'Why the HELL wasn't anyone monitoring them?'
The words ricocheted around Marcellus's brain as he stripped off his coat and rushed to the cages, but there wasn't time for shouting them aloud; there wasn't time for anything.
He knew of course that Helen's bleed would probably have started overnight, and that even a little blood can look like a great deal when it's spilled on the floor. But this wasn't a little. This was far, far too much.
There was an emergency release button, safely out of the prisoners' reach on the wall above the cages. A single jab opened both of the cage doors. The partition that could separate them was still in the open position, out of the way.
He didn't think of the danger; he didn't have time. He thrust Malcolm out of the way and strode to the woman on the floor.
Her skin tone was gray. Her lips were turning blue. Her pulse was slow and thready, her skin icy cold and clammy. But she was still breathing, though the inhalations were shallow and far too fast.
"Stay with me, Helen!" He picked her up. She was so light, she weighed almost nothing. She was even lighter than Joelle, who felt like a feather in his arms.
"Blood! Top shelf!" His finger jabbed towards the refrigerator. Emergency stores of suitable blood were standing by in case of emergency, stripped of their leukocytes to reduce the risks.
There was only a second's hesitation. Moments later the bag of blood was in the warming device, and another was standing ready.
The bio-scanners flashed on as he laid her on the bed. He looked at the results and was appalled.
He hurriedly disinfected his hands and then broke out a sterile IV set. In this condition, finding a vein was going to be damnably difficult. His hands were surprisingly steady, however, as he strapped a tourniquet to the patient's arm and wiped the insertion zone with alcohol.
It seemed to take hours. Even the vein he finally found was flaccid; there was hardly any flashback as he gently slid the cannula's plastic tube into the vein.
The blood wasn't at the ideal temperature yet – he'd have liked it warmer, to help combat shock, but the way her blood pressure and hemoglobin levels were dropping he had no choice. Moreover, standard practice said you started a transfusion at a slow flow rate for fifteen minutes to monitor patient reaction, but if he went with standard practice he was likely to end up with a corpse on his hands after the first ten. An acute adverse reaction wasn't going to do anything shock wouldn't – not at this stage.
As slowly as he dared, he opened up the flow valve to maximum.
As soon as it was in place, he set up the second bag on her other arm and placed two more in the heater. He knew – or rather prayed – that they'd be needed. Red was leaking off the bio-bed, and spreading in a pool on the floor. A slip hazard; automatically he cleaned it up, throwing the saturated towels into the sanitary disposal chute before packing her lower body with more to help absorb the bleeding and, hopefully, go some way towards slowing it down.
There was nothing more he could do for her surgically speaking, not alone. If they were in a hospital she'd be sent for a crash hysterectomy, but although he was pretty sure he could carry out the operation successfully there was no way he could do it single-handed, and his support team wouldn't have arrived yet. If he could only keep her going for a while longer they'd be here, and he could set to work. The operating theater was kept prepared for emergencies, all the equipment set ready and sterile. Surgery could save her. If only they had time…
He went to the comm and sent urgent orders for his anesthetist to be contacted and told there was an emergency, and that she should get her sorry ass in here the instant she arrived.
The only other thing he could do for in the meantime, however, was to warm the patient up, and her legs should be raised to minimize the amount of blood being diverted from the heart. He bundled up his discarded coat and put it beneath her calves, and went to the cupboard to fetch warm blankets.
All of this time Malcolm had stood watching, his hands clenched into fists. After that first agonized cry he'd made no more sound, and his face was uncommunicative. He simply looked at Helen's face, and after the second cannula was taped into place he'd taken the nearest lax hand in his uninjured one and held it gently. As Marcellus brought over the blankets he took off his wolfskin and vaulted lightly on to the biobed beside her, where he gathered her thin body into his arms as if he feared she would break there. He took the utmost care not to touch or jar either of the transfusion sites.
Marcellus spread the blankets over both of them, with the wolfskin on top of all, and went to prepare warming pads. Soon he'd have to contact Harris, let the man know what the situation was. There would have to be an investigation, surely; he'd reported before he left the previous night that the patients would have to be closely monitored during the hours of 'darkness', and that he was to be called immediately if there was an emergency.
A hot, helpless rage churned in his stomach. The traffic had been lighter than usual this morning, and he'd reached the lab maybe ten minutes earlier than normal. If he hadn't….
They'd be down on half of their investment already.
He put the pads into place and checked on the cannulas, then glanced up at the scanner readings. They were confused by the fact of two bodies occupying the bed, and he grimaced. Well, whatever. There was nothing more he could do for her right now, no matter what her vital signs were. It was all down to the waiting game.
After a moment's hesitation he drew up a chair and sat down beside the bio-bed. Helen's back was turned to him. Her right arm lay on top of the coverings, the tube still safely in place. In the suspended bags, the blood levels were slowly falling.
He looked at her nails. Instead of a normal, healthy pink the beds were a bluish color. He tried to tell himself they hadn't gotten any worse, but he couldn't be sure.
The silence in the lab was profound. You'd have thought they were on a desert island, miles from the nearest outpost of civilization, rather than buried somewhere beneath Starfleet HQ on San Francisco's seaboard.
Marcellus rested his elbows on the bio-bed and his forehead on his linked hands. He believed in God, but he hadn't prayed for years, and doing so now seemed something of an imposition: you only remember I'm here when you want a miracle.
He was certain – as certain as he could be – that he'd done everything that he could. In an ideal world, these unfortunate people would have been placed for long-term treatment by professionals, men and women experienced in the treatment of mental trauma. Unfortunately, they weren't in an ideal world. They'd been placed in the care of a man who was more of an experimental scientist than a clinical psychologist, and the orders had effectively been less to treat them than to break them; he understood that well enough. He'd tried to do it with kindness, and certainly now he could point to some success: the guy had shouted for help, which in psychological terms was pretty well equivalent to unconditional surrender. At a cost. Jesus, what a cost.
The injection he'd administered should have been as safe as it was effective. It was in standard use. He'd checked the dosage over and over again, run every check against her analysis results and readouts. Apart from doing what it was designed to do, it should have had no ill effects. But as a qualified doctor, he knew that there are no guarantees with a human body. For some reason, Helen had hemorrhaged. Severely. He couldn't have foreseen it; he hadn't been present to treat it when it started. Logically, he wasn't to blame.
Yeah.
Wonderful thing, logic.
Always made everything okay.
After ten minutes or so, he lifted his head.
Malcolm had laid Helen back soundlessly on the bio-bed. His forehead was now resting against hers. The lashes of the visible eye lay above his cheekbone like a dark fan, and there was a gleam of moisture underneath it. For one moment the doctor thought she was staring back at him, but then he realized she wasn't.
No!
As Marcellus leaped up, the other man pushed back the blankets and rolled off the bed in one smooth, controlled gesture.
His face was still; too still, like a mask from behind which he watched the world and gave away nothing. There was no trace of tears in the eyes, which were dark, so dark they were almost the color of wet slate.
They watched the CPR and expected nothing.
They were justified.
When Marcellus finally laid aside the paddles, and recorded the time of death in a voice as flat as the lines on the scanner overhead, the mask lifted to survey him.
"Perhaps it's for the best," he said quietly. His voice was English; Marcellus hadn't expected that. It was also surprisingly cultured.
"How can you say that?" demanded the doctor hotly, gesturing at the body between them. "She had her whole life in front of her!"
"She had a life in front of her." He lifted the wolfskin, looked at the blood smeared over it, and flung it into a corner. "You know what it would have been. The same as mine will be. She's spared that, at least."
Enraged by this fatalistic acceptance, Marcellus made to step around the bio-bed. Instantly the other man retreated. Automatically his top lip twitched up. It would probably take a while for that reflex to fade.
"You don't have to play their game!" the doctor shouted. "Just get the hell out of it. Get away and get yourself a real life, among honest people. You seem like a decent guy, you can't want to work for these bastards. I won't believe it!"
A queer half-smile twisted the mask briefly. "I gave my word. And for someone with such pronounced views on what sort of people one should work for, you're in somewhat strange company yourself."
His own smile in return was bleak and humorless. "I had my reasons." A gesture. "I thought I could make a difference. And look where it's gotten me. Look where it's gotten her."
"Oh yes, Doctor. I know what you did. I can even make an educated guess at why you did it."
The voice was level, stating facts rather than offering absolution, but at that moment Marcellus didn't want absolution; he wanted resolution. "I'm responsible for her death."
"Almost as responsible for it as I am." For a split second the mask slipped, giving a glimpse of a frozen wasteland of self-loathing. "After all, I was the one who raped her in the first place. You were just trying to undo all my good work."
Now it was his turn to step back involuntarily. Seeing it, the half-smile writhed again. "I assure you, Doctor, I didn't say 'please' and 'thank you'."
"It wasn't your fault!" God above, how could they have done this to him? Laid this burden on a man who was utterly unfitted to bear it, who'd spend the rest of his life flaying himself for something he'd done when he was effectively out of his mind?
But that was all part of the plan, wasn't it? He'd kill because he hated himself and risk death because he was valueless, offering up his life on the altar of fate every time he was sent out on a job. Even more than the killing and the obedience, that was what they'd accomplished. Finally and truly, he didn't care about his own survival at all.
"It wasn't your fault," he said again, hopelessly this time. The words fell like warm rain on permafrost, just as the first had done, and were extinguished.
There was a small, cold pause before Malcolm spoke again. "Take your own advice, Doctor," he said at last. "Do whatever you must, but get out of here. You're not one of us. You never will be."
"You're telling me you are?" His helpless wrath blazed up again. There had to be something he could do. He'd lost one patient; was he to lose both of them? "I don't believe it. I won't believe it!"
"I'm flattered. You're wrong." Malcolm stepped backwards again, and it was as though he was retreating into the shadows that would hold him from now on. "But I'll justify your belief in me in just one thing. I swear, by anything that's worth my word in this shit-hole of a life, that for the rest of mine I'll protect everyone that's entrusted to me, with my heart's blood if necessary. She's the last one who'll die when I could have saved her."
You couldn't have saved her. Nobody could have saved her. But the Englishman was no longer listening. He turned around and walked back into the cage, where he sat down and put his head in his hands.
"Get out of here, Doctor," were his last words.
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