Seventeen hours of continuous surgery later, the wounds were all clean and open. Modified saline and regenerated plasma flowed in and out. Extraneous personnel disappeared after the patient was turned upright once again. Not being able to tell if the person were awake, or asleep, what with no eyelids bothered most of them.
Truthfully, McCoy couldn't blame them.
He'd sent the whole team away once they did their best to make their guest comfortable. Not much more than covering all the wounds in dry, silver nitrate impregnated bandaging and slipping in pads of cotton gauze under the naked bone of the back to make lying in the firm medical bed a bit more comfortable.
Chapel urged him to eat, to sleep but... hell. He might be exhausted, but he couldn't help but being amped up. Once a couple of the others from the debridement team came back from the breaks he'd ordered them all to take, he'd at least take the time for a meal.
As it was, he didn't want to waste the time on a snack just to go through the half-hour long process of getting sterile again after. His back ached from being bent over for so long, his fingers cramped from keeping every movement smooth and subtle for hours.
If McCoy were going to take a break, he'd at least need a long, hot shower, a good meal, and at least two hours of sleep to even pretend to be sane.
Robinson left him too. He'd done all he could for the little ones. Washing them in a solution the database supplied, intended for infants. They'd tested it on one of the cooked eggs first, pleased with the results after they scanned it for radiation. Even as far gone as the first dead one was, the solution removed ninety-five percent of the scannable markers.
They'd carefully washed the rest. Robinson wanted to soak the whole lot, but McCoy didn't want to chance interrupting the delicate air sack within each.
"Seems you know a lot about these eggs," Robinson had noted, about six eggs in.
"Don't know about you, but I had my chicken eggs to hatch when I was a kid. Even got a few Denobulan wailing bat eggs too, once I was old enough for the permit. Across the board, doesn't matter what kind of eggs, there are some rules. Ninety-nine-point-five, keep the air sack up, don't shake... you know, the basics."
"What, you don't want scrambled eggs?"
McCoy frowned at him. "Don't even joke. These are children."
"Fetuses, if you're going to be making correlations. And I can't tell you how many roller-coaster rides my wife took while pregnant."
McCoy felt an eyebrow go up in a very Spock-like gesture, before he could slam it back down.
"And you're an OB/GYN?"
"Some crave pickle ice cream, mine craved adrenaline. I'm just glad I talked her out of skydiving and bungee jumping."
Now, nothing but the quiet beeps of the monitor, and the hiss of pure oxygen flowing into burned lungs, interrupted the silence.
Well, that and the timer he'd had Chapel set up for him. Every four hours, a quiet beep sounded in his office.
McCoy pushed off of where he'd been leaning against the biobed and headed for the incubator. He checked temperature, humidity, color, before opening the cover. With calm, smooth movements, he systematically rotated each egg a quarter of a turn. If they were his leghorns back home, he'd be doing a half rotation, along with plucking the ones from the center, put them to the outside, and bring the rest in, so that no "hot spots" would develop. With state-of-the-art Federation technology, he didn't have much of that to worry about... and he wanted to be able to pick out which of the eggs bore visible cracks. Three were beyond salvage, another couple cooked right through. Robinson had patched two more. They'd been cracked, but their membranes not breached yet.
With luck, the medical plaster they'd decided on would keep those little spider cracks along the surface sealed up tight, without setting chaos to the delicate balances.
Some subtle shift in the atmosphere caused the CMO to look up at his patient. The unblinkable eyes were focused on him again.
"Just another couple to rotate, then I'll check on you."
Once he finished, and had the lid back in place, he pushed the whole box up close, so his patient could peer in. If he tilted it just so those bright eyes wouldn't see the troubles within the nest. With so much physical shock, an emotional one didn't need to be added in to the mess.
"Uhura is working on updating our Universal Translator for you," McCoy said, standing near by, but not wanting to get in the way. "As long as nothing else goes wrong, soon we'll be able to talk to one another." Once you have lips, tongue, and larynx again. "Until then, I'm going to make sure you're not alone. A doctor and nurse will be here to keep you company at all times. Nothing like being stuck in a hospital with nothing but the ceiling to stare at to drive a man... or woman, I suppose... batty.
"I wonder which you are," he mused out loud a moment, before looking around guiltily. External versus internal didn't count for much in the grand scheme of things. Hell, even Vulcans kept their boys inside. Even curled up over the eggs, certain areas had been burned off, then neatly trimmed away, and others the medical scanner couldn't quite read. All the extraneous radiation.
"We have tissue samples in the regenerators now," he said conversationally. Even without a language between them, a calm, friendly voice meant a lot in a place like this.. "I'm going to start with facial features, if you don't mind. Delicate, and small, so the cultures will grow faster. Relatively speaking of course. And we're going to need you able to articulate for Lieutenant Uhura to figure out your native language. Seems those bird whistles were a bit over her head. Well, that also might have been more having to watch your surgery happen.
"Burns are some of the hardest wounds to deal with. I'm sure I don't have to tell you that, now." He picked up a medical tricorder, scanning over the whole of his patient, checking for continued radiation burns. "That's the big problem, really. A contact burn, a thermal burn, a chemical burn, the damage they cause crops up right away. We know exactly what we're dealing with off the bat and can deal with the damage. Radiation? Well that can take a week to develop. We might have you cleared out now, and more blisters will fill up with heat and burst through. Which means more surgeries to remove that tissue as it happens. Even more reason to grow your replacement bits outside of you, for now.
"I just wish we had a better idea of what you looked like. Spock says your distress call petered out a few hours ago. The last of your computers melted in the heat. With that down, our sensors can now penetrate farther, well, as far as we can with all that radiation contaminating half a parsec in every direction. Engine melted to a slag heap, computers down to nothing too. If we had access to your databases... Ah, well. We'll figure it out, won't we? Lips, tongue, and teeth first, hmm?"
The slow sweep of the tricorder pulled up at the pockmarked skull. McCoy sighed.
"I think I'm going to chance regenerating at bit of this now, at least. I might end up just cutting it all out again, but... hell, I shouldn't be able to see inside your nasal cavity like this."
He picked up the handheld boneknitter unit, flashed the want over the back of his hand to show it didn't hurt – not that his patient could feel it at this point anyway – before raising it up. The calcium mesh twinned up together, flowing like water up and over each of the voids that had no point in being there. The portable unit couldn't lay down full sheets of calcium - that machine he mostly used for large fractures or to reinforce large sheets of bone after traumatic injuries, like the time the last time a redshirt snapped half of his ribs during a airlock blowout and risked puncturing a lung with each breath. But the artificial mesh served well enough. In a healthy body, it laid groundwork for the patient's own immune system to see a "minor injury" and heal it naturally by filling in the mesh with the body's own calcium stores. Back in his grandmother's day, they'd replace lost bone tissue with DNA scrubbed coral - nearly identical in cellular structure and it supplied enough calcium so the body wouldn't leech from elsewhere, causing more harm than good like the old bone transplants did.
"There we go, not much, but it's a start, hmm?"
The lower jaw worked a bit up and down, trying to communicate.
"Shh, it's okay. Try to keep calm. We're doing everything we can right now. What you need to do is stay calm and concentrate on healing."
"Doctor McCoy?"
He sighed. The comm panel again. Would someone please design a wireless one? Please?
With a frustrated huff, he made his excuses to his uncomprehending patient, stripped off his gloves, and headed out the sterile tenting.
"What is it?" He grumbled with more anger than he intended.
"Yeoman Duan here, sir. The Captain has scheduled a debriefing in twenty minutes."
"Of course he has. Surprising he waited this long. Alright, I'll be up soon enough."
With a few flicks of his own comm, he found a couple doctors with a little sleep under their belts to hold his station.
M'Benga gave him a bit of a wan smile.
"Feel up to dealing with our burn victim?" McCoy asked, waving his Vulcan expert into his office a moment.
He made a so-so movement with his hands. "The staff are already gossiping. It sounds like a pretty bad sight."
McCoy sighed and nodded. "I'm going to post a restricted access, for the moment. The fewer people going in and out the better, and not just for reducing the chance of infection. Try to keep our friend calm, will you? Don't wheel the incubator too far away. Slow, calm speech."
"Of course, sir."
McCoy spent a few more minutes going over readings, copying more to his own PADD to take with him upstairs, before snagging a mask and waiting for a freshly sterilized M'Benga to lead the way back into the tent around biobed one.
"This is Doctor M'Benga," McCoy introduced, to cover the startled gasp from his colleague. "I need to go report to my Captain, but I'll be back in time to do the next rotation on your eggs."
He offered a smile with his eyes, unable to offer a reassuring touch without sterile clothes.
"Just keep our friend stable, and signal me if there's any trouble. I'll be down in two shakes of a lamb's tail."
M'Benga followed him back out, his eyes wide.
"That- I... I thought... it couldn't understand us."
"He, or she, can't, as far as I can tell. But kindness is universal. Take a deep breath, get a shot from my cupboard if you have to, but keep close. We're far from out of the woods, Doctor."
McCoy disposed of his mask on his way out. The sooner he left, the sooner he could return.
If only he could talk with the poor creature.