Oh. Fuck. A sickening surprise bolstered my false calm and smothered speech, emotion, reaction. No, they hadn’t fetched me to hear about my beloved’s fate. They’d brought me here so they could ease him into his grave.
“Oh,” I managed. “I- Okay. I need more information.”
“No,” Laramie said, new rivulets of tears trickling down his cheeks. “You don’t needdick.Jackson isdying.He’s gonna be in pain soon, and there’snothing they can do.You sign the damn papers then you take your ass out of here so we can mournourfamily.”
Randall made a gesture behind his wife’s back for Laramie to stop talking. “This is what’s going to happen, boy,” he said, with a forced calm that rivaled the doctor’s. Paternal calm, I realized. The variety of mask parents everywhere practice with each skinned knee and childhood scare. “You’re going to sign what the good doctor tells you to. You’re going to tell them to let Jackson go so he can die in peace.”
By then, though, my hindbrain had spun up into frantic action. “Put a pin in that. We’ll come back to it,” I told Randall, as my social skills dove for cover and relinquished the mental bandwidth to medical troubleshooting.Nerd stuff, Jackson would have said.You’re getting lost in the nerd stuff.My throat closed as I heard his voice in my mind, teasing me for my nerdery.
This is not about Jackson. This is not about the man you love. This is regarding a patient who requires your full attention, uncolored by emotion. Think, Sebastian. Keep it together.
I turned back to the doctor. “Can you get me a line to the doctor treating Jackson, please? I’d like to speak to him directly.”
He hadn’t expected that, though why, I cannot imagine. Perhaps my wonderful in-laws had given the man a less-than-flattering impression of me. Maybe one in particular – I’m talking about you, Laramie. “Mister- Sebastian, surely I can answer any-”
“Stop. No. I’m sorry. I need the details from the attending. Please call him and put him on the monitor.” I pointed at the large screen on the wall and tried to speak with as much tact as I could scrape together. It felt a little like scouring beneath the seats of a car for loose change and polite words. He was just trying to do his job and didn’t need me to go ham on him. “Once I have talked to him, I will discuss what to do about Sergeant Sadler. Not before.”
Whatever he saw in my face convinced him I would not budge on this. What he saw in the faces of Jackson’s family had him stop by the door to ask the guard to step inside while the doctor fetched a communications technician. Our medical liaison didn’t seem inclined to leave a sheep in a room full of angry, half-starved wolves. That was a nice touch.
Not daring to take up an empty chair near the family, I sat down on the floor next to the wall. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes, so I could think without seeing their gazes boring into me, filled with a hatred I could feel anyway.
Their hatred didn’t matter. Nothing did except the man I loved, dying millions of miles away.
* * *
Doctor Flannigan was the kind of gruff, no-nonsense medical professional I’d come to love working with. Not the pure, unadulterated asshole variety. The sort who spoke his mind so you never wondered where you stood, and that plain speech included both earned criticism and warm praise. His gruff exterior protected a keen mind and a soft heart that cared for each of his patients with unfettered affection – even when he knew he would mourn that much harder at a loss.
Love is hard. Love is risk. Brave Doc Flannigan dove into that foxhole and fought every time they brought him a patient. I could not have chosen a better doctor to look after Jackson.
I’d stood up and straightened myself out as best I could when our medical liaison brought in a comms tech, who said the connection would go live in two minutes. I knew Doctor Flannigan by reputation. The doctors who had patched me up after the Jeep ran over me had consulted with him when they did the initial reconstruction on my hip and spine. We’d never met, but I’d heard them talk about him. He wouldn’t mind if I looked like hot garbage in a T-shirt, but he would remember if I showed him the respect of presenting myself with care.
Right now, I needed all the goodwill he could spare me.
The screen lit up with static for several seconds, then resolved into a grainy but acceptable image that showed Doctor Flannigan at a desk. Books and papers waited in neat stacks on the surface, information sentinels there in case of need. He also had a tablet and a laptop directly in front of him, and if I squinted I could seeSadler, Jackson Ron the line for “Patient Name”.
“Hello? Doctor Flannigan?” said our doctor liaison. “Can you hear me?”
A few seconds passed. Realtime discussions can’t happen between Mars and Earth. At the start of this conflict, any communications took around ten minutes just to reach Mars. Then the other person would have to respond, and that response would takeanotherten minutes to go back to Earth. Advanced relays and proprietary communications technologies had reduced the delay to several seconds per message.
“I can hear you,” Doctor Flannigan said, and ran a hand through his silver-salted red hair. “We have a good connection today. Thank fuck for small favors.”
The liaison suppressed a pained expression. “Doctor Flannigan, I have here the family of Sergeant Jackson Sadler. His parents, his brother, his sisters are on a video meeting, and his, ah, his husband.”
That was my cue. I stepped up, one pace in front of our liaison. “Hello, Doctor Flannigan. I’m Sebastian Sadler, but you would know me as Sebastian Hendrick. You consulted on my care several years ago, after a transport ran me over halfway up a Colorado mountain.”
Flannigan squinted and leaned close to the screen. Not his most flattering view, from my angle. “I remember you. You were that talented young doctor who’d just started his residency. You ever finish that?”
Even in the swamp of worry and upset I trudged through, his comment still warmed me. Heck, the fact that he remembered me at all both flattered me and fed the tiny hope I harbored. “I couldn’t, unfortunately. They gave me a medical discharge and shipped me back into Civvieland. It was easiest for them.”
“I’ll bet,” Flannigan said sourly. “General’s son screwed that pooch while wearing lipstick and fake eyelashes. You didn’t go to civilian medical school?”
“I wanted to, but…” I spread my hands wide, hands open and full of nothing I could do. “Between my student debt and recovery issues, I couldn’t afford to go through my residency. I teach history and science now.”
A frown pulled down the corners of his mouth. “That’s a waste. Teaching is important, don’t get me wrong, but I read your records and saw your marks, son. You had a gift for medicine. You belonged at a patient’s bedside.”
“I wished it had been different.”
“Me, too.” He sat with that a moment, then cleared his throat. “You’re the Sergeant’s husband. I guess they had problems reaching you.”