Chapter Two: Testing the Timeline

"Are you a doctor?" Sydney asked, looking up at him with eyes wide in hope she hardly dared feel.

"Yes," Bashir answered. "And it looks like I'm already going to be working on him for a couple hours; the last thing I need is another patient to worry about, so I'd appreciate it if you stayed here," he added to Walker.

Walker still appeared undecided. "No offense to you, but no matter how good a doctor you are, he needs more than you can give him out of a first aid kit."

Bashir chuckled dryly, looking again at the claw marks on the satchel he carried. "Well, I think the damage to my medkit is mostly superficial; the instruments and drugs inside should be all right." And the fact that he had been carrying a full field kit when he fell through that portal — stocked for humans, no less — made it seem even more likely he had been brought here for some cosmic reason.

Regarding the matter as settled, he moved to kneel beside the patient, Sydney shifting to make room for him just as Gage coughed harshly.

Dr Bashir's eyes narrowed in concern at the sound. "Does anyone have something we can use to prop him up a little?" he questioned, wondering how they had thought having him flat on his back was a good idea, particularly when the coughing indicated there was already some pulmonary involvement. But now wasn't the time to question their competence in first aid, and he merely accepted the pack Walker handed him with a nod of thanks. "There we go," he murmured, tucking it behind Gage's head and shoulders with practiced ease. Pulling a reflective blanket from the field kit, he unfolded it and tenderly wrapped it over Gage's shivering form. "You just rest now…let me have a look at you."

The man's eyes were slitted halfway open, staring and glassy; he was half conscious at best, and Bashir doubted even that. But he had seen enough brain scans of patients in similar condition to know the soothing cadence of his voice could still get through.

He reached automatically for his tricorder, then hesitated a bare instant before unclipping the piece of futuristic technology from his belt. It was true he could probably adequately assess Gage's condition without it, but the rest of his instruments were equally forbidden in this time. Since he fully intended to use them to treat Gage to the best of his ability, he might as well make things easy on himself and use the tricorder as well.

In under a minute, it had given him all the information he needed to judge Gage's precise condition.

"He's in deep shock," he diagnosed, "brought on by pain, loss of blood, and sheer trauma. I'm also seeing signs of infection starting to set in, and the beginning stages of pneumonia."

Sydney made a sound halfway between a choked sob and a moan. "He's dying, isn't he?" she whispered.

Dr Bashir laid a gentle hand over hers. "I'll do everything I can," he assured her softly, unwilling to make an absolute promise when the patient was in critical condition; he couldn't know how often she had heard the phrase used to mean there was nothing more that could be done, and what had been done wouldn't be enough. But Sydney mustered up a smile, hearing the hope he intended in the words.

Bashir reached into his medkit for the hypospray and vial of cordrazine, calculating even as he did so the precise dose required for Gage's body size and current level of cardiac function.

"Was there a lot of bleeding?" he questioned, switching out the used cordrazine vial for a powerful pain reliever.

Walker hesitated. "I don't think you would say any of the wounds bled really profusely…but there were so many of them that by the time we got him here, his chest was covered in blood, and I don't think the oozing ever really stopped."

Bashir nodded slowly in understanding as he injected a third dose, this time an antibiotic to combat the infection. Pressing a small device to Gage's wrist, he glanced at the reading. "AB negative; that's even rarer than mine." He looked around at the others in the room. "Is anyone here an exact match, or at least a negative blood type?"

"Sorry, no," Walker responded, the other two Rangers giving similar answers.

"I…don't know," Alex admitted.

"Let me check," Bashir told her, getting to his feet and crossing the short distance to her side. She watched with curiosity as he pressed the device to her wrist.

"O positive."

"But that's universal, isn't it?" Alex asked in excitement.

"Sorry, not quite. It's called that sometimes, since most people have positive blood types, but it's O negative that's truly universal, and that's what your friend would need."

Turning back toward his patient, Dr Bashir found Sydney staring at him with her expression stricken.

"It's all right," he assured her. "I would have preferred to give him a transfusion if it was possible, but I think he can manage on…fluids."

He caught himself in time, letting her assume the pouch of pseudoheme he pulled from the medkit was merely the saline solution used even in her day.

It was more stable than donated or synthesized blood, and had the advantage of not being type- or even species-specific. Too large an amount would damage the kidneys, but it would save a patient until they could receive blood, or if the loss hadn't been too great, might be all they needed.

Bashir was hopeful that would be the case with Gage…but if not, there was always his own B negative blood. He wouldn't mention the possibility aloud, even to reassure Sydney and the others; he didn't want them attributing selfish motives to his hesitance to give his own blood when in fact it had everything to do with his genetic enhancements.

Every cell in his body had been genetically altered, not excluding his blood cells. He had run tests early on to determine whether he could safely donate blood if necessary, but the results had been inconclusive. They had told him his blood was still unquestionably B negative, and he didn't have to fear an adverse reaction, but even the best computer simulations hadn't been able to tell him whether those enhanced biomarkers would subtly alter a patient's own DNA.

He had to admit to enough curiosity that he almost hoped the situation would someday arise for him to find out — as long as it truly had been to save a patient's life, they couldn't prosecute him for doing it with the intent to pass on his enhancements; not with his lawyer.

But he couldn't satisfy his curiosity here — not in this time, when he would presumably be leaving soon and there would be no one to explain to Gage his new abilities. And enhancements in this time would be an alteration of the timeline, no matter what Tairvaul said.

But that meant if Tairvaul was right, then if he had to transfuse his own blood, he could do it in the knowledge that any effects would either be short-lived, lasting only until Gage's body replaced the donated blood, or so mild as to be overlooked, because the fact that no one had been found to be enhanced in this time meant that no one would be.

But while he was increasingly seeing the logic in Tairvaul's ideas, he knew that he still wanted them to be true more than he actually believed them to be proven fact, and so he would wait until his blood meant the difference between life and death before testing the timeline any more than he already was.

Next chapter coming next week!

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