For twelve grueling minutes, Medical Ward Three was a theater of controlled, bloody mechanics.
Arthur worked with a rhythm that left Toby stumbling to keep pace with discarded sponges, empty syringe barrels, and torn packaging. Three tension pneumothoraces were decompressed. Two thigh cut-downs were performed using micro-blood-vessel clips salvaged from an emergency field pack. A tense compartment syndrome was relieved by bedside fasciotomy. And four units of man-made oxygen-carrying cooling-oil emulsion were pumped directly into the blood lines of the three deepest shock casualties.
By the time Arthur drove the final stitch needle through the sub-muscle-sheath layer of the sergeant’s thigh, the air inside Titus’s high-pressure bubble was clean, still, and holding at an even one hundred and two kilopascals.
The sergeant’s monitors, patched into Arthur’s tactical HUD, flickered from flashing red warning banners to a steady, rhythmic green pulse. Heart rate: seventy-two. Oxygen saturation: ninety-six percent. End-tidal carbon dioxide: thirty-eight tiny fractions of an inch of liquid silver.
All eight patients were breathing on their own.
“All eight are breathing,” Toby whispered, collapsing against the side of an empty equipment crate, his forehead smudged with dried betadine. His hands were shaking so wildly that he couldn’t re-cap his test penlight. “We... We actually kept them alive. In a blown room.”
