Ark

88

The crushing in the cupola had been even worse than in shuttle B. People were emerging clutching their ribs and struggling for breath, and one couple were holding a limp little boy, desperately pummeling his chest and breathing into his mouth.

Among these drifting survivors was Zane, looking cowed, frightened. Holle felt a surge of savage anger. She wondered which of his alters had come out to help him cope with this crisis he had done so much to trigger. And there was Jeb Holden, one of Wilson’s closest associates, a brute of a man now naked and blood-smeared. He pulled away from the rest, evidently looking for a blanket, something to cover his body.

Grace, hanging on to a handrail, was trying to get the apparently unharmed to help her, while she sorted the rest into rough groups according to their injuries. Her coverall front was sprayed by blood and bits of grayish flesh. Chunks of somebody’s lung, Holle suspected. Grace was functioning, but she looked bewildered. Holle always had to remind herself that Grace wasn’t a doctor, even though for sixteen years since the Split she had been trying to fill the hole left by Mike Wetherbee.

Holle grabbed Helen’s hand, and they dived over to Grace’s side. “Grace, we’re here. Tell me how we can help.”

Grace looked at her vaguely. “There were around twenty in the cupola. Twenty! I thought we’d all die in there. I estimate twelve seriously injured.”

Holle nodded. “OK. We had about forty in shuttle B, many injured..”

She didn’t have to complete the arithmetic. Since the Split the crew’s numbers had grown, minus some deaths and plus several births, grown in an unplanned way that would have horrified the social engineers back in Denver. A total of around sixty saved in the shuttle and the cupola together meant they had lost several lives to the decompression. And, glancing around the hull, her first estimate was that maybe a third of the survivors were wounded. A third of the crew of a half-wrecked ship, incapacitated.

One step at a time, Holle. “What about the injured?”

“Some crushing from the crowding in the cupola. The rest, what you’d expect from exposure to vacuum. Cases of hypoxia-we may see some brain damage. There are cases of temporary blindness from neurological effects. A few cases of the bends, caused by air bubbles in the bloodstream. I’d recommend using the cupola as a high-pressure chamber to relieve those symptoms.”

“Do it.”

“The ebullisms-the swelling, caused by the vaporization of water in the tissues-ought to subside in a few hours. They look worse than they are, mostly. Some internal injuries due to gases trapped in the bowels. Damaged eardrums. Anybody with any congestion or catarrh will have suffered. We’ve also got injuries relating to the explosion at Wilson’s bulkhead. Blast injuries, burns, broken bones, hearing loss-”

“There must be damaged lungs.”

Grace nodded. “Two in this group.”

“Yeah,” Helen said. “More in the shuttle group.”

All the crew, and every shipborn child since before they could walk, had been trained to open their mouths wide in the event of a decompression. Try to hold your breath and the expanding gases in your lungs just ripped apart your delicate pulmonary tissues and capillaries, and then trapped air was forced out of the lungs into the thoracic cage, from where it could get directly into the general circulation through ruptured blood vessels. The final result was massive air bubbles moving through the body and lodging in the heart and the brain. But, despite all the training, some people always followed their instincts to hold their breath when the crisis came.

Grace said, “We’re going to have a host of cases of bronchiectasis. Damaged lungs. You’re left vulnerable to infection for the rest of your life. I’m concerned about our stock of antibiotics.”

“We’ll figure that out.”

“Some are worse than that,” Grace said bleakly. “I don’t believe there’s anything we can do for them. I don’t think even a medic with the proper training could-”

“It’s OK,” Holle said. “We’ll deal with this. Helen, go round up some volunteer paramedics. You know who to ask.” As Helen pushed away, Holle spoke quietly to Grace. “We need to set up some kind of triage system. Three priorities,” she said, thinking aloud. “First, those who will recover but need immediate treatment. The burns, the bends victims. Second, those who will recover in time with minimal attention. People with swellings, this temporary sight loss you talked about.”

Grace looked away. “And third-”

“Those who won’t survive. The ripped lungs. We’ll put them somewhere. Hell, we’ll put them in the shuttle, away from the rest.”

“What do we tell them?”

“Lies. We’ll have Helen or one of her volunteers round up lovers, parents, whatever.”

“I can’t operate like that.”

“That’s OK. You don’t have to. I’ll stay with you. You just indicate to me which category each patient is in. I’ll do the rest.” She listened to the words coming out of her own mouth. Could she really do these things? Well, she must, so she could.

“Holle, there’s one more thing. Steel Antoniadi. She survived. She’s still in the cupola. Everybody knows she led the rebel attack. I thought it was best if she stayed out of sight.”

“Good thinking. I’ll talk to Venus about that, about keeping her safe somewhere-”

There was a tap on her shoulder. “Holle.”

She turned.

The punch in the mouth was hard enough to send her sailing through the air. Somebody fielded her, and she grabbed a handhold and shook her head to clear it.

It was Magda Murphy. Her arms and hands were swollen; that punch must have hurt her own fist like hell. Magda came up against an equipment rack on the wall, spun in the air, and used her booted feet to kick off and throw herself at Holle again. Somehow Grace Gray got in the way. She grabbed Magda around the waist, and the two of them, deflected by Grace’s momentum, drifted away.

Magda pointed at Holle and screamed, “You left my baby to die! You left her to die! All you had to do was reach out-” She struggled, but Grace held on tightly. The strength went out of Magda, and she broke down into wretched sobbing. “I’ll never forgive you for saving me rather than her, Groundwater. Never.”