“My phone broke and there’s a chip shortage. I got here as soon as I knew.” Trying to look competent and confident, neither of which I felt right then, I clasped my hands in front of me. “Could we go through Jackson’s condition in detail, please? I’ve only gotten the most basic information about his situation.”
Flannigan nodded, grim sympathy on his features. “I’ll go through it with you, son, but you aren’t going to like it. It’s not good. I wish I had hope to give you, but the facts are all I’ve got.”
“I’ll take them. At least then, I’ll know how to make the best decision I can.”
We started with the facts. Doctor Flannigan was right; I didn’t like Jackson’s situation, and it was a unique and horrible flavor ofnot good.
The gunshot had hit a major organ. They’d repaired it, and that was the second least of our concerns. Its recovery was being hampered by literally everything else. Organ failurecouldhappen, but we had bigger fish to fry. These are not words you want to hear.
His radiation exposure would cause a heightened risk of cancer later in life unless he received extensive therapies to mitigate it. This was the actual least of our concerns, because Jackson wasn’t expected tohavea later life. Right now,later lifewas measured in weeks.
Toxic Mars dirt was Public Enemy Number One. By now, I have written several papers about the properties and dangers of Martian soil, and I will hand out copies of those to anyone who wants them. In brief: Mars dirt sticks to you worse than the dirt at a Renaissance Festival. It has chemicals in it that interact with the moisture in your lungs and turn into poison. It’s sharp, so it tears up the insides of your lungs, and humans are utter crap for regenerating organs and limbs without pharmaceutical encouragement.
Jackson’s body would fail within days unless he had aggressive interventions to neutralize the Martian soil’s byproducts and force his body to regrow the lining of his lungs.
“I’m going to assume you’ve given him Regeneris,” I said, just to get it out of the way. Regeneris had literally been formulated to handle this situation, though at a lesser severity. It was meant for more casual exposures, not profound cases of Martian dust snorting and radiation sunbathing.
“Oh, yes,” Flannigan said with a weary sigh. “It helped as much as it could. It’s just not designed to handle these levels of exposure. It can’t keep up.”
“What aboutTrigeneris?” My chemical child. The therapy I had decided to take under my wing as the most promising treatment for the conditions unique to Mars soldiers.
I knew its capabilities better than most of the doctors in the field because I’d helped lay the foundation for its development. Every time I ran Jackson’s condition through my mind, Trigeneris popped up as our answer. Doctor Flannigan might not have known about it, or, as someone who hadn’t worked as much with it as I had, might not have realized it could have such a profound effect.
At that, he leaned back in his chair and looked disgusted. “IwishI had some of that on hand. I would have pumped him full of it already, just as a Hail Mary. I haven’t gotten to work with it much, but the briefs on it say it could heal a dead rat if you asked it nicely enough.”
“You don’t have any test doses on hand? Van Horn usually provides experimental doses to the US military for use in just this kind of situation.” The situation where the patient would die anyway, so a shot for the moon on treatment could only help. Most of their late-stage test drugs for Martian ailments sat around, waiting for an edge case.
“Not anymore. Van Horn pulled their experimental dosages a year ago.” His disgust turned to quiet, simmering anger. “We had it up until one of the European medics stole it. He tried to defect to the Russians and use it as an offering for their goodwill. Van Horn gotpissedand said if we couldn’t keep their secret formula secure, we could have it when it hit the market like everyone else.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I growled.
Just like my father to get his panties in a twist because some asshole decided to go off the ranch and take some corporate intellectual property with him. The formulas for both Regeneris andespeciallyTrigeneris had been under lock and key since the first chemicals hit the test tubes in their creation. You could steal Britain’s Crown Jewels more easily than you could the formulae for those treatments.
If the Russians or North Koreans got hold of a dose, they could reverse-engineer it. Van Horn Biologics would lose billions of dollars. My father might have just killed my husband because money was more important than medicine for the wounded.
“All right,” I said. “Hypothetical time. If some Trigeneris appeared at your door, along with instructions for treatment, do you agree it would give Jackson a fighting chance to live?”
“Absolutely,” answered Flannigan immediately. “If it does even half of what they say it will do, he might be able to pull through.”
“It does more than half of what it promises. Next question. You say Jackson has a week, maybe two at the outside to live under current treatment.”
“That’s right.”
“And your current treatment involves Regeneris. At what dosage?”
One of his salt-and-paprika eyebrows lifted, but he humored me. “Max advised dosage.”
“Have you considered doubling it?”
“No. You can’t just give twice a drug for twice the effect. You know that,” he said, almost an admonishment. “Regeneris is toxic at high dosages. It can push the body into a systemic failure.”
I raised a point-of-order finger and tried to quash the stomach butterfly rebellion that flared up. “Not for short amounts of time. Do you have any of the scientific papers on Regeneris up there?”
“I have most of them.”
“Look up ‘Beneficial Effects of High-Dosage Regeneris at Short Theraputic Intervals’, please. The information you want is on page sixteen. It’s an obscure paper. Most doctors ignore it in favor of the dosage advised by Van Horn, but I think you’ll find it instructive.” Nerves jittered down my spine and through my limbs. I had little sleep, needed food and coffee, and oh, I was questioning the attending physician taking care of my husbandon Mars.
Doctor Flannigan shot me a dubious look, but he picked up his tablet to poke at the screen. Light reflected on his face when the paper came up. I watched his eyes scan the lines of the abstract and skim over the text on the page. He swiped once, twice, fifteen times, until his gaze snagged on the chart I knew he needed.