“Call for a security detail,” O’Mara snapped as he hurried towards it. “Armed and with heavy restraints.” But the lieutenant was already talking urgently into the nearby communicator and doing just that.
They were mixing it up so thoroughly that O’Mara had difficulty at first in seeing who and how many were involved among the debris of the partially demolished table and furniture, and the volume of untranslatable noise they were making gave no clue as to the reason for the fighting. But it was immediately obvious that they were fighting indiscriminately among themselves and not ganging up on one individual. That, O’Mara hoped, might reduce the severity if not the number of casualties. A Tralthan was trying to batter in the bony carapace of a Melfan, who was snapping with its pincers at the other’s leathery hide while jabbing with a stiffened leg at the lower torso of a large, bear-like Orligian, who was hanging onto one of the Tralthan’s free tentacles and trying to kick its elephantine legs out from under it. A well-muscled Earth-human charge nurse with blood that was probably his own running down his face and white tunic was in there somewhere using fists and feet. The Orligian’s fur was also showing patches of blood and one of the Melfan’s limbs was hanging limp. As O’Mara moved closer, a Nidian he hadn’t noticed until then was expelled from the affray and came to a skidding halt at his feet.
He went down on one knee and grabbed the tiny, red-furred figure by the shoulders.
“Why the hell are you fighting?” he yelled above the din. “Stop it, stop it at once or you’ll wreck your careers here.”
“I know that, dammit,” said the other crossly. “I was trying to stop it, but they have the advantage of weight. You try to talk some sense into them.”
O’Mara growled an apology, lifted the Nidian to its feet, and began circling the group of combatants, who were completely ignoring the advice he was shouting at them. Suddenly he saw his chance and moved in on the Earth-human and gave him a hard double kidney punch. As the other gasped and buckled at the knees, he grabbed him around the waist and dragged him backward onto the floor a few yards away.
“Don’t move from there, Charge Nurse,” he said furiously, “or I’ll damn well stamp on your stupid face.”
As he returned to the fracas he felt so furious at the stupidity of these people who had started the first inter-species fight in Sector General’s history that he almost meant what he had said.
He took out the Melfan by encircling its underside with his arms and, keeping the side of his face close to the carapace so that it couldn’t reach around to poke him in the eyes, immobilized it by sliding it onto its back at a safe distance from the Earth-human charge nurse. Moving the Orligian was going to be much more difficult. Even in the old, wild days when his body weight was made up of muscle rather than fat, he had rarely bested one of them. Feeling ashamed of himself because he might almost be enjoying what he was doing after all the years of civilized behavior, he grabbed the other by its long, furry ears, planted a knee between its shoulder blades, and pulled back hard.
The Orligian gave a growling bellow, released its hold on the Tralthan’s tentacle, dropped onto its hands and knees, and tried to throw O’Mara over its head like a maddened horse trying to unseat its rider. It might have succeeded if a pair of slim, iron-hard Hudlar tentacles hadn’t encircled his waist and legs suddenly and dragged him away from it and high into the air. Another pair of tentacles were doing the same to the Orligian.
“What the hell are you doing?” said O’Mara, startled. “Put me down, dammit.”