Chapter 4
There were always moments in a physician’s career when they really dropped the ball. Sometimes the mistakes were disastrous. Sometimes they caused injury or pain or worse. Sometimes they changed the trajectory of an entire career.
And sometimes they just made a guy sprawl out on his bed, stare up at his ceiling, and think what the holy hells just happened?
I’d replayed my visit with Elanie over and over in my mind, wondering how it had all gone so far off the rails.
I never got flustered like that. I never let my patients derail me so thoroughly.
I might be a lot of things: a perfectionist, a workaholic, a son who never lived up to his parents’ expectations.
Lonely. But I was never flustered. I was always in control. Calm and collected. Cool.
Until today.
She’d already scheduled another appointment with me, which I was initially tempted to cancel. I wanted to refer her to holohealth instead, tuck tail, and tell her I couldn’t see her again because, quite frankly, she terrified me.
But then I realized that wasn’t true.
She didn’t terrify me. Only what she represented.
I thought it would be the silence surrounding her that would send me reeling.
But it wasn’t. Far from it. It was the chaos.
The unexpected questions, statements, physiological reactions.
As an empath, I was always one step ahead of my patients.
With Elanie, I was sprinting behind her as fast as I could, tripping over my own feet just to keep up.
Left frazzled and dazed and wondering if her reactions were really so shocking and abrupt, or if they only seemed that way to me because they were unexpected. Because I couldn’t feel them coming.
With some distance, some time, I couldn’t deny that the visit had been invigorating in a way.
I’d been so uninspired lately. So dissatisfied with treating sniffles and space sickness and sprained…
appendages. Maybe I was thinking of my interactions with her the wrong way.
Maybe this situation wasn’t a disaster, but a challenge.
Maybe, if I reframed my time with her as a learning opportunity, I could treat her more effectively.
Maybe while I taught Elanie about the changes she was going through, she could teach me how to be a better physician without having to rely on empathy.
Because, until now, I’d never realized how much I did rely on it.
Could I be a good physician without it? Could I be a good person without it?
A good friend? I didn’t know. Suddenly, I was desperate to find out.
It could work. I could be her doctor. I could help her.
So, we’re just going to skirt right past your unexpected physiological reactions to her? Is that what we’re doing—
Captain Declan Jones’s stern voice in my head yanked me from the intrusive thought I was in no way ready to examine.
The airlock? That couldn’t be good.
I replied, stumbling out of bed and sliding my feet into my slippers.
I would have preferred not to race to the docking bay in my boxers and T-shirt, but when Captain Jones took that life-and-death tone, I knew better than to waste a single second getting dressed.
I commed, hustling to my office to grab my med bag.
My feet, and heart, skidded to a stop.
he commed firmly, like I needed to pay better attention. And he was right. I did.
A bionic. Thermal generators. Stims. An airlock. None of this made any sense. Had a bionic somehow wound up on the wrong side of an airlock? There must have been a malfunction.
Rifling through my drawers and cabinets, gathering the necessary supplies and shoving them into my bag, I commed, Even though it could be any one of the bionics on the ship needing help, the only face I could see, possibly swollen and bruised and unconscious, was Elanie’s.
My knees wobbled in relief. It wasn’t her.
the captain asked.
Zipping up my bag, thinking on the fly, I commed,
I ran as fast as I could, breathing hard while I weaved through the late-night crowds. Whipping around the corner, I passed the holo floating at the entrance to the docking bay, its soothing voice telling me, “We hope you enjoyed your stay aboard the Ignisar. Please come back soon.”
Far from soothed, I reached airlock C-3, and dread landed like a brick in my stomach. Then it swelled, ballooning as I absorbed the fear and confusion pulsing outward from the captain and the huge Aquilinian twins who ran security flanking him.
Stepping closer, I began to understand why. I’d seen the damage a being could take from exposure to the vacuum of space in medical texts and vids. But witnessing it in person chilled my blood.
The bionic was a rigid mass on the floor. His lips were tinged blue from hypoxia, his arms and legs so grotesquely swollen that his shirt and pants had ripped at the seams. His skin was mottled with bruises, and his face was a deep and angry red from radiation exposure.
“Dr. Semson,” Captain Jones said with a tight nod, concern vibrating all around him.
“Captain.” I nodded back while the Aquilinians stepped aside to let me through to my patient, broadcasting—quite effectively—pure intimidation.
Stepping between the twins the way someone might step between spike-lined walls, I knelt next to the bionic. “How did this happen?”
“He took a trip out the airlock,” one of the twins replied.
“A trip?” I felt for a pulse at the bionic’s neck. Weak and thready, but there. Thank the Saints. “He’s alive,” I said, then frowned up at the airlock. “Was there a malfunction?”
The captain remained silent, but he didn’t need to speak. He was hiding something. The twins too. I felt it: a tingle in my chest, a tightness in my jaw.
“Captain,” I said, watching all three men stare at each other, trying in vain to hide their emotions from me. “What is it? I have to know what I’m dealing with here.”
“We aren’t exactly sure what happened,” Captain Jones admitted with reluctance. “But I cannot stress to you the importance of not alarming our guests.”
Ah, that was it. They had considered not even calling me over, hoping to sweep this bionic situation under the proverbial rug. Well, not on my watch. He’d survived. He needed medical attention. They’d just have to learn to trust me.
It was only then that I noticed that the C-wing of the docking bay was completely empty.
No guests leaving or arriving, no staff members milling about.
Not even a single cleaning drone buzzing along the floor.
The slightly more enormous twin stood above me with his arms crossed and a brow cocked, his vibe saying, That’s right, Doc.
And I can clear your ass out, too, if you step out of line.
“Can you save him?” Captain Jones asked, kneeling beside me.
Rolling my neck until it cracked, I said, “I can try.”
I clasped two thermal generators around the bionic’s wrist and ankle, passing the other two to Captain Jones to apply to the bionic’s other side.
“How long was he out there?” I asked, misting three shots of hyper-roids into the bionic’s nostrils, watching as his limbs began to shrink, his swollen hands and feet deflating while the medicine went to work.
“The Vcams recorded him walking into the airlock sixteen minutes ago,” said the slightly less enormous of the twins.
Sixteen minutes. I shook my head. Nobody could survive sixteen minutes in space without a suit, not even a bionic. “How long ago did you find him?”
“Rax saw him floating out there from the B-wing.” Captain Jones pointed an exasperated finger at the twins. “Then these two idiots strapped themselves together and opened the airlock so they could grab him and reel him back in.”
“You went out there?” I gaped at the twins, both still standing with their arms crossed, both glowering in matching form-fitting black shirts and tactical pants. “Without suits?”
“Rax went out,” the slightly bigger one said, shrugging.
“Morgath pulled us back in,” replied Rax, shrugging in a carbon-copy maneuver.
“Can you talk about this later?” The air around Captain Jones sparked with impatience. “After the bionic is stable?”
He’d made a good point, so I grabbed a stim from my bag, bit off the cap, and slammed it into the bionic’s slowly shrinking thigh.
After watching the bionic shiver and shake through thirty minutes of questioning from the captain and the twins, I’d insisted on taking him back to the med bay for proper care.
His name was Darius. He was a generation twenty-seven, worked in a high-end boutique on deck twenty-two and had absolutely no worldsly notion of how he’d ended up floating alone in the big black void.
“Is your vision returning?” I asked, holding Darius’s eyes open one at a time to squeeze a thin line of neoGen ointment under his lids.
Blinking a few times, he said, “Not yet.”
“How about your tongue?”
“It feels like I licked a circuit board.”
“Open,” I requested, trying not to wince at what I saw when he did.
Not that he could see me, but it just seemed rude considering all he’d been through.
“The radiation singed your eyes and burned the saliva off your tongue,” I told him.
“You’ve got some blisters, and your taste buds might be off for a few days, but you’ll live.
You really have no idea how you got out there?
Were you sleepwalking?” I’d never heard of bionics experiencing episodes of sleepwalking, but their programming didn’t allow for self-harm.
So he couldn’t have vented himself into space on purpose.
“I don’t remember.” His voice was thin. “It’s like the entire night has been wiped from my memory. Is that what happens when a bionic sleepwalks? Like the memories aren’t encoded at all?”
“I don’t exactly know,” I answered honestly. “Do you remember anything? Anything at all?”
Wringing his trembling hands in his lap, he said, “There might be something. I remember hearing a word. Maybe a name. Something like”—his brows pinched together—“gundon?”
“Gundon?” I repeated.
“Or maybe…Golgundon.” His shoulders inched toward his ears, his hazel eyes rising to meet mine. “No. Golgunda. It was Golgunda.”
The skin along the back of my neck prickled, like an icy wind had just blown past us. “Do you know what it means?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. I’d never heard it before.” Closing his eyes for a moment, he said, “And I can’t find anything about the word on the Vnet or the Shared Bionic Network.”
“Can you run a systems scan—”
“I already have.” Color started to return to his face. “All my systems are running optimally. I haven’t been sleeping well, though,” he admitted. “They have me working double shifts at the store, and I’ve been wrecked.”
I reached out to squeeze his shoulder. “LunaCorp works you all too hard.” Bionics worked fifteen-hour shifts, sometimes even longer. Every single day. “It’s barbaric.”
Darius’s laughter was heavy with exhaustion. “It’s just the way it is.”
“You may be right.” I turned around to open one of my med drawers. “But it doesn’t make it okay. Here.” I handed him a metered dose inhaler. “This is SomaMist. Inhale two puffs before bed every night. It’ll help you sleep.”
Rotating the puffer in his hand, he asked, “Will this keep me from trying to walk through an airlock again?”
I gave him an encouraging smile. “Two puffs of that will keep you from noticing a herd of oorthorses stampeding across your bed.”
“Thanks, Doc. This whole thing has me pretty freaked out.”
Considering how much adrenaline still charged through my bloodstream, I could only imagine how he felt.
Which, I realized, I didn’t have to. Because he told me.
He was honest, open. Elanie had been honest and open too.
Maybe I could treat bionics effectively even though I couldn’t read them.
Maybe all I had to do was ask questions and listen.
“It would have freaked me out too.” I walked him to the door, making sure he was steady on his feet. “Try to get some sleep. I’ll check in on you in a couple of days. And please don’t hesitate to comm me if you need anything.”
Two hours later, after watching and rewatching the ship’s Vlog footage of Darius walking dead-eyed into the docking bay, disabling the safety protocols, and stepping into the airlock, my nerves had finally faded enough to try to get some sleep before sunrise sim.
But the second I closed my eyes, my VC buzzed with an incoming text message.
Groaning, I opened the message in case it was Darius.
Elanie: Hello, Dr. Semson. Can I come see you sooner than next week? Something happened tonight.
Strangely relieved to hear from her, I texted back.
Sem: Are you okay?
she commed.
“I am now,” I muttered to my empty pod, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.
I grunted. Not sure why.
she stated, solid as granite.
Swinging my legs over the edge of my bed, I scanned through my schedule in my VC.
I’d saved the slot for Mr. Lagerta’s inevitable return.
If he fornicated his back out of alignment again, this time, he’d just have to make do with a cryopatch and some anti-nox tabs.
Then, after a beat, she asked,
I sat up straighter, trying to remember the last time anyone had asked me how I was doing and coming up short. It wasn’t a question physicians were routinely asked. Probably because we were too busy asking it first.
The truth was, I wasn’t all right. Not even close.
But I couldn’t necessarily tell her that I’d just brought a bionic back from the brink after he’d vented himself into space.
I couldn’t tell her that time had stalled from one second to the next when I’d thought the bionic might have been her.
I definitely couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t sure I’d been all right for years.
Not since the incident. Not since I’d irrevocably changed my life and derailed my career with the push of a button.
All I could tell her was
she commed before I could thank her for asking.
Maybe I was delirious, but when she clicked off the comm, I actually laughed out loud.