Irene sent Todd, Ellen and Valin back to the upgraded rest. She told Valin to let Ellen repair his armor. Sarah, Alex, Companion and herself continued on to the Speedwell. Before they parted, Irene took a sample of Valin’s blood.
Irene handed off her camera to Sarah for processing and went up to the medical center. Growing up with a doctor as one of her parents taught Irene a few things about medical care. The most important thing she learned was that medical care on the Speedwell was almost completely automated. No doctor ever held a stethoscope or scalpel. The treatment beds did all of that. Doctors just selected what procedure the machines should do. There were even machines that would tell them what procedures should be selected. A drop of blood in one machine would run a battery of tests. Another would scan a patient's entire body looking for abnormalities or damage.
The doctors on the Speedwell were fully trained in order to replace those machines should they fail. As long as the machines worked, the crew of the Speedwell didn’t really need doctors. Irene’s mother hated that reality.
Irene put Valin’s blood sample into a set of official sample tubes. She slid one into the wildlife analysis machine. She ordered the machine to sequence the animal’s DNA and determine which tranquilizer was most likely to work on it. She took a second tube over to the blood cloner and told it to make a gallon of the stuff.
She went over to the internal imager and made sure she knew how to use it. She was still working through its menus when Alex came into the medical center.
“What is that thing?” Alex asked.
“It’s an internal imager,” Irene explained. “It uses x-rays, sound, magnetics and even different wavelengths of light to map the internal structure of a patient. I plan to use it to see where that vine is inside Valin.”
“How does knowing where it is help?” Alex queried.
“See that bed machine over there?” Irene said, pointing to a second unit that looked a lot like this one. “That is a robotic surgeon. I can program it to cut the vine out. Outside of the structure, nanobot material is rather weak. The surgeon’s blades will cut through it. Broken into pieces, it should be easy to remove. Especially since it won't repair or regrow, which I suspect is what would happen if we tried to cut it out inside the structure.”
“So you weren’t lying to him,” Alex commented. “You do think you can get it out of him.”
“Of course,” Irene responded. “The worrying part is the blood loss. I’m hoping the ship's blood cloner will be able to duplicate his blood. If that doesn’t work we’ll have to bleed him for a couple weeks and save it up for the surgery. The really nasty part will be if the machine over there,” Grandmother said pointing to the wildlife analyzer, “can’t identify a tranquilizer it thinks will work on Valin.”
“What is a tranquilizer?” Alex asked. Irene forgot sometimes that all her companions didn’t have the same scientific upbringing she had.
“A chemical that makes you sleep,” she explained.
“Like what Control gives us in the transportation system?”
“Yep,” Irene confirmed.
“I got the impression you don’t really like this guy,” Alex commented.
“I don’t,” Irene admitted. “You saw that thing,” Irene shivered. “That was nasty. I wouldn’t leave that in an Earthen squirrel if I had the means to get it out. Besides, he hasn't taught Ellen everything he knows yet.”
“Ellen will be unhappy if you kill her teacher,” Alex commented.
The analyzer dinged. Irene went over to look at the readout.
“That’s interesting,” she said to Alex, “the machine thinks Valin is similar to an Earth shark. It has a chemical it thinks will work, but it is warning me that unless water continues to flow over the shark's gills it will die.”
“What?” Alex said.
“It has identified something we can try. That is the important part,” Irene said. She memorized the chemical name and went over to the drug dispenser to order it up. The dispenser told her dosages. They were based on weight. Irene made a note to take a scale with them. She would have to make Valin strip off all that armor, since there was no way to know how much it weighed.
“Can you run down to supply and pick up a ship uniform you think will fit Valin?” Irene asked Alex.
“Umm sure, I guess. I don’t know how good of a fit it will be,” Alex responded.
“Get several. I’d look at the larger child sizes,” Irene suggested. “While you're there, see if you can get a scale, like the one in the apartment's bathroom and a stretcher. Load it all up into the cart.” Irene wondered what Companion was doing. She didn’t bring Alex, Sarah or Companion with her because she needed their skills in particular. She brought them more to prove to Valin that she wasn’t that worried about him.
“Anything else?” Alex asked.
“Probably,” Irene admitted, “but that's all I can think of at the moment.” Alex headed off in the direction of the door. Before he got there, Irene called, “Oh and a length of rope.”
Irene continued her checkout of the equipment she planned to use. When she finished she went back to the blood cloner to see how it was doing. The readouts were all in the green. Irene thought it might work. It looked like it was slow. If she was reading it right it wanted three weeks to produce the gallon. She knew a gallon was a lot of blood, maybe she should have ordered less. She changed the amount needed to one pint.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
The time only shortened to eighteen days. Thinking about it she decided maybe she just needed a larger starting amount. She went over to the small training station in the corner and pulled up the lesson on taking blood manually.
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She found Alex, Sarah and Companion in the engineering center watching recordings.
“What are you watching,” Irene asked, pulling up a chair.
“This is Ellen inside Tinkerer’s test,” Sarah explained. “I exchanged cameras with her before we loaded up.”
“Did she get a good shot of the Tinkerer?” Irene asked. “She was a lot closer than the rest of us.”
“Apparently he was just a projection,” Alex said with obvious disappointment. “There is just a round door in the side of the arena that drops back and slides to the side. After a small delay, Ellen steps inside and the door closes behind. It looks like the same small room as the transportation system.” Recording of the transportation system was disappointing. All the cameras caught was a very small empty room. When the door closed behind the passenger a complete darkness fell that blacked out the camera.
“What’s interesting is the other side. Even though everything she repairs is default white and gray, you can tell by how she fixes them what material they must be made of. She handled a lot of items we don’t have,” Sarah said. “I want to ask her if she revealed any of the patterns.”
“I am going to head back down to the structure,” Irene announced. “I think the blood cloner might work faster if I got a bigger sample out of Valin to start with.”
“I’ll go get my ax,” Companion announced, picking himself off the floor. He didn’t trust the office chairs in the engineering headquarters. Sarah shut off the recording and rose to her feet as well.
“I don’t think we all need to go,” Irene commented.
“No, we do,” Alex countered, already moving toward the door. “Todd will be unhappy with us otherwise.”
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Four days later, Irene’s preparations were complete. They tied Valin to the stretcher and carried him out of the improved rest to the cart. The cart was parked as close to the entrance as they could get. Irene was fairly certain the short stay inside the structure's area of influence wouldn’t do it too much harm. From Todd's experience getting injured and healed near the entrance, they knew it took several days for a heal to be ‘real’. Irene thought the constant damage the vine made as Valin moved was masked by the improved healing abilities of a tier five. She wanted to limit the amount of movement he made on the way out, in order to minimize the damage.
Valin wasn’t too happy with this form of transport since Irene stripped him first and tied him face down. She did cover him with a blanket to keep him warm and preserve his modesty, if he had any.
At the border, they stopped and Irene injected him with the tranquilizer. They tried this before, and Irene thought she had the dose dialed in. She did it close to the border in case she was wrong. They could just roll back inside and cast a heal to clean the poison from his blood.
When they tried testing it inside the structure, Valin’s tier five nanobots cleared his blood so quickly it was hard to tell if it even worked. A small amount of blood was leaking from around the vine penetrations, but Irene didn’t think it was dangerous.
The internal imager worked beautifully. As Irene suspected the vine looped around Valin’s organs. If they just pulled it out it would have killed even a tier five. They transferred Valin to the automatic surgeon and loaded the machine with the data from the imager. Irene instructed it to remove the vine with a minimum of tissue cuts, but told it to cut the vine whenever it wanted. She marked everything she thought looked like an organ or a major vessel and told the surgeon to avoid them too. The surgeon was loaded with Valin’s cloned blood. Irene crossed her fingers and pushed go.
It was nasty. Irene was sorry she watched. There was a reason she didn’t follow her mother into medicine. The surgeon dropped slices of white plastic vine into the discard chute. When the last piece dropped it began gluing Valin back together with liquid sutures. When the machine finished its surgery it recommended Valin get another pint of blood. Irene ignored its recommendation and rolled Valin back into the imager. The imager could not find any sign of the vine.
They carried him back out to the cart and drove down to the boundary. When they crossed. Sarah and Alex hit him with another set of tier three heals. Once more he tried to spring up and attack. Tied as he was to the stretcher, none of them even blinked. After that he promptly passed out.
Irene watched his back closely as Todd drove the cart the rest of the way back to the structure. She was afraid they might have missed some sliver of vine that would regenerate. She saw nothing.
They carried Valin most of the way back up to the rest before he regained consciousness. Valin walked the rest of the way wrapped in the blanket.
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Valin sat on the edge of one of the hard chairs in the house outpost and rubbed the seamless skin on his back. He was still dressed in only the odd sheet of material Grandmother called a blanket.
“How did you know what to do?” Ellen asked Grandmother.
“I didn’t think of it as a magic or medical problem,” the old woman explained. “I thought about it as an engineering problem. Really that's what I am in the end, an engineer. I know how to use machines and write code. I know how to plan assembly and disassembly. Plus my mother was a doctor. She complained about how little there was for her to do for years. She hated the automation because she thought it stole her glory.”
Valin didn’t understand most of that. His translation just buzzed on a lot of the words. That or it used words so old they’d fallen out of use before Valin was born so he didn't know what they meant. He did understand that she was talking about her mother, but he could not understand what the mad queen of Londontown could have to do with this miracle.
“You will need to stay inside the structure for at least three days,” Grandmother told him. “If you leave before then the heal will unravel at the boundary. After that if you still want to see the Speedwell, we can drive you up.”
“I want to see it,” Valin said. He wanted to see this place that could so easily undo the most advanced magic of the King.
“I still have some things I wanted to get done on this trip, so I am going to head back to the Speedwell. I’ll leave Todd and Ellen with you. While I am gone I want you to talk to this box,” she said to Valin. “Push this button here and it will talk to you. Push it again and it will stop. I want you to repeat whatever it says back to it in your native language.” The little recorder wasn’t that fancy. Irene was fairly certain it would last three days in the structure. It used the same seals their camera did. The most vulnerable part was the player with its button. The recorder was a separate unit and recorded continuously. The Speedwell’s computer would listen for the prerecorded messages, then strip off whatever followed as the response.
“Why?” Valin asked.
“Your translator won’t work on the Speedwell. I am going to use this information to make you something that will,” Grandmother explained. Valin accepted the little box. “Try to keep it with you and touch it every day.” Grandmother rose to her feet and motioned Ellen to join her.
“I think he might be in shock,” Grandmother said to Ellen. “See if you can talk him into teaching you something. Something familiar might be comforting to him.”
“Ok,” Ellen said. “That thing was in him for a long time. I don’t think he can conceive of it being gone.”