Part VII, Act II: Unethical Practice
Julian fought to open his eyes. It was such a small task, but getting even these parchment-thin muscles to obey him took a sophistication of coordinated effort that was almost beyond the reach of his pain-addled and panic-ridden faculties. The weight of the Vorta's palm on his face was far more oppressive than the force she exerted should have suggested. Her hand and fingers were very rigid, the tips not even touching his skin. It was a position meant only to restrain, not to support or to reassure. As she leaned back, reaching for something with her other hand, even less of her skin touched his. He had the impression that she would have withdrawn even that cursory contact if she'd had other means of restraining him.
He recognized the chittering beep of a Dominion medical scanner: it sounded exactly like the one he had used on the Eighth. It drew close to his ear, and then travelled away, moving towards his hip.
"What did you do?" the woman said contemptuously. Tiellyn, Julian reminded himself. Deyos had called her Tiellyn. "Have the Jem'Hadar form a circle and kick him around like a sack of grain? He has a fractured zygoma, three cracked ribs… ooh, and how did you manage this? A broken scapula. That's unusual." Her tone had changed to one of morbid fascination. It hardened again to scorn as she added; "I know he wasn't in a shuttle crash, because you don't have a ship!"
The choked noise of indignation must have come from Deyos. Again, Julian fought to open his eyes. His terror was dulled just a little by curiosity. He wanted to see the woman who could tear down the cruel-eyed commandant so easily.
"He was promised an opportunity to perform in the ring, and he was given one," Deyos said stiffly. "He proved… difficult to subdue. The damage to the Eighth's Ketracel White port was his handiwork. The Second disciplined him accordingly."
The scanner stopped whirring. There was a clack as it was set down near Julian's hip. The pressure on his brow increased as the woman leaned in close to him, and her other hand took hold of the back of his neck.
"Open your eyes," she hissed, imperious and strangely seductive.
Julian had been trying to do just that, of course, but the command made him abandon his efforts. He didn't see any reason to cooperate with her, and he certainly had no intention of obeying her.
This time, the words were almost a purr. "Open your eyes, human, or I will have the Jem'Hadar peel them off with his fingernails."
The hand gripping Julian's pelvis dug further into his flesh. He could feel the talon-like nails even through the cloth of his uniform. The pressure on the soft flesh of his lower abdomen sent a tremor of electric warning up into his battered flank. Fighting his fear, not wanting it to show in his eyes, he forced his lids to obey him. The left one bore up well. The right complied as far as it was able.
She was three centimetres from his face, eclipsing his vision with pale skin and chiselled, patrician features and startlingly silver eyes. Her lips curled into a slow smile. They were stained a rich maroon, glossy with a cosmetic that smelled faintly of coconuts. Her eyelids were brushed with iridescent powder of a twilight purple hue. From the upper crests of her ribbed ears dangled long, fringed earrings set with small sapphires. In other circumstances or some other place, Julian might have thought her beautiful. Here, her elegant efforts were uncanny and horrifying.
"You removed the Eighth's White port?" she asked, her lips working more forcefully than necessary. "In the combat ring? Prisoners are not given weapons in the combat ring."
Her eyes narrowed, blazing with sudden anger. She glanced away from Julian, firing twin torpedoes of admonition back over her shoulder.
"I did not give him weapons!" Deyos protested, defensive in the face of the unspoken accusation. "He did it with his hands."
The head made far too large by proximity pivoted back to Julian. Her hair was piled on her head in elaborate coils that would have made a Bajoran hairdresser jealous. She curled her lip in an imitation of amusement. "The Ketracel White ports," she said, rolling each syllable luxuriantly; "are not meant to be removed by hand. It was a very neat job, too. You could have shredded his jugular vein, but the freshly regenerated tissue shows a precise extraction. Bare-handed surgery, Doctor? And in the ring, at that."
Julian couldn't tell if she was suspicious or admiring, but the cool disdain with which Tiellyn spoke his title made his insides writhe. She had done what Deyos could not; what even the mirror-Odo in the alternate universe had failed to do. She had made of that honourable word an insult, a slur meant to debase him. He felt the mortification only for a moment, before his pride surged up again to remind him that he was a doctor, and that it was not something of which he should be ashamed. But he felt it.
"Very impressive," mused the woman. "And positively perverse. I knew you had a history with the Jem'Hadar, Doctor. I did not expect you to exhibit sufficient ingenuity to apply the knowledge gleaned from your studies to such a bloody end. Fascinating."
Surely she could not know how those words smote his heart. Julian shut his eyes again, this time to restrain a hot wave of misery. That was exactly what he had done, and the steps he'd later taken to repair the mutilation weighed light against the breaking of his oath.
"I assume the unfortunate Eighth was his first opponent, and your Second incapacitated him?" Tiellyn said, straightening up. Julian blinked away the threat of a tear and tracked her as she stepped back and withdrew her hands from his head and throat. She chafed her fingers against her palms, and looked at them in mild disgust. "Always so filthy, these Alpha Quadrant creatures," she observed. "And this one's only been here twelve days!"
Julian felt suddenly very weary. Twelve days. It felt like an eternity. It was a little longer than that by the Bajoran calendar, of course, but that didn't account for it. He didn't feel like he'd been here for two weeks, but for ten thousand years.
The Vorta picked up the scanner, and picked up where she had left off: at Julian's scapula. "Are you going to answer my question, or not?" she demanded.
He didn't understand what she meant.
"The Eighth was his second opponent," said Deyos uncomfortably. "He wore out the first one. They danced around for twenty minutes. The human is very fast: my man could hardly land a blow."
"Really," said Tiellyn, in a sceptical tone of voice that was as eloquent as if she had called the other Vorta a liar outright. "The humans in Internment Camp 253 all proved very easy to subdue."
Suddenly, Julian's exhaustion dissolved. He was almost able to forget the pain. Other humans, in another camp? He thought of the Starfleet ships that had vanished in the Gamma Quadrant in the last three years. The Maryland. The Sarajevo. The Proxima. His retinas burned with the memory of the glare as the Odyssey exploded: a Galaxy Class starship reduced to shrapnel in a matter of seconds. There had been no survivors; no time to abandon ship. If not for Jadzia's thinly-veiled insolence in goading Captain Keogh into off-loading all non-essential personnel before departing Deep Space Nine, the death toll would have been ten times higher. Haunted by that spectacle, Julian had always assumed the other lost ships had met similar fates. Now it seemed he was mistaken.
"Brutality is easy. Strategy takes greater effort. Perhaps the garrison at Internment Camp 253 is not as skilled as mine," Deyos said with thinly-veiled contempt.
"Perhaps," said Tiellyn, in a tone that made it plain she was not swayed by this argument. "How many of your men did this human defeat? He's not very large, you know, for one of his species. Taller than the average, but scrawny."
She was talking about him as if he were a piece of meat, but Julian didn't care. He was hoping she would say more about the humans in the other camp. Instead, she moved the scanner down the length of his body, and stopped where he had known she would, midway between his twelfth rib and the crest of his pelvis, where his insides felt pulverized to liquid.
"He won two matches," Deyos said sullenly. "The first by attrition, the second by… well, you saw what he did to Talak'ran. The Second made short work of him. The whole thing took less than an hour."
It had actually been seventy-five minutes. But then, maybe the Vorta wasn't counting the time Julian had spent sealing the wound in the Eighth's neck. He wondered if the female Vorta had been appraised of that, and what she thought of it if she knew.
"Well!" she said crisply, stepping sideways and continuing the scan down the length of Julian's legs. "You are fortunate that I was eager to return, Deyos. Or you might have been forced to deliver me a dead specimen after all. Where is Fifth Gorotok'ren?" she demanded, glaring over Julian in the direction of the Jem'Hadar restraining him.
"I will go and seek him, Vorta," one of them said gravely.
Just then, however, the door shrieked open. The noise startled Julian, and he bit down on a hiccoughing hiss of pain as his body tensed. Tiellyn made a sound that was almost a chuckle of irony.
"There you are," she said. "Bring it around and prepare to assist me."
"I can assist you," Deyos said, silkily obsequious. "I am responsible for the routine repairs to the Jem'Hadar in my unit, after all. You have seen my handiwork yourself. I am surely more experienced than any Fifth."
"Not my Fifth," said Tiellyn frostily. "Stay where you are, jailor, and be grateful I allow you to observe at all."
Julian might have taken a perverse pleasure in hearing Deyos thus rebuffed, but he was thinking about something else. You have seen my handiwork yourself, the commandant had said. Did that mean he was indeed taking the credit for the extemporaneous repair to Talak'ran's neck? More importantly, did that make Julian's own position safer or more perilous? If Tiellyn thought him too gifted, that could be dangerous. If she thought him worthless, the same might be true.
"Laser scalpel," she said in a dispassionate tone, handing off the scanner to the Fifth. He had brought a wheeled instrument cart around to the front of the makeshift table — Julian now thought he was lying on three cubic crates pushed together. He opened the top of the cart, unfolding it like a tackle box to reveal trays of surgical tools. Julian didn't recognize most of the designs, but it was obvious that this was a far more comprehensive collection than what Deyos had in his medkit.
Tiellyn took the device handed her by the Fifth, and she held it up before her, depressing the main button so that a thin column of purple light glowed from the tip, five centimetres long and about a millimetre wide. Julian's mouth went dry as she began to adjust the settings. Surely she didn't mean to cut him open here, like this? The room wasn't sterile. He was still fully clothed. He was unwashed, stewing in his own bacteria. He didn't see a delta wave inhibitor, no one had given him a sedative, surely, surely…
She lowered the scalpel into the hollow of his shoulder, where his left arm was bound to his side by the strips of torn blanket. "Hold still," she advised dispassionately. "You don't want to lose a sleeve: it's cold in this place."
As Julian strained his eyes to watch without tucking his chin, she activated the laser again and drew it smoothly down the length of his humerus. There was a faint reek of singed fibres as a dark fissure appeared in the cloth. She pulled back the tool as she passed the last wrapping, and then handed it back to the Fifth.
Julian felt the comforting pressure of the dressing release, and the weight of his arm shifted subtly forward, awakening the pain in his scapula and trapezius. Using only the tips of her fingers and thumbs, Tiellyn flung back the ruined strips of dirty cloth. She had done very careful work: the sleeve of his uniform was not even nicked. She frowned when she saw the sling beneath, and reached for the knot where it lay against his collarbone. She made a cursory attempt to untie it, then snorted in disgust and held out her hand for the scalpel again. She sheered away the knot and flung back the two corners, removing the last support for Julian's arm. He ground his back teeth together against the stretching misery in his back, but that only sent a sharp jolt into his head.
Frustration, irrational and puerile, gripped him, and Julian had to fight the impulse to curse. He was sick of being in pain, damn it! It was senseless and horrible, and it was wearing on his patience as well as his will to fight on.
"Turn him on his front," Tiellyn instructed, seizing Julians wrist and yanking his forearm flush against his side. Between this, and the rough way the Jem'Hadar flipped him from his hip to his belly, he wasn't able to think much of anything for a few minutes.
(fade)
Osteogenic stimulators were not supposed to hurt.
Julian knew this. He'd used such a tool hundreds of times, probably thousands, on everything from children's green-stick fractures to bones shattered in critical inertial damper malfunctions. He had used them on sedated patients, people medicated into a twilight state, those under the influence of neural blocking agents or a mild emergency analgesic, and even once, on the Teplan homeworld, a little boy with a two-week-old break who had no pain relief at all. He'd even had them used on his own body by other hands, and he knew: they were not supposed to hurt!
This one did. When the Vorta applied it to his shoulder-blade, working through all three layers of his uniform, the first thing he felt was a piercing column of warmth passing through skin and muscle and into the bone. That was the guiding laser, and the Federation tool produced much the same sensation: not painful by any means, but a little disconcerting if you didn't know what to expect. Then the pitch of the device's hum had changed, quickening and intensifying, and the pain had come.
It was a corrosive, burning, bubbling sensation deep under the muscle. Julian, lying with his left cheek pressed to the grate-like surface of the crate, two hard ridges bisecting his middle and two more digging into the front of his thighs where the boxes met, had not been able to stop the strangled moan of shocked misery that escaped his lips. His body tried to jerk away from it, too, but there was a Jem'Hadar at each limb now, holding him down like a battlefield casualty about to go under the saw of a Crimean War surgeon. He hadn't understood why that was necessary before, but he did now.
He felt the rippling, crawling seat of this new, unnatural anguish as it travelled over the bone. There was a sensation almost like a latch clicking into place somewhere deep within him, and then it was over. Gasping for air, his whole body limp with sudden relief, Julian lay shuddering and spent beneath the hard hands of the Jem'Hadar, involuntary tears trickling from his eyes to pool at the bridge of his nose and spill onto the crate beneath him.
Why did it hurt? he wondered bewilderedly. And then another part of his mind countered, Why wouldn't it hurt?
He didn't have much use for other varieties, but the history of medicine had always fascinated him. The development of a painless osteogenic stimulator had been a laborious and time-consuming project for Federation equipment engineers. As recently as the turn of the last century, it had been necessary to use a neural block even on sedated patients, not just to ease the pain of the fracture itself but to mitigate the agony of the treatment. Human bone was a living tissue, surrounded by delicate nerve clusters and sensitive musculature. The rapid regeneration caused by artificial stimulation of the osteoblasts disturbed the careful homeostasis surrounding a fracture, which elicited what was essentially a panic response in the nerves. The body interpreted that as pain.
In a fresh fracture, the patient's shock and the natural endorphins automatically released after significant trauma blunted such a response. In a fracture of a few weeks' old, the changes were less dramatic because callous formation had already completed and osteogenesis was well advanced. Assuming the fracture was well-aligned, and didn't need to be re-broken and properly set before healing, the pain of even a primitive osteogenic stimulator would be markedly less. In a situation like Julian's, with a three-day-old fracture, it made sense that it would be excruciating: old enough that the endorphins were spent long ago, but fresh enough that the regrowth was extensive and radical.
Lucky again, he thought sourly, steadying his breath as much as he could without being able to adjust his heart-rate with a thought. What he'd just been through was a cellular trauma. It had sapped him of still more of his strength, and he hadn't had much left going in.
"Step back," Tiellyn said coolly. The grip on Julian's elbow released. There was a clack as she set down the instrument. Then she planted her palm on Julian's shoulder-blade and pressed down firmly. Even understanding that the fracture was healed, he still expected pain. When it didn't come, he felt an almost giddy instant of gratitude.
"Move your arm," she instructed. "Touch the crown of your head. Do it, human," she hissed when he was slow to obey. "Or I will have my Third break every bone in your body so that I can have the pleasure of setting them."
The threat wasn't necessary: he wanted to know if his arm would move just as much as she did. Almost certainly more, in fact. He'd been shying away from the fear that if he didn't receive timely treatment, he might have permanently reduced function in that shoulder. Julian carefully navigated his arm away from his side, lifting it first and then stretching it. He swung it out in a broad arc, and had a moment's satisfaction when her heels clacked against the floor as she stepped out of the way. He flexed his elbow, extended it, rolled his wrist and wriggled his fingers, reached out ahead of him, and then finally cupped his hand to the back of his skull, fingertips feeling the rough crust of the scab where his scalp had been lacerated. It was warm to the touch, but he thought that was just the fever. It didn't feel inflamed or especially tender, so it probably wasn't infected.
"Very impressive," said Tiellyn sarcastically. "Now the face."
"No!" Julian cried reflexively. His first frantic thought was that he could not bear that boiling, caustic sensation in his cheekbone. The second, less cowardly and more rational, told him that he didn't want that laser of dubious quality too near his eye. The reason the Dominion device was painful and the Federation device was not was simple: the Dominion didn't care how much the therapy hurt. It followed that they might not care about other collateral damage. If that thing had not been tested near humanoid eyes, or if it had been tested and the results deemed unimportant, he did not want it anywhere near his face.
Her smooth hand curled around his wrist, yanking it back to his side under the protest of muscles sore after days of tensing against referred pain. The fingers of her other hand coiled about a fistful of hair, pressing him down against the crate so that its rough surface dug deeper into his left cheek. The scalp wound stung beneath her hand, and Julian's eye was forced closed as she increased the pressure still further.
She was leaning over him. He could feel the soft contour of her breast against his back, and her breath was hot in his ear.
"You are misguided, human," she said. "You were trained to believe that patients have a choice in their care, were you not? That the purpose of a doctor is to respect the bodily autonomy of those they work on. That if someone says no, you must stop, even if it is not in their best interests to do so. Am I right?"
"Yes!" The simple word broke from Julian's lips with a strength of resolve and certainty that heartened him. She could mock him and his ethical standards if she wanted to — goodness knows, everyone else had taken their turn — but that didn't make him misguided.
In his moment of righteous certainty, he didn't pause to consider where she was headed with this murmured diatribe.
"Well, you're wrong," she said. "The doctor's purpose is to get results, to further the general knowledge, and to obey the wishes of the Founders in all things. You are not a 'patient', you are a subject: a specimen. And you have no bodily autonomy, not here. In the Dominion, all bodies belong to the Founders, and yours is of interest to them. Now, if you will lie still, I will repair the fracture to your cheek while you are awake. If you will not lie still, I will sedate you. And you will never know what I have done."
Julian's heart seemed to stop. Time itself ground to a halt. His thoughts whirred at high warp, whipped to a frenzy but cold, awful panic. How had she known that would be an effective threat? Almost any other patient would have leaped at the offer of sedation; he knew that. Most people didn't want to be conscious for medical procedures, especially painful or invasive ones. He'd had patients request to be put under while he used a dermal regenerator! He could usually talk them out of it, of course, and when he couldn't, a delta-wave inducer was quick, harmless, and avoided all the difficulties of pharmacological anesthesia.
But Julian was desperate to know what this woman did to him. If he'd been even a little more lucid, he would be interrogating her right now about what they had done on the journey from Meezan IV. She could start with telling him what the hell she'd given him to cause such miserable withdrawal afterwards, and then…
He couldn't let her put him under again. It was better to know.
"I'll lie still," he said. Then he dared a clinical opinion. At least he could try to ensure her aim would be true. "You'll have better access if I'm on my back."
She straightened, releasing his head and retracting the other, more unsettling point of contact. She let go of his wrist last of all, and he heard the soft shush of skin on skin as she dusted her hands. "Will you turn yourself?" she asked. "Or shall the Jem'Hadar do it for you?"
He wanted to turn himself, and with two good arms he should have been able to. But his limbs were trembling and his head was swimming and he couldn't find the strength. They let him struggle for twenty long, humiliating seconds. The they flipped him unceremoniously, and suddenly the ridges were cutting into his back instead of his front. The ceiling, exactly like the one in Barracks 6 but much cleaner, spun lazily above him as Julian fought off senseless disorientation and the soldiers secured his limbs again.
"Gorotok'ren, immobilize his head," the Vorta instructed. Suddenly hard pincers were closing on Julian's collarbones, and his head was squeezed in the vise of two thickly-muscled forearms. He felt the rippled ridges of loose skin against his ears, and the Fifth's saurian face moved briefly into his line of sight as he adjusted his position and dropped into a crouch.
Julian knew it was wiser to be silent, but he couldn't help himself. "Has it been tested for use on the zygoma?" he asked. "Do I need something to protect my eye? Tritanium goggles?" He heard how ridiculous that suggestion sounded, when they were working out of a portable procedures tray. He groped for something less unobtainable. "A piece of lead flashing? A… a spoon?"
His voice faltered a little. Her lack of any response was making him desperate, increasing his anxiety exponentially. He forced himself to stop talking, and pressed his lips together. He felt a shiver of pain up the muscles on the right side of his face. While he didn't doubt that would be a thing of the past soon enough, it didn't quiet his fears. Next to the hands, a surgeon's most valuable tools were his eyes. Ocular implants were remarkable but imperfect. They fell far short of a natural human eye in many crucial respects, much less the keen, genetically enhanced pair Julian had taken for granted since the beginning of his academic ascent.
And this was the woman who had bungled the healing of General Martok's eye socket. It was possible she had even been the one to make the decision to anucleate, instead of to repair the organ. Suddenly he wished he had pressed the warrior for more details about his treatment at her hands.
"You're labouring under a misapprehension, Doctor," she said coldly, coming back into view. She had the osteogenic stimulator in her hands, and she moved it into place. "It is not your eye. It's the Dominion's."
(fade)
He didn't think his vision was compromised. It was too early to be certain, but he didn't think so. Julian kept blinking, his gaze darting from fixed point to fixed point. He could see the scratches on the rivets on the ceiling. He could see the facets on the tiny sapphires in the Vorta's earring. If he closed his left eye, he could still see them, just not without adjusting the position of his head. The fracture was healed and his head had not exploded — though while the stimulator was working he had felt certain that it would — but the swelling around his eye socket was unchanged. So were colours, however, and the quality of the light was constant. He didn't think his vision was compromised.
"Sit him up," Tiellyn commanded. She had her back to him all of a sudden, sorting through one of the trays of her instrument cart. The Jem'Hadar obeyed, and Julian had to grip the edge of the centre crate as he swayed dizzily with the sudden change in position. His fever was still burning, but now all of his pain seemed concentrated in his flank. The other sites still ached, of course, but it was such a reduction from the quixotic anguish of open fractures that he could scarcely feel the soreness.
"Now, Deyos," said the Vorta doctor. "We will see if I can complete my tests. Hold this!" she snapped, whipping suddenly around and thrusting something at Julian.
It was a sphere, made of some translucent polymer with an electronic device at its core. The device had fan-like ridges, and looked a little like a barnacle studded with coloured lights that flickered and flashed. Julian caught it as it was foisted on him, and eyed it in puzzlement. It felt exactly like a child's ball — a little heavy, maybe, but the texture was unmistakeable.
"Squeeze it," said Tiellyn. She had the medical scanner in her hand again, and she was navigating its menus with two quick fingers. "As hard as you can."
Julian closed his fist around the ball and squeezed, but he did not obey her. As hard as you can. He'd heard that one before. Of course, the Starfleet doctors who had performed his annual physicals at the Academy, and Nurse Jabara, who oversaw the same for him on Deep Space Nine, always said please. But the instruction was the same, and so was his response. He squeezed firmly and precisely, exerting fifty-five point two kilograms of pressure: a high-average grip strength for a man of his age, deliberately not a round number, and similar but not identical to his last three equally deliberate results. Over the years, he had honed faking normalcy in physical tests to a perfect science.
"Other hand," said Tiellyn boredly, and Julian was seized by a moment of curious déja-vu before he remembered where he'd heard those words before, spoken in exactly that way. Vin, the haggard veteran of the Sanctuary District Police, ordering Commander Sisko to place his palm on the fingerprint scanner.
You didn't think you could bear that day, but you did it, a small, proud part of him insisted. We do what we have to, to survive.
He moved the ball to his other hand and squeezed. It was his left, non-dominant. Fifty-one point eight kilograms of pressure seemed about right.
Tiellyn was looking at him pensively, her head tilted to one side so that her right earring swung pendulously, and her left rested in the hollow of her ear. "Do it again," she said silkily, her painted lips curling into a serpentine smile. "And this time, if you do not use your full strength, Gorotok'ren will cut off your nose."
Alarmed by her insight far more than the threat, Julian squeezed again. This time, he exerted seventy-four kilograms of pressure. It was considerably higher than the average, but still believably achievable without training or a history of sustained manual labour. As Julian shifted the ball to his other hand, he was relieved to note that it was now slick with sweat. He had a feeling that the absence of perspiration might have been what tipped her off the first time. He hoped that was the case. His right palm was wet, too, and he squeezed, this time careful to avoid a round number. Eight-one point three kilograms.
Tiellyn's eyes narrowed, but she took the ball from him and returned it to the tray. The Fifth made no move to cut his nose off, so Julian assumed he had passed this test. He scrubbed his palms against the lap of his uniform and tried not to think too hard about lying down again. It would feel wonderful, he didn't doubt that. His head was swimming, and the chills were back. He was still running a fever, and the deep, pernicious pain in his flank was throbbing to a new rhythm. He had wondered why she would fix the fractures but leave the kidney. At least now he knew why she'd prioritized the scapula.
She opened a flat case, and loaded an empty vial into the Dominion's equivalent of a hypospray. She approached him without preamble, grabbed a fistful of hair with her left hand, and pressed the device to his throat. He heard the hiss of negative pressure and heard the almost noiseless gurgle of blood collecting in the vessel. She was taking it right out of his jugular vein, freshly deoxygenated as it returned from his brain. The sensation was horrible. He felt as if his mind were being drained, not just of blood but of thought, and it was suddenly very difficult to breathe. When the vial was full, she withdrew both hands. Without her hold on his head, Julian swayed, giddy, nauseous and breathless.
Rough hands seized him from behind, gripping his arms and keeping him from falling. His head lolled, and his vision was filled with black spots. Tiellyn glanced at him and sniffed disapprovingly.
"You don't need to be so dramatic. I only took five millilitres," she said. She turned again, sliding a fresh canister into the hypo and approaching him from the other side. "Now, I'm going to take another five," she said with grim glee, and pressed the device to the opposite vein.
(fade)
In the end, she took sixty. It wasn't a substantial amount of blood: about one percent of his body's total volume. Either the way she was extracting it was placing undue strain upon him, or the effort of remaining upright was too much to endure, because by the time she was finished, Julian hung limp against the hands of the Jem'Hadar behind him, sawing laboured breaths against the urge to lose consciousness.
Tiellyn put the last vial into what looked like a portable spectroscopy scanner. Julian couldn't make his eyes focus properly, so he couldn't even attempt to read the screen. He knew it would have been useless anyway: all he knew were numbers, and he had already discovered that wouldn't get him very far without units of measure. He tried to watch her face instead, but she looked only faintly perplexed and gave nothing more away.
She stowed that vial with the others and turned to look at him, still silent and unreadable.
"Are you finished?" Deyos asked, his irritation plain. "You've disrupted the function of this camp enough already."
"I don't think you want to measure which of us is more disruptive," Tiellyn purred. She stepped forward, shoes clicking. Inanely, Julian noticed that her garments were all sewn of the same cloth: her close-fitted tunic, the asymmetrical skirt, the snugly fitted trousers beneath. Apparently she rated a coordinated wardrobe, while Deyos's garments were mismatched. It was a strange thing to contemplate just now, but while he kept his mind working he was in less danger of passing out. Her threat, the only one that had truly affected him, echoed in the halls of his memory: I will sedate you. And you will never know what I have done.
She reached with both hands as if moving for his throat. Instead, she seized the front of his jumpsuit and opened it to the waist in one fluid movement.
Julian stiffened, but he could not recoil. He could not even swat her hands away as she reached inside the garment and navigated his right arm out of the sleeve. The Jem'Hadar holding him adjusted his grip to allow it, and then changed position on the other side so that Tiellyn could do the same with his left. She reached behind his neck to open the back of the undershirt's grey collar. Then her hands moved around his waist, freeing the two remaining layers from the waistband of the jumpsuit. She stripped them off him as if he were a disobedient child, roughly removing turtleneck and singlet as if they were one layer. Part of Julian's mind wanted dimly to fight. Another part, frightened and bewildered, wondered why she was undressing him. The voice of the physician within had an answer.
You wouldn't treat a ruptured organ through a patient's clothes. You wouldn't diagnose a battered kidney without visualizing the flank.
But when he was bared to the waist, the Jem'Hadar's rough hands gripping his naked arms to keep him upright, it was not his kidney she went for, but his sternum. Julian let his chin fall to the notch between his clavicles, so that he could look down at himself. His head was impossibly heavy and he could manage no more useful contortion. What he could see from this vantage was quite bad enough. His left side was black with bruises that wrapped around behind. They reached from his ribs to his pelvis, and sent out tendrils of blue and purple towards his umbilicus. Worse, the flesh looked edematous and puffy. He was distracted from the gruesome sight when Tiellyn planted a small, cylindrical instrument against his breastbone.
The side she pressed against him, squarely between his nipples, was flat. The other with a clear glass dome affixed to it. He could see the glow of the device as she pressed the appropriate control. There was a faint susurration of particles rematerializing, and the dome was suddenly filled with dark, carmine soup: his bone marrow.
This procedure, at least, had been painless. The device was some kind of micro-transporter. She untwisted the dome and set it aside: it was completely sealed. Tiellyn affixed a fresh one, and applied the tool just below his ribs on the right. What she beamed up this time was a collection of shredded tissue. Julian felt something shift within him, and he understood she had just biopsied his liver. Apparently the device spared the nerves: there was no pain. Whether it also spared the blood vessels remained to be seen, he supposed.
"Lie him down," she told the Jem'Hadar. The one behind him navigated his torso. Another grabbed his legs. Then suddenly, blissfully, Julian was flat on his back, his unsteady head firmly anchored by the crate beneath. The sick feeling of imminent syncope faded a little, and it was easier to breathe down here.
But then Tiellyn was tugging at his garments again, and Julian wished he were still upright. At least then he might not have felt so defenceless. She rolled the top of his jumpsuit low about his hips, so that the waistband was no longer around his waist. She offered no warning of her actions, no explanation. She merely did as she wished without regards for what she had so scornfully called his body autonomy — his absolute right not to be touched without his consent.
It was horrible, humiliating, and utterly unnecessary. Julian understood that there were times when a doctor had to have access to a patient's bare flesh, and the patient was not always in a fit state to disrobe unaided. He wasn't in any such state himself at the moment, weak and dizzy and disoriented as he was. But all she would have had to do is explain what she was doing and why, and he would have been able to bear it. As it was, when she folded back the waistband of his trunks and bared his suprapubic region, he felt a wave of mortified vulnerability that turned his empty stomach and made him long for unconsciousness.
At least you'll be able to remember what was done to you, he told himself frantically. At least this time, you're not drugged insensate. At least this time…
Something cold and hard pressed against his flesh, just above his pubic crest. He heard the hiss of the ersatz-hypo again, and felt a sudden easing of the pressure on his bladder. Julian closed his eyes, trying to talk himself out of the feeling of violation. A urine sample, that was all. She had taken a urine sample.
He heard the telltale slosh of fluid, and forced himself to seek out his assailant with his eyes. She was standing over him, holding the sample to the light. It was almost scarlet.
"Gross hematuria," she said with perverse satisfaction. She looked him straight in the eye, lifting one brow. "I'm sure you know what that means, Doctor."
"You're the one who's seen the scans," he said. His voice was hoarse, his throat was parched, and he couldn't manage more than a whisper. "How bad is it?"
"Bad," she cooed, pursing her lips. "You would call it a Grade 4 renal injury. Multiple lacerations, only two of them deep enough to qualify. There's damage to some of the secondary renal vessels. No avulsion, but you have a significant hematoma. Your glomerular filtration rate is impaired."
"How impaired?" Julian asked. He hadn't expected her to tell him even this much, but he couldn't help asking for more. Specimen or patient, surely he had a right to know how dire his situation really was.
She clicked her tongue. "Now, that would be telling!" she chided. "My recommendation would be surgery, but we really aren't equipped for that here." She smiled poisonously as she said it. She knew that was exactly how he would have phrased the problem. Only he would have said it with regret and ill-concealed frustration instead of amusement.
"Can you stop the bleeding?" Julian asked, more lucid now than he had been in days. The concrete diagnostic information had galvanized him, lending him reserves of strength he'd believed long spent. He wasn't foolish enough to try to lift his head, much as he wanted to get another look at his flank. Dizziness still swirled in the dark recesses of his brain, waiting to swallow him at the slightest invitation.
"I can give you a clotting agent," she said indifferently. "If I do, you probably won't die, at least not from loss of blood. A pulverized kidney can heal on its own: you'd have a fighting chance. Unless you want me to open you up here, while the Jem'Hadar watch?"
She made it sound like a serious offer. In her place, it was absolutely what Julian would have done, assuming evacuation to a sterile facility was completely out of the question. He could have rigged a small sterile field with a containment generator and done his best. But he cared about his outcomes. He had an ethical and personal investment in every life that came under his care. Tiellyn, obviously, had no such moral watchdog on her shoulder. He didn't trust her to try her best. He didn't trust her at all.
And a Grade 4 renal injury, if she was telling the truth about the severity, could heal on its own. With diligent bed rest and plentiful fluids and adequate nutrition, his prognosis was good. Julian didn't let himself dwell too long on the adjectives or the fact that he couldn't read his own scans. He couldn't afford to think about either.
"No," he whispered. "I don't want that. Give me the clotting agent, and I'll take my chances."
Tiellyn shrugged indifferently. Plainly she had no investment in the question whatsoever. She dipped her hand into her instrument trays and brought up a vial of medication, which she loaded into the pressure infuser. "Pity," she said, as she pressed it to his shoulder and administered the dose. "I've dissected half a dozen of your species. I would have liked to see if you're any different, anatomically."
(fade)