"Prepare for insertion of ER-CC1 graft."
Vera stood stock still in the OR, still preoccupied from her conversation with David. He'd been cryptic at first-he's no good to me like this-but it had been enough for her to push for answers. He'd deflected her, but rustily thanks to fatigue and their shared history.
"God, Vera, what do you expect?" he'd said. "You think the guys who did this won't be back? Whoever did this made a few million dollars worth of paramilitary security staff and defense systems look like rent-a-cops. You think that if Sarif gets back up they won't be back?"
"What does this have to do with Jensen?"
David had pursed his lips, and she could see his mind turning over the consequences of explaining the truth to her before he'd lied. "Jensen's a good man," he said finally. "Kid deserves a second chance against those guys."
"I suppose when he wakes up, you can see if he wants one. For now, If he requests augmentation to recover from his injuries, LIMB will of course be happy to help."
David looked as if he was going to say something else, then thought better of it. "Well, we've still gotta deal with all that damage to his abdomen. What'd Yan say? 'Scoop out his guts like butchers'?"
Vera sighed. "Don't encourage him. He is enough of a...how would you put it, Sarif? A tetchy prima donna?... Without a major biotech CEO for an audience."
David laughed.
They had a shared history, stretching back twenty years. Vera had grown up in Poland, and she'd been a veteran GP in her late thirties when the superbug epidemics had hit there. She'd gotten by as a scholarship student at a German university, had found residence and a home in Hamburg and had been happy enough to forget her home country entirely until the bodies had started appearing on the streets of what had used to be her home town. Without antibiotics, doctors had settled for older and less subtle tactics, chiefly amputation or cauterization. David had been younger then, more an entrepreneur than a CEO. He'd managed to make a couple contacts with the local government by sheer brute force of personality more than salesmanship, enough for them to pay him just enough to cover the cost of the prosthetics. His devices had been fledgling things to what they were now, but to the survivors that had lost everything from parts of their families to parts of themselves they must have seemed like salvation. Sarif had probably had no more than ten employees back then, and David had gone in alone to oversee the implantation processes himself.
She'd had a few chances to talk to him, and there was one time in the small hours of one morning while they waited for the next round of patients they knew were coming when she'd decided she finally had the measure of him. She'd asked him why the hell an American start-up CEO with DoD contracts was doing humanitarian work in a plague-ridden hell hole. He'd laughed around the cigarette she'd given him that was lodged in the corner of his mouth. She couldn't remember his exact answer, only the idealism and blind compassion in it. There were a fair number of holes in her memories of the plague years; within the first few weeks of dealing with twenty or more patients for every doctor and a mortality rate of 70 per cent an exhaustion had polluted her as deeply as the marrow of her bones and she'd held herself together with stimulants and adrenaline. If there had been anything between her and David in the first few years, they'd both been too exhausted to find out and the bond between them had annealed into a strong professional friendship.
With Jensen's brain held together with Sarif implants, Yan finished the final stitching-up handily and quickly. In the corner of her vision, Vera's HUD flickered into a slow series of sine waves curving gently to Jensen's theta wave patterns. Immunoresponse biomarkers spiked with firework intensity behind them before curling gently downward.
She cleared her throat. "Vital signs are stable. All indications point to control of the immune response. EEG shows preliminary connections with implants and brain matter are established."
David grunted in satisfaction. Yan, integrated so utterly into the machines he was interfacing with that his consciousness may as well have been spread into their hard drives, didn't make any movements that suggested he'd heard her.
The nurses and techs were in motion with the abdominal implants. Vera caught sight of an artificial heart amongst the pile of miraculous matte black detritus. They organized them in a row next Yan so that the robosurgeon could easily distinguish and grab them as needed.
Watching Yan and the robosurgeon was like watching a carefully choreographed dance. Jensen's flesh sizzled and parted for them, his new components fitted in amongst his organs and flesh like jigsaw puzzle pieces. Blood seeped out only to be cleaned away with the meticulous precision of well-engineered machinery. The IV tubes and mechatronic interfaces that were so well-immersed into his flesh they were practically prostheses themselves hummed and flecked red as they worked to replace the spent blood. Vera watched it all, her view of the process augmented by her implants, and felt a slow building sensation of satisfaction. Despite Jensen's catastrophic injuries, the procedure was moving along as easily as an appendicitis surgery.
The last component to go in was a bulky, box-shaped component that Vera assumed was a power supply. Associated cabling meant to interface with other systems hung out of it limply like arteries and viscera. It was peculiarly heavy, and the robosurgeon's magnetic grabber twitched with effort when it grabbed onto it. Yan grimaced, murmured "steady, steady" in a reflexive echo of his communications with the robosurgeon. It twitched and flexed as it was immersed in Jensen, plugging itself into its interfaces and snugging itself taut against the framework of his ribcage.
"Good work," said David at last. He moved in and surveyed his employee critically. "Very good work. No wonder Vera recommended you, doctor."
Yan tilted his head, and the robosurgeon's arms curled for Sarif in a simulacra of a diffident bow. "We live to serve of course."
David nodded. "Well, you've earned your pay tonight. Next shipment came in while we were working. Some of it's hard to sterilize, some of it's fragile. I need to go check through it before they start bringing it in."
Vera was too tired to ask what exactly the 'shipment' consisted of. She was watching David walk out through the airlock system when Yan grunted in surprise. She turned to him, eyebrows raised in inquiry. Jensen's vitals, according to her HUD at least, were almost astonishingly stable. "A problem, doctor?" Yan just motioned her over. He pointed at one of the discarded boxes in the pile where Sarif's techs had left them; hospital protocol said to immediately remove all waste from the OR at the first opportunity but people were exhausted. He turned it over with his foot so that she could see the side he'd been looking at. Where the box wasn't stamped in DoD warning labels, Vera could just make out the bold capitalized letters.
'TYPHOON', the box said.
"He doesn't need that," Yan said flatly.
