Part 6 (1/2)
AUGUST 2379.
TORONTO, CANADA.
The crack of displaced air from a teleport caused Jael Dawson, chief medical officer (CMO) for the Strykers Syndicate, to jerk her head up.
”Jael! Ciari needs you!” Keiko shouted.
Jael was already moving, having been on standby since being notified by a nurse that Ciari and Keiko were on the news streams. Keiko was crouched worriedly over Ciari's still form on the arrival platform. Jael swore, her thin, black dreads swinging around her face as she ran to aid them.
”Get me a gurney,” Jael snapped to one of the nurses. ”And prep OR three.”
They had been dealing with the fallout of Buffalo for hours, even before Ciari was ordered to The Hague. The medical level was full of wounded, dying, and dead Strykers, with a handful still unaccounted for. Teams who hadn't been transferred to Buffalo for the initial fight now hunted for the missing in bunkers of that city, looking for bodies. Jael hated retrieval.
She knelt beside Ciari, dropping several layers of her mental s.h.i.+elds to see what kind of mess she had to deal with. The Cla.s.s III telepath swore loudly as the mental trauma of a mind raked through physical torture battered against her own. Jael, the best psi surgeon in the Syndicate, wrapped telepathic s.h.i.+elds around Ciari's mind to try to stabilize her.
”We need to move her,” Jael said, glancing up at the crew of medical personnel that swarmed around them. ”Let's go, people, we don't have much time.”
Keiko telekinetically lifted Ciari off the floor of the medical level's arrival room and onto the hover-gurney. Ciari's face was streaked with blood and tears, her lips bitten through and teeth flecked with pink-tinged saliva. Her eyes roved beneath her eyelids. When Jael brushed against Ciari's mind, all she got was a tidal wave of emotion. Jael flinched.
”The OR,” Jael said. ”Now.”
Everyone rushed to obey, the medics and nurses working to stabilize Ciari's physical form as they hurried to the operating room. Keiko followed in their wake, the telekinetic pale-faced and angry, a futile emotion, Jael thought.
Don't die on me now, Ciari, Jael thought grimly as she let her crew pull the hover-gurney into the operating room. We still need you.
Jael thought for a moment of a time just hours ago when she'd had Ciari on her operating table for a different sort of procedure. Shaking aside that memory, Jael spared a moment to look over at Keiko, the telekinetic standing just outside the tiny sterilization room. ”Do you need medical attention?”
”No,” Keiko said, voice tight. ”They didn't touch me.”
Jael nodded. ”Then wait outside. I've got work to do.”
The door slid shut and Jael continued through to the operating room. She still had to scrub in, standing shoulder to shoulder with some of her nurses and a.s.sistants. For all that this was psi surgery, a physical operation was involved as well.
”Marguerite,” Jael said. ”Deal with the bleeding. I'll deal with her mind.”
Jael's second-in-command nodded and began barking orders. A nurse cut off Ciari's uniform, another hooked her to an IV and other machines to monitor her vital signs. Electrodes were adhered to her skull, pulling up Ciari's chaotic mental readings on an EEG machine and overlaying it with the baseline in her medical records. Jael closed her eyes against the organized chaos of the operating room as she curled a hand around Ciari's own lax one. She dropped all but a single mental s.h.i.+eld and sank her telepathic power into Ciari's traumatized mind.
A maelstrom of agony greeted her on the mental grid, jagged edges cutting into her own mind, psionic pain bleeding through her power. Jael worked to hold on to her own sense of self. She let a little of the pain seep in, needing to know where it stemmed from. The brain was a link between the body and the mind. The neurotracker that every Stryker carried was capable of doing enough damage that sometimes death would have been the preferable option.
Jael focused her power, splitting it through the burned-out pieces of Ciari's psyche. She went deep, letting herself be drawn into the other woman's subconscious mind. Jael knew that Marguerite would be putting Ciari under with as many drugs as her battered body could handle. Consciousness would be a slippery thing to grasp right now, and sometimes healing worked better as a suggestion than as an order. Sometimes it didn't.
Ciari, Jael said, piecing together the woman's shattered sense of control one thought, one heartbeat, at a time. I need you to turn off the pain.
Raw emotion flowed over her, no control in the response. Jael struggled to find an answer in a sensory overload where words weren't even an afterthought, but simply forgotten.
Turn it off.
Of all the psions, empaths were the best at altering how they felt pain. It was nerves and tissue, mind over matter, the concept of pain, of an ache that could carefully be denied. Jael used every bit of her power and concentration to guide Ciari into changing how her body felt, so it would change how her mind felt. It was almost a relief when the pain switched off, that all-encompa.s.sing drag on Jael's mind disappearing.
”ICP at twenty-one mm's,” Jael heard a nurse say. ”Scans are showing possible brain herniation, definite epidural hematoma.”
”Prep for decompressive craniectomy,” Marguerite ordered. ”Map out placement of the neurotracker for the operation. We can't take any chances with her.”
The hum of a laser saw was a hideous background noise. Conversation was reduced to medical jargon that only a tiny part of Jael's mind bothered to translate. Jael felt Ciari's mind dip sharply beneath hers, sliding away. She gripped the cold hand tighter, a physical anchor point for the one on the mental grid.
No, Jael said, holding tight to the other woman's frayed thoughts. You don't get to leave us yet.
They didn't like each other; never really had. They were trained to handle different tasks, to reach different goals. Ciari led Strykers into harm's way; Jael pulled them out. The only thing they had in common was that they actually gave a d.a.m.n for their fellow Strykers. In this instance, Ciari was just another patient who needed Jael.
With Marguerite handling the physical operation and Jael refusing to let Ciari's mind die, they managed to keep her alive. This took several long hours and the results could be summed up in a single sentence.
”She's breathing,” Jael informed Keiko and Aidan Turner, the Stryker Syndicate's chief administrative officer (CAO), outside the recovery room. ”On her own. Consider it a miracle. The neurotracker did a lot of damage.”
”Erik meant to kill her,” Keiko said, looking through the observation window at the still form surrounded by machines and nurses. ”Travis Athe wanted her alive. He managed to get a majority vote to spare her life. They appointed me Acting OIC until Ciari recovers.”
Jael's mouth twisted. ”Travis doesn't have a compa.s.sionate bone in his body. Why would he spare Ciari?”
”I don't know.”
Possibly because the launch is so close, they can't risk the upheaval appointing a new OIC would cause, Aidan said, the Cla.s.s IV telepath drawing both women into a psi link.
Keiko's Acting OIC, Jael pointed out.
They can risk me being in the public eye during Ciari's absence, but they made it very clear it was to be temporary, Keiko said. They need her for the launch.
Did they give you a time frame for when I'm supposed to have Ciari standing on her own two feet and not in a coma?
Aidan winced at that announcement. Be honest, Jael. What are her odds?
Jael crossed her arms, stepping out of the way of a nurse. The nurse, used to the silent, gesture-filled conversations that happened between 'path-oriented psions, ignored them. She's in no pain, but only because I was able to get her to turn off part of her mind.
What?
Her system was in overload because of the neurotracker. She's going to need a biotank and regeneration of most, if not all, of her central nervous system. We have her hooked up to an external monitor that's sending impulses directly into her brain to ensure her major bodily functions still continue to work. Jael spread her hands in a helpless gesture, grimacing. I've got her telepathically anch.o.r.ed, but there's no guarantee she'll want to live. There may very well be damage to her body, to her brain, that we can't treat.
Erik had his finger on that kill switch for a full five minutes, Keiko said softly, the look in her brown eyes bleak and hateful.
I still sensed coherency in her subconscious mind during the surgery, Jael said.