The thump was felt throughout the ship, followed by an alert in all our ocular implants. The ship AI immediately closed bulk head doors and flashed internal cameras to the forward screens.
Something had hit the ship with enough velocity that it had cleared our passive electrostatic shielding, been fast enough to avoid debris lasers, pierced the ablative armour of the hull and still had enough mass to vapourise several hundred square metres of our middeck. A cloud of debris could be seen glittering in the ship lights as it rapidly fell behind. The rapid staccato banging of thrusters correcting our attitude and spin could be heard in riposte.
The first thought is whether anybody had survived their impromptu exit from the ship. Our uniform collars could seal our heads in a split second, followed by coma meds that reduced our basal metabolic rate to near zero. The uniform would then start to heat enough to give a modicum of time to retrieve the errant crew member.
In the time you’ve taken to read this the ship AI had ordered everybody to acceleration couches, alerted for an imminent deceleration burn, enough to slow us to eject rescue drones that would decelerate at 50G’s into the ship’s wake while we prepared to decelerate at 12/10/8/6/4/ G’s in a pattern that was tolerable for our squishy bodies.
The AI had picked up 14 live beacons but 20 had been extinguished in the explosion.
As the ship’s doctor I get special dispensation to head to the injured once the G loads were down to 4. The ejected personnel had to take priority, luckily the ship was intrasystem so not moving fast, but we had been on an acceleration burn and trying to retrieve people from the vastness of cold, hypoxic space was a complicated physics problem.
I activated my exoskeleton and pushed up against my 240kg apparent weight and headed for the blown decks. The corridors were empty so I hustled as my neural assistant started polling injured patient’s assistants for statuses. Not too bad – either dead, floating or suffering broken bones. One patient was bleeding so I dispatched a medical drone ahead and aimed for them first.
I arrived to a room with a patient crumpled against the bulkhead door – the zero pressure of space outside it. They had been bounced off the wall when the room decompressed. It had been repressurised once the doors had sealed but the grey pallor and the shallow breathing wasn’t a good sign. The medical drone relayed their obs to me whilst it compressed a noradrenaline patch to their thigh whilst running an ultrasound resonance imager over their body. The images were projected in 3D to my ocular implant but the depth is always a bit weird so I got a full size projection into the room whilst I clamped a volume infuser to their neck. It scanned for the internal jugular fed a port in and then cannulated the carotid with a micro catheter and started giving real time blood pressure readings.
I commanded a concentrate of superoxygenated perfluoroglobin into their blood stream whilst seeking the source of their shock.
“Nanx can you hear me?” No reply, “Give my hand a squeeze!” Nothing. Something had ruptured – they needed to be in a better position so I gently lowered them to the ground to get a better look, all fractures having been cleared by the med drone. There – a ruptured spleen.
The volume infuser injected a muscle relaxant as I clamped a breather pack to the patient’s nose and mouth. It grew a tube and crawled its way down their nasopharynx until it found the tracheal inlet and promptly sealed itself around and started jetting oxygen down to their lungs. Meanwhile the medical drone had split in two laid down either side of the patient and was lifting them gently onto its “back” – I alerted the medbay and off we went.
The ship AI alerted me that we had slowed enough that we were going to rotate and the gravity vector was about to change. The med drone clamped itself and its patient to the floor and gimballed gracefully as the ship flipped. I clamped myself to the wall via my exoskeleton until the manoeuvre was complete and released once the main engines started to thrust again. It would be a further 10 minutes until we could match velocities with our ejected crewmates.
Once again I hustled to med bay to find the team ready to go – I handed over and watched the trickle of broken bones, minor injuries and patients with minor blast lung injuries coming through the doors. I was polled by the AI and once again was off to the main hangar bay. Our retrieval drones were returning with their prey…
13 patients were being drifted in – life signs being checked by the med drones. Number 14 didn’t have survivable injuries. I gave the override command, in agreement with the ship’s captain and their survival suit turned off their oxygen. The patient was already unconscious but hypoxia is a nice way to go. Better than knowing you were going to drift in the void until the cold, bitter end.
We’d lost 21 crew to the explosion. All getting a ship’s burial – the energy expenditure to retrieve their corpses not deemed economic by the ship’s AI. The cold, hard brutality of logic.
I am Dr Alpha “Alf” Serco and I am a combat doctor on the Intersystem Ship Void Light…