Memory Transcription Subject: Chairman Debbin, Seaglass Mineral Concern

  Date [standardized human time]: January 27, 2137

  I rubbed my face exhaustedly. It was still very early on the whole for this much chaos. Something had to be done, a steady paw placed on the rudder, and the colony charter rather clearly stated that that responsibility fell to me. Or possibly to Sifal, but she seemed hungover and, evidently, far more blasé about gunfire, screaming, and pools of blood than was proper. I had no intention of getting my paws dirty here. Metaphorically, perhaps, but literally? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get bloodstains out of snow-white fur? I’d probably have to bleach it, which would utterly ruin the health and texture.

  I sighed. Heavy weighed the crown. “Sifal, darling, would you mind actually fetching Doctor Tika back in here for a bit? I know it’s not her specialty, but surely even a PD specialist knows basic triage and first aid. An extra set of skilled paws wouldn’t go amiss here.”

  Sifal snorted. “Don’t call me darling,” she said. She vanished back into the hallway with a look of (hopefully helpful) purpose.

  I took a deep breath. Step one, establish a clear chain of command. I pointed at Doctor Wylla. Ancestors spare me, bloodstains or not, she looked fantastic when she was locked-in on a singular goal like this. The energy, the dynamism, the passion… I wanted to paint her. I shook my head. Work first, Debbin, fantasize later. “Chief Medical Officer, what’s first on the priority list?”

  Wylla’s ears pinned back as she found an opening to stick our Mazic, Sopa, with a syringe. “I need the Gojid out of here if he can’t stop interfering.”

  I scanned the room. The Arxur orderly and the Takkan orderly were still busy holding Sopa still while the sedatives kicked in. The other Takkan, Cowlin, was stuck full of quills underneath Bori’s back. Garruga was still broken and mentally clocked out. Benwen was on the floor, fainted. Kitzz was in a wheelchair trying to get a good look at Sopa’s gunshot wound… but he still had Benwen’s gun. “Excuse me, my good man, but may I have that? I need to assert my authority over a pair of fucking clowns.”

  The Arxur surgeon snickered and held it out to me. “Haven’t figured out a good use for a handgun in surgery yet.” Kitzz grinned. “But I’ll let you know if I get any ideas.”

  “Grand.” I actually had learned some very rudimentary firearms handling. Way easier to just have trustworthy people handle security for you, but it never hurt to be able to fend for yourself if the situation called for it. Keeping in mind Tippen’s reminder to keep my pawpad off of the damn trigger, I held the gun at ease as a silent threat while I gestured with my free paw at the two longshoremen. “Alright. You two, get up, scootch this bench over to the corner, and stay out of the doctors’ way until they have time to treat you.”

  Bori got up to a sitting position. “I’m not letting the Arxur eat Sopa!” A couple of his quills had come loose and gotten stuck into Cowlin, who was taking his time to catch his breath before he got up.

  I casually rolled the wrist of the paw holding the gun. “That will not be happening. Now sit.”

  The two longshoremen slowly, their bodies plainly aching the whole time from the consequences of their escapades, complied.

  Wylla tried to snort with a bloody snout and coughed a bit instead. “I’m just surprised nobody’s lapping up all the free blood.”

  “Fuck off,” Kitzz scoffed. “I’m not licking blood off the floor. And you know what? I’m really enjoying being well-fed enough to say that!” He licked his lips. “You got a little on your snout, though, if you want me to get that…?”

  “No!” Wylla spat.

  Sifal came back at a light trot, carrying the small-legged Zurulian Doctor Tika. Tika hopped down and scurried over towards the nearest counter for a better vantage point of the carnage. “Oh my,” she exclaimed.

  “Alright, Doctor Wylla, what’s next on the priority list?” I asked.

  Wylla shook her head. “The bullet hit her femur. I need to run a scan to survey the damage, but… the details almost don’t matter. We don’t have the supplies to treat this. We used up nearly all our bone foam on Garruga and Kitzz. We don’t have enough left for a Mazic-sized fracture.”

  “How fast can we get more delivered?” asked Sifal, finally chiming in.

  “It’s already en route with the starship parts you requested,” I said. “Today or tomorrow. Can you stabilize her leg until then without the bone foam?”

  Wylla shook her head hollowly. “I don’t… I have no idea. I trained on a core world. I’ve never been in a hospital that ran out of supplies!”

  “Sure we can,” said Kitzz, off-handedly. “We hardly ever get the good shit, operating out in the field. You just patch it up like shards of a broken mug. A little biodegradable glue, a tiny brush, and a lot of time and patience.”

  Wylla stared incredulously. “Biodegradable glue?”

  Sifal, still hovering by the door, held up a hand. “I can whip some up. Maybe use the bioprinter to make it out of her own cartilage?”

  “Oooh, fancy!” said Kitzz. “Yeah, lower chance of the body attacking it as foreign. That’d do nicely.”

  I pointed at Sifal, but addressed Wylla. “Before she goes, do we need any other medical supplies that Sifal could scrounge up on the way back?”

  Wylla’s eyes drifted down to the large puddle of red blood on the floor. “Sopa almost certainly needs a transfusion, but we don’t stock blood packs for one-off species.” Right, Seaglass only had about eight hundred people, not counting the twenty-odd Arxur. Something like fifty percent Nevoks, twenty percent Takkans, just shy of ten percent Gojids, and everyone else was a mish-mash. More than a few species only had one member on the whole planet, and Sopa was our lone Mazic. “We’ll just have to give her saline and feed her copper-rich… no, fuck, iron-rich foods…”

  “Or we can use the bioprinter to clone up a couple spare liters of her own blood,” said Sifal. “Honestly, I should probably just set up a second bioprinter here in the hospital. Cloned blood transfusions, cloned organ transplants, and it’s never bad to have a backup anyway in case anything happens to our food supply.”

  A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

  “Ohoho, and now we’re getting a snack machine in my office, too?” Kitzz said, grinning. “This day just keeps getting better!” I barely knew the man, but I already was willing to bet good money that Kitzz was going to use it to taste his patients in effigy. Probably with unblinking eye contact.

  Sifal groaned, drawing the same conclusion. “Tika, can you just grab me--”

  “Two sample vials and a biopsy syringe for the cartilage,” Tika said, already snout-deep in a supply cabinet. “Already on it.”

  “Temmah, can you grab the biggest sterile bed you can find?” Wylla asked the Takkan orderly. I guess that was his name? “We need to get her into a surgical suite. Kloviss, can you handle the patient for a bit without him?”

  The big Arxur shrugged. Ah, finally, I had all the names. What a joyous occasion. “Yeah, blood loss or sedatives, she’s slowing down. Might need a hand or four getting her onto the bed, though.”

  Sifal made a long, drawn-out noise in her throat somewhere between a sigh, a groan, and a whimper, bemoaning yet accepting a fate that had been sealed the moment she’d been born as one of the physically-strongest species in the known galaxy. “Yeah, it looks like a three-person job. I’ll help the orderlies before I go.”

  “If you need a warmup,” I said, nodding to her, “would you mind putting Benwen in the open bed?”

  “On his side!” Wylla called out. “Recovery position. Ancestors forbid anyone that cute chokes to death on their own vomit.”

  “I’ll spot you,” said Tika. She set the vials up in a sample holder next to a long syringe, and scurried across the counter, following the perimeter of the room. She took an extra moment to bap Bori on the side of his head with her forepaw as she passed behind his corner. He flinched, and wound himself up to say something, but Cowlin elbowed him, and Bori bit his tongue.

  “Okay, and next, Wylla?” I asked.

  Wylla clenched her jaw, thinking. “This amount of bloodflow, at the very least, we can probably safely say the bullet missed the femoral artery, which is a freaking miracle, but we still need to stem the bleeding harder.”

  “Tourniquet,” Kitzz said with a shrug.

  Wylla clucked. “Fucking medieval, but yeah. I’ll grab one. Note the time, Surgeon. Can’t have it on more than, uhh…”

  “I dunno the Mazic numbers, either,” said Kitzz. “Just get moving.” He turned to me and explained with the preening smirk of an expert eager to lord his knowledge over a layman. “Too much time with the tourniquet on, we lose the limb. Too much time with it off, we lose the patient.”

  “Got the tourniquet,” said Tika, climbing back out of the cabinet. She was turning into a real quartermaster for the whole operation. “Wireless leads for the monitor, too. We gotta get eyes on her vitals.”

  Wylla swore and snatched them up. “Off my damn game this morning,” she muttered. “Never drinking again.”

  “That’s a lie, and you know it,” said Tika, chuckling.

  Wylla snorted. She dashed back, tied the tourniquet, and called out the time of day, which Kitzz tapped down on his holopad. Then she started sticking little round adhesives onto Sopa, now fully unconscious, while Wylla thumbed through her holopad. “Okay,” she said. “Vital signs aren’t great, but they’re at least stable. It’s a start. We’ll get her on supplementary oxygen as soon as she’s in the bed. Let’s get the sample collection going.”

  “Just the cartilage,” said Sifal. “There’s plenty of blood to go around.”

  “Belay that, Commander,” said Kitzz with a little too much glee. Even in the Federation, specialists overruled generalists, regardless of rank. Even Exterminators weren’t stupid enough, typically, to order PD Specialists around. “The floor blood is contaminated and starting to clot. Take a little fresh blood from the vein. Patient’s a Mazic. One more vial isn’t going to kill her.”

  “Agreed,” said Wylla, Chief Medical Officer, and that was that.

  Wylla collected her samples, Sifal got Benwen into the recovery position on the free bed, and Temmah wheeled a much larger one into the room and lowered it to the floor.

  “Carry or roll?” asked Sifal.

  Kloviss glanced at Temmah, trying to assess the Takkan orderly’s strength. “I think we can carry.”

  “Safer for the patient,” said Kitzz, nodding.

  “I’m honestly still surprised that you care this much,” muttered Wylla.

  “I don’t,” Kitzz scoffed. “I just can’t solve a broken puzzle.”

  “Fucker,” Wylla growled, but there was a subtle chuckle underlaying it all.

  “On three,” said Sifal. “One, two…” Two Arxurs and a Takkan, jointly, managed to hoist the unconscious Mazic up a few inches for a few seconds. It was enough.

  “Okay!” said Wylla. “I’m… gonna go get her prepped for surgery. Kitzz, if you wanna scrub up, meet me at the third door on the left in about five minutes.”

  “Yeah,” said Kitzz, only half-paying attention. “Just gonna wash my hands, maybe take a perfunctory glance at the other patients.”

  Kloviss squinted. “Didn’t you need to patch your own leg up first?”

  Kitzz laughed. “Oh, buddy, I used the last of the bone foam on that like twenty minutes ago. And some pills! I am riding high, buddy. I feel great!”

  Sifal’s eyes went wide. “Okay, Kitzz, upon pain of death, how impaired are you right now?”

  For the briefest moment, Kitzz looked legitimately offended. “None! It was a fractional dose for my weight. Ask me anything.”

  Sifal’s eyes narrowed. “I have exactly one data point to indicate that an Arxur on the autism spectrum can fake sobriety.”

  Kitzz tilted his head. “The fuck is the autism spectrum?”

  “What’s the cubic root of twenty-seven?” asked Sifal.

  “Three,” Kitzz said immediately. “That’s not even a diagnostically-useful question. Get more complicated.”

  “Okay,” said Sifal. “If I start smelling florid egg-rot on a starship with no hatcheries, what is the most likely explanation?”

  Kitzz did a double-take. “Okay, I mean, that’s a weirder question, but still an easy one for a medical doc--”

  “Just the answer,” said Sifal, “and write it in the air with a steady hand.”

  Kitzz took a deep breath and started scratching at the air.

  Sifal threw her hands in the air. “Fine. I trust you. Don’t fuck this up.”

  “I would never!” Kitzz growled.

  Sifal nodded. “Okay. I’m gonna go run these over to home base. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

  Kloviss, the orderly, did a double-take. “It’s like twenty minutes of travel time alone. When are you making the materials?”

  Sifal scoffed. “Kloviss, I run the planet. I’m not walking. I’m just gonna commandeer a shuttle or something.”

  “You can fly?” Kloviss asked.

  Sifal shrugged. “Well enough.” She ducked out the door. Kloviss watched her go. Kitzz… eyed up the other patients, idly, while he washed his hands. Bori sneered. Kitzz sneered harder. Cowlin continued sitting upright and not bleeding out from his quill punctures.

  “So, uh,” said Kitzz, idly glancing at me. His eyes narrowed slightly with suspicion. “Not that I care or anything, but it’s been bugging me that I don’t know the answer. What happened to your eye?”

  I rubbed my dire bruise awkwardly. “I may have, ah, propositioned one of your compatriots. Laza, if you know her? She said no. Rather forcefully.”

  Kitzz snickered. “Yeah, yeah, you’re really chasing the wrong prey, there, buddy,” he said. “Not everybody appreciates a strong man’s attention.”

  My eyes narrowed. “...do you?”

  Kitzz laughed again. “You’re not a strong man,” he said, simply, moving his wheelchair towards the exit. “Funny one, though! Reeeal funny.”