Warhammer: After 18 years, finally an end

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Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

hopterque posted:

Yeah I'm not sure why anyone still thinks the Tau are particularly good.

They pretend to be good but they're really just a bunch of brain washed slave races serving whatever the ethereals are.

Xenology explicitly spells out that the Ethereals were created by the Eldar to control the Tau through pheromone-based mind control organs derived from an insectoid alien species. Exactly why is left unclear, of course.

One of the factors that does let the Tau behave as a nicer, kinder, more enlightened group than the Imperium is the fact that they don't have to worry about Chaos. They can afford to be nicer because they pay no price for not doing so. The Inquisition and the Black Ships are horrible and brutal, but if they aren't around, rogue psykers run wild and then you've got demons rampaging through your population. Since the Tau essentially don't have a Warp presence, don't produce psykers, and aren't targets for possession, they can ignore this whole issue.

# ¿ Jul 25, 2013 15:29

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 07:28

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

I tried to re-read the Night Lords trilogy a little while ago, and gave up on it. Not that it isn't well-written, because it most definitely is, but because the protagonists are so irredeemably evil that I couldn't get through it a second time. I finished it the first time because I wanted to find out what happened, and every fight they got into, I just wanted them all to die, despite how well-characterized they were.

ADB is a great writer, but I hope his upcoming Chaos-oriented books focus on characters who are motivated by something more than simple desire to torture people to death.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2013 20:02

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Nephilm posted:

I think it's a fair assessment to not enjoy ADB's Night Lord books because the protagonists being evil, but yeah, "motivated by something more than simple desire to torture" is the opposite of what the book aims (and succeeds) to portray - they're complex individuals with diverse personalities and motivations, for the most part clinging to what gives them a sense of identity.

What you're saying mirrors the position Talos holds, but every other Night Lords character in the books is quite emphatic about him being wrong. Talos may think there's some greater goal to his deeds, while the rest don't try to disguise that they do it for pure enjoyment. And I never accused them of being one-dimensional torture machines, they're clearly three-dimensional torture machines.

# ¿ Aug 25, 2013 19:11

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Khizan posted:

IIRC, it went like this:

1) Magnus does his poo poo.
2) Emperor sends orders to Russ to bring Magnus in
3) Horus intercepts the orders and changes them to "murder the gently caress out of those dudes"
4) Russ gets his orders to murder the gently caress out of those dudes, not knowing that the orders had been hosed with
5) Russ murders the gently caress out of those dudes

It wasn't mentioned in Prospero Burns because that book is from a Space Wolf POV and they didn't know that the orders had been tampered with.

Prospero Burns also has its absolutely brilliant long-con plot twist, with the whole concept of Ibn Rustah being planted among the Wolves with the goal of making them think he's a puppet of Magnus, when in fact he's a sham puppet of Chaos itself, so that when Russ tries to communicate with Magnus through him, he gets no reply to his last-chance offer of surrender. All that work getting him where he needed to be, and it paid off perfectly.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 22:33

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Nephilm posted:

(re: Space Wolf geneseed carrying canine genetic components)

Wait, what? Where is this stated or implied?

It is explicitly stated in Deliverance Lost.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2013 17:18

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

VanSandman posted:

I will read then subsequently mock all fanfiction submitted to me... then I will offer up my bad writings in response. The ASOIAF thread does it, why not us?

Back in the day, there was 40K fanfiction in the ASOIAF thread :shepface:

# ¿ Nov 15, 2013 01:28

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

I wrote it. Glad you enjoyed it, it was in truth tremendously fun to write.

I need to get back into writing.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2013 01:39

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

I think it's actually a slight variation on what you say. For both the psyker and the sorcerer, their power itself is derived from the Warp (even for Fenrisian psykers), but the psyker manipulates that power using their own will, whereas the sorcerer uses a daemon to assist them. In A Thousand Sons it was made very clear that the Thousand Sons were sorcerers, because their "Tutelaries" were straight-up daemons.

That's a good point about the Sons being the teachers for the other legions' Librarians, and thus the concern for widespread corruption.

# ¿ Nov 16, 2013 00:07

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

^^^ It was indeed a Dark Heresy tie-in, and you can practically hear the dice rolling during some of the sequences. The characters are all archetypes straight out of the rulebook's classes section, too. Despite this, they weren't awful, although they did seem kind of lazy. Mitchell gives me the impression that he could write better stuff, but instead just goes :effort:

Have to say that I prefer his characterizations of the Adeptus Mechanicus more than anyone else's, though. They are absolutely perfect.

Also, I encountered the word "clavier" at work today. I may have uttered a wet leopard-growl.

# ¿ Nov 17, 2013 03:27

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

hopterque posted:

Uh, there were "wolves" before Leman Russ came, remember that humans had been living there for ages before Leman Russ came in the early imperium/pre crusade years.
I think the theory is that the "wolves" are people mutated by dark age of technology bioengineers or something back during the original original settlement of Fenris.

e: You've got to remember that the coming of the Imperium to Fenris is pretty recent history in the Heresy days, the human settlement by the old pre-strife human empire was at least five thousand years or so before that and that's where the "wolves" come from.

Yes, it's exactly this. Fenris was settled during the Dark Age of Technology, and the genetic engineers of that time created the Canis Helix to give the settlers the ability to survive in that very harsh environment. For a portion of the recipients, the Helix caused them to turn into wolves, or possibly give birth to wolves, that isn't specified (for good reason :nms:

). But regardless, the wolves are descended from human settlers who overexpressed the Canis Helix, not from failed Marine recruits - those are the Wulfen.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2014 14:01

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Clockwork Rocktapus posted:

At this threads high recommendation I've picked up and have started reading the Ciaphas Cain novels. Can someone give me a primer on the Tau? Most of the other races in 40k seem bent on destruction or are just omega dicks but the Tau don't seem too bad from what I've seen in Cain. Are they also secretly dicks?

The Tau can't really be said to be anything, considering their whole society is a puppet of the Eldar. In their codex, it's described that they were an extremely warlike and self-destructive species in their pre-modern era, to the point that they brought themselves to the brink of extinction in the equivalent of the late-Renaissance/early gunpowder era. At that point, the Ethereals popped into existence, seemingly from thin air, and the Tau became a unified, cohesive, progress-oriented culture overnight.

The book Xenology explains that the Ethereals are a creation of the Eldar, and that they're mind-controlling the rest of the Tau through some kind of pheromonal :techno:

that the Eldar stole from a race of sentient insectoids at the far edge of the galaxy. So really, the Tau do whatever the Eldar want them to. And everyone knows how considerate the Eldar are of other species when something they care about is at stake.

Farsight and his followers being the exception, of course, as long as they manage to stay away from any Ethereals.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2014 15:33

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Spuckuk posted:

I can't be the only one who thought the Night Lords trilogy was kinda..lovely.

I spent the whole of three books hoping I was missing something and there was any possible reason to be rooting for Talos 'Killfuck Soulshitter' and his band of one note goons.

I think reading Gaunts Ghosts and Eisenhorn before any of the other BL stuff may have been a mistake.

I disagree about Talos and his crew being one-note, but I have to mostly concur. It wasn't that the writing was lovely, so much as the book made me feel like a lovely person for reading it. It was like reading a story about a very personable and often hilarious band of einsatzgruppen rampaging on the Eastern Front.

Yes, I know it's silly escapist fiction, but still, Talos et al. are very evil.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2014 07:23

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

I've written some vignettes (or very short short stories, I dunno how best to classify them) in the 40K setting, focusing mostly on absurdity played straight and dark humor. There is a noticeable lack of bolters. Would anyone be interested in me posting these here? I want to write some more, and getting some feedback would help provide motivation.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 00:30

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

jadebullet posted:

I wouldn't mind reading them.

Alright, here's the first one.

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. No, I don't mean the Monsignor Jeremias, not directly; he deserved every bit of the madman's reputation he earned, sure, but he never scared me on a personal level. I never even met him, not face-to-face, just saw him at times when he delivered his addresses, and he, no doubt, had not the slightest idea that I even existed.

I can blame the Monsignor for everything I went through, though. He'd held the Warrant for several years, at the time this all started, and everyone on the ship with an open ear knew he was addled. If his madness hadn't consistently led to successful ventures, he would have had real trouble on his hands, but since he kept the profits rolling in, everyone with any say in the matter was willing to let him keep going. And it was on one of those oh-so-profitable runs out into the barely charted regions at the edge of the Astronomican's light that he ran into my new boss.

In those days, I was the chief orderly for Doctor Bisko, the head of the ship's medicae service, supervising the servitor assistants and helping him whenever he needed another set of hands. Bisko was good at what he did, but he'd been shipboard for a long time, and had finally grown tired of it. When we made our final port of call before the outward run, at Telentus Prime, he resigned his post and took a shuttle planetside. He was off to enjoy his retirement, and Monsignor Jeremias didn't seem especially concerned; rather than putting out a call for a replacement, he took the ship out into the dark. I wasn't happy, but no-one asked my opinion.

With Bisko gone, I didn't have much work to do. The ship's other doctors had their own work suites, their own assistants, so I served as little more than a housekeeper for the four-month first leg of the run; if there had been an emergency, the suite might have been needed, so I kept it ready, day after day. I'm not sure where we ended up; some dead-end feral planet where the Monsignor managed to acquire an improbable volume of precious metals and gemstones, but that was always his way. And it was on the day we left orbit for the next part of the voyage that I met my new boss. It wasn't just wealth that Jeremias had picked up planetside, apparently.

When I came into the surgical suite a half-hour before the first-shift bell, he was already there. That was the first surprise - there'd been no-one inside the suite except myself, every single day of the voyage. The servitors had been put in hibernation, a tech-adept had eased the diagnostic auspex into its own slumber, and I'd grown used to being alone. To see someone else standing there, peering at a rack of surgical equipment under a sterile film, caught me off-guard.

The surprises that followed made the first one seem insignificant.

I thought at first that the stranger was augmented; he was tall, maybe a shade under two meters, but unnaturally thin. Tech-adepts get that look sometimes, when they've replaced enough of themselves with metal. He was wearing a long robe, cut approximately like the physician's coat that Doctor Bisko used to wear, and at first glance I thought it was pure white, as Bisko's coat had been. Later, I noticed that it was shot through with silver threads, which formed symbols I didn't recognize, but in that first meeting, once I saw his face I stopped paying attention to his coat. It wasn't a human face. I've seen my share of faces before that have been ruined beyond recognition, by mechanical accidents or violent intent, and none of them were as terrible to look upon as his. It was close enough to human that all the differences just stood out more - two eyes, but eyes that were too large, too bright as they flickered across the scene in front of him. Ears that slanted up to peaks, sharp as a hound's. A mouth too thin, lips almost indistinguishable from the surrounding skin. And the teeth behind those lips, predatory, a mouth full of needles and razors. I saw those teeth when he first spoke, and the image has not left my mind.

"Be welcome. Your shipmaster needed a new chief physician. I was available."

That Jeremias had had dealings with xeno-kind was an open secret among the ship's crew. He'd made barely-veiled references to it in the past, and why not? It was within the mandate of his Warrant, and the profits to be gained from such an otherwise inaccessible market were vast. But it was one thing to know in an abstract sense, and another to come face-to-face with a breathing example. My instinctive fear of the alien himself was joined, a heartbeat later, by the fear that I would be tainted by association - unlike the shipmaster, I had no Warrant legitimizing my contact with a non-human.

The alien had paused after his first utterance. His speech was clear, with only a trace of an accent, and his voice was clipped and precise. He waited, motionless, watching me come to terms with his existence. "I have taken an inventory of your equipment here," he continued after a moment, "and it is adequate, although I will be making some changes. Shipmaster Jeremias has, as part of my contract, designated this facility as the principal location for treatment of traumatic injuries among crewmembers, and I received an alert just before your arrival that one is on the way. Minor injury, a laceration from a snapped cable." I nodded, not ready to attempt speech just yet. "You will assist me, as you did with my predecessor. I dislike your kind's servitors, so do not activate them. We will work hands-on." There was the barest tinge of anticipation as he said those last words - the first emotional inflection I'd heard in his otherwise dry tone.

I worked my tongue around inside my mouth and finally managed to speak. "What should I call you, sir?"

"My name is -" followed by a string of syllables - I counted nine but I know there were more that I missed.

Sparing me from the need to try to imitate him, the atrium door slid open, admitting a servitor pushing a gurney, on which a young man was clutching a bloodstained cloth around his left forearm. A medicae corpsman paced beside the gurney, and began calling out her report as soon as the door opened. "Twenty-year-old male, no prior history, was working on a hoist when a tension line snapped - left forearm laceration, anterior compartment, into the muscle but no arterial damage, bleeding is controlled."

The alien moved, so quickly that he was a blur, but when he came to a halt beside the gurney he once again stood as poised as a statue. He locked his eyes on me. "Throw me equipment as I designate. And I do mean throw." He glanced down at the patient. "I will fix your injury. Hold still. Bi-hook retractor and a vessel blotter."

His hands moved faster than I could follow. He had the injured man's arm unwrapped and strapped down across a work-tray before I could pull his requested tools off the rack. I threw him the retractor, then the blotter, and he caught both with bare flickers of his hand, seeming to not even look towards me. The tools descended on the patient's arm before he could begin to scream - but scream he did, as the alien picked through the mess that the snapped line had made of his forearm. The small oozing vessels he clotted off with the blotter, and in under a minute he had exposed the wound like an anatomical model. Dr. Bisko was a fine surgeon, but I'd never seen him do anything so thoroughly, nor work with even a quarter of the speed.

Our patient wasn't in a position to appreciate the alien's technical skills; with no anesthetic, it was all he could do to suck air through his clenched teeth. "Hold on just a moment, sir, and I'll give him a shot of heptacaine."

"Do not," the alien replied, throwing me a glance that stopped me from making an argument of it. "I dislike anesthetics. You will administer no such drugs under any circumstance, unless I give an explicit instruction."

"Collagen-bonder, then?" I offered, seeing that he'd finished the wound exploration and should be ready to close.

"Bonding agents interfere with the optimal healing process; they are used because they are easy, not effective. I take more pride in my work than that. I will need two meters of number-three dissolvable microsuture."

Number-three microsuture is only two steps above the smallest we've got; it's normally used for repairing blood vessels, not skin. The unfortunate crewman made a horrible ongoing groan as the alien set to work, fingers moving with insectile speed. With growing rows of perfect stitches, the man's arm resumed its proper shape. After mere minutes, the alien twitched a final knot into place and stepped back, leaving his patient to sob in relief.

"That will heal beautifully," he said. And I could see that he was right - the suture lines were as clean and well-sealed as any I'd ever seen. Although the shape of the closed wound...it was odd, seemingly more complicated than it should need to be, with some of the rows of suture being short and staccato, others long and looping back against themselves. It went against the image of perfect efficiency that I was gathering from the alien.

He must have seen the confusion on my face. "You examine the scar-lines?" I nodded. "I could have saved seventy, perhaps seventy-five seconds had I done something more simple," he commented, as the servitor began to wheel the stretcher away in response to a flick of his fingers, "but it was my first case in my new role on this ship. I wanted it to be special." He beckoned me closer, lowering his voice. I didn't especially want to get close to him, but I did, fearful of what offense he might take if I refused.

"I closed the wound to form the symbols of my written name," he whispered, and the edge of his lipless mouth twitched in what might have been a smile.

I never did figure out how to pronounce said name. I ended up calling him Doc Eldar.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 03:01

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

FrantzX posted:

A Dark Elder slumming on a Rogue Trader ship as a doctor, just for the novelty of it?

Yes, that's exactly what I had in mind. Not the most groundbreaking concept, but I took it and ran with it.

jadebullet posted:

I like it. I didn't really get as much of a Dark Eldar vibe from it, as much as I did an Eldar Corsair feel. He seems more arrogant than sadistic. Plus, I doubt that a Dark Eldar could sustain themselves on that little pain.

He's a Dark Eldar, I just have no desire to write any truly sadistic stuff. He is meant to be a paragon of arrogance, though, and I do appreciate the feedback!

Here's another one:

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. On one of the Monsignor Jeremias' voyages into uncharted space, he'd set aside even more of his sanity than was usual for him, and hired an alien to replace the recently retired chief physician of the ship, Doctor Bisko. I don't know how he'd come into contact with the alien, nor what he'd promised him as payment, but it was enough to make the creature take the bargain. I had been Bisko's assistant, and so the alien inherited me, along with a fully equipped medicae suite and the role of chief trauma surgeon. I can't tell you his name, and I do mean can't, not won't - I was never able to pronounce those vile xeno syllables. For lack of a better name, I called him Doc Eldar.

The doctor was standing - he always stood, unless he was kneeling or crouching - at the suite's equipment bench, preparing one of his trauma rolls. I was at the far end of the bench, a pile of medical supplies in front of me, trying to figure out how to best fit them into the emergency scene box so that I would be able to retrieve them with an adequate measure of speed. For the xeno, "adequate speed" meant a couple of seconds, ideally less.

There were a lot of things that needed to go into the scene box. Doc Eldar traveled light, with a couple of trauma rolls tucked inside his robe, but an emergency situation occurring outside of our medical suite would likely demand a lot more than that. The scene box was meant to carry fluids and blood-replacements, airway tools, ventilation devices, wound dressings, and a variety of pharmacologicals, drugs that could set a heart into a racing frenzy or slow it to a crawl, drugs of all varieties...except analgesics. Doc Eldar had a loathing for painkillers, and refused to allow any to be administered to his patients.

"You should sling the box beneath your left arm," the xeno said in his dry, clipped voice. "A proper harness will let you use both hands." He spun his completed trauma roll into a tight cylinder and it vanished, presumably into one of his sleeves. Then he turned to the rack of bandages and began pulling out lengths of the heaviest material we stocked, the kind meant for wrapping over a cast.

The scene box was coming together. Synth-blood in the deepest compartment, since it was generally the last thing to be needed. Plain fluids above that, alongside the heavier wound dressings. Light dressings and airway gear above, and drugs right on top, with a single small bag of fluid as a carrier. I didn't have to worry about vascular access needles - Doc Eldar carried those in his trauma rolls, and could have two in a patient in as many heartbeats, if not faster.

"A reasonable arrangement." The alien was standing at my elbow, too close for comfort. Of course, being on the same ship was too close for comfort. "Raise your arms, so I can measure you for this harness."

The times when Doc Eldar laid hands on someone without causing pain were few and far between. But he merely ran his fingertips around my shoulders, barely perceptible. "You have a great fear of me," he commented.

"Yes, sir." How else are you supposed to respond to a statement like that?

"I mean no harm to you, nor any of your shipmates," he said, stepping back and turning to the pile of bandage material. His knife appeared in his hand, and he began slicing the bandages into precise strips.

Doc Eldar used only one cutting implement. He had removed the trays of scalpels from the surgical suite, and did everything with his knife. The blade was about as long as his hand, slightly curved, single-edged and with a tip like a needle. No matter what the situation, if cutting was called for, that knife would be in his hand. In moments, he had shaped the bandages, and the knife vanished once more.

"I have done some reading on your human philosophy of medicine," he continued. "It is strange. The base principle is 'First, do no harm.'"

"That makes perfect sense," I said, as the alien began stitching the harness together, using a heavy suture that I had never seen him use on a patient. "Above all, you should avoid making the problem worse."

"But why would doing harm even be mentioned? I would never do harm if my intent was to perform medical treatment."

"You don't use anesthetic." Even as I was saying the words, I realized that they might be a terrible mistake, but the alien took them in stride.

"That is not harm. No-one ever dies from pain, take it from someone who knows. People have died from anesthetics - they suppress the natural responses of the body, responses intended to keep the body alive through times of greatest stress. Here, put this on." He handed me the completed harness. The stitching could have been servitor-wrought, such was its precision.

"Anesthetics are part of the standard of care accepted by every other physician on this ship." If the xeno would tolerate my disagreement, as he seemed willing to, then I would speak my mind.

"And all of them have seen patients suffer poor outcomes. Many have had patients die under their care. I receive a copy of every medical report written on this ship, I know the statistics. And my statistics are perfect."

The new harness held the scene box at the ideal position, and at the same time distributed the weight more comfortably than I would have thought possible. And the alien was right - it was impossible to argue with his results. I was trying to think of an argument in favor of anesthetic that he might accept, but our time of discussion was interrupted.

"I hear weapons fire," the alien said, cocking his head slightly.

"What?" I had flinched at the news. "Out in the halls?" Perhaps some faction among the crew had decided to end the xeno's presence shipboard.

"No. Ship's guns. Sporadic fire...and now a broadside."

I felt the broadside myself, not as a sound but as shudder through the deckplates.

"It could be an attempt at piracy," I said. We were out in wild space, coasting through an uninhabited star system that boasted an asteroid belt rich in valuable metals. Monsignor Jeremias had been picking at the densest concentrations for several weeks now, and any forge world would pay a tasty price for the ore that was filling the hold. These were conditions that could inspire a shipmaster to consider piracy if another ship was spotted.

The xeno nodded. "I see. Then I suspect we shall be needed soon."

Soon was a relative word. The volleys continued for the better part of an hour, before the klaxon sounded to alert that a boarding action was in progress. We had moved to a staging point with a collection of other medical personnel and some of the reserves of the ship's fighting complement; they all made a determined effort to stay as far from Doc Eldar as possible. After perhaps another five minutes, a gendarme officer gestured to us, while pointedly keeping his eyes fixed elsewhere.

"You're up!" he called. "Reports are coming back, we've got some wounded but the scene is secure enough. One is bad off, needs immediate treatment. Follow him!" he pointed at another gendarme, who immediately took off at the double.

Doc Eldar matched the soldier's speed effortlessly. With the weight of the scene box, it wasn't so effortless for me, but thanks to the new harness it was more manageable than it had been on previous responses. We made our way out to the skin of the ship, to the open mouth of a boarding tube.

The alien glanced at me. "This ship initiated the boarding."

I shrugged. "A successful attempt at piracy." It was always an option, depending on the Monsignor's mood.

The doctor said no more, but I thought I caught an approving look on his face before he flung himself down the boarding tube. I bounced off the walls a few times during the null-grav transit, as any human does; the xeno, to my lack of surprise, floated cleanly down the center of the tube, making a perfect touchdown at the transition back to gravity.

The other ship had clearly not been a match for ours; down several hallways I saw sealed blast doors, with the red telltales warning of hard vacuum on the far side. Its security complement had likewise been overwhelmed by our troops, and we passed several corpses on the deck, none in the livery of the Monsignor.

We reached the scene where the gendarmes had taken losses - the defenders had erected a barricade at an intersection, defending it with las weapons and flechette guns, based on the marks I saw on the armor of the fallen. They'd killed three and injured two more, but they'd been overrun nevertheless; I saw stains on the walls and ceiling from incendiary grenades. I didn't look over the remains of the barricade to see what the grenades had left of the defenders.

Doc Eldar appraised the situation in an instant. "Priority one," he said, flicking a finger at a gendarme who had taken flechette hits to both legs, "and two," to the other, who had been hit in the belly with a las shot. He dropped to his knees, trauma roll unfurling across the deck. "Hold still. You are safe now," he said. It was perhaps the least reassuring such statement I had ever heard, and even as he spoke, he had unfastened the armor from the man's right arm. Hands flicking between his trauma roll and the patient's arm, he started a pair of large-bore intravenous lines. "Fluid and synth, he has arterial bleeding from his left femoral." I'd had time to open the scene box, but only barely.

The gendarme who'd led us in was backing away, looking queasy. "This...this area's secure. I'm going to join up with the front team."

Doc Eldar paid him no attention. Nor did I, as I obeyed the doctor and got the lines connected. He had stripped the armor off the soldier's thigh and was probing into the wound with a pair of slender forceps; it said a lot about how much blood the man had already lost that he was barely able to struggle as the alien did this.

"There." He locked the forceps on something deep within the wound - he couldn't have seen into the narrow channel, must have done it entirely by feel. "Artery clamped. Final repair can wait, he is now priority two." He turned his attention to the other gendarme, who was faintly moaning as he clutched his belly wound.

I heard a clatter of boots approaching from a side hallway. More gendarmes, I thought, as I inflated a pressure infuser around the bag of synth-blood.

Doc Eldar had moved. One moment he was kneeling, cutting through the flank webbing that held his patient's torso armor together, and the next he was gone. I looked up. The sound I'd heard hadn't been gendarmes. It was a pair of men in the half-armor that the victim ship's complement wore. Both carried flechette guns.

The alien stood in front of them, hands open and empty. "We are non-combatants," he said.

"So were we," one of the men growled. My adrenaline was soaring - fixated on the flechette gun in his hand, I could see every detail. I saw his finger convulse against the trigger.

Doc Eldar became a blur. Even in my adrenaline surge I couldn't fully track him. He lunged, seizing the barrel of the flechette gun and wrenching it upwards, its spray of darts pinging harmlessly off the ceiling. Then he shoved the armsman, sending the man staggering away, now without his gun. The alien dropped the weapon to the deck and was perfectly still, waiting.

The armsmen exchanged glances. The one who still had his gun looked scared, but the other just looked furious. He drew a long combat knife with a spiked knuckle-guard from a sheath at the small of his back and hunched into a guard posture. The second armsman sighted carefully with his gun.

This time, the xeno didn't wait. He dropped into a crouch - the armsman fired his flechettes too late, the burst passing over the doctor's head - then sprang. He seemed to flow in beside the knife-man, brushing aside a wild stab, and there was a horrible cracking sound. Doc Eldar moved on, twisting the gun out of the other man's hand, this time accompanied by a staccato popping.

Both men fell to their knees, screaming. The first man's elbow was bent the wrong way; the other seemed to have had all the fingers of his gun-hand dislocated.

"There," the alien said. "That was in keeping with your human philosophy. I did them no harm. At first."

I'm posting these in the order they were written, but the writing was fairly spaced out, I didn't knock these out one after another.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2014 04:02

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Thank you all, glad you're enjoying. If you have any specific commentary on the stories, my writing, or how to improve it, I'd be glad to hear it. Here's another one:

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. This was during the time I served on the ship of the Monsignor Jeremias, but I'm not referring to the Monsignor himself; he was just as mad as you've heard, I can guarantee that, but it was one of his...employees, I suppose is accurate...that was the source of my fear. After the retirement of Doctor Bisko, the Monsignor needed a trauma surgeon. What he got was an alien. A humanoid alien who was without question the most effective physician I've ever seen - and the last one I'd want working on me, in all but the most dire of situations. Being unable to pronounce the syllables of his xeno name, I called him Doc Eldar.

To the surgical suite where we spent most of our duty hours, a package had been delivered. It was a large polymer box, stamped with the emblem of the ship's Mechanicus enclave, and a servitor left it wordlessly at the main door. I hadn't been expecting it, but clearly the alien had; he lifted it onto one of the equipment benches and flicked open the catches holding on the lid.

I looked inside, and saw rows of gleaming steel needles, sheathed in transparent polymer tubes. They were intravenous lines, built like the ones we already had in plenty, except -

"Those are huge," I said.

The largest gauge of IV needle we had was perhaps the size of the core of a graphite stylus. The standard lines - standard prior to Doc Eldar's arrival, at least - were considerably smaller. Some of these needles were almost the size of a whole stylus.

"Fluid resuscitation saves lives," the xeno replied. "If you double the size of a tube, you can increase the flow through that tube by a factor of sixteen." By this point, I'd given up trying to identify the ghost of an accent that touched his speech; I'd hoped to figure out where he'd learned Gothic, but it'd probably been the same place he'd learned human anatomy and physiology. And given how he manipulated those, I'd rather not think much more on the subject.

Doctor Bisko might have put a line that size into someone's jugular - with sedative, and a bio-auspex to guide him to his target. I knew the xeno would never deign to use an auspex, much less sedative, but I thought at least having these available might stop him from inserting two or three of our current large-bore lines, if one of these would handle a greater infusion rate.

More the fool I was. The first patient I saw him use them on got one in each arm, with yelps of pain as they went in. I will say, they were amazing when someone needed blood replacement, whether natural or synth.

"Integrate an assortment of these into the scene box," he ordered. He snatched a half-dozen for himself, which would go into his trauma rolls. Those strips of cloth held needles, forceps, vessel clips, and the scant few other items that Doc Eldar considered essential. The scene box, which it was my job to carry, held a much wider variety of equipment.

Other than the two of us, the surgical suite was empty. There had been one patient brought in a little over an hour ago, a man who'd had a finger amputated in a mechanical accident. The finger had been retrieved and was largely intact, so the alien's response was entirely predictable: he strapped the man's arm to a work table and reattached the finger, using bone-spikes and suture so thin it was barely visible to the naked eye. Anesthetic played no role in the surgery; Doc Eldar claimed he didn't want anything to interfere with testing the finger's touch sense, to verify proper nerve reattachment. The patient didn't scream much, other than when the spikes went in. The xeno finished a surgery that would have taken Doctor Bisko two or three hours in eighteen minutes, and I cleaned the surgical table, ready for the next case.

The next case, as it turned out, never made it to the table.

The emergency chime went off, followed by a buzzing voice on the overhead vox: "Surgical team to delivery room 3, stat." Doc Eldar was out the door by the third word, and I slung the scene box over my shoulder and followed as quickly as I could.

Our surgical suite was part of a larger medicae complex, sectioned off by bulkheads from the rest of the ship. It was the primary hospital site on the ship, buried in the hull beneath the bridge tower, and contained multiple suites for emergency and routine surgeries, several intensive-care units, and an obstetric ward, where many of the ship's void-born were delivered. On a vessel the size of the Monsignor's trading ship, there were a fair many of these, and the obstetrics department had its own set of surgical rooms. Emergencies during the delivery process were rare, thankfully, but when they occurred, they threw everyone into a frenzy of action.

I was breathing hard when I caught up to the xeno. He'd run into the patient and her team in the hallway, just outside the surgical delivery room, and brought them to a halt with an upraised hand. "Status," he said. The woman on the gurney appeared to be in her thirties or so, hugely pregnant, face tight and nervous but looking stable, not in acute danger.

"Healthy, term pregnancy, laboring well and then the cord prolapsed," the senior nurse replied.

Cord prolapse would shut off blood flow to the infant. The mother might be fine, but the child would die if not sectioned immediately. Doc Eldar's eyes were locked on the patient's distended abdomen, his head swiveling minutely side to side.

"We need to get in the -" the nurse began.

"No time. Fetal heart rate below sixty." He flicked his eyes to meet mine long enough to say one word. "Ventilate."

I reached for the latch on the scene box. Doc Eldar moved.

He crossed the distance to the side of the gurney in a lunge, trauma roll unfurling in one hand, the other twitching a syringe free of its loop in the cloth. The alien carried only the barest variety of drugs, and I knew which one he'd drawn: the fastest-acting paralytic we had available. He jabbed the syringe into the side of the patient's neck and slammed in the drug, and I knew he'd undoubtedly gone straight into the carotid artery. Right to the brain, near-immediate onset of paralysis.

I'd barely had time to open the box's lid. I was reaching for the ventilator mask - the paralytic would render the patient unable to breathe in moments. The alien twitched aside the patient's gown, and his knife appeared in his hand. The nurses, momentarily stunned by his flurry of movement, were just now starting to clear the space around the gurney.

The fastest human surgeon I'd ever seen was an obstetrician, Doctor Hudessa, an older woman who'd been delivering babies by every possible method for decades and picked up a few beneficial augmentations along the way. A woman seven or eight months pregnant had been badly burned in a shuttle-fuel incident, and Doctor Bisko had been present to manage those injuries. Doctor Hudessa made the call that the baby had to come out first, based on the mother's unstable condition, and she had successfully extracted the child in just over two minutes from the time scalpel touched skin. At the time, I was stunned at how fast she'd been.

Doc Eldar made one slice. One slice that went through skin, abdominal muscle, and uterine wall. Blood and amniotic fluid gushed, and the only reason the patient wasn't screaming in agony was that the paralytic had made it impossible for her to do so. The xeno reached into the wound he'd made and seized the child, hauling it free by its neck and shoulders. By this time I'd reached the head of the gurney and pressed the ventilator mask over the patient's face, squeezing the oxygen bladder to deliver it into her lungs.

The infant in Doc Eldar's hands � a boy, I noticed � was a dusky blue, and his limbs hung horribly limp. The xeno twitched the umbilical cord around itself into a knot, single-handed, then brought the newborn up to his face. His near-lipless mouth locked over the infant's nose and mouth, and he sucked in, then spat aside the fluid and mucus that had filled the infant's airway. One thumb locked in place over the middle of the infant's chest and began pumping up and down with mechanical precision, and the xeno gave a breath that expanded the child's lungs. A second breath followed, a third, a fourth - and the infant answered with a cry. A weak cry, but it meant everything.

By this time, a nurse was approaching, holding a syringe that doubtlessly contained some kind of anesthetic agent. The paralytic had stopped muscle movement, but did nothing to affect consciousness. Our patient � our adult patient, that is � had experienced everything that had just been done.

"Do not," the xeno ordered. The child in his hands was shading from blue to pink, and beginning to wriggle his limbs. The nurse met his gaze, and backed away.

Doc Eldar slid over to stand beside the head of the bed. Blood was still flowing steadily from the wound that he'd left, but it had only been a matter of fifteen or twenty seconds since he�d made the slice; the overall blood loss was certainly no worse than any typical cesarean. He brushed my breathing mask away from the woman's face, and tilted her head so that she could see the infant he carried in his other hand, long fingers twined around its shoulders and the nape of its neck. "Congratulations," he said, voice devoid of emotion. "You have a son." He placed the infant, who was now squalling healthily, on his mother's chest and stooped, snatching several lengths of suture from the scene box at my feet. Returning to his work, he began repairing the wound, needle flashing lightning-quick.

One of the nurses bundled the child into a warming blanket and started performing their standard assessment. None of the blood smeared on his skin was his own; the xeno�s knife hadn't touched him. The senior nurse finally found her voice. "She was awake for that. What were you thinking?"

"I understand that humans find the birth process to be an important time of bonding between mother and child," he replied, finishing his suture line on the uterus and expertly maneuvering the organ into its proper place to begin closing the abdominal wall. "You would have preferred that I denied her this precious moment?"

Before I post any more I'll need to do some writing. I've got two more of these stories written, but both need a little touching up, and I think I want to write something totally fresh before going back and redoing them.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2014 03:33

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Again, thank you all for your feedback. I'm getting started on another little story right now, I may not finish it tonight but I'll at least knock out a chunk of it.

MrNemo posted:

Just chiming in to say keep going with the Doc Eldar stories if you've got more. Slice of life type stories are some of the most shorts in the 40K universe. You're making me wish I had the talent and patience to actually try writing some Alterna-K stories with a happy Imperium.

One of the stories I've written (and won't post just yet because I need to redo it a bit) is very slice-of-life and does some exploring into the kind of cultural practices that might develop among the Adeptus Mechanicus. Using Doc Eldar and his assistant as a window onto such things is very much part of my aim.

Arquinsiel posted:

Please post more, and consider contacting GW with samples of your work.

Is this possible? I thought GW was a really insular company and didn't take submissions. If it is, I totally will try, it'd be hilarious if I got published. I wouldn't even care if they paid, just having my name on something published would be awesome.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 01:36

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Arquinsiel posted:

It is such a loving shame that it ruled out being able to enter Doc Eldar

Aw man. I haven't been online much in the past couple of weeks and missed this, but when I saw the link I thought of this too. But welp.

On the upside, I do have a brand-new Doc Eldar story for those of you who are interested.

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. When I say terrifying, I don't mean the distant, impersonal sense of terror that you might expect to feel for someone much further up the chain of command; it's true that I had a vague fear of the shipmaster, the Monsignor Jeremias, but that's only natural when someone has the power to end your career - or worse - at a whim. But Jeremias never struck fear into me face-to-face, since I spent the whole of my time on his ship without encountering him in person. No, I was scared of my immediate superior, the chief surgeon of the ship - both because he paired consumate surgical skill with hideous cruelty, and because he wasn't human. Why a xeno would want to serve as surgeon on a rogue trader's ship, I do not know, but he did. His name was a polysyllabic tangle, which I was consistently unable to reproduce. I called him Doc Eldar.

I woke up feeling sick that day. Nothing concrete, just nausea and a vague pain in the middle of my abdomen. I tried to ignore it, doing my best to convince myself that it was just something I had eaten, but that explanation didn't stand up; the last night's dinner hadn't been anything unusual, and I trusted the ship's food supplies, more than I trusted those in port or even planetside, outside of a high-class eatery. The Monsignor demanded much from his crew, but with the outlandish profits his adventures routinely produced, even the lowest menials in cargo decks got to eat as much as they wanted. Granted, their food was mostly nutrient broth from the ship's microbial bio-reactors, or variously textured blocks of the same material, but nobody went hungry.

In the top echelon of the enlisted crew, which was the mess rating I was assigned, the food was genuinely good - we had bread with every meal which was never more than a couple of days old, and whenever we were in port over an agri-world we received real meat and fresh produce. One time, we spent eleven days in orbit over a farming colony, waiting for another ship to meet us and crossload some cargo, and I think until that point I'd never eaten so well for such a long span in my life. Even in deep space, we got greens from the hydroponics groves fairly often, and when we did eat nutrient blocks, at least they were served prepared as if they were real food.

I'm digressing about food, I know. It doesn't have anything to do with the story I said I'd tell. But I'd rather think about food than about what happened later.

Breakfast that morning got skipped - no, I'm not going into details about it, although I'm sure I would have enjoyed it if my stomach had been settled enough to make the attempt. I went straight to the hospital and set to my usual task of checking equipment and making sure our portable supplies were ready to go at an instant's notice.

Doc Eldar was staring at me from the moment I entered the trauma suite. It was a foregone conclusion that he'd be there when I arrived - as far as I knew, the only times he left the surgery sector were to respond to an emergency scene or on the personal summons of the Monsignor. "You appear to be uncomfortable," he said. There wasn't any inflection in his voice, but to be the target of that unblinking gaze made me break out in a cold sweat. As far as I could tell, there was one thing that the xeno truly loved, and that was committing surgery on a patient aware enough to scream.

"I'm fine," I replied, wishing above all else that I could mean it.

"You are not. You will see."

He was right.

There weren't very many cases brought in that morning, and what did come in was simple, nothing taking more than a few minutes. The most memorable one was a cargo handler who had lacerated the inside of his forearm deeply enough to nick the radial artery; a medic team brought him in with the bleeding controlled by a pressure bandage, and the xeno promptly unwrapped the wound and spread it open with a pair of mini-retractors, so that he could suture the artery back together as it pulsed and spurted. He had the vessel closed within four of the patient's adrenaline-rapid heartbeats, but by that point the man had already passed out at the sight of droplets of his blood flying to more than a meter above the operating table.

"There is a meeting scheduled for the senior officers," the xeno informed me as I was cleaning up after that patient had been wheeled away. "Jeremias has expressed concern that we are not setting a proper example of morality to the crew, and has prepared a seminar for us."

The Monsignor Jeremias, I probably don't need to remind you, had on more than one occasion commited acts of deep-space piracy out of boredom. It's a reflection of how accustomed I was to his madness that I took the xeno's new statement in stride. "What time will that be?" I asked. The pain in my abdomen had worsened throughout the morning, a suspicion of what it was was solidifying in my mind, and the thought of the xeno being occupied by a lecture from the Monsignor offered me an unexpected ray of hope that I could get someone else to fix the problem.

"Twenty minutes from now. The itinerary says it will last four and a half hours. During that time, Dr. Deiq will be the active surgeon for all less-than-critical cases."

Dr. Deiq was a longstanding member of the ship's medical staff, a man in late middle age with wirey salt-and-pepper hair and a beard to match. During Dr. Bisko's tenure as chief surgeon, he'd been one of the secondary trauma specialists; since Doc Eldar now operated solo on every trauma of any significance, Dr. Deiq mostly handled urgent and semi-urgent non-traumatic cases. It took real effort to keep from breaking into a grin - he would be able to fix me up in a matter of fifteen or twenty minutes, while the xeno was none the wiser.

"I have thought of a rearrangement that might benefit the scene box," the xeno said. "Look at this." He was standing next to the equipment bench that held the rectangular box, made of orange polymer, that was my constant companion on any response runs we made outside of the hospital complex.

I crossed the room to stand beside him and peer into the box, which appeared to be unchanged from how I had last stocked it. "Have you already made the rearrangement?"

"Yes. Instead of six trauma-gauge venous lines in the top layer, there should be four, with another four in the layer below."

Now that he'd mentioned it, I could see what he'd moved. It was a miniscule change - I would say negligible, but few things were negligible in the eyes of the xeno. I had just started to wonder why he had made a point of it.

Then I felt something pressing against my abdomen, just off the spur of the right pelvic brim. In the time it took me to glance down, the pressure was gone again, with only a ripple of the xeno's sleeve to show what he had done - and no sooner was the pressure gone than a jolt of pain shot through my guts, making me wince despite myself.

"You have appendicitis," the xeno said, "you cannot deny it to yourself now. That diagnostic test is older than your species' ascent into space, but no less valid for that reason. You are not in danger yet. Your surgery can wait until after the Monsignor's seminar has finished."

With nothing more said than that, he left the room, and I found my eyes glued to the clock on the wall. I made it a whole three and a half minutes before I could bear waiting no longer, and hustled out the door at the fastest pace I could manage without making a scene. The acute surgery triage clinic was a level up and several hallways away, just a couple of minutes for someone in a desperate hurry - which I was.

The triage nurse knew me - most people in the ship's hospital did, as the xeno's assistant if not by name. Some of them treated me like a leper, tainted by association with the vile nonhuman I worked under, and I can't say that I really blamed them. Sometimes I had to wonder if my soul was forfeit due to my actions, particularly when I helped Doc Eldar complete a particularly horrific work of surgery...or in the middle of a sleep-cycle, when the memories of such events woke me in the dark.

This nurse, luckily, was part of the other end of the spectrum, the ones who viewed me with pity instead of blame. They were the ones who knew that someone surely would have ended up being the chief surgeon's assistant, and if it hadn't fallen on me, it might have been them.

"What's wrong?" she asked, getting straight to business as I neared the desk.

"I've got appendicitis. The xeno diagnosed me. He's in an officers' meeting right now, and if I don't get it taken out before he's done, he'll do it himself."

"Golden Throne!" Putting on a mask of sympathy was part of any medical provider's job, but from her tone, those words were the real thing - she sounded nearly as horrified as I was. Doc Eldar's reputation had spread far and wide, and everyone had heard the stories of how he operated. "Dr. Deiq's fixing a hernia right now, there's a gall bladder waiting but void take it, he can keep waiting a little longer. Get into the prep room, we'll have you on a table within a half-hour."

Words cannot describe the relief I felt as I changed into the sterile paper surgical suit; this was one designed for abdominal procedures, so the entire square over the abdomen could be peeled away for surgical exposure. It was far from the most comfortable thing I'd worn, but all I could think of was that it meant I wouldn't have to go under the xeno's knife.

The door to the OR was just ahead of me, and I was struck by a flash of terror at the thought of seeing Doc Eldar when it slid open. I wouldn't have put it past him to be waiting for me, officers' meeting or not. But as it opened to reveal the surgical suite, the xeno was nowhere to be seen. Instead, I laid eyes on what I'd most been looking forward to: the room's seerna.

The anesthetist-servitor was built into a stanchion at the head of the operating table; its base flesh had once been a man, I could tell from the shape of what remained of its face, but now its arms were frameworks of steel, wound through with ventilator hoses and fluid lines; its fingers were tipped with bio-auspex monitors, and a set of bellows - currently still, with no patient to breathe for - nested in its abdominal cavity.

A scrub nurse and an assistant servitor were laying out the last of the surgical tools on the back table - compared to the xeno's absolute reliance on his personal knife as sole cutting instrument, seeing nearly a dozen packets containing various shapes and styles of scalpel blade struck me for a moment as unusual. But I didn't spare any time thinking about scalpels - the operating table was right there, and all I had to do was lay down.

The table was very narrow, and covered in a pad made of high-friction sticky rubber, to prevent me from sliding around during the case, so it took me a moment to settle comfortably onto it. The table's arm rests rose into position, straight out from each shoulder, and the seerna guided my arms into position.

"This is Dr. Sawettan," the organic machine said, relaying the words of its anesthesiologist overseer from another room. "Are there any questions you'd like answered before you go to sleep?"

As it spoke, the servitor fastened a monitoring pod against the inside of my upper arm; I felt a faint sting as it sent its thread-thin probe burrowing through my skin and into the artery, to measure pressure and oxygen content. Another sting as the seerna accessed a vein at my elbow - not truly painful, of course, since the lines used in surgeries like these were only a fraction of the size that Doc Eldar considered the absolute minimum for access.

"No, sir, I'm ready to get this done."

"Alright, Dr. Deiq should be finished with his case in the next five minutes, we'll go ahead and get you to sleep," Sawettan replied.

The servitor brought a mask down to cover my nose and mouth. The anesthetic gas had a bitterness to it, more taste than smell, but I inhaled it greedily, anxious to be asleep. Anxious to be done.

I don't remember the exact moment of falling asleep, of course. Nor do I remember exactly when I woke up - it was a gradual process, senses returning one by one. At first I could hear - the low rumble of the room's air ducts, the rustle of surgical gowns as the OR team shifted their feet, the faint beeping of the seerna's vitals display. Then I could feel - the rough paper gown against my skin, the resilience of the table beneath me, and a continuing discomfort in my guts. Sight came last - I was awake for at least a couple of minutes, I think, before I realized that my eyes were still closed.

When I opened them, I found myself staring into another pair of eyes. Eyes too large, the pupils huge and the irises almost as pale as the surrounding sclera.

Doc Eldar's eyes.

Barely ten centimeters from mine.

"I heard that you were about to undergo surgery," he said. "I ordered that it be delayed until I could arrive to perform it."

"And you've done it, right?" My heart was pounding in a way I'd otherwise only experienced at the end of a race.

"No. I will perform it now."

I screamed.

Being the xeno's assistant had made me the audience to all manner of screaming. Some people were remarkably lucid as they screamed, proclaiming they didn't need Doc Eldar's help and would rather have someone, anyone, else fixing their wounds. Others couldn't manage words at all, just noises of pain and terror. Mine was somewhere in between, a melding together of various obscenities as I struggled to an upright position on the table.

Doc Eldar straightened as I rose, but didn't step away. And even in my fear, I wasn't so far out of my wits that I considered laying hands on him to make him move, so I ended up stuck, seated on the edge of the table but with no room to go anywhere.

"There is a list of crew who are sufficiently important that no-one save myself is allowed to operate on them," the xeno said placidly. "I hope it makes you proud to know that you are the only person on it who is not a senior officer."

"I have every confidence that Dr. Deiq would be perfectly capable of removing my appendix safely and effectively," I replied, speaking slowly as I picked my words with utmost care. I knew I couldn't convince Doc Eldar to let anyone else operate on me, but I had to try. I had to.

"Do you know that Dr. Deiq had a patient who required four days in intensive care after what should have been an uncomplicated appendectomy? An otherwise healthy woman, and she came close to dying of sepsis because he failed to secure the stump adequately."

"When did this happen?" Dr. Deiq, from everything I'd heard, had a fine reputation, it seemed out of character to have made a mistake like that.

"Sixteen years ago. I read the reports."

I felt myself start to slump in defeat. There would be no last-second reprieve. The xeno was staring at me with that hideous intensity that usually heralded the appearance of his knife.

"I can have the surgery completed in eighteen to twenty seconds," he said. His knife appeared in his hand.

I stared at that edge. From what I'd seen him do with it, it was sharper than any scalpel that had ever been used in the hospital complex. You'd think that something that sharp would be less painful - but from its effects on his patients, that logic was far from the truth.

Eighteen to twenty seconds. Eighteen to twenty seconds of horrible agony. I would live, I had no doubt of that. All of Doc Eldar's patients survived. But, Throne help me, it would almost be better to die. I knew that for those eighteen to twenty seconds, I'd be wishing I was dead. And he just stood there, knife poised in his right hand, waiting.

With all the courage I could muster, I said "Alright."

His hand blurred - his left hand, holding something that glittered silver-bright, as he leaned to reach behind me - I felt a sting in the skin over my spine, and an instant later a sensation as if someone had plucked a string running from the base of my skull down to my tailbone -

And from the diaphragm down, I went numb. I toppled backwards as I lost control of the muscles in my hips, and the xeno caught me by my shoulders and maneuvered me onto the table before I could hit the floor. As soon as I was flat on my back, I saw his knife dart towards my skin. I swear, I could hear the sound it made as he performed the cut.

But I felt nothing.

The xeno fished into my abdomen with his fingers and came out with the swollen, angry-looking appendix, tied it off with a pair of heavy threads, then neatly severed it away. I let my head fall against the table again as suture appeared in his hands and he began closing the incision. I couldn't believe it. This was unheard of. Doc Eldar was operating...with anesthetic.

Moments later, the xeno shifted to stand beside my head. He pressed one finger against my neck, checking the pulse. "Your blood pressure is thirty-two points below normal," he informed me. "You are likely to experience dizziness and nausea. These are known side effects of spinal anesthetics and will persist until it wears off, approximately twenty seconds from now. I do not have any spinal drugs with a shorter action time."

All I felt was relief. Nothing else mattered except that I hadn't felt the surgery. "Why did you do the spinal?" I asked. It was so out of character, perhaps it heralded a change of heart for the xeno. Or perhaps in Jeremias' meeting, he'd been told to change his practice - that seemed possible.

"The Monsignor lectured us today on the importance of temperance and avoiding gluttony. You had already given me so much fear, extracting any more would have been conduct unbecoming an officer."

# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 12:36

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Thank you all for your encouragement, I love feedback on my work. If you have any specific suggestions for how I may improve my writing, I'd be happy to hear those as well.

What I'm starting to do as I write these is use them as a window onto everyday life in the 40K setting, that's why I included the food tangent.

Right now, I have another story written that's essentially ready to post, another that is written but that I don't want to post yet, and I've got a couple of ideas for further stories to write. Honestly, the idea of Deathwatch shenanigans as was mentioned a page ago is really tempting, but it will be hard to square against some already-written content. And I've got another idea I've been chewing on for a long time that plays straight with an even more absurd premise. But I'm also interested in any ideas or suggestions any of you might have, if there's a scene or idea you want me to focus on.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 01:25

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Umiapik posted:

Lost it at this line. I'd happily read a novel's worth of this poo poo: you should totally quit your job and start writing full-time on here, so I can read it.

Glad to hear you enjoyed; I actually really love my job and wouldn't quit it, but I will keep writing and posting, most definitely. There's actually a couple of longer stories not involving Doc Eldar that I want to write, but right now they are just story seeds in my mind, I haven't developed them to any degree. I've also got some more ideas for Doc Eldar, of course.

Here's a story that I wrote a while ago, it's more of an exploration of what could be possible in 40K societies than whacky hijinks, but I really enjoyed writing it:

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. He - at least, I always assumed he was a he, although to be truthful I never explicitly asked about it - wasn't human. Humanoid, sure, enough to pass as a human, as long as you were half-blind and didn't notice his ears, or his eyes, or his teeth, or the way he moved. But human he was most definitely not, as any interaction with him would quickly prove. For the unfortunate majority of people who did interact with him, it was from the position of one of his patients, since he'd been hired by the Monsignor Jeremias as the ship's chief of trauma surgery. As his orderly and principal assistant, I was one of the few members of the crew who interacted with him regularly. Despite working with him on a daily basis, the pronunciation of his xeno-language name forever escaped me. I called him Doc Eldar.

As time was measured on the ship, it was late night or early morning, depending on your personality. About three hours before the start of the day shift, in other terms. Doc Eldar lived his job, though, instead of working a given shift, and since I was his assistant, I kept the same hours, outside of an occasional designated rest day.

The job came with some perks, I can't deny that; for a non-officer crew member, I was well paid, and my quarters were a fairly nice private room. But it had its downsides as well, so none of the other orderlies had ever offered to switch jobs with me. The hours were one. The other was being present while the xeno was operating.

A tech had just wheeled our most recent patient away on a gurney. He would make a fine recovery, I was sure - the alien was a brilliant surgeon, on a level beyond the best human I ever witnessed. But no human surgeon displayed so little concern about the pain his patients suffered.

"You could have covered the wound with a smaller graft if you'd meshed it," I offered, as I restocked the suture rack.

Doc Eldar finished polishing his knife on a gauze pad and made it vanish, presumably into the sleeve of the robe he wore. "A meshed graft would have been cosmetically unappealing," he replied.

When we had first met, I had been terrified of angering the xeno with an ill-chosen word. I had found over time that he took my questions at face value; I had not yet succeeded in finding a way to make him admit that a less-painful option might be superior to a more torturous one, but I would keep trying. Just not during an actual emergency - I reserved my disagreement for when patients weren't around.

"It was on his foot. Given the choice he may have opted for the less beautiful procedure." If it had meant a smaller graft harvest, I didn't say aloud.

The patient had been a fairly young man, barely out of his teens, who had scalded his toes and the front of one foot by spilling hot grease onto them; not a life-threatening injury, but bad enough that it wouldn't heal appropriately on its own, so a skin graft was indicated. Doctor Bisko, the xeno's predecessor in the role of trauma chief, would have sent the man to a ward overnight and done the graft the next morning. But Doc Eldar was not one to see value in waiting. He had immediately taken his knife and peeled off the layer of dead skin, which was, oddly, bright yellow.

"This smells like a food condiment," he said, as he exposed the bed of healthy tissue. The patient was staring wide-eyed at the flickering knife, but he wasn't screaming yet - the burn had rendered the first stage of the surgery painless. That wouldn't last.

"It's mustard, yeah," the young man said.

The xeno stared him in the eye, knife now moving in minute twitches as the last shreds of dead skin sloughed away. "Why."

"It's good for burns, man!" The patient's nerve broke at the same time as his voice, squeaking the word "burns," and he turned his head away, eyes shut tight.

"Graft suture, size three," the xeno told me, apparently uninterested in correcting the patient's misconception. As I was retrieving it, he had strapped the man's leg to the operating table. The first pass of his knife shaved the hair off a patch of healthy skin on the man's thigh, as close as any barber could.

The second pass shaved off a partial thickness of the epidermis. Normally this was done with a dermatome, which had an automatic blade and a guard that let you precisely control the thickness. Doc Eldar didn't need the guard, just his knife and the fingers of his free hand to stretch the skin taut. Of course, normally it was also done under anesthesia. The patient gave a shriek that faded to gasping whimpers as the donor skin came free, which thankfully took no more than three seconds.

Doc Eldar held up the skin, which I now saw was not a simple rectangle - he'd harvested precisely the shape needed to cover the forefoot and the toes. He perforated the skin in a few places with his knife-tip, then laid it over the burn. The fit, to my eyes, looked perfect.

I handed over the suture, which was hair-thin, and the xeno stitched down the graft, taking less than a minute. He didn't get any more screams, just yelps - he was probably disappointed. And then the patient was on his way out, and no doubt praying to the God-Emperor that he would never be seen by the alien again.

"He was clearly distraught from the situation," the xeno countered. "His decision-making ability was compromised. I acted in his best interests."

I was thinking of how I might counter that when I was interrupted by the chime of the trauma-alert vox.

"Priority one scene response needed to power routing station, deck gamma-sub-four, compartment eighteen," the dispatcher intoned.

Priority one. That didn't just mean that someone was in critical condition. It meant that someone important was in critical condition. The xeno had made the point in the past that all patients were important - and had backed it up, with the weight of his position and his own unique approach to conflict resolution - but if this one was officially important, the clock was already running. I had the scene box slung over my shoulder before the message had finished. The xeno, naturally, was already out of the door.

I caught up to him at the lift bank; even with the priority override he possessed, a car wouldn't arrive instantly. The first lift car to arrive turned out to be loaded with freight, crates of produce and other foodstuffs on their way to officers' country. The boxes were stacked unevenly, shoulder-high for the most part, with no floor space unoccupied. The xeno simply pounced upwards, landing in a crouch on top of a plastek crate. Feeling utterly ridiculous, I tried to scramble up beside him; if he hadn't given me a helping hand, I wouldn't have made it, not with the lopsided weight of the scene box slung around me.

"Go to compartment eighteen, deck gamma-sub-four," the xeno ordered to the servitor built into the panel next to the door.

The Monsignor had spared no expense when it came to the quality of his ship. Although the lift system was chiefly used for vertical movement within the ship, there were a number of shafts that ran horizontally as well as, and the car was able to take us to within a hundred meters of the routing station. The xeno outdistanced me again, no surprise there, but I caught up with him before the real work could begin.

The routing station was fairly small, as shrines to the Machine God go. It was a cubic room full of arcane devices, which drew power from the ship's almighty central superconducting loop and portioned it out in manageable trickles to the surrounding compartments. The lighting was bright and iconography shone on the walls, and the ceiling was painted in a sweeping mural, depicting the interconnection of organic and mechanical components - I recognized neurons, meshing into spiderwebs of steel and gold and carbon-black.

The ceiling where Doc Eldar was standing was discolored with soot. I made my way through the banks of machines until I could see what he saw, and my suspicions on why this had been a priority one were confirmed.

Two figures in the red-and-white robes of the ship's Mechanicus enclave lay sprawled on the floor. One was prone, the other propped in a half-sitting position against a machine. The station where they had been working looked like it had exploded, and the surroundings were scarred from flying shrapnel and scorched from electrical discharge.

The xeno knelt and performed an eyeblink-quick patdown of the prone tech-adept. "Biologics are shut down," he reported. "Condition appears stable."

At the sound of his voice, the other adept stirred. "You...the xeno." His voice was a thick whisper; probably accustomed to using a vox speaker that was now offline. "I need four hundred seconds," he said. "Without intervention, I estimate I have less than two hundred."

"Your biological components can hibernate. Do so and you will have sufficient time," the xeno replied.

"I cannot shut down my bloodstream. I carry a fetus that is reliant on it."

Doc Eldar gave the adept a stare. "You are male."

The tech-priest twitched the front of his robe open. Beneath it, he was largely augmetic. In the space below the junction of his ribs, where a normal human's abdomen would begin, nestled a complex creation, a thick glass cylinder with elaborate brass and chrome end-caps. Wires and tubes joined the cylinder to the adept's body, some of them clearly pulsing with bloodflow.

Inside the cylinder was a human child, a fetus perhaps five or six months of age. Its umbilical cord led to a placenta that clung against the upper cap.

Doc Eldar stared at the assembly, blinked, paused for an instant, and blinked again. It was the most profound expression of surprise I ever saw him make.

"Four hundred seconds," he said, recovering. "What then?"

"Another will arrive who can carry the child, and I can hibernate safely. Three-seventy, now."

The xeno nodded. "Synth, two lines," he volleyed at me as he opened the adept's robe to expose the rest of his body. I got to work, spiking two bags of synthetic blood-surrogate, as the xeno assessed the injuries.

Metal, ceramic, and flesh were blurred into a tangled ruin all down the adept's left flank - it seemed that he had managed to turn away from the blast enough to shield the fetal support cylinder. The xeno had unfurled one of his trauma rolls onto the deck, and he was probing at the wound with his bare fingertips, through the wash of dark blood and pearly grey synthstream fluid.

"Your heart is functional," the xeno said, occluding a spurting artery with a finger. "Adequate pressure." He flicked a clamp out of his trauma roll and sealed the bleeding vessel. "But your synth pump is marginal."

I held out the first of the primed infusion lines. Doc Eldar hadn't yet established any intravenous access, and given the lack of exposed organic tissue on the Mechanicus adept, I wasn't sure where he would find it. He solved the issue by piercing one of his oversized vascular needles into the tube that returned blood from the growth cylinder - it was armored with a wire-mesh skin, but he twisted the needle in a precise motion that drove the tip through, and then the line was open and pouring replacement fluid volume into the wounded adept.

Doc Eldar explored the flank wound further; the injury was mostly from shrapnel from the machine's casing, I thought, but the margins of it were scorched and the overlying areas of robe had been burned away, either from flame or an electric arc discharge. I thought I recognized intestine exposed in the deepest areas of the wound, but there was so much augmetic strangeness that I wasn't sure what I was seeing. The xeno was blotting closed the microscopic bleeders and clamping off the larger ones, rapidly cleaning up the gaping wound. He paused with his probe-tip touching a severed synthstream vessel. "Return?"

The adept nodded. I had the second infusion line ready by that point; the xeno took it, didn't even reach for a needle, and wedged the line itself straight into the open vessel. The fluid bags were made of memory-polyer, and once their initiator tapes had been pulled they would contract towards their empty shape, forcing fluid through the lines faster than gravity alone could drive it. Both bags were emptying rapidly. I had two more ready to spike, and from the size of the pool of mixed life-fluids that had spread from the tech-priest, he would need all of it.

"Synth pump critical," the tech-priest rasped. The xeno was stemming the bleeding rapidly, but the priest wasn't yet looking much better.

"Where is it?"

"Spleen."

From what biological landmarks the machine devotee had left, his spleen would have been slightly above the wound he'd taken. Doc Eldar went burrowing for it with his hands - anyone else would have had to rip and tear through tissue and augmetics to get to it with the speed that he did, but I could see that he was dividing tissue planes with his fingertips, sliding between and around structures without damaging them. Don't mistake "not damaging" for "not hurting," mind you - the adept couldn't spare power to drive any of his manipulatory augmetics, but I saw the frantic twitching of his two remaining flesh fingers as the xeno sought his damaged pump.

The synth-pump turned out to be a flattened metal frame with four electro-fiber balloons bulging from it, with hoses and metallic linkages trailing away from it. I could see that the balloons were barely twitching, when they should have been contracting deeply. The damage must have occurred somewhere in the power delivery mechanism; the balloons and hoses themselves were intact, else the adept would have exsanguinated before our arrival.

Doc Eldar wrapped the long fingers of one hand around the artificial heart and began squeezing, his joints rippling in a complex, disconcerting pattern. I could hear, very faintly, the clicking of valves within the device, and the rhythm sounded exactly like that of a healthy human heart. With his other hand, he continued sealing vessels - with the increased perfusion pressure he was now delivering to the adept's synthstream, many new sites of bleeding were revealed, washing pulses of thick fluid into the wound bed with each heartbeat.

I kept the replacement fluids running and provided the xeno with his tools; he was focused on pure damage control rather than attempting to repair things, so it was mostly vessel clamps and blotters.

"Fifty seconds," whispered the adept. Although he still appeared to be not far from the edge of death, the terror that had filled his remaining organic eye had eased away.

"That will be easily achieved," the xeno replied.

Moments later, I began hearing a noise. At first, I thought it was something coming from the shrine itself, a faint rhythmic crashing noise. As it grew, I realized that it was coming from the hall outside.

It occurred to me then that I had never seen a member of the Adeptus Mechanicus run. They had always been solemn, sedate, droning their prayers and performing their rites of maintenance, or picking meticulously through a site where something had been damaged. They were calm, logical, skillful, perfectionistic, and they never, ever ran.

When this one rounded the corner into the shrine, she must have been moving better than twenty-five kilometers an hour. She had four augmetic eyes, two on her forehead and one on each cheekbone, but both of her organic eyes were still there as well, and the expression in them was one of terrifying focus. God-Emperor have mercy on anyone who didn't get out of her way fast enough. Given how much of her was elaborately wrought brass and steel, she must have weighed as much as three or four unaugmented humans. It would have been like standing in front of a cargo tram.

With a heavy-lifter mechadendrite, she seized hold of the doorjamb and swung around it like a pendulum, losing only a little speed as she pelted into the room. I, wisely, got out of the way. Doc Eldar shifted in place, and I saw that he had shifted his free hand to rest on top of the fetus' cylinder.

The female tech-priest dropped to her knees, skidding across the floor in a squeal of metal on metal. Slender many-jointed mechadendrites looped above and below her shoulders, opening her robe and proffering a set of cables and tubes - the match to those on the fetal cylinder. Doc Eldar released the augmetic heart as she slid to a halt within touching distance, and his hands blurred in the same tempo as her augmetic manipulators, connecting her to take over the growing child's life support and freeing the cylinder from the injured adept.

"Thank you," whispered the male, and slumped as he at last was able to go into hibernation.

"Thank you," echoed the female, as she latched the cylinder into place against her own abdomen. "We will be able to repair him without lasting harm. But this one would have died if not for your skill." She placed her right hand over the cylinder - it was flesh, and clearly old, the skin thinned and wrinkled and the veins prominent.

"It is part of my job," the xeno replied, "I would not do less. Are you the child's mother?"

The tech-priest shook her head as she rose to her feet. "As you intend the word, no, this one is not of my genes. Nor of his, for that matter. Our children are children of all."

"Interesting." It was difficult to pick out any emotion or inflection in Doc Eldar's speech, but there was something in that word. He sounded almost puzzled. He had collected his trauma roll and was turning to go, and I was getting the scene box ready to carry, when the adept spoke again.

"When it is time for the birth, you are both invited to attend. It is a rare thing for one not of the enclave to see, but the two of you are also in part responsible for making it possible."

I expected the xeno to ignore the offer, but he stopped, turned to look at the adept, and nodded. "Yes. I would see this."

Three and a half months later, just after the mid-day bell had tolled, a figure in red-and-white robes arrived at the hospital. It was the man who had been carrying the child, looking none the worse for the injuries he had suffered. He informed us that the time had come, that all was ready and waiting only for our arrival. We followed him towards the stern from the hospital complex, through bulkheads marked with the skull-and-cogwheel, into the territory claimed by the Mechanicus.

The birthing room turned out to be a small but steeply-terraced amphitheater, like a surgical suite in a training hospital, its seats filled to capacity by robed adepts. The growth cylinder sat on a pedestal in the middle of the open central floor, and flanking it were a pair of adepts, female and male - neither ones that I had seen before, but the cylinder's life-support feeds led to both of them equally. The elderly female priestess was there as well, standing slightly to one side.

Inside the cylinder, the child - a female - had reached full term. She twisted and flexed her limbs, and I could see the ropy grey-white umbilical cord with its dark vein standing out, a fine cap of pale hair covering her scalp...and a mechadendrite, silver-bright, one end floating free in the amniotic fluid, the other tunneled to the base of the child's skull.

"As the ship's ranking medical officer, you may perform the delivery if you wish," the elderly priestess said. "It will be rather more simple than most you have done, I am sure," she added, flicking a dendrite towards a mechanism that had been fastened onto the cylinder cap and was clearly some kind of removal tool. The placenta was on the downward pole of the cylinder in this orientation, so it would be simply a matter of reaching in and lifting the child from the amniotic fluid.

The xeno shrugged and stepped over beside the pedestal. "Now?"

"Ah, you may remove the lid, but before she leaves the amnion one thing remains. We must be ready to welcome our daughter." She held out a cable.

Doc Eldar worked the unlocking mechanism and twisted the cylinder cap free. I could smell the pungent amniotic fluid inside, as the priestess carefully lowered the cable beneath the surface. The tip flexed, prehensile, seeking connection to the infant's matching cable. I traced the other end of the cable, and found it led to a junction box built into the ledge of the first level of the amphitheater seats. And from that junction box - dozens of cables, snaking up and out.

Every tech-priest in the room had a cable running to them. An enormous mind-impulse link, a shared consciousness. All focused down onto that almost-born child.

The cables joined, and the child gave a twitch. "We are ready," the priestess said.

The xeno reached into the cylinder and raised the child into the air. There were cord-clamps, scissors, and a stack of fine soft towels on the pedestal; he used the clamps, but didn't deign to touch the scissors, instead parting the umbilical cord with a touch of his knife. He briskly toweled the child dry and began wrapping it in another clean drape.

And the child hadn't cried. Hadn't made a single squall or protest at having to leave the warmth of the amnion and be forced to make the effort of breathing on her own. She appeared content, happy - not sedated, for she wriggled her limbs as actively as any other healthy newborn, just not upset.

"What are you projecting through the mind-link?" the xeno asked.

The priestess would have smiled, I think, but the lower half of her face was augmetic, and instead she sketched a bow. "Love, doctor. She knows that she is loved, and always will be."

Doc Eldar handed the precisely-bundled child to the woman, and without prompting the two adepts who had flanked the pedestal moved in as well, each providing a hand to support the infant. It was a unique situation for him, I thought. There was no-one around him afraid or in pain; he was, in a way, out of his element. His face betrayed no emotion, so I can't know what he thought of it.

But for me, it was close to magic.

I really love the Mechanicus, and the opportunities for storytelling they represent. There're so many ways they could be developed other than "people who really want to act like robots," and the great thing about 40K is that it's such a big setting that all of the different possibilities can exist simultaneously with no contradition whatsoever.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2014 01:35

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Really happy that you all are enjoying the stories. To be honest, I don't have the first idea about how I'd go about finding an agent. And even if I did know, I'm not sure I would want to do it - I'd be thrilled to have my stories reach a larger audience, absolutely, but I don't care about being paid for it, and I really don't want to deal with schedules and deadlines, I think that would hurt my enjoyment of the writing process. My job doesn't give me much free time as it is.

That said, I'm planning to start work on another story, and there are three candidates that I have ideas for, each with a different tone. I'd like your input on which one I should do first. One is a piece focused mostly on exploring the setting, like the most recent one, this one dealing with the menials among the crew. The second is the idea that was proposed earlier, of Doc Eldar "versus" the Deathwatch (this is going to be tricky to write, because the Deathwatch themselves have to be kept offscreen from the narrator, but I have some ideas). And the third one is full-on whacky hijinks, in which the narrator meets a kindred spirit as it is revealed that Jeremias is not the only shipmaster insane enough to hire a xeno physician :orks101:

# ¿ Dec 24, 2014 03:36

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

PRESIDENT GOKU posted:

I had a shower thought. If space marines rib cages are fused into a solid mass of bullet proof bone during the implant process, and they're given a third lung during the same process, then how do they breathe without intercostal ligaments? Without the flexibility afforded by flexible bones and intercostal spaces, are their chest cavities cavernous enough to allow for the expansion of three respirating lungs along with their primary and secondary hearts?

How the gently caress?

The answer is almost certainly that the overwhelming majority of people who write 40K content aren't medical professionals.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2015 14:12

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Pistol_Pete posted:

A classic of Western literature that will still be being read in 100 years.

I read every word of it & enjoyed it, too

It makes me very happy to see that people are still reading that story.

It also reminds me that I need to write some more. It's been way too long since the latest Doc Eldar piece.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2015 03:24

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Waroduce posted:

Guys the Ahriman books are real fuckin good btw if ur lookin for something to read.

The depiction of the space wolves is metal as hell. Especially when they emerge from the eye and run the cadian blockade like god dammmn these old heresy wolves are so twisted and warped by their time spent pursing the Thousand Sons so fuckin awesome bro

I read the Ahriman books and wasn't impressed at all. The author tried too hard to make the books run at a crescendo pace from start to finish, and it had the opposite effect and turned them into a slog to read. The description of the Wolves was pretty good, but on the other hand, controlled time travel, the worst plot device an author can pull out. Yes, ships leaving and departing the Warp in a non-linear fashion is well established, but Ahriman had control over it, which I believe has always been an off-limits thing. The only other really explicit time travel that I can recall in a 40K book was the three-sided door in Ravenor, and the characters clearly didn't have control over that.

Firstborn posted:

If Miles Cameron hasn't written for Warhammer Fantasy yet, he should. Try his book The Red Knight. It's like Warhammer with the numbers filed off. Amazing gore-soaked fights with super detailed arms, armor, and tactics. A complex magic system based on a more metal version of catholic holy man stuff where Jesus uppercuts evil, and a refreshingly interesting look at how to be an rear end in a top hat on the sly with chivalry and get in barbs on your frenemies while bowing in their face and smirking underneath your helmet. It owns.

Cameron owns hard, but I'd place his historical fiction (written as Christian Cameron, for some reason, as opposed to Miles Cameron for his fantasy stuff) well above The Red Knight, which I think is probably his weakest work. Try "Alexander: God of War," which is a self-contained novel about Alexander the Great. It not only has serious battle scenes, but also some moments of philosophy and clever writing that really struck home for me. He'd be an awesome Warhammer/40K writer if he got interested in the setting.

Kylaer fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Jun 20, 2015

# ¿ Jun 20, 2015 15:14

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Gameko posted:

I really like the fluff around the Skaven and I'm wondering...are any of the Thanquol books worth reading? Any Skaven books in general?

So much goon praise for the Dan Abnett I might have to finally read some of these 40k books too...

Werner's Thanquol trilogy isn't all that well written, the plots are kind of threadbare and none of the secondary characters were memorable at all, but Thanquol himself is one of the most hilariously written characters I've ever read about. Werner does an amazing job of capturing the mindset of a paranoid schizophrenic, and it is awesome. I would definitely read them.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2015 01:56

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

victrix posted:

You have not mislead me, Black Library thread. Night Lords was real good ya'll.

I just went and ordered First Heretic, The Emperor's Gift, and Talon of Horus.

Anything else I should grab? Ahriman looks interesting but it's loving $32 on Amazon, so uh, no.

I'm not a fan of the Ahriman books at all. They have a few interesting sequences here and there, but they're mostly a slog to read.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2015 02:33

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

SavTargaryen posted:

Shakespire comes up a couple times in Unremembered Empire, yeah. I think some of the other Rogal Dorn stuff, too. Dude's a huge nerd.

Edit: Also in the audiobook he pronounces it weird, and you could pretty much hear the reader's soul dying when he had to make the noises of Dorn's answering machine beeping.

There was another reference to Shakespeare, in Prospero Burns, where someone proudly informed the main character (during a flashback, before his journey to Fenris) that his team had successfully reconstructed the fourth of Shakespeare's plays, and that the collection was now complete. I like that kind of reference, one that uses something real to illustrate the differences between our world and the 40K setting. Just dropping names of famous things isn't as interesting, although having a translated Voynich Manuscript is quite clever.

Speaking of weird references in Prospero Burns. There was a flashback scene where the protagonist found a tomb with religious statues in it, and then some Thousand Sons marines came in and made everyone leave and presumably investigated the site themselves. Is that scene supposed to tie into anything? Because it seemed like something that would come up again, but it never did that I could determine.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2015 20:03

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Alright, after way, way too long, I've finally got back to writing Doc Eldar. Today has been very productive, and I'm not done yet, but I've reached a good break point and thought I could post what I've already finished. For those of you who are interested, here it is:

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. You've had some scary superiors in your life, I expect, but trust me, this one was unlike any you've ever encountered - unless you've worked for an alien, and I strongly doubt that you have. Out of all the people I've met, or even heard of, there's only one I know who can claim to have shared an equivalent experience. Not working for the same boss, we each had our own, and our paths only crossed once. I would not have wanted to switch places with him, but I'm sure he wouldn't have wanted to take my job either - which consisted of working for the Monsignor Jeremias' chief medical officer, the xeno whose name I could never pronounce. I called him Doc Eldar.

I remember that we had an unusually long layover at one of our regular ports of call, a station in orbit over an unremarkable lightly-populated world. It was fairly small, as stations went, so our ship wasn't able to dock; instead, we settled into the same orbit and ferried cargo back and forth with lifter shuttles. The station was more a fueling post than a major trading site itself, and much of our commerce was actually performed directly with other ships who were there for the same reason, rather than the station itself. A bit like a a swap meet between inhabitants of the same living-quarters block, all sorts of cargoes being exchanged. We stayed for more than two weeks because the Monsignor had heard news that a vessel carrying some "high-end technical equipment" was inbound, and he wanted his pick of the offerings.

(The vessel, when it eventually arrived, turned out to be carrying agricultural harvesting machines, made in numbers far in excess of demand because of a clerical error at the forge world where they originated. Jeremias cheerfully filled one of the holds with them, despite having no buyer. He ended up selling them four months later, when we arrived at an agri-world that had just experienced a devastating solar EMP event on the verge of harvest season. Needless to say, his profits were vast; the Monsignor had an uncanny talent for reaping money in all his endeavors)

For the first eleven days of our stay, there was not a single trauma on the ship that required our intervention. No longshoremen crushing their hands or feet moving cargo, no low-deck menials having life-threatening encounters with heavy machinery, not even any kitchen staff burning or cutting themselves badly enough to need medical attention. The hospital's routine surgeries went on as they normally did - there were still hernias to fix and gall bladders to remove, tumors to excise and worn-out joints to replace with augmetics - but no traumas.

The xeno, I suspect, was rather unhappy with this. As far as I could tell, he lived to operate - when we didn't have patients, he would check equipment, or stand at the trauma suite's data kiosk, monitoring the streams of information from the other operating rooms, or reading through old records. I was happy enough, though; being Doc Eldar's assistant, I got to experience all the screams his surgeries produced, but unlike him I took no enjoyment from them.

But all things end, and when our break reached its conclusion, it did so in a memorable fashion. Not with an alert of patients incoming, or a communication from the ship's emergency response coordinator that we were needed at the scene of an accident, but with the chime of an incoming message from the bridge itself.

Doc Eldar was standing in front of the pict-caster in a heartbeat, before the chime had even faded. He tapped the key to establish the connection and waited as the screen resolved from blankness into a murky image of one of the Monsignor's adjutants.

"Doctor, are you occupied at the moment?" the officer began, without preamble - making small talk with an alien was not high on anyone's list of enjoyable activities.

"No, I am not. Is there a task for me?" Doc Eldar was eager. His voice revealed very little emotion, but the cues were there, and I had worked with him long enough to pick them up.

"The station has requested all available assistance with an emergency. Two lifters collided in their main landing dock and the casualties are too numerous for them to handle."

The xeno's ears gave a fractional twitch, in synchrony with his eyebrows. "Relay to them that I will be on the way immediately in my personal craft. Follow me with a conventional shuttle, equipped per standing doctrine, at earliest opportunity. Anything else?"

"No. Bridge out," the adjutant said, and the screen returned to darkness.

Doc Eldar's eyes were bright when he turned to me. "We have been lacking meaningful work recently. I am pleased that there are people we will be able to help. Follow me."

With the scene box slung over my shoulder, I followed. We made our way towards the fore of the ship, mostly along the conveyance belts that ran down the longitudinal thoroughfares. Groups of crew scattered when they saw the xeno approach, so our path was never hindered; the alien could have outdistanced me easily, but he kept his pace at one that I could match, since I did not know our precise destination.

In the fore quarter of the ship, we took a transverse hallway that led to the port side. We were in the vicinity of a bank of smaller landing bays, the ones housing shuttles for officers, wealthy passengers, or especially valuable trade goods. We passed deck crew, Mechanicus priests, and servitors, some carrying cargo, others unburdened; we paid none of them any attention, and they returned the favor.

At the entry ramp to one of the bays, I saw a pair of servitors of a different brand entirely. These were as large as the cargo models, but instead of manipulator claws and stabilizer gyros, they were equipped with heavy-caliber weapons, and all of their organic tissue was hidden behind armor plating. Optic lenses and active scanners protruded from their face-plates, and as we approached, they focused on us, weapon mounts pivoting to track our movements.

The xeno didn't break stride. He raised one hand, fingers splayed to show his palm, and recited a lengthy string of numbers. The servitors hunched, turning their guns away, and he tapped another code into the locking plate at the bay's door. "The Monsignor's doing, not mine," he said, twitching his head towards the servitors as the door began to slide open. "My craft can defend itself."

I'm no stranger to space vessels. I was born planetside, but it was in a city built around a landing port, and almost all of my adult life has been spent in the void. I've seen shuttles, lifters, and light craft of all descriptions; I've stared through observation blisters at dozens of space stations, countless system patrol cutters, hundreds of civilian starfaring vessels, and even a detachment of the subsector battlefleet - I took picts of that, including one I was really proud of, a shot of the battlecruiser King Daerglaion bracketed by its escort frigates, basking in the light of a red sun.

You probably won't be surprised when I tell you that the ship in that bay was unlike any I'd ever seen before.

The alien vessel, at first, seemed to be painted black. It was only after I'd had a chance to stare at it a bit more that I realized it was actually near-black, in truth being shades of blue, green, and red, each so close to pure darkness that they could fool the eye into wondering if the hint of color was just your imagination. It was smaller than a standard shuttlecraft, and lacked the robust, orthogonal lines of the vessels I was used to - the edges of its curving, forward-swept wings narrowed to razor thinness, and its hull was rounded like the body of a bird or a fish. The control cockpit was perched on a spar that projected from the top leading edge of the hull, and the spar itself was tipped with blade-like fins. Ovoid shapes hung from the wings, and others were built into the hull and the front spar, and from these stretched long, thin projections that were obviously weapon barrels. Even sitting still, with its landing claws deployed, the ship looked deadly, like something out of a combat pilot's dream...or nightmare.

Without an obvious signal being given, a ramp extended, from the vessel's fore section, just underneath the spar that held the cockpit. Doc Eldar strode up and vanished into the gloom within; I paused, reflexively, but only for a moment. If there was something inside that would have done me harm, the xeno would have warned me, I reasoned.

In truth, I couldn't see anything inside. The interior of the craft seemed to soak up the light, despite the hatch open right behind me; the darkness was like layers of cloth enveloping me.

"Put the scene box down and look behind you to your right," came the xeno's voice from above me. "There is a ladder to the cockpit." I obeyed; the ladder was barely visible, and as soon as I laid hand on it the hatch slid closed, making the gloom absolute. Thankfully, as I climbed, things grew brighter, from the light entering through the canopy.

There were two seats in the cockpit, one beside the other, with Doc Eldar sitting to the right. I maneuvered my way into the left seat - it was designed for someone taller than me, and was none too comfortable, and on top of that it did not seem to have any kind of restraints. I could see the xeno wasn't wearing any either; he had fitted his hands into a pair of complex mechanisms, consisting of dozens of spindly, many-jointed arms, each of which led to a ring that was positioned at a specific point of one of his finger. His hands flicked, the armatures not impeding his motion at all, and I realized belatedly that they were a control system. A similar pair of control mechanisms was curled against the station in front of me, but I made no motion towards them, instead resting my hands against my knees.

Patterns of light danced across the canopy ahead of us. "Pre-flight complete," the xeno intoned. He cocked his left thumb and I heard the hiss of a vox channel opening. "Coordinator, I will launch at your clearance."

The blast shield ahead of us rumbled to life, splitting along the diagonal to show the field of stars beyond, shimmering faintly through the atmosphere retaining screen.

"You are cleared to launch when the door is open," crackled the voice of the traffic coordinator.

I could see that the door was barely half-open. Doc Eldar stared at it, fully intent. "That is far enough," he said, no inflection in his voice.

His hands began to dance in their control-armatures.

The ship's engines shrieked to life - not the howl of conventional aero-turbines, but something else, something that set my teeth on edge. We launched like a bullet from a gun, accelerating towards the doors that were still far, far from fully open. I didn't even have time to gasp as the xeno tilted the ship and slipped through the gap, the meter-thick metal of the blast doors seemingly close enough to reach out and touch.

As soon as we were free of the ship, the xeno turned precisely, cutting an arc that would lead us directly to the station. I have to admit, the view from that alien vessel's cockpit was tremendous, much better than from the portholes of a standard shuttle, and I took in the sight of the rapidly-nearing space station with an air of joy.

Until I saw the bright, hard specks of light blossoming from the turrets on its flanks.

"Are they...firing on us?" I asked.

"Yes. They do not have our vector yet, evasion can be delayed." Doc Eldar cocked his thumb to open a vox channel. "Station control, cease fire. This vessel is inbound on a relief mission at the request of your own command staff." He paused, waiting for a reply, but none came. He glanced at me. "I shall have to speak to the Monsignor regarding our traffic controller on our return."

"We're turning back, then?" My knuckles were white from where I was gripping my own knees. The path of the ship hadn't twitched yet, but I could see three gun turrets still firing on us. Accurate or not, eventually they would put enough flak shells in our direction that something would get close.

"Certainly not. We have a mission. We proceed. Brace yourself, I must start evading fire."

He was so calm as he said it that I almost didn't brace in time. But when he sent them ship into evasion, despite the excellence of its localized grav-generator, I lurched in my seat, and if I had been unprepared I likely would have hit my head on the canopy. That ship could fly. The xeno's fingers danced, the view outside the canopy spun madly, the wail of the engines hurt my ears, and if I hadn't been hardened by all my previous void experiences, no doubt I'd have lost my breakfast all over the cockpit.

The station was growing closer, in the brief instances when I could focus clearly enough to make out details. It wasn't just flak shells flying at us now - glowing lines of las energy were criss-crossing space all around us, some bright enough to leave after-images on my retinas.

I squeaked something along the lines of "You can't dodge las-bolts!" - those may not have been the exact words, it was a stressful time, as you might imagine.

"All I need to do is not be in the line of the turret when it fires," the xeno replied, still glacier-calm. "Their gunners are unskilled. We will not be overly delayed." He was quiet for a moment, while he sent the ship into a corkscrew, with at least six batteries seeking to destroy us. "Almost there. Soon the shape of the station itself will start reducing the number of turrets that can fire on us."

At that point, I just closed my eyes and prayed, as we spun towards our goal.

Some moments later, when I was starting to feel like I couldn't handle it any more and was about to start gibbering in fear, the xeno spoke again. "Air barrier in three seconds."

I opened my eyes, and saw the cavernous landing dock, sized to handle a dozen full-size cargo lifters at once. There was no physical blast door, just the atmosphere screen, so I could see the interior quite clearly - I could see the smoke in the air, and the wreckage of the two lifters, crumpled together near the middle of the floor. There was a fair amount of empty space in the bay, luckily, with only about half the available space being occupied, so finding a place for the xeno to land his craft shouldn't prove a problem.

"The Monsignor will want that traffic controller ejected from an airlock for neglecting his duties," Doc Eldar remarked. "I will have to intervene on his behalf."

"You don't want him punished?" I was starting to breathe easier, now that the ship was through the barrier and sinking towards a landing site.

The xeno blinked. "Of course not. I have not had an opportunity to fly like that since signing Jeremias' contract."

And as for what the second part is going to involve, I had mentioned this story earlier, described like this:

Kylaer posted:

And the third one is full-on whacky hijinks, in which the narrator meets a kindred spirit as it is revealed that Jeremias is not the only shipmaster insane enough to hire a xeno physician

Kylaer fucked around with this message at 21:06 on Aug 5, 2015

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 20:39

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

And here's the other half! Glad you're enjoying, let me know your thoughts!

quote:

There was a faint clicking noise transmitted through the hull, as the ship made a perfect four-point touchdown. Doc Eldar stripped the control rig off his hands and was down the ladder in a matter of heartbeats; I followed, still feeling a bit wobbly from adrenaline. The air outside the ship was harsh with smoke, but just as heavy was the smell of fire-retardant foam, and I hadn't seen any flames on our approach, so I figured the scene itself should be safe.

Doc Eldar was standing at the base of the ramp, head twitching as he tracked the screams of the injured - and likely estimated the severity of their wounds based on the sound, I wouldn't have been surprised. "This station must have a medical crew as inept as their gunnery teams," he remarked. "This incident does not seem catastrophic. I estimate ninety to one hundred and twenty injured. We will tally and triage the injuries before starting work, unless we encounter criticals." He set off at a brisk walk, and I followed, as we wound between loading gantries and powered-down lifters on our way to the epicenter of the wreck. We passed several longshoremen who had taken minor injuries and were standing around with dazed expressions; the xeno declared them low-priority and we continued on our way without pausing.

The air crackled - something coming through the atmosphere barrier, something big and moving fast. I turned. The craft flying into the dock was about as aerodynamic as a brick, its skin of heavy plates in places splashed haphazardly with paint, but mostly raw metal. Like Doc Eldar's ship, the station personnel had obviously been firing on it. Unlike Doc Eldar, this pilot hadn't dodged. Fresh shrapnel scars gleamed bright amid the rust, and part of the ship's landing gear had been blasted clean away. It touched down and skidded five or six meters, with a hideous screech of metal on metal, coming to rest perhaps thirty meters from where we stood.

The xeno watched as a hatch on the side of the ship ratcheted open. He looked pensive. "If that ship is what I believe it to be," he said, "this situation is about to get interesting."

Now, I'm sure you've heard stories about Orks. Given your past, maybe you could tell a few of your own, eh? At that point in my life, I'd heard stories too, and I even believed a few of them. I'd been told by some older hands among the crew that the Monsignor had gotten into a fight with a band of them once, before my time on the ship, over some ancient wreckage found in deep space; he'd won that fight, and recovered some bits of archaeotech that the Mechanicus paid handsomely for. The things I knew about Orks that I thought were safe to consider facts were the following: they were big, they were green, and they were dangerous.

All true, for the record. But I was about to learn more.

The Ork came bounding down to the deck with a jangle of metal on metal. He - I'm not truly sure if Orks have gender, to be honest, but I considered him male based on his voice - was definitely big. Not out of the human range of height, and in fact a few centimeters shorter than Doc Eldar, but so heavily built to put even the most habitual dyel-swigging longshoreman to shame. Not simply his upper arms, but his forearms were bigger around than my thighs, and his neck was almost indistinguishable from the piles of muscle surrounding his shoulders. And he was definitely green, his hairless skin ranging from a lighter green on his hands and scalp to a much darker shade on his neck and shoulder girdle. He wore heavy boots, pants, and a thick leather front-and-back apron; this was festooned with gear loops, and all manner of tools of dubious medical efficiency were hooked through them, clanking together with every movement he made.

One of the first things I didn't know about Orks that I was about to learn was how loud they could be. He turned back towards his ship and bellowed, in heavily accented but definitely understandable Low Gothic: "Come on, grot! Get the cart out here!"

Doc Eldar was walking towards him. I let him lead by several paces. I strongly suspected that the two of them were not instantly going to become working partners, and I didn't want to be too close when they decided to settle their differences.

The Ork met Doc Eldar's gaze and nodded at his approach. "You here to help with the relief effort? Good. I'll be in charge."

"No. You will not. I am -" and Doc Eldar recited his name again, in a blur of syllables "- chief medical officer of the ship Ebenezer Majd, by lawful contract with the Monsignor Jeremias."

"Oh yeah?" The Ork curled his lips, revealing even more teeth than the pair of tusks that had already been on display. "Well, I'm Dok Gitskragga, chief medical officer of the ship Svaktigan, by lawful contract with the Contessa von Leostradt."

"You carry tools better suited for butchering animal carcasses for the kitchens than working on human beings," Doc Eldar said, gesturing at the saws, hammers, and pincers on the Ork's apron. "You are not equipped for delicate work, and thus I must conclude that you do not plan on performing delicate work. It is inappropriate for you to be in charge here if that is your attitude."

"Doesn't look like you came equipped for much at all," Gitskragga countered. "Don't see any replacement limbs. Don't see any transfusion squigs." He patted an ovoid, yellow-green lump tucked through a loop on his apron, and I jumped when it blinked, drawing attention to the fact that the speckles on its top were in fact eyes. The Ork gave a couple of deep sniffs. "Don't even smell much in the way of drugs. Some pressors. No antibiotics. Paralytics, yeah..." and his brow wrinkled "...but no anesthetics? What're you thinking?"

"Anesthetics are not required, and hemodynamically unstable patients are less likely to experience adverse events if they are avoided." Doc Eldar was placid before the Ork's growing anger.

"Anesthetics are standard of care, you git, even in traumas! That's supported in every medical journal published in the sector!" Gitskragga was roaring now. "If you don't even believe that, you aren't practicing medicine, you're practicing torture! You shouldn't even be here! I have standards of professional behavior to uphold!" He shook one enormous fist in Doc Eldar's face.

Doc Eldar, still impassive, reached past the Ork's arm and plucked one of the tools out of his apron, whip-quick. "The standards of care also mandate cleaning of instruments between uses." He was holding what appeared to be a meat cleaver, heavily rusted. "I smell the blood of four different individuals on this." He tapped the edge with a fingertip. "Not only that, it is blunt. This would not even be deemed suitable for kitchen use without sharpening and polishing. What standards are you following if your surgical objectives can be accomplished using tools like this?"

Behind Gitskragga, another figure had emerged from the Ork ship. This was a human, dressed in scrubs, although he was built more like a bouncer or longshoreman than what you'd expect of a medical orderly. He was hauling a cart laden down with wrapped bundles that I assumed were surgical equipment. He stared at the ongoing argument between the two aliens for several seconds, then looked over at me.

Our eyes met, and all the sympathy in the galaxy flowed between us. Here was someone who could understand what I had been going through since the xeno's arrival, and clearly, he had the same realization. It meant a lot, in that moment, and I missed the next few exchanges between our respective bosses.

I had to return focus to the situation at hand as Doc Eldar turned away from Gitskragga and motioned to me. "Dok Gitskragga has agreed to divide the labor. We will work our way around the crash site heading counter-clockwise, while they do the same heading clockwise. That creature will mutilate any crew he gets his hands on, so we must work with utmost haste, to preserve as many as we can." He didn't lower his voice, and I presume Gitskragga's hearing was keen enough that he caught every word, given that we were less than ten meters away.

"Alright, here we go," Gitskragga shouted at his orderly, "every human we don't fix gets cut on by that git while they're still awake. Now!" Yes, he'd clearly heard everything.

The next span of time went by in a blur, as we treated patient after patient with no time in between. Response teams from the station's own medical facility were gingerly approaching to collect patients and haul them off for treatment, but none stayed on scene to perform any work - the presence of two aliens, both terrifying, had them spending as little time at the accident site as possible. The flight crew from both lifters has been killed in the crash, so all the victims who were able to be helped were ground personnel, and those were mostly shrapnel injuries, with a few burns among those who had been immediately adjacent to the falling vessels.

Even from the far side of the crashed lifters, I could hear the Ork bellowing orders. Doc Eldar never raised his voice, but his location was equally obvious to a listener: you could track his position by where the screaming for help turned to just screaming. We were making good progress; I don't remember many specifics about the injuries we treated, but there were a lot of lacerations and punctures repaired, a few minor amputations reattached, some burn eschar released to prevent compartment syndrome...the usual spectrum of injuries for a scene like that. We were definitely outpacing Gitskragga, that I was confident of, and in time our teams came within sight of each other, now working our way closer as the last patients were treated.

"Where are your fingers? Are you aware of where you lost them?" the xeno asked, face mere centimeters away from that of a longshoreman we'd found sitting against a gantry, clutching to his chest his left hand, on which everything except the thumb ended in ragged stumps.

The man turned his quivering head to one side and stared fixedly at a plate of metal that must have come flying off one of the lifters.

"Under that," the xeno surmised. "Unlikely that they can be salvaged, if they are fully crushed, but we will try."

I got a grip on one side of the plate while the xeno took station on the other. Doc Eldar, I had learned, was not preternaturally strong; sure, he was stronger than a human of the same build would be, but I doubted he could lift as much raw weight as the man whose fingers we were now hunting could have. Prior to his injury, at least. We lifted the plate, though, and shifted it far enough to reveal the fingers. Three of them, the xeno judged, were beyond salvage, but he informed the man that he believed his index finger could be saved, and so he went to work, with me feeding him lengths of suture.

A short distance away, Gitskragga was kneeling beside another man, who'd been hit by a similar plate, but had taken it against his left knee and lower leg. Blood was pooled on the deck around him from open fractures, but apparently he'd managed to rig himself a tourniquet before passing out. The Ork prodded the wound a couple of times, shrugged, and took the small creature from his apron and pressed it against the man's neck. "That's ruined," he growled, "it'll have to come off." He unslung the cleaver from his apron and hefted it. "Grot! I need a limb here!" He brought the cleaver down with an ugly, heavy thump, then rocked it back and forth a couple of times to separate the last of the tissue.

"We're out of legs," his orderly said, in a tone that said this was not the first time he'd faced this situation. "All we have left are arms."

"Can't be helped," Gitskragga said, undeterred. "Give it here, that torturer's gotten ahead of us."

Doc Eldar hadn't looked over, instead keeping his attention fixated on his work. Any kind of amputation reattachment was tricky business, and something as mobile as a finger especially so - the bone, tendons, nerves, and blood vessels all had to be connected perfectly before the skin could be closed. But I couldn't help but watch. Attaching things wasn't nearly so tricky a process for the Ork, it seemed - he had taken a crude augmetic arm and was now drilling its base screws into the stump of his patient's leg. He placed three screws, none of which matched the others, and then slathered the stump with some kind of thick, wax-like sealant. "Job's a good 'un," he muttered as he rose to his feet.

I realized there was only one patient left with what appeared to be significant injuries, sprawled prone on the deck between us and the Ork with several pieces of shrapnel in him. Doc Eldar no doubt had already been aware of the same thing - he was already rising from his crouch as he tied off the last of his sutures, and he sprang over, facing Gitskragga across the patient's body.

"This one's mine. Hands off," the Ork growled.

"Hands off? Planning another totally unnecessary amputation?" Doc Eldar replied.

I caught the eye of Gitskragga's assistant and tilted my head off to the side, towards an undamaged cargo crate several more meters away. As nonchalantly as we were capable of, we ambled over and leaned against it, side by side. Neither of us said anything, as we watched the ongoing argument. Gitskragga's assistant produced a packet of lho-sticks from his shirt pocket, drew one, and offered the packet to me, which I waved off. He shrugged and lit the stick, still saying nothing, a pattern I was fully agreeable with continuing.

Before us, Doc Eldar stepped back a pace, and his knife appeared ready in his hand. "Very well. I will throw, and not move until it comes to a full stop. Whoever the point ends up facing will get to treat this patient." His hand flicked upwards, and his knife spun into the air, reflections glittering from its edge.

As it fell back towards the deck, Gitskragga stepped over the prone patient and held out his hand. The knife plunged into his palm, barely slowing until the handle slapped against his skin. The Ork flipped his hand over, examining the point protruding from - I assume - between his metacarpals. "Hmm. Looks like it's pointed at me."

How did Doc Eldar look when he was furious? Much like he did normally, truth be told. There weren't a lot of clues. But his stance was slightly different, as was the set of his eyes, and I suspect he was contemplating a lunge. He probably could have retrieved his knife and slit the Ork's throat before Gitskragga could react...but he did not put this to the test.

Instead, he gestured at the knife. "I request that you use that for the work instead of your butchery tool. Patients deserve the best we can provide them."

Gitskragga tugged the blade free of his hand, squinted at it, and nodded. He knelt beside the patient, then looked back up at Doc Eldar. "Here. I'm out of staples. How about you suture him up, eh?"

For this patient, at least, there was no argument over anesthetic - a blow to the head had rendered him unconscious, and his other wounds consisted of two pieces of metal in one arm and a larger one transfixing his right thigh. Dok Gitskragga removed the metal while Doc Eldar closed the wounds, and within a couple of minutes the work was done. Then they stood, and the Ork handed over the knife once more. "Right," he said, apparently having no other words. Doc Eldar said nothing at all, merely nodding and turning away.

I exchanged a final expressive shrug with my opposite number, then we turned and each followed our own boss.

I don't know what happened to that man. Perhaps he's still serving Dok Gitskragga, or perhaps the Contessa von Leostradt tired of her Ork physician and sent him away, and now he's returned to a normal life. Or maybe he's dead, that's always a possibility. But I feel reassured, one way or another; if he's alive, there's someone else out there who truly understands what I went through. And if I do turn out to be destined for a special kind of damnation for my actions, at least I won't be alone there.

It feels really good to write again. I have a lot of free time until the end of the month, so I want to get a fair bit more writing done while I have the opportunity. If anyone has suggestions or requests for things they'd like to see in future stories, I'd be happy to incorporate them, I like working with audience suggestions.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2015 04:06

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Arquinsiel posted:

Dok Gitskragga doesn't feel quite like an modern, 3rd ed onwards, Ork to me, but it's still great. A bit more fonetik spellin' might help with that. The anaesthetic thing and the journals is particularly jarring though, what with Ork Painboyz just having a big mallet handy for that normally, so maybe the spirit of that scene could be saved while further fitting the expectation by a "wherez yer big hammer?" line or something.

That's totally just nitpicking though, since the focus is on the narrator and his counterpart and that works great.

No, I appreciate the nitpicking, all kinds of feedback help improve my writing. I actually don't know any Ork dok fluff except some half-remembered stuff from the 1st Edition rulebooks, and I do believe they had syringe-squigs with all kinds of medicines back then, but I'll rework that line a bit. The medical journals thing doesn't fit the rest of the character, it's true, so that will also get changed a bit. I just love the idea of Gitskragga giving Doc Eldar poo poo about not following standards and then grafting an arm onto someone's leg, but I can do that in a slightly different fashion.

The fonetik spelling, though, was something I considered and then decided against. It's not fun to write and (for me, at least) it's not fun to read, either. I'd rather let the reader give characters their own voice, although I do try to keep speech patterns consistent for given characters (Doc Eldar, you may have noticed, never uses contractions).

berzerkmonkey posted:

It wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but there was no reasoning behind it, other than "The Cabal wanted to." If Abnett had explained the reasoning behind it, I don't think it would be so reviled by people.

I could swear that it is stated in the book that the Cabal was trying to prevent humanity from overcoming their own internal divisions and uniting, and that's why the assassin guy killed these various people throughout history. Did I just make this up?

# ¿ Aug 6, 2015 15:41

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

For those of you who like the Doc Eldar stories, I'm going to start working on my next one. However, there's something else that I can offer, if you want. I've written a story that I haven't shared yet, and the reason is that it's chronologically the final story (it was written fourth). I'm going to keep writing regardless, but if you want to read the ending now, I will be happy to post it.

Unlike the other stories, which just have numbers, this one has its own title, which is "Last Night On Call."

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 18:00

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Arquinsiel posted:

To be fair, I kind of see this as the narrator offloading to some poor kid who just wanted a night out but got grabbed by the old SpaceCoot at some bar in downtown Vervunhive twenty years on from him quitting the fleet or whatever. Go right ahead, dodgy timeframes makes sense for a drunk old guy.

Alright, here it is. Let's see how it matches up with your expectations. It's too long to fit in one post, so it'll be split.

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. It's not a story I enjoy telling. The boss I'm referring to was an alien, a hireling of the Monsignor Jeremias, who was no particularly stable individual himself, even for a rogue trader. What motivated the Monsignor to offer the xeno a contract, I have not the slightest clue, other than that he needed a trauma surgeon...and the alien was, with total honesty, the most skillful surgeon I'd ever seen. At the same time, he was perhaps the worst doctor, due to a stunning disregard for the suffering experienced by his patients. His idea of an anesthetic was telling the patient to hold still. It was a testament to his skill level that this was usually enough to let him accomplish his work...and when it wasn't, he would inject paralytic. The alien had a name, but I never learned to pronounce it properly. I called him Doc Eldar.

You've heard of the Monsignor Jeremias, I'm sure - after the incident that ended his career, I'd be shocked if you hadn't. There are official reports, too, all available now that you've got clearance. Doc Eldar was there when it all came to an end, although his part in the story was never written down, never recorded in any way. But I remember, the details clear in my mind as if it happened an hour ago. Our last night on call.

We'd received an alert from the bridge, telling all medic-response and trauma teams to be standing ready for possible casualty treatment. Having recently made transition to realspace, just after starting the long burn that would take us in-system, the ship had received a distress call from a vessel outside the Oort cloud and, the Monsignor having been caught in a favorable mood, was responding.

"Perhaps we will be treating injured from the other ship," Doc Eldar said, as he prepared a third trauma roll, in excess of the two he normally carried. The thin roll of canvas was punctuated with straps and slots, and he fitted them with his essential tools - a handful of vessel clamps, probes, and a few syringes of chosen medications. Packing up an extra trauma roll meant he was expecting significant casualties.

"Or, perhaps, from our own ship," I replied. I had already checked and re-checked the scene box, the carrying of which was my principle responsibility in mobile responses. It carried all the other equipment that might be needed in an emergency, but which the xeno didn't care to burden himself with.

"I predict Jeremias will not initiate an attack this time," Doc Eldar replied, with his head cocked at a pensive angle. "He did that for the last distress call. He dislikes repeating himself."

"The other ship might initiate," I offered. "Jeremias isn't the only shipmaster willing to dabble in piracy. The distress call could be just a lure."

"That could be...interesting."

And how right he was, in such a horrible way.

The deckplates started a steady, barely-perceptible quiver as the ship burned engines to match vectors with the distressed vessel. Our trauma suite was part of the ship's main hospital facility, near the aft end and close enough that engine vibration was still easily picked up, even by my human-average senses. Doc Eldar could probably have told me exactly how fast the ship was decelerating, but I didn't particularly care. One way or another, things were about to get busy.

The hum of the engines was interrupted by a sudden twitch of movement, running counter to our line of travel. As I looked at the xeno, waiting for an interpretation, it happened again, this time more forcefully. A suspicion dawned in my mind.

"Ship-grade weapons impacts," the alien confirmed. "Possibly kinetic batteries...possibly plasma fire. The void shields have now been raised."

"They're attacking us." It was not a particularly insightful comment, but at the time it seemed important to say. "Someone thinks they can take Jeremias. Take us all."

Instinct told me to go pelting down the hallway, looking for wounded and jumping in to start treating them. But reason told me to wait, to trust that the triage coordinator would assign us to the most appropriate task as soon as it presented itself. If casuality-evacuation protocols held up, we might never leave the trauma suite, since we'd certainly be able to do more with a stream of patients being brought here than we would running from site to site. It hadn't yet dawned on me the scale of the event that was occurring.

Doc Eldar, for his part, just stood, entirely still except for his head. That twitched back and forth, long ears aligning to pick up sounds I couldn't catch.

A chime sounded on the public-address vox - a six-note fanfare that warned of an impending announcement by the Monsignor himself. Anyone with access to a pict-caster screen would be expected to watch as well as listen, and we had one in the surgical suite. Seconds later, an image of Jeremias swam into view on the blurry projector.

"Hear ye, hear ye," he began. "As some of you may have realized, we are currently engaged in a battle against a ship that treacherously ambushed us from the position of making a distress call. As some of you won't be able to realize, due to being dead, they gave us a sucker punch, but now our shields are up and we're hitting back. My condolences to the deceased, and you will be avenged."

The red tell-tale light over the trauma suite's main door began flashing. Casualties inbound, from one of the ship's emergency-response medic teams.

The Monsignor had been involved in ship-to-ship battles in the past, of course, Some of them had been attempts at piracy directed against our vessel, but Jeremias was an improbably successful trader, and was confined by the structure of his warrant to owning a single ship. Thus, the ship he helmed was a jewel of Mechanicus craftsmanship, every system finely tuned and optimized. More than one attempted attack had been warded off simply by running out the macro-cannons and showing just how many of them the ship had. For the rare fools who had persisted beyond the opening engagement, it had always ended with the Monsignor's ship all but untouched, and the carcass of the other vessel ready to be picked over for reclaimed loot. On a few occasions, the Monsignor had been sufficiently bored to commit piratical acts of his own, usually in the wildest regions of the subsector's edge. These tended to be even more one-sided than the defensive fights, although they had always ended with surrender and subsequent ransom rather than outright destruction.

Today's fight was different. There would be no easy conclusion. A shiver in the air denoted the firing of a broadside - a sensation to be repeated many times over the next few hours.

"We stay here," the xeno said. "No scene responses." I nodded in response.

A minute or two later, we had our first arrival. It wasn't one patient. It was four patients, crammed onto two gurneys, ushered by a frantic team of three emergency responders.

"All blast and shrapnel injuries from the edge of one of the impact zones," the lead medic shouted as she crossed into the suite, "this one has arterial bleeding from the brachial, tourniquet is in place." She stared at Doc Eldar, eyes wide. "Doctor, there are more coming. A lot more."

The xeno nodded, no expression on his face. "Triage and mass-casualty protocols are active." He turned to me. "Move the surgical table and our equipment out into the holding area." His eyes flicked back to the patients. "Low priority. Low priority. Medium priority" - that in reference to a middle-aged man with a blood-soaked pressure dressing wrapped about his midsection - "and...low priority." In the pause in his speech, he'd slit the tourniquet wrapped around the arm of the young man with the severed artery, stuck a vessel clamp into the ragged gash just below it, and fastened it tight. He hadn't been able to see into the wound, but that didn't matter. I knew that the bleeding would be controlled.

Mass-casualty protocols meant that the incoming casualties were too great in number to handle in the trauma suite. The suite had its main door that opened into one of the main longitudinal concourses of the ship, but a side door that led down another short hallway would take you to the principle operating area; there were thirty regular operating rooms, arranged around an open pre-operative holding area, and the post-operative recovery area was down another hallway. Equipment storage was located on the floors immediately above and below, with each pair of rooms having a dedicated lift-shaft to bring them their gear. It was an efficient layout for all of the routine surgeries that were performed in the day-to-day life of a ship with tens of thousands of crew. I could only hope that it would be an equally efficient layout for all of the far-from-routine surgeries that were about to take place.

According to the infrequent drills, one physician would be tasked to stay in the holding area and triage the incoming patients, while every other available surgeon would be in an operating room. The holding and recovery areas would be used as staging grounds for the patients who were waiting for surgery, and if those overflowed, there were several more large gathering halls around the hospital perimeter, tasked for that purpose. There was no mention in the plan of a surgical table in the triage area. But the xeno had other thoughts. I loaded as much surgical gear onto the table as I could, then pushed it carefully down the hallway. Doc Eldar had strode ahead of me, joining the gathering crowd of medical staff assembling in the room.

"The ship took two major impacts before the shields were raised," the xeno said, without preamble. The others - surgeons, surgical nurses, and assistants alike - were silent as he spoke. In his pale robes with their faint silver traceries, he stood apart from the blue- and green-clad mass. They all knew him; none had worked with him like I had, but none would question his skill, or doubt his judgment. "Casualties could number into the hundreds from those strikes alone. I will handle many of them myself," his eyes taking on the light of anticipation as he said this, "but everyone here will be busy. I will perform triage as well as operating. Now, assignments." He sped through the crowd, matching up surgeons with operating rooms and filling in ancillary staff. Only eighteen of the thirty regular rooms had surgeons available, and the trauma suite itself was being staffed by Doctor Jayamar, who was the surgeon closest to Doc Eldar in seniority; she and her team immediately went to work on the patient who had been brought in with the abdominal wound in the first wave.

One physician did not enter a room. His name was Doctor Sawettan, and although Doctor Bisko had had great respect for him, he was a man for whom Doc Eldar had no use under normal circumstances - he was the chief anesthesiologist for the hospital, and the xeno had a spiteful disdain for anesthesia of any sort. But when Sawettan explained that he could use his full dozen spare seernas to keep patients alive until surgeons were available to fix them, the xeno nodded. "Yes. I will take this into account in my triage decisions. You are data-linked to your servitors, correct?"

Doctor Sawettan nodded. He was a big man, both tall and obese, with most of his hair going grey. He had bulbous augmetics fused to the skin behind his ears, and haptic filigrees running down each of his fingers. "Constant stream, from every one."

"Stay close. I will need your information." Hearing that surprised me. I suppose it shouldn't have - Doc Eldar had never shown a tendency to let anything personal get in the way of providing treatment.

A few patients had been trickling in as all of this had been occurring. Most of them were, by current standards, minor injuries - Doc Eldar sent these away to wait in the gathering halls, not wanting an operating room to be occupied by something minor when a desperate case arrived. More serious injuries - a collapsed lung from a spar of shrapnel, a leg that had been nearly amputated just below the knee, third-degree burns across a man's arms, chest, and throat - were shunted into operating rooms. The xeno kept the table in front of him open, awaiting its first case - it was the only time I had ever seen him not dive in with all haste to get his own hands into someone else's body.

The flow of patients grew from a trickle to a flood. It wasn't just emergency-response teams that were bringing them - a few came in as walking wounded, others were assisted by any means available. People were being carried through the door in cargo nets, slid on mattresses, or just dragged bodily. Doc Eldar picked his first patient from this latter group, a young man who surely wasn't out of his teens yet, who had a head wound that didn't appear to be severe - the scalp had bled, of course, but that would have been easy to control.

"Look at his left eye," the xeno pointed out to me. "The pupil is barely three millimeters in diameter. The right is almost five. He is bleeding inside his skull."

The young man didn't struggle as we hauled him up onto the table. That, more than anything, was a clue of just how severe his injury was; anybody who understood what was going on would have been terrified as we strapped his head immobile. The xeno opened his scalp with a S-curve incision, exposed the bone, and cut through it. With his knife. I never saw him use any cutting instrument other than that knife, regardless of circumstance. Its blade bit through bone almost as easily as it did skin and flesh, and a few circular passes allowed the removal of a plug of skull several centimeters across. Just as the xeno had predicted, there was a large quantity of blood, which he evacuated with a suction rod, before placing a drain and tacking a wire mesh panel into place over the hole. Closing the skin took less than a minute more, and all in all he had accomplished the surgery in about the same time a typical neurosurgeon would take just to expose the skull bone properly.

But in those few minutes, another nine badly injured men and women had arrived.

The xeno dealt with all of them, sending some to the remaining available operating rooms, others to be maintained by Doctor Sawettan's seernas, and taking one onto his own table, as a technician wheeled the first young man away on a gurney. Another surgeon arrived, an orthopedist who was immediately tasked to work on a woman with a shattered pelvis who was hemorrhaging internally. The tipping point had been reached, I could see - another few critical patients, and there would simply be no-one available to take care of them.

Another gurney rolled in, escorted by a pair of wild-eyed medics. "Minor burns, major shrapnel to the throat and chest, right lung is collapsed," called the senior medic.

Doc Eldar looked at me and gave me a glimpse of his nightmarish predatory teeth, in what I'm sure he meant to be a smile. "The days you encounter a challenge are the days most worth living," he said. Then he turned back to the medics, standing side-on to our operating table. "Bring your gurney here," he directed, gesturing at his other side. I realized what he was about to do before the medics did - they found themselves serving as impromptu scrub technicians, as the xeno began operating on the new victim with his right hand, while continuing his operation on our other patient with his left.

He split his attention between two completely different surgeries and still managed to perform triage as he did it. A string of minor injuries were sent away, and as operating rooms finished, he directed the worse-injured victims to the surgery teams best suited for handling their injuries. There was a cardiac surgeon in room four and another in room seven, handling lung and thoracic injuries, vascular surgeons and orthopedists working on traumatic amputations - even the obstetric surgeons were put to the task, treating abdominal injuries. They were not trauma specialists, but in this time of need, they got the job done.

Even though he was operating with one hand, I was hard-matched to keep up with him. On a string of patients, he clamped or tied off bleeding vessels, inserted intrathoracic decompression tubes for collapsed lungs, slit open throats to insert breathing tubes, and more. This was damage-control surgery, meant to prevent death - there was no question of trying to reattach severed limbs or perform cosmetic closures. My long history of working with him was paying off, though - despite how slow I felt, I was doing a better job of providing the tools and assistance he needed than the two surgical technicians on the far side, who had replaced the utterly-out-of-their-depth medics. Patient after patient was shuttled out to the recovery area, and I felt reasonably confident that they all were going to make it. That wasn't true for all of the operating rooms; Doctor Sawettan was steadily relaying updates to Doc Eldar from each of his seernas, and there were a few deaths being reported. But for the scale of the disaster we were facing, it seemed like our results were remarkable. We were fighting against a tide, and some were being swept away, but for the moment, by and large, we were holding. This was not to last. The battle had been going on for barely more than an hour.

The xeno had finished work on two patients at essentially the same time, and had immediately taken on two more. Just moments after this, another rolled through the door, this one burned so badly that I couldn't tell whether it had been a man or woman. I thought maybe it was someone who was already dead - several corpses had mistakenly been brought in so far, mostly dead from closed head injuries. But no - there were twitches of motion in the withered limbs. The victim lived, against all likelihood.

Doc Eldar stared at the hideous burns for a full three seconds - an eternity, with the speed his mind operated. Then he spat a word as if it tasted vile: "Palliative."

I didn't understand what he meant. I'd never heard him use the word before. He had to explain: "Take him away, give him painkillers, and let him die. There is not enough time to help him."

With those words, the mood changed. On an instinctive level, I believed that Doc Eldar didn't lose patients. Doc Eldar didn't let patients die. In my mind, that was how it worked - if you were injured, and you made it to the xeno's presence, you would be saved. It might cost you the worst pain you ever experienced, and for a time you might wish that you had instead died, but you would make it. That first palliative declaration marked the moment I began to realize just how bad the situation was. Not even the xeno, with his preternatural skills, could save everyone. And right behind the realization that Doc Eldar was fallible came the realization that the Monsignor, too, must be fallible - what if all our efforts here in the hospital were meaningless? What if Jeremias lost? What if the ship was shelled to an airless wreck, and all of us died?

The next few hours are a blur in my memory. I was terrified, and the work just kept getting worse. We didn't get walking wounded any more - anyone who was still able-bodied enough to move was needed at their duty station. The shields were failing, I gathered, and the hull was intermittently taking fresh hits, each creating a new wave of victims. The patients who were brought into the hospital were an unending stream of horrors. Burns - from flame, steam, electrical arcs and caustic chemicals. Shrapnel. Void exposure. Blunt force trauma. Those are what filled my eyes and my mind. I worked because there was nothing else to do. And the declaration of palliative care became more and more common, as we fell further behind, unable to handle the number of casualties.

Doctor Sawettan stayed close at hand. He didn't look at the surgeries being performed in front of him - his eyes were unfocused, as if he was listening to something only he could hear. Which, in fact, he was - I'd had a chance to talk to him about his work, back in the days before Doctor Bisko left the ship, and he had told me that he heard the data streams from his seernas as music, and the twitching of his hands relayed commands to them like a conductor to an orchestra. His forehead was sheened with perspiration - I could only imagine that he was hearing a cacophany of discordant notes, with thirty major trauma victims under his care.

"Jayamar's got her patient stabilized, closing now, finished in five to seven minutes," he reported. "Deiq's losing his eleven - he got the spleen out so that's controlled, but there's intracranial bleeding that I didn't notice in time, brainstem herniation will occur before either of our neurosurgeons are free to assist."

"What is the status of the patient in room six?" Doc Eldar said, tying off a stitch with each hand.

"Pressure's falling despite massive transfusion and pressors. I think it's an iliac artery laceration from the shrapnel. Estimate four to five minutes before point of no return." A drop ran down the anesthesiologist's face, hung at the end of his nose for a moment, then fell, unnoticed.

"Palliate the patient in eleven. Send Deiq and his team to six. Is Doctor Adonly making progress?" That was one of our neurosurgeons, who had been working for several minutes without a report, on a young victim who'd been thrown from a catwalk by an impact and landed on her head.

"Adonly just called for a tech-priest. Too much neural damage, they'll puppet-spike the body and send it back to work. He'll be available for a new patient within ten minutes." I winced at that. Turning brain-damaged but whole-bodied victims into short-lived servitors made sense in an emergency like this, you could usually get an hour or two of function out of them - but it was an act of utmost desperation, one I'd heard of as a theory, but never seen practiced before today.

You've seen people die, I know enough about your history to know that. I'd seen people die, too; I'd been a surgical orderly for quite some time by this point. But it's never easy, I'm sure you'll agree.

When the Monsignor's fanfare went off again, I barely recognized it. It was only when he started speaking, in his usual boisterous tone, that I thought to look around towards the pict-screen.

"My brave and loyal crew," Jeremias began, "today has been the blackest day in all my time as captain of this grand vessel. Today has seen great suffering and death. But behold! There is now a gleam of light!" His image was replaced by a view from one of the external telescopes, as he often did when on close approach to whatever world was our destination. This time, rather than showing the bright sphere of a planet, it showed another ship, one with lean, harsh lines - a military vessel, smaller than our own ship, but clearly built with violence in mind. And violence in plenty had been visited upon the ship - great gouges and tears marred its armor, and it was surrounded by a faint cloud of debris and vented atmosphere. The view wobbled, then zoomed in closer, to show where blue-white plasma fire was boiling from a particularly deep crater, well back along the ship's flank.

"They lured us in by pretending to be in distress! They struck us a treacherous blow! They have killed your fellows by the thousand! But they did one more thing." The Monsignor's voice rose to a triumphant crow. "They put their main reactor in front of our spinal lance battery! And now they're *dead!*" He paused, and the pict-screen returned to showing him, seated on his command throne. "Well, mostly dead, at least. They launched a few pods and we may not be able to shoot them all down. Gendarme teams, stand ready to repel boarders. And if you see their captain, there's money on his head, or any other irreplaceable body part. Big money. He tried to taunt me earlier. This is what he looks like."

There was another cut on the screen, and this time the Monsignor was replaced with a close-up image of a face - a man's face, I was sure, although there were odd things about it, proportions that struck me as wrong. He was heavily tattooed, and braided wires twisted across his forehead, tunneling into the skin beneath his hairline. The image was a still, apparently caught in mid-roar.

Doc Eldar stared at the image with a focus I'd previously seen directed only at the critically wounded. He murmured something that I could barely hear - I thought part of it was "child," but that made no sense. His hands kept moving, performing his dual surgeries, even with his gaze locked on the screen. He looked away when the Monsignor's image returned to wish everyone good hunting, and after another fanfare, Jeremias was gone.

When he finished his right-hand surgery, stopping the bleeding from a deep pelvic artery and grafting in a bypass conduit so that the man wouldn't subsequently lose the leg from lack of blood supply, he didn't take on another patient. Wordlessly, he turned and focused with both hands on my patient, a woman who had sustained flash-burns to her upper chest, neck, and face. He had already performed a tracheotomy and skinned away most of the burn eschar, and all that remained was to tack some temporary synth-skin in place, which would protect the wound bed until there was time for a proper graft. This took less time for him to perform than it does for me to describe it. Again, as an assistant rolled the patient away, he refused to take another.

"Triage," he said, in response to my questioning stare. "There is something I can do that will save even more lives than my work here. Go and tell Doctor Jayamar that she is in charge now."

He turned and sped away, towards his call room. The role of chief of surgery came with a fine suite of rooms in officers' country; Doctor Bisko had often hosted dinner gatherings for members of the surgery department, so I'd seen them several times. To the best of my knowledge, Doc Eldar had never entered his suite. He lived in the little call room off the hallway between the trauma suite and the main operating area. Now he vanished through its door, leaving me puzzled.

By the time I had told Doctor Jayamar of her new role, Doc Eldar was back in the corridor. His robes were gone. In their place, he wore a suit of armored plates, bone-pale and trimmed in deepest purple. The suit was sinuous, articulated so that it seemed to impede his movement not at all. His ever-present knife was strapped to the back of his left forearm, and it was not the only weapon he carried - there was a pistol with a slender, fluted barrel secured to one hip, and a sword on the other, which looked like a stretched version of his knife, single-edged and needle-pointed. He had a helmet in his hands.

"The Monsignor does not understand what he is facing," the xeno said. "His ignorance will see him slain, and everyone on the ship afterwards, when that being has access to the bridge controls. I will prevent it."

I don't know what came over me. I'm not a fighter, of any sort. But if the xeno said something had to be done, I trusted him, and so I spoke up. "Can I help?"

He stared at me for a moment, then gave a fractional nod. "Yes. You will need a weapon." He opened the call room door once again, and from inside - it must have been leaning up against the door frame - he produced a rifle. It couldn't have been anything other than a rifle, despite not looking like any weapon I had seen before. The barrel was long, almost spindly, and fluted with ridges like those on his pistol. The grip and stock were smoothly contoured, showing an artistry in their construction that common weapons lacked. But there was nothing artistic about the bayonet blade fixed beneath the muzzle - it was a simple, cruel sliver of metal, a double-edged copy of the xeno's knife. He handed me the weapon, and I took it carefully.

"Be aware," the xeno said, "the projectiles are coated with a poison that is lethal to human biology. The poison would not affect me, but the projectiles themselves could still injure or kill. Aim carefully. The trigger is here." The rifle didn't fit me well, but I would make do. "Now, we must move."

The hospital was located near the lift-trunk that led up into the bridge tower, the better to receive wounded from that most vital region. The xeno outpaced me effortlessly, and I caught up to him as he waited in an open lift cube. I knew he had an override token, and I assumed that was the only way he'd obtained a lift so quickly. We entered, and he tapped the icon for the command deck.

"What did you mean, being?" I asked.

"What you saw in the Monsignor's broadcast was not a human," the xeno replied. "It is one of your emperor's creations. An Astartes. A fallen son. An Emperor's Child."

I had no idea what the words meant. Surely a son of the God-Emperor would not be attacking us in such a way. And if the Monsignor had crossed such a line that the military might of the Imperium was set against him...surely he wouldn't be winning the battle.

"Not the first such being I have killed," he said, voice taking on a musing tone. "I remember the civil war your species fought. It was not long after disaster had struck my own kind, and we were scattered and weak. But some of us took to the battlefield - not enough to change the war's course, but for spite against the servants of the Great Enemy. And of all the blood we shed, that the Emperor's Children was the sweetest." He gave another of his horrific smiles. "It will be good to taste it once more."

I honestly had nothing to say in response to that. The lift cube was creaking as it crawled upward - I'm sure the shaft had taken some damage. I just gripped the curiously-shaped rifle and waited. The xeno, apparently having said all he wanted to say, settled his helmet down over his head.

Doc Eldar killed a man a quarter-second after the doors opened. He was standing just outside the doors, carrying a wide-mouthed shotgun, and even though the gun was raised and aimed towards the lift, he wasn't fast enough to fire before Doc Eldar had drawn his pistol and put a shot through his right eye. The alien pistol made a dry, quiet sound, like someone snapping their fingers. The man dropped like a puppet, falling bonelessly to the floor. He didn't scream, or thrash around, or show any signs at all. He just fell. I stared at him for a couple of seconds - he was an older man, his face tattooed and scarred, dressed in a mixture of body armor and flowing silk. He'd probably been left behind to guard against someone doing exactly what we did, but he'd been too slow. And now he was dead, face slack, remaining eye open and staring at nothing.

"Follow," the xeno ordered. I'd never been to the bridge, but he moved with certainty down the hallway, and so I followed. There were bodies on the floor ahead of us - mostly gendarmes in the Monsignor's livery, but a few others as well, showing no uniformity in their dress at all. One was heavily armored, another practically naked, a third swathed in voluminous robes and a cloak, which now puddled around him on the floor, soaking up his life's blood. He'd been killed by at least one shotgun blast to the chest, and his death had been messy.

But not as messy as those of some of the gendarmes. I saw two that had been hit by what I could only guess was some kind of explosive projectile - they had burst from the inside, ribcages and tissue splaying away from the hideous wounds. Other gendarmes had died from huge slashing wounds, blows that had split skulls, severed limbs, and in one case had actually cut a man in half. I'd seen all kinds of trauma, in my time as an orderly, and that was what let me keep my stomach steady - but even for me, this was butchery of a sort I'd never considered possible. The battle wounds we had been treating in the recent hours had been grievous, but they had been inflicted from far away; this had been up close and very, very personal.

I heard a burst of gunfire just ahead, and Doc Eldar gestured for me to halt. I could hear both the high-pitched crack of las weaponry and the duller booms of projectile firearms, resounding appallingly loud in the corridors. "A gendarme team against the tail of the invaders' force," he said, head cocked as he listened. "The gendarmes are losing...and now they have lost," he concluded, as the guns fell silent. A couple of isolated shots followed, and I had no difficulty imagining their purpose.

"They chased the gendarmes down that side corridor. We will hit them as they return. Be ready." Doc Eldar flattened himself against the wall near the corridor junction, pistol in one hand, sword in the other. I followed his example, careful to keep the muzzle of the rifle pointed at the deck.

I had thought that the xeno would wait until the invaders had rounded the corner, but this was not his plan. Instead, as I heard their footsteps draw close, he turned in place, right arm snaking around the corner, with his head leaned just close enough to the edge that he'd be able to see with one eye. His pistol snapped, too rapidly for me to count individual shots. I heard the dull thumps of falling bodies, and the clatter of armor and weapons hitting the deck. No screams. It had been over too quickly for that.

He slid around the corner, and I followed. Seven bodies, tumbled limp between two and ten meters away. Their deaths had been quieter than just about every surgery that I'd ever seen the xeno perform. "What kind of poison is this?" I asked.

Doc Eldar angled his helmeted head down slightly as he looked back at me. "Surgical paralytic."

I blinked. Their deaths had not, in fact, been peaceful. In fact, it was likely that, having only been shot a few seconds ago, they weren't actually dead yet. With no muscle function, all of them would die of suffocation soon, but it would not be a peaceful way to go, despite how it looked from the outside.

The blast doors leading to the bridge were only a bit further down the hall. They had come under a heavy assault, and had failed - cut edges of metal were still glowing as we approached. I could hear fighting within, and screams.

"Good hunting," the xeno said, and he blurred through the ruptured door. In that moment, with the alien rifle clutched in my trembling hands, I wasn't sure if I could follow. I wasn't a soldier. I'd never gone into danger like this before.

I crept to the door, and peered in.

The bridge was a cavernous space, with a vaulted ceiling supported by ornate structural ribs. The control stations were arrayed in banks that rose along the walls and sunk into the floor, with an arching platform at the rear of the hall for the Monsignor and his personal advisors - I recognized his throne from his broadcasts.

I didn't have time to take a full account of the violence swirling through the room, because one of the invaders noticed me and raised an ugly, short-barreled lasgun. I ducked back, and a brilliant ray of energy lit the air, close enough to leave a bloom of heat on my face.

The xeno was in there, fighting against what were likely long odds. Part of me was screaming that he could handle himself, that I should turn and get out of here...but I had offered to help. I couldn't turn back now. I thought, for a moment, what would Doc Eldar do? And then I acted.

I didn't come around the door at standing level. I crouched as low to the floor as I possibly could, hugging the metal. I held the rifle vertical - it was very light, easy to maneuver. Without taking time to second-guess myself, I slid around the edge, rifle dropping into a firing position.

The man who had taken a shot at me was heading for the door, as I had expected. His gun was ready, and he pulled the trigger faster than I did - but he pulled it faster than he could aim, and his shot scattered sparks from the metal of the door a few centimeters away from my face.

I was not a killer. I'd been in the usual scuffles as a child, a few fistfights as an adult. The worst injury I'd ever dealt someone had been a broken cheekbone and jaw, delivered with a barstool to a man who had become dangerously drunk. But I sighted the xeno rifle at the man's chest and fired. It wasn't an accurate shot - I saw the man's loose shirt get suddenly tugged, against his right shoulder, and an instant later blood began to wet the fabric. Yet the poison meant accuracy was of little importance. He tried to sight his gun on me, but his arm went limp, then his knees followed, and he toppled to the deck.

With the immediate threat gone, I had a chance to look around. I had killed a man. Meanwhile, Doc Eldar had killed at least a dozen - as I watched, he flicked his sword clean and turned to face the Monsignor's platform.

There was a...thing...standing on the platform. I recognized its face from the Monsignor's broadcast, when I had thought it was a man, but it was not human. It would be easier to mistake Doc Eldar for human than this.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 16:44

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Second part:

quote:

The figure was tall - not tall on the typical human scale, as the xeno was, but head and shoulders above this. Its frame was enormous, three or four times as bulky as a normal man, encased in armor that enlarged it even further. The armor was hideous, with barbs and spikes lining its edges, painted in a mixture of garish colors where it wasn't splattered with blood. In the center of its chest plate, a golden aquila shone, the one thing of recognizable beauty about the figure - made all the worse by the horror surrounding it.

In one hand, the terrible giant carried a sword, a double-edged weapon whose crosspiece would have been level with my shoulder with the tip grounded on the deck. Sullen sparks of electricity crawled along the blade, crackling loud enough for me to hear, even from my distance.

In the other, it held the head of the Monsignor Jeremias.

Doc Eldar stood among a swath of fallen bodies, and although it was hard for me to tear my eyes away, I did glance around to see if any of the human invaders were still standing. I saw none of them, only the remainder of the bridge crew, scrambling frantically towards the emergency exits. It was down to the xeno and the monster.

The armored giant smiled as it spoke, showing a set of massive teeth as white and perfect as those of an anatomical model. "One of the forsaken race. And of the fallen kin, at that. Even more pathetic than the rest of your kind. You were offered glory by the almighty Slaanesh, and instead you chose to cower and die."

"You are an original," the xeno replied, "not one of the later-crafted of your legion. Do you remember a ship, a fast raider that flew under the name Sixfold Glories?"

"Presumed lost in action at the Battle of Terra," the giant replied.

Doc Eldar gave a slight shake of his head. "The ship never made it to Terra. It had twelve Emperor's Children Astartes on board when it started its flight, slightly over five thousand human thralls...and me. I left that ship a charnel house. If you searched the vector between Rigel and Terra thoroughly enough, I expect it drifts there still."

The giant's expression hadn't wavered. "So you were a hunter once. And what are you now?"

"Unchanged."

The snapping reports of the xeno's pistol merged into a single ripping sound. I hadn't seen him raise his hand, and at the same time he streaked forward, up the steps to the command platform. The armored giant twisted and ducked his exposed face behind one of his outsized shoulder pauldrons, sword blurring into a guard position. I think Doc Eldar threw his sword, as he closed the final few meters; it was all happening too fast for me to pick out details. But I saw the xeno launch himself into a roll, barely clearing the top step as he flew under the giant's swinging blade. I saw him ricochet upwards as the giant tried to turn towards him. And I saw him clinging to the giant's armored back, left arm latched onto the rim of the giant's pauldron, right arm snaking in front of the giant's face. His knife was in his hand. His knife was in the giant's eye.

Even as I saw this, I heard the booming of a gun's report, and my eyes tracked down. As Doc Eldar had made his strike, the giant had drawn an enormous pistol, twisted back to press it against the xeno's hip, and fired.

Slowly, like the beginning of an avalanche, the giant fell, face-first to the platform's surface. Doc Eldar rode down with the fall, still gripping the hilt of his knife.

I dropped the rifle and ran, pounding up the steps as fast as I could. The giant was motionless, but Doc Eldar was moving, twisting slowly to roll off his fallen adversary. I reached him just as he slid to sit on the platform, back braced against the giant's flank.

His pale armor was shattered, burst from within by the explosive round. It had struck at a shallow angle, I saw, so rather than tearing him in half at the waist, it had only left a huge, gaping wound across his hip and pelvis - or what would have been a pelvis on a human, I wasn't sure if his bone structure was comparable. Regardless, the wound was terrible to look upon. I found myself praying to the God-Emperor that the xeno's physiology was more resilient than my own, that he might survive his wound. I'm pretty sure that was heresy, looking back.

Doc Eldar slowly, carefully unrolled one of his trauma rolls from a belt pouch, and began pulling out vessel clamps. I slid to my knees beside him. "Let me help you!"

His helmet turned towards me. "That may be impossible. It is a severe wound." He began probing, clamping off some of the most prominent bleeding vessels, but his customary speed was nowhere to be seen. "Bring me my knife."

I obeyed, scrambling around the fallen giant to pull the knife from its eye. The blade was stuck hard in the bone of the eye socket, and I had to wrench it free. I handed it over to him. "You can't die," I said, hearing the frantic edge in my voice. "We need you. The ship needs you."

The xeno clamped another vessel, then reached up, unfastening his helmet and letting it drop to the floor beside him. "Of all the things that could be said to me in my last moments...that is one I would have never heard, save in this situation." He stared at me, as his hands returned to their careful work. "You cannot help me now. Go, and begin triage of the bridge crew. Return to me in five minutes. At that point, I will either be able to use your help, or be beyond it." He paused, then lifted his knife up to his face, edge facing the ceiling. He ran his tongue down the spine of the blade, licking off the runnels of blood that had settled there. "Just as it was," he said, a note of satisfaction in his voice.

I turned away. A horrible weight had settled into my guts, as I left the xeno to his work, but I obeyed. I circled the lower tier of the bridge stations, checking bodies - I found a few who were wounded badly enough to be immobile, but still potentially salvageable. Not many. Most of those I checked were simply corpses.

After the five minutes the xeno had demanded had passed, I returned to the platform. I knew as soon as I laid eyes on the scene that I was too late. Doc Eldar was slumped against his fallen foe, head resting against a ridge on the giant's backpack. His eyes were closed. I crept close and knelt, afraid to speak, but knowing that I had to. "Doctor? Are you...?"

He hadn't moved in response, and I couldn't finish the words. I reached out and pressed two fingers against his neck, checking for a pulse. Nothing. Not even a flutter. He was gone.

Doc Eldar had been the cruelest medical provider I had ever met. He had acted with complete disregard for the suffering of his patients. Yet his skills had been unmatched, and he had shown time and again that he truly did care about the outcomes of his work - which were consistently superlative, not even in the same sector as those of any other physician I had worked with or, for that matter, heard of. And now he was dead.

I had to look away, and as I did I noticed that he was holding several things in his blood-covered hands, which rested across his thighs. A syringe, an ovoid thing I didn't recognize, and a square of paper. I seized the paper and stared at what he had written, in between the splotches of deep-purple bloodstains.

"I cannot survive this wound, but you are right. The ship needs me, and I signed the contract of service. The most I can do is to enable you to act in my stead. Take the syringe to my call room, and filter its contents through the alembic you will find there. Then inject yourself. It will give you what you need. The other device is a grenade. Pull the priming strip free, and run away. May fortune favor you."

My hands were shaking, but I obeyed. He hadn't mentioned what to do with his knife, so I took that with me as well - I had no sheath, and had to carry it bare in my hand. I heard an almighty hissing sound as I ran, and a flare of light and heat washed over me, but I did not look back. I found my way back to the lift-trunk. It was nonfunctional, even when I performed the ritual of summoning, so I circled around to the emergency gangway. It was a long way down to the hospital, and I tried not to spend any time thinking on the way. Several decks below the bridge, the lights had failed, leaving only the strips of emergency glow-paint to light my way, but I made it back to the hospital.

I was raised to believe in Hell, you know. A place of suffering and torment, where the souls of those who reject the light of the God-Emperor are doomed to stay for all time. And I do believe in it. I caught a glimpse of what it must be like, on my return to the hospital.

The lights had failed throughout the entire deck, both the primary and the backup circuits. The only illumination came from the dull red tertiary tubes set into the ceiling, which had their own capacitors, and the infrequent cone of a hand-held spotlight. The wounded were crowded around the hospital for hundreds of meters - that's where the injured were supposed to go, and when they got there they were supposed to be treated, be saved. But there were too many, too many by orders of magnitude, too many even to triage. People were dying in the halls, bleeding to death on the floor, or quietly going into respiratory failure from brain trauma. Blood looks black, under red lighting, and black was splattered everywhere, spreading in pools, even slashed against the walls. Some of the wounded were too far gone to scream...but most of them weren't.

I pray that I never see the real Hell. That memory is bad enough for an eternity.

I made it through the press of bodies, if only because most of them were unable to prevent an able-bodied person from stepping over them. Inside the holding area that had become a triage zone, Doctor Jayamar was standing where Doc Eldar had been, trying to juggle a surgery and perform triage simultaneously. Just one surgery, of course. She was skilled, as good as Doctor Bisko had been, but she was only human. She caught me with her eyes as I slid through the door.

"Where's the xeno?" she demanded.

"Dead." I paused for a second. I'd said it, so I couldn't pretend to myself that it hadn't happened. "The Monsignor, too. But Doc Eldar killed the other ship's captain. He broke their attack on the bridge. So the ship should be safe."

Doctor Jayamar was wearing a surgical mask, but I could see around the edges that her mouth was twisted in disappointment. "Alright. We'll carry on without him, then. Can you scrub in? Doctor Risonn in room eight needs a good assistant."

"Of course. Give me just a minute."

"Go ahead. A few minutes will mean little..." She turned back to her dual tasks.

I entered the little call room that had been the xeno's home on the ship. It was only a few meters along each wall, and most of the space was occupied by a bed, which looked untouched, and a work table. The table had clearly seen more use, and had a number of objects scattered on it that I didn't recognize. One I did recognize, thankfully, was a self-powered lamp, which gave me a pool of yellow light amidst the red. And I recognized the alembic, a standard piece of medical glassware, with its chambers and heating element. There was something already in one of the lower chambers, a fine powder, and a clear liquid just above the heating element. I took out the syringe, gave it a shake, and squirted it in with the powder. A flick of a switch turned the heating element on, and I stared and waited as it began to boil.

The liquid from the syringe was black, I thought at first, but as the clear liquid boiled up into the upper chamber, I saw that it was actually a deep purple. It looked like the stains that had marked the xeno's message. Doc Eldar's blood.

The mixture dissolved the powder, then siphoned into a collection beaker. I looked at the syringe. I didn't know what else was in that concoction, but part of it was alien blood, and the rest was probably not anything from the hospital's formulary either.

But I hadn't trusted the xeno this far to stop now. I drew up the liquid, found a tourniquet and clean needle, and tapped a vein at the bend of my elbow until it was a prominent target. The needle was cold as it slid through my skin - but nowhere as cold as the rush of sensation that followed, after I'd pushed home the injection. It was a good thing I had seated myself on the bed, else I'd have ended up on the floor.

When the room had stopped spinning, I thought at first that the main power had been restored - the gloom was gone, and I could see everything with razor-edged clarity. I sat up, feeling a prickling in my muscles as I moved. I heard Doctor Jayamar calling out triage instructions. I could smell blood, and terrified sweat, and the sharp chemical tangs of disinfectant and wound-sealant.

I stood up. The soles of my shoes were uneven, imperfect. My balance would be better without them, so I kicked them off. I saw them tumble lazily through the air, and knew - knew, not merely guessed - how they would glance off the wall and where they would come to rest. I glanced over at the xeno's knife, lying where I'd left it on the table. The edge was still perfect, despite today's hard use. I would need it.

I didn't know what exactly the xeno's injection was meant to do, but it seemed to be the best stimulant I'd ever heard of.

Doctor Jayamar was working on a new patient as I approached. She didn't look up. I could see the tension in the muscles of her back and shoulders, beneath the surgical gown and scrubs. I could see the minute tremors of her left hand, the one holding the retractor as she cauterized a bleeding vessel. She was giving directions to a medic team as she worked, and I could hear the ragged edge in her voice, and picture the irritation that had begun to set in on her vocal cords.

"Doctor, I can take over triage," I said.

At that, she looked up. She was dark-skinned and sharp-featured, and when her eyes met mine, I saw her pupils dilate in a sudden, adrenaline-fueled twitch. I don't know what she saw in my eyes, but she looked away, and then nodded.

The battle was over, but the aftermath had only begun. It was fifty-one hours after the guns had fallen silent before the first relief vessel arrived. Fifty-one hours of struggling against overwhelming odds, trying to save as many as we could.

In truth, it is a miracle that the ship even held together for those fifty-one hours. Layers of the ship were open to deep space, hemorrhaging atmosphere and heat even as our patients hemorrhaged blood. I credit Belinta Creytion, officer of the second watch and highest-ranking survivor of the ship's command hierarchy, for organizing repair and recovery teams that kept the void out of the ship's remaining habitable regions. I credit the ship's enclave of the Adeptus Mechanicus, who performed brilliantly in restoring the power grid, fixing the atmospheric processors, and keeping conditions inside the ship able to sustain life; when the main lights came on, seventeen hours into the ordeal, there was cheering throughout the hospital, even in the middle of a sea of horrors. I credit all the men and women of the crew whose names I will never know, who sacrificed their lives - who walked unprotected into zones of hard radiation, who stayed in vac-suits until their oxygen supplies were totally exhausted - to do the work that saved the ship, and saved us all.

And I credit Doc Eldar, for giving me the gift he did.

I limited myself to triage for the first two hours. It had taken me several minutes before I realized that we were still relying on the emergency lights - the red gloom seemed to pose no hindrance to my eyes. I could hear heartbeats while standing over someone on a gurney. I could lay my fingers over someone's pulse and not merely count their rate, but discern their blood pressure. All my senses were hyperacute, and time passed slowly, giving me time to pick through each patient's problems while my directions were carried out.

Just past the two-hour mark, I took the xeno's knife in my hand, and went to work. Now I had something to occupy my hands, as I continued my triage work unabated. I was not the equal of the xeno; I never tried to manage two surgeries at once. But the act of operating came to me instinctively, and I found it easy as I treated patient after patient.

All fifty-one hours, I worked. I was the only one who did so. At the twenty-one hour mark, a vascular surgeon named Cohl slipped and laid open his assistant's thumb to the bone with a scalpel, and I realized that measures had to be taken in order to prevent the teams from collapsing of exhaustion. I scheduled breaks - not long, but enough to keep the error rate from becoming dangerous. The only physician who didn't get a break was Doctor Sawettan, who refused to step down, simply because there was no other anesthesiologist and no-one else could handle his seerna orchestra. He worked until he dropped unconscious where he stood - and in the hours that he was out, our fatality rate climbed by sixteen percent, as the seernas fell back on their integral routines. I saw to it that he was not reawakened prematurely; I had no idea when relief would arrive, so he had to be kept healthy.

The only fortunate aspect was that by that time, most of the emergent cases that hadn't been treated had died. We had progressed to salvaging the second wave of injuries - the ones who we had been able to triage earlier, and those who had received enough first aid to hold them together for a day, but who were now at the end of that lifeline. There were still thousands of wounded, many of them desperately so, but the tone had changed from those early hours. Things became more steady, a degree less frantic. The workload remained tremendous, but now things were starting to improve, rather than worsen.

The tone changed again, just after the forty-hour mark, when we ran out of medical supplies. Some things had run dry early; there was no remaining transfusion blood three hours into the aftermath, and the stockpiles of synth-fluid ran out a dozen hours after that. Maintaining the sterility of our instruments fell by the wayside towards the end of the first day - at most, they would get a quick wash in one of the scrub sinks, and at times there wasn't even time for that. Infection would kill someone in days, perhaps, but a liver laceration would kill in minutes. That was one thing. But by forty hours into the aftermath, we'd run out of vessel staples. We'd run out of bone pins. We'd run out of suture. I was closing wounds using thread taken from the clothing fabricators. People started dying again, not because we couldn't spare the staff to treat them, but because we had nothing to treat them with.

Acting-captain Creytion appeared on the pict-screens in the forty-fifth hour. Her message to us was short: help was on the way. And the screen switched to displaying a telescope view once more. On the screen, against the distant stars, a pinprick of light was moving. Over the hours, the light grew, becoming identifiable as the engine flare from a system patrol cutter, burning hot to match our vector. Only a small vessel, compared to ours, but any assistance would be gladly welcomed. And a mere hour behind the cutter flew a frigate from the subsector battlefleet, salvation wrapped in a battlemented shell.

I remember the expression on the face of the first relief physician to reach the hospital. He came through the door, expression alert but calm, and I could see him tallying casualties and setting priorities in his head. Then he saw me, and he stumbled, eyes bugging wide.

"Golden Throne," he gasped, "who are you?" When I didn't immediately reply, he looked at my assistant, pointing a shaking finger in my direction. "Who is she?"

Admittedly, I must have been a sight. Since I had first started operating, my only gaps in activity had been as one patient was hauled away and another maneuvered into place on my table. I hadn't washed. Blood had coated me in layers, particularly my arms, and where it had dried it cracked and flaked away as I moved. As he entered, I had the xeno's knife in my hand, and was extracting a spar of shrapnel from a man's calf - it was a jagged thing, requiring great care to remove it without inflicting even more damage. I had made several small incisions to relieve tension and preserve the blood vessels. I set the knife aside, held the man's leg still with one hand, and carefully drew out the offending piece of metal with the other, tossing it into a waiting trash receptacle. The man shuddered and moaned, but the metal had transfixed his leg for long enough now that the additional pain of removal meant little.

Over the next two hours, the relief physicians carefully interacted with me as little as possible - which was still more than they liked, after Doctor Jayamar informed them that I had been acting as the lead for almost the entirety of the event. I integrated them into the workflow, sending my people off to get some well-deserved rest, and by the time the frigate had docked and those Navy crew were streaming across, I was the last person still working who was from our ship.

At that point, I was asked to step down. Very cautiously, of course, but emphatically nevertheless. My place at the triage station was taken over by a Navy doctor, and I found myself without any clear task to perform, save to wash off the blood - which took a while, I have to say. After that, I wandered into the staff lounge; I wasn't tired, despite all my hours of work, but had no better ideas. Doctor Sawettan was there, passed out on a couch; Doctor Jayamar sat on another, staring into a cup of recaf, and I sat down beside her.

"What happened to you?" she asked, after a few moments of silence. "You're talking like he did. You're moving like he did. What did you do?"

I didn't know how to answer that.

It was there that the detachment of Naval armsmen found me. I was escorted to a nicely-appointed suite onboard the frigate, provided with all manner of comforts - but my presence there was not optional, that was made clear to me. The frigate's captain had no idea of who I was or what should be done, so he deferred the decision to someone more experienced.

He deferred the decision to the one we both serve currently, in fact. I was fortunate - some members of the Inquisition would have killed me on the spot, and the great majority of the rest would have killed me after a full investigation of what had taken place. But I am, have always been, and will always be loyal to the God-Emperor and to humankind, and our leader was open-minded enough to recognize that - and to see what kind of advantages I might bring, through service to the Inquisition, given how I had performed in the emergency.

I kept expecting the xeno's injection to wear off over time. As hours stretched to days, I waited for my perceptions to return to their feeble previous standard, to lose my new coordination and speed. But they have not faded. Some of the traits have grown even more pronounced; my hearing is more keen than it has ever been. I can hear a murmur in your heartbeat. I would need a bio-auspex to see the valve definitively, but I suspect it is mitral in origin. Probably harmless.

In any event, I understand that you received medic training in the Guard before the incident that led to your own recruitment. When needed, you will act as my assistant.

My name? It's not important. You can call me Doc Eldar.

I can share some of the thought process that I went through in writing this, if people are interested, and as always, I love hearing your feedback.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 16:45

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Thank you! The assistant was previously never specified to be male or female, if you look back you'll see there's never a clue either way, I was careful about that. I hadn't initially planned on that being a twist, but somewhere along the way I got the idea.

I always planned on Doc Eldar dying; it's a 40K story, if there isn't tragedy then it doesn't suit the setting. I was actually influenced by the movie The Prestige, which beats the audience over the head with the principle that a magic trick has three parts: show the audience something, take it away, and bring it back. This made me think about all the classic fictional examples of characters dying and coming back, Gandalf and Aslan being the first two to come to mind - their deaths are meant to take the audience by surprise, and then their subsequent return is also meant to be a surprise. Of course, this idea has been so heavily used that by now, the audience expects dead characters to return, thus the shock value of stories where main characters die and don't come back, as in the Song of Ice and Fire books. So when I went to write Last Night On Call, I wanted it to be clear from the outset that things were going to turn out badly, hence the tone of the first couple of paragraphs. I was trying to anticipate what my audience would guess was going to happen, and I thought the traditional expectation would be that Doc Eldar would seemingly die, but actually survive, perhaps leaving a clue that he's off to have further adventures on another ship. So I wanted to make it very clear that he's dead, and show the body. But I still wanted my magic trick, and that's how I got the idea of "bringing him back" by turning the narrator into the new Doc Eldar.

For those who are interested in the stories, did this work? The only person I've shared this story with before now knew about the plot twists in advance, as I was running ideas past him as I wrote, so I haven't gotten feedback from anyone who read the story in one piece.

I'd like to get my stories out to a wider audience, not sure how I should go about that, though. Does Black Library read random submissions? I can only imagine that they get flooded with peoples' stories, if so.

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 22:22

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Pistol_Pete posted:

Yes, it worked! I'd happily read a Ciaphas Cain style novel about Doc Eldar and his assistant. Don't know how you'd get it out to a wider audience tho without going through the Black Library: you know what GW are like with copyright.

Thanks, but I don't know if I can make a novel-length story. Doc Eldar is better suited to short stories, I can't think of a way to write a plot that could carry through an entire novel. I will write more short stories, though.

Arquinsiel posted:

I kiiiiind of saw it coming, but I misinterpreted the details slightly and assumed the grenade was actually a pilfered soul stone and that Doc Eldar would survive somehow rather than let himself be devoured.

That was a massive tone shift from the "lol crazy boss" stories so far, but TBH you managed to make 40k combat interesting so well done there.

Yes, the tone shift was intentional. The story contains some things that no other Doc Eldar story will, such as him using lethal force, and being unable to save patients. To maintain the uniqueness I can't have them happen any other time. Same with Space Marines - in order for the Emperor's Child to be such an oh-poo poo-what-is-this to the narrator, she can't have ever encountered one before, which unfortunately means I can't write the story that someone suggested of Doc Eldar playing hide and seek with some Deathwatch marines (he can do this with conventional soldiers, though, and that's one of the future story ideas I have).

The grenade was a regular plasma grenade. The powder in the alembic, though, I was thinking that could be a ground-up spirit stone; it's what I had in mind when I wrote, but I didn't want to explicitly say it. Better if the exact mechanism stays unrevealed, I think, although I admit this is a judgment call; sometimes it's fun to really dig into the details of things, and sometimes it's better to let the audience come up with details in their own minds.

Glad you liked the combat, too. I didn't want to focus on the scenes of actual fighting, so I kept them brief, but I don't think anyone has written about the aftermath of a ship that's taken a real beating. ADB's written some excellent void warfare scenes, which I won't try to imitate, but they're always from the perspective of bridge crew or Space Marines, not the crew trying to put the pieces back together afterward.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 00:37

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Thank you all for your support! The next story is focusing on a more everyday experience and I'm hoping to explore the society a little with it, like I did with the AdMech baby story. It's not going to be as far on the whacky hijinks side of the spectrum, although I have some ideas for that kind of story, too.

If any of you have ideas or suggestions for things you'd like to see in future stories, I'd be happy to work those in, as well.

VanSandman: That's an interesting thought, but do you think the aftermath really contains enough content to be its own story? I do get what you're saying, they are distinct stories, but they follow immediately on each other without a break, whereas there's no chronological connection between the other stories. But I may write an end paragraph and a new beginning paragraph and see how they flow, thanks for the idea.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2015 14:47

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Groetgaffel posted:

Wanna echo this.
Something I thought about :
Is this a nod of foreshadowing to the transformation, or am I reading too much in to it?

Oh, and will the assistant take on some Eldar features in time following the transformation?
I think I'd like if she had some subtle changes; slightly elongated ears and fingers, got a bit more lithe, those kinds of changes.
Nothing that would prevent her from passing as fully human at first, and even second glance, but just enough to be a little bit off, the Uncanny Valley kind of deal.

I didn't mean that as foreshadowing, it's just an indicator of it being a horrible incident that got burned into the narrator's memory.

As for the narrator taking on some Eldar physical traits, that's something that could go either way. It's also a topic I'm not sure if I should explore - in most part, I want the last night on call to be the end of the Doc Eldar stories, with nothing chronologically following it, because I think it's a good note to end on. On the flip side, I do think it would be a lot of fun to write one or more stories that are half "present-day" events that the narrator is experiencing with the Inquisition, and half flashbacks to times of working with Doc Eldar, or possibly even into flashbacks to Doc Eldar's memories :getin:

# ¿ Aug 24, 2015 17:38

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Here's the next story! It's short, and as planned, it's more a slice-of-life piece, it's not very whacky.

quote:

Let me tell you a little story about the most terrifying boss I've ever had. Every underling has stories about their bosses, and it's no rare thing to be scared of those higher up the ladder, is it? I'm sure the Monsignor Jeremias at times struck fear into everyone under his command, given his unpredictable whims and absolute power aboard the ship; for me, it was the result of one of those whims that made my life a terror. The Monsignor had hired, as chief of surgery, an alien; humanoid in body, but indisputably inhuman in thinking. His name was equally inhuman, and despite trying I was never able to pronounce it. I called him Doc Eldar.

The alien had a strange set of priorities. He was utterly dedicated to part of the surgeon's craft, namely completing surgeries successfully, saving lives and fixing wounds. But the other part - making the experience tolerable to the patient - he neglected entirely, forbidding the use of anesthetics during his cases, making even the most straightforward procedure into an excruciating ordeal. I can only assume that any patient who underwent surgery by the xeno would have nightmares about it for the rest of their life...but I cannot deny that he completed surgeries successfully that no-one else would have even attempted, insuring that his patients - his victims - would be able to have those nightmares.

As Doc Eldar's tenure aboard the ship progressed, he became known among the crew. First as a collection of rumors, spread by those who came under his care - some claimed he was just a psychopathic man, others that he was some kind of crazed magos from the Mechanicus. The first whispers of "xeno" were surprisingly long in coming, probably because the idea was so outlandish, but as he performed more scene responses, as he was seen by more bystanders who, unlike his patients, did not have their perceptions clouded by agony, the truth spread. I wondered, now and then, if a mob would try to bring Doc Eldar down, but I think the fear was too strong - both of him personally, and of the Monsignor, by whose warrant the xeno was aboard the ship. And there was more to Doc Eldar's reputation than fear; there was an edge of awe in the stories surrounding him, too, as reports spread of miraculous survivals brought about by his skill.

One of those miracles happened only because of the xeno's vigilance - he didn't simply wait for cases to be brought to him, but sought them out, with the focus of a predatory animal. He monitored the ship's communication system, piecing together information to lead him to his prey.

I recall that I was scribing a letter home. The ship was traveling through the Warp, and our destination was still several weeks off, so I was in no hurry to finish it. Sending personal communications by astropath was prohibitively expensive, of course, but carrying data packets and communiques is part of the role of every commercial ship, and at port it usually wasn't difficult to find a vessel headed in the appropriate direction, so your message would arrive within a few months, at a price even a menial could afford. Not that menials sent a lot of mail, of course, since most of them were born aboard the ship that would be their home for life.

Doc Eldar looked at me from where he was standing beside the trauma suite's data terminal. "Something is wrong. Prepare to move."

"What's happening? Are we getting dispatched?" I immediately went for the scene box; if the xeno said to move, I moved. But I did ask.

"No. But a morgue retrieval team has been ordered to a tram station on cargo deck two. As has a priest." His eyes narrowed. "And the tram has not left on schedule. Something has happened."

Those were all the clues he needed, and his assessment was right - something indeed had happened.

The platform of the station was occupied by several dozen of the ship's menial workers, mostly clustered at its edge, where two tram cars stood connected, both full of cargo - freshly loaded, I assumed. A few workers stood further away; I saw clenched fists, tight expressions, all the signs of bottled-up emotion. I didn't see the priest or the morgue team, we must have gotten there first. I also couldn't see what had happened until the crowd parted, shying away as the xeno approached.

There was a man down between the tram cars, a worker, probably in his twenties, and I saw immediately the reason his coworkers were so rightfully upset. The couplers between the cars had fastened to each other - and the man was caught between them, the metal enfolding his thighs.

I'd heard of this happening twice before; Doctor Bisko had been clear that it was not a survivable injury. There was enough space between the couplers that it wasn't an instant amputation, but all the tissue was crushed to ruination, and as soon as the couplers were released and the "tourniquet" they provided removed, death by hemorrhage would follow within seconds.

But he wasn't dead yet. And not only was he alive, he was fully conscious, and the expression of absolute terror on his face showed that he understood exactly what the situation was. He was gripping the hands of two of his fellow workers who knelt beside him, his knuckles bloodlessly white. He caught sight of the xeno as he approached, and his mouth worked silently several times before he managed to produce a sound. "Doctor. The doctor's here."

One of the men kneeling beside him, considerably older than the victim, nodded but didn't look around. "Right. Doctor's here, he'll give you something, you won't...feel anything." The man's voice broke as he said the words. "I'll be right here with you, all the way, son."

"No. You will need to move," the xeno intoned, "to give me room to work." He crouched, leaning between the two workers, who both recoiled away from him, and he went eye-to-eye with the injured man. "Thank you, foolish human. You have made my day less routine." I was behind him, so I couldn't see if he smiled as he said it, but I'm betting that he did. Doc Eldar's teeth looked as sharp as his knife, so his smile was a terror in its own right.

As he rose again and turned towards me, ready to issue directions, the victim's father did something very few people ever did, and caught Doc Eldar by the sleeve. "Doctor. Can you really save him? Nobody ever lives through this." He was hopeful, and fearful at the same time - the thought that the new hope might be a false one must have been tearing at him.

"Can and will," the alien answered, before looking at me. "Prepare four trauma infusion lines."

There were no convenient IV poles to hang the bags on, so I recruited a couple of the menials to assist me in moving a supply rack into a suitable position. Doc Eldar wasn't placing his needles yet; the site supervisor had drawn his attention, and was concerned about the situation.

"Doctor, this tram needs to go, we're already causing delays throughout the system," he complained.

"I will not create unnecessary delays," the xeno replied. "Only necessary ones."

"But I can't hold them up!" The supervisor looked miserable. "I got the deck coordinator to agree to a delay so the priest could get here before we uncoupled him, but I can't stop the whole transit system because of this!"

"You cannot, true. But I can." With a flick of his wrist, Doc Eldar presented a many-hued ident strip to the supervisor. "The ship's regulations stipulate that in situations of medical emergency, I have authority to supercede the orders of anyone except the active officer of the watch, the chief of security, and the Monsignor himself. Show this to the coordinator and explain that this is my call. If they wish, they can discuss it with me. Afterward."

I expect you've spent your share of time shipboard, but you haven't made a life of it. For menials - the unskilled workers who form the lowest rating of the ship's complement, below even the specialized manual laborers like the longshoremen - it is a fact of existence that they are expendable. Menials often spend their entire lives on a single ship; they're born, raised, live, and die without setting foot planetside. Conditions for menials aboard Jeremias's ship were better than on the overwhelming majority of other vessels, I should point out; none of the ship's population went hungry, and since the vessel itself was barely half a millennium old, and maintained at the state of the art, living and working conditions were relatively safe, no worse than many planetary workers experienced. But I emphasize relatively, compared to ships where menials were kept in line with whips and starvation. Work injuries among the menial population created the largest portion of the patients we saw in the trauma suite, and it was never a surprise to read in the daily ship's bulletin of one or more of them being killed on the spot by even worse mishaps - particularly in port, when the loading and unloading of cargoes was in full swing. I was always reminded of how fortunate I was, to have been born into a family of medical professionals and to have the opportunity to become one in turn. Whereas this young man was born a menial...and if not for the xeno, would have died a menial then and there.

The xeno was crouching by his patient again, arranging his equipment on a square of sterile paper out of the scene box. I finished spiking the fourth bag of blood-surrogate fluid and held out the lines, one after another, as Doc Eldar placed his IV catheters, one in each arm and one in each jugular. The young man gave little yelps at the bite of each over-sized needle, but he was clearly soaring on adrenaline, and wasn't feeling pain like a normal person would - if not for that, he surely would have already been unconscious.

Doc Eldar surveyed the scene, knife dangling at ease in his right hand. "Everyone without a specific task needs to stand at least five meters away while we are working. And you," he added, stabbing a finger out towards one of the men, "need to come to the hospital later today to get that abscess drained." The man, I belatedly noticed, had an angry red swelling on the side of his neck, below the angle of his jaw.

"It's, uh, it's fine, doc," the man said, turning and starting to move away, as quickly as he could without obviously running.

Doc Eldar glanced at me. "Retrieve my knife." Something inane flashed through my mind, along the lines of It's in your hand, then his arm blurred, and the overhead lights glittered off the blade as it flew. The fleeing man shrieked, clapping a hand against his neck, and the knife quivered to a halt in the upright truss of a cargo rack. I handed the man a thick gauze pad as I passed him - he took his hand away from his incision, and I saw that the cut had released a large amount of pus, and relatively little blood. I wiped the blade clean with a solvent cloth as I returned it to the xeno. "That abscess pocket should be packed with a gauze wick. I will have to find him again later," he said. I knew it was no idle statement.

There were no more distractions forthcoming as we faced our work. The crowd had drawn back per the xeno's instruction, and every eye was on him. But this was not a case where he could simply start work immediately - there needed to be a clear plan of action, and as expected, he had one. He sent the supervisor to call for a stretcher team and tasked workers to stand ready to uncouple the cars and to move the car in front of the patient away, while I secured a strap around the man's chest to keep him from falling down when his support was removed. He was staring at me as I worked.

"Am I gonna make it? Truly?" he asked.

"Yes. He will save you." I believed it, too, despite the fact that to any other physician this would be an impossibility.

"He's not human. Why's he a doctor?"

"That, I don't know." It was a question I had pondered many times, and its answer remained unknown to me. What I did know was that Doc Eldar must have heard us, even though he was currently crawling underneath the tram car to get in position for the decoupling - but he added nothing to my answer.

Everything of mine was ready - I would open all of the fluid lines immediately before the decoupling, replacing them as they emptied and supplying the xeno with instruments. The workers were in position to move the car, and the xeno was working his way into position down by the patient's knees; a few moments later, I heard his voice. "Begin in three. Two. One. Now."

Even as he'd said "three" I had begun opening my lines, and they were pouring fluid into the patient's veins by the time the coupling mechanism unlocked with a thud. The labor crew hauled, pulling the car away, and as it moved, the patient gasped - not screamed, just gasped, and as his head lolled back I knew his pressure must have just dropped to the floor, as he poured blood out through the ruins of both legs.

I saw the xeno's hands before the tram car had been pulled away far enough to reveal anything else. He had a pair of angioplasty balloons with him, and his fingers picked through the gruesome wounds, seeking the femoral arteries. How he could tell what anything was, amid the crushed flesh and pouring blood, I have no idea - but he slid the catheters into something near simultaneously, triggered their inflation, and the bleeding slowed. Almost stopped, almost, other than oozing.

Doc Eldar's head came into view. "Slow down your infusions once you reach two liters, do not overload his system. The iliacs are currently occluded and that is not a viable long term solution, but it will temporize. He can be moved to the platform now."

There was no shortage of willing hands to help move the young man away from the tram track. The patient had passed out, but the pulse in his wrist was strong.

"These are not ideal conditions for limb replacement surgery," Doc Eldar stated, looking around the platform. "The remainder of the procedure will be performed at the hospital. The legs themselves cannot be salvaged, augmetics will be needed."

"You saved him." The patient's father had amazement in his voice. "You stopped the trams to save him." To disrupt the tasks of the ship like that to save the life of one menial was unheard of.

"I signed the Monsignor's contract. Saving lives is my foremost priority," the xeno replied.

The reasons why Doc Eldar had signed that contract might be a mystery, but one thing was certain: he took it seriously. He didn't forget his earlier pledge, either; as soon as we finished scrubbing clean after grafting augmetic caps onto the man's leg stumps, he gestured towards the door. "We must find that man with the abscess. He risks incomplete healing of the infection if the wound is not packed."

"How are you going to find him? We never got his name."

"Even after an hour, I can track a staphylococcus abscess. The odor is distinct."

We caught the man at his table in one of the low-deck mess halls. Doc Eldar left no task incomplete.

This story is one I've had vaguely in my head for a long time, and today I sat down and hammered it out. I am very much an amateur writer - I've never had formal training in writing fiction, I don't make outlines, and generally I just start at the beginning and write through to the end. If I have inspiration for something, I think it usually goes well; if I don't have inspiration, it's a real struggle, and for this one I didn't have any clever ideas for how to end it, so I just kind of let the curtain fall.

I don't have any firm ideas of what to write next, so if any of you have things you'd like to see written, please let me know.

Kylaer fucked around with this message at 14:34 on Aug 28, 2015

# ¿ Aug 28, 2015 02:53

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

Arquinsiel posted:

What's missing from that, the one thing, is firing Chekov's gun.

Doc Eldar should start unwrapping some gauze and head off to find abcess boy.

Yessss, you're right! I edited the ending and I think it works better, thanks!

SavTargaryen posted:

A story where Doc Eldar meets the Inquisitor he eventually winds up with, that'd be pretty good foreshadowing. I mean, it'd give the backstory as to why they'd be interested, and also you could deal with some cool xenos weaponry injuries.

I can work with this, definitely. I don't know if it will be the same inquisitor that the narrator ends up working for, but a story about the Inquisition hunting Doc Eldar within the ship, that will be fun to write :getin:

(One of the rules I'm working with is that Doc Eldar never uses a weapon except in the final story, so there won't be any shoot-outs between him and his pursuers, but there can definitely be a scene where they blast away at him, catch some bystanders with stray shots, and then he has to double back after evading them in order to treat the wounded)

# ¿ Aug 28, 2015 14:48

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 07:28

Kylaer: Aug 4, 2007; I'm SURE walking around in a respirator at all times in an (even more) OPEN BIDENing society is definitely not a recipe for disaster and anyone that's not cool with getting harassed by CHUDs are cave dwellers. I've got good brain!

SavTargaryen, mllaneza, and Arquinsiel: Thank you for the suggestions, I like the ideas and they're giving me inspiration. The Doc Eldar stories are evolving away from just medical anecdotes, I think, although I still want to include some of them in each piece; I really want to delve into the setting and try writing about some of the aspects that aren't bolters and lasguns.

I'm thinking this is going to be a story spanning three parts; in the first, the narrator gets locked up while off the ship because of making an overly truthful confession, and is subsequently sprung from jail by Doc Eldar. This piece will focus mostly on the relationship of a regular citizen with the Ecclesiarchy. The second will follow immediately after the first, chronologically, and feature the Inquisition arriving in force and searching the ship for a particular xeno. It'll be a slapstick piece in which Doc Eldar enacts some of the classic maneuvers of horror movie villains, but performing surgery instead of murder. And the third will involve working with the Inquisition to keep the Monsignor in their good graces, and I'm going to see what kind of strange situation I can come up with, getting into the baroque weirdness that is technology in the 40K universe.

Sephyr posted:

I've been thinking of writing a series about a Tzeentch chaos champion that is not a sorcerer but a true-blue revolutionary, balancing several disparate warbands for the purpose of freeing as many systems from Imperial rule as possible and then just seeing what happens. It was going to be the basis of a Black Crusade campaign, but now that i moved a country away from my group it's likely not going to happen.

This could be interesting to read if you develop the various characters the protagonist is trying to strike a balance between. To be properly Tzeenchian, though, the outcomes on the protagonist's plans should always be some shade of horrible - to be true to the setting, Chaos must always be malignant, always a force of destruction, and Tzeench in particular loves smashing the dreams of his followers.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2015 02:39

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Warhammer: After 18 years, finally an end

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