Dr. Amanda Plumley moved quickly from one biobed to the next, supervising her staff of surgeons, nurses, and medical technicians as they tended to the scores of grievously wounded personnel being ushered into sickbay by security officers, paramedics and damage control officers. Dr. Phlox was even helping out with what he could. He was already deep into a surgical procedure, trying to stabilaize the vital functions of a Bajoran woman whose legs were gone, sheared away halfway between the waist and the knees, cauterized black and smooth by some hellish trauma.

Walking down the row of biobeds, Plumley saw only more of the same, the brunt and the broken, the amputated and the paralyzed. Her normally antiseptic smelling sickbay was rich with the charnel perfume of scorched flesh and spilled blood. Pitiful moaning, wails of agony, the hoarse exhortations of the suffering and the dying dispelled the quiet ambience she had always taken for granted.

"Doctor Plumley!" A woman's voice called out.

Plumley turned around and saw Dr. Tabar, a dark, short-haired female surgical intern, beckoning her into the triage center adjacent to sickbay. Plumley dodged past a pair of medical technicians carrying a wounded officer on a stretcher to the O.R., brushed a few sweat soaked strands of her dark hair from her face, and joined Tabar.

The patient, a youthful looking man, lay on his side, facing away from Plumley. A jagged length of what looked like a fragment of a metal support beam skewered his torso.

"Fill me in." Plumley said.

"Fell onto a broken railing segment." Tabar said. "The DC team cut him free and left us a few centimeters to grab onto, but it's stuck tight. He's in shock and fading fast. Pulse is one fort and thread, BP fifty over thirty."

Plumley grabbed one end of the man's stretcher and nodded to Tabar to take the other. "Okay, front of the line, let's go." They carried him into sickbay, toward a biobed that had just been vacated. "Does our lucky friend have a name?"

"Lieutenant Coble." Tabar said as they set him down.

Hearing his name enabled Plumley to see past the blood and grime on the wounded man's face and recognize him. He was the ship's deputy chief o security.

"Get a breathing mask on him. Try and bring up his pulse ox while we get a clearer picture of the damage." She called over her shoulder, "We need a surgical arch over here!"

She lifted her medical tricorder, which she kept holstered on her belt during crises like these, and began an exploratory imaging sequence of Coble's torso. "Damn," she muttered. "It's straight through the inferior vena cava." To the unconscious deputy chief of security she added, "You had to make it difficult, did you?"

A pair of technicians, one a blonde human female and a Vulcan male, hurried over with a surgical arch for the biobed. They slipped past Tabar and Plumley, fitted the arch into place, then rushed away as another doctor called from across sickbay for a new pack of hyposprays.

Plumley pwered up the arch, calibrated its settings for human male physiology, and downloaded Coble's medical history from the ship's computer to serve as baseline data. "Activate the delta wave generator and monitor his vitals for me." Plumley said. "I'm about to open the pericardium and put a circular constrictor field around the auricle of his right atrium."

Her touches on the arch's interface pad were delicate and precise. Its noninvasive surgical protocols were state of the art medicine, but only if one knew how to use them. This seemed to Plumley like a good opportunity to pass on some of that skill to her fresh faced intern. "Watch closely," she said to the other woman. "We're going to constrict the auricle and create a virtual venous return catheter from there to the IVC."

The procedure went exactly as Plumley hoped, with the surgical arch manipulating force fields and tissue regenerators in an intricately programmed sequence. "As soon as I detect resistance from the fragment, I want you to use the controls on your side to dematerialize it." She watched Tabar initialize the interface on the other side of the arch. "Ready?"

Tabar nodded and kept her eyes on the controls.

"Okay." Plumley said, watching the resistance gauges creep upward for the constrictor field. "Now."

Tabar tapped in the micro transporter sequence and removed all traces of the intruding metal fagment. As soon as the transporter sequence ended, Plumley finished closing the constrictor field. "All right, the auricle's sealed, the catheter's functional, and we can start doing some repair work." She looked over to Tabar. "Feelup to finishing this one on your own?"

"Yes, Doctor." Tabar said glancing at the display screens on the arch. "I'll need to transfuse him first." She turned her ehad and caught the eye of Nurse Donofrio, who was passing by. "Nurse, prep eight units of A-neg stat." Donofrio nodded her acknowledgement without breaking stride.

"Let me know if you need a hand." Plumley said.

Tabar nodded and continued repairing Coble's wounds as Plumley moved on, back through the chaotic hustle of bodies and equipment. She paused in the open doorway to the triage center, which was packed almost to capacity. Patients lay on beds arranged in long parallel rows. Most of them were unconscious; a few stared blankly at the overhead. Multiple copies of the Emergency Medical Hologram moved from bed to bed, assessing the criticality of new patients as they arrived.

Closer to Plumley, the ship's counselor, Christine Nycz kneeled beside a wounded young medic and conversed in soothing whispers with the shaken woman. Plumley admired Nycz's gentle bedside manner; for a moment she lamented that she lacked the surgical training to do more for the wounded, but then she noted the generally subdued mood in the triage facility, and the she realized that much of it was likely the product of Nycz's calm attention.

From the main sickbay compartment, she heard Dr. Foglesong's voice get louder pitch upward with frustration. She turned back and watched a moment she had witnessed far too many times before: a surgeon fighting a losing battle against injuries so severe that nothing short of a miracle could fix them.

"Push one twenty-five triox." Foglesong snapped at the trio of assistants. "Cortical stims to two eighty-five! Damn it, the artery's bleeding again!"

"V-fib." A medical technician said.

"Charge to three hundred." Foglesong said.

"Belay that." Plumley cut in. "Your patient has total organ failure, and her EEG flatlined four minutes ago." She hated to pull rank, but Foglesong could be obsessive in times like this, and she couldn't afford to let him fixate on one lost cause when there were a dozen other lives in need of his help.

Foglesong stared back at her, wild eyed, and his nurse, his technician and his intern all watched him. Then his shoulders slumped and his head followed. When he lifted his head again, Plumley saw in his eyes that he knew what he had to do.

He shut off the surgical arch. "Time of death, oh two hundred."

His assistants removed the surgical arch and Foglesong waved over a pair of medical assistants to remove the body. Then he nodded to Nurse Filar and said, "Let's go see who's next."

Plumley watched the assistants transfer the body of the dead female engineer to an antigrav gurney. With decorum and gentility they stretched a clean blue sheet over the body from head to toe and guided it away from the living patients, into the recesses of sickbay, to the morgue, where it would be placed in stasis pending its final journey home to its next of kin.

Over the triage center Foglesong and Filar zeroed in on a patient and directed his assistants to move the wounded Bajoran officer to a biobed in sickbay.

The fight goes on. Plumley thought to herself.

Then she impelled herself into motion, and summoned medical technician Strnisha to join her as she crossed the compartment to find a case of her own. "Look for critical," she said to the sharp eyed young woman. "I'm in the mood to work miracles tonight."