“I don’t have time or patience—”
“Bull!” Sam snapped. “Can you feel anything—I mean anything—lower than your tits?”
The sense of wrongness flooded over him, and with it a visceral, profound fear. Vertigo passed through him again, and he closed his eyes. All the words the doctor had been saying—crushed spinal cord, diffuse blood pooling, paraplegic—finally reached his brain. To his shame, tears welled up in his eyes, blurring the women’s faces.
“If the fibers grow back wrong,” the doctor said, “the damage will be permanent. Our bodies weren’t designed to heal in zero g. We’re built to let things drain. You have a bolus of blood and spinal fluid putting pressure on the wound. We have to drain that, and we have to get the bone shards out of the way. We could start the regrowth now, but there are about a dozen people who need the nootropics just to stay alive.”
“I understand,” Bull said around the lump in his throat, hoping she’d stop talking, but her inertia kept her going on.
“If we can stabilize the damage and get the pressure off and get you under at least one-third g, we have a good chance of getting you back to some level of function.”
“All right,” Bull said. The background of medical alerts and voices and the hum of the emergency air recyclers stood in for real silence. “What’s your recommendation?”
“Medical coma,” the doctor said without hesitating. “We can slow down your system. Stabilize you until we can evacuate.”
Bull closed his eyes, squeezing the tears between the lids. All he had to say was yes, and it was all someone else’s problem. It would all go away, and he’d wake up somewhere under thrust with his body coming back together. Or he wouldn’t wake up at all. The moment lasted. He remembered walking among the defunct solar collectors. Climbing them. Bracing a ceramic beam with his knees while one of the other men on his team cut it. Running. He remembered a woman he’d been seeing on Tycho Station, and the way his body had felt against her. He could get it back. Or some part of it. It wasn’t gone.
“Thank you for your recommendation,” he said. “Sam, I’ll have that damage report now.”
“Bull, no,” Sam said. “You know what happens when one of my networks grows back wrong? I burn it out and start over. This is biology. We can’t just yank out your wiring and reboot you. And you can’t macho your way through it.”
“Is that what I’m doing?” Bull said, and he almost sounded like himself.
“I’m serious,” Sam said. “I don’t care what you promised Fred Johnson or how tough you think you are. You’re going to be a big boy and take your nasty medicine and get better. You got it?”
She was on the edge of crying now. Blood was darkening her face. Some of her team were surely dead. People she’d known for years. Maybe her whole life. People she’d worked with every day. With a clarity that felt almost spiritual, he saw the depth of her grief and felt it resonate within him. Everyone was going to be there now. Everyone who’d lived on every ship would have seen people they cared about broken or dead. And when people were grieving, they did things they wouldn’t do sober.
“Look where we are, Sam,” Bull said gently. “Look what we’re doing here. Some things don’t go back to normal.” Sam wiped her eyes with a sleeve cuff, and Bull turned to the doctor. “I understand and respect your medical advice, but I can’t take it right now. Once the ship and crew are out of danger, we’ll revisit this, but until then staying on duty is more important. Can you keep me cognitively functioning?”
“For a while, I can,” the doctor said. “But you’ll pay for it later.”
“Thank you,” Bull said, his voice soft and warm as flannel. “Now, Chief Engineer Rosenberg, give me the damage report.”
It wasn’t good.
The best thing Bull could say after reading Sam’s report and consulting with the doctors and his own remaining security forces was that the Behemoth had weathered the storm better than some of the other ships. Being designed and constructed as a generation ship meant that the joints and environmental systems had been built with an eye for long-term wear. She’d been cruising at under 10 percent the slow zone’s previous maximum speed when the change came.
The massive deceleration had happened to all the ships at the same time, slowing them from their previous velocity to the barely perceptible drifting toward the station’s captive ring in just under five seconds. If it had been instantaneous, no one would have lived through it. Even with the braking spread out, it had approached the edge of the survivable for many of them. People asleep or at workstations with crash couches had stood a chance. Anyone in an open corridor or getting up for a bulb of coffee at the wrong moment was simply dead. The count stood at two hundred dead and twice that many wounded. Three of the Martian ships that had been significantly faster than the Behemoth weren’t responding, and the rest reported heavy casualties. The big Earth ships were marginally better.
To make matters worse, the radio and laser signals going back out of the Ring to what was left of the flotilla were bent enough that communication was just about impossible. Not that it would have mattered. The slow zone—shit, now he was thinking of it that way too—was doing everything it could to remind them how vast the distances were within it. At the velocities they had available to them now, getting to the Ring would take as long as it had to reach it from the Belt. Months at least, and that in shuttles. All the ships were captured.
However many of them were left, they were on their own.
The station’s grip was pulling them into rough orbit around the glowing blue structure, and no amount of burn was able to affect their paths one way or the other. They couldn’t speed up and they couldn’t stop. No one was under thrust, and it was making the medical crisis worse as zero g complicated the injuries. The Behemoth’s power grid, already weakened and patched after the torpedo launch debacle, had suffered a cascading shipwide failure. Sam’s team was trekking through the ship, resetting the tripped safeties, adding new patches to the mess. One of the Earth ships had come close to losing core containment and gone through an automatic shutdown that left it running off batteries, another was battling an environmental systems breakdown with the air recylers. The Martian navy ships might be fine or they might be in ruins, but the Martian commander wasn’t sharing.