How I Got Here: “Abbott”
20 Oct 2023Columbuss
Commander Justin Estok. Stardate 20-OCT-3309."A sample this size would be quite... substantial..."
In low-G environments, wounds, they don't heal. Without the full force of gravity pulling down on the human body, blood vessels can't dilate and constrict like they're supposed to. The pressure gradient that gravity applies to the body in full gravity environments, that's lost, so blood and molecules necessary for cellular regeneration, they can't reach the injured areas properly. Skin cells, called Keratinocytes, they can't move into the gaps in injured flesh to repair wounds.
On a full-G world, wounds can be serious, but working with the levels of gravity the human body is accustomed to, it gives medical professionals a lot more options to keep you alive. In Earth-like gravity, blood clots. Clotting is one of the many evolutionary traits the human body has developed that we all tend to take for granted. When mixed with oxygen, rather than continuing to run like a liquid, blood coagulates and forms a sort of... gel, stopping the flow of blood. Your body then works beneath that clot to heal wounds, stopping you from bleeding out.
In low-G, however, the body can't do these things. So, open wounds, they tend to just stay that way.
Most starships, like The Chelsie Grin, they come equipped with fully functional medbays. These come standard with T-MRI medbeds with full internal imaging scanners and stasis module (for the more serious afflictions). The medbay stores come fully stocked with all manner of analgesics, for minor scrapes to more serious burns. Standard medbays come equipped with an onboard cryogenic refrigerator for storing "ready to use" artificial blood, saline and plasma. Some of the more "in demand" items you might find are blood and immune system stimulators, or "stims". These "stims" can do any number of different things, such as providing chemical resistance's to disease or environmental damage, or by stimulating the blood's reactivity to oxygen. This is especially important in cases of Hypoxemia, like when your canopy gets busted open by incoming tracer rounds, your ship loses power and you end up going into suit induced hibernation, surviving on the flight suit's built in oxygen tanks.
All in all, these medbays, they're fully equipped to handle most minor problems. Anything someone who isn't a doctor can handle. Most of the equipment in the medbay, it does the work for you. Anything more serious and you're going to need gravity and a doctor. For all intent and purpose, medbays are a temporary solution until you can reach a starport. Think more "bandage" and less "stitches". Think more "ambulance" and less "hospital".
Fortunately, thanks to Brandson's relentless attention to inventory, the medbay aboard The Chelsie Grin, it's always fully stocked with medical supplies to treat almost any problem we might end up in it for. Unfortunately, there's no cure for prolonged, and untreated, blood loss. Like, when six bullets burn a hole through your chest and straight out the back, there's just no amount of stims that are going to slow that kind of blood loss down. Some holes, suffice to say, just can't be patched up. So while Finn and I carried Doctor Abbot, in point three-G, over both of our shoulder's through the hangar door of RenenBellot Lab toward the Chelsie Grin with a smeared trail of blood tailing us on the floor, you know we were doing it at a bit of a rush.
"Why are you still standing here?! Didn't I tell you on the comm to get the ship ready to dust off?!" I bark at Brandson, who's waiting for us on the flight deck and watching, bewildered, as Finn and I stumble toward the on ramp, covered in blood, with pistols in one hand and a severely wounded scientist in the other. "Get on board and get this ship to the surface!"
"What the FUCK happened?!" he yells back, pressing the switch to close the on ramp behind us.
"NEVER MIND THAT! GET TO THE COCKPIT AND GET US THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!"
Brandson turns, hustling down the short hallway and up a short step into the galley toward the cockpit before disappearing as the automatic doors close behind him. Finn and I hike the dying man back up on our shoulders, shuffling our way into the medbay and laying him down on the table at the center of the room before strapping him in. Finn frantically starts pulling open drawers, removing stims and injecting them into the dying man's thigh trying to slow down the blood loss. He removes an IV and blood bag from the refrigerator in an attempt to keep Abbott alive and breathing long enough for us to get him to a doctor. As we scramble, the floor jolts as the ship begins to ascend to the surface before we lift off. I push my chair back against the rear wall, holding on to the bed frame as the engines boost, pulling us toward the aft of the ship. The high-G maneuver pins us back into our seats before the weightlessness of zero gravity, and the FSD drive, take over.
Activating my mag boots, I stand up, looking at the monitor to get an idea of the doctor's vitals while Finn scrambles to secure the IV to the fixture at the end of the tube in the pouch of artificial blood. He's removing the cover over the needle before looking over at me and noticing that my arms are hanging down by my sides.
"What's wrong?!" he asks, before looking down at the table to see that the doctor... had stopped breathing.
Everything. The shooting. Chelsie's blood soaked on-ramp. The lifesaving flight toward gravity. It all started several days before. It all started with Lorencian Ardulo spilling his guts about his role in the events that led to his arrest. With me watching through the glass, the attorney standing nearby and Alysianne leaning over the table so as to not miss a single word, Lorencian, he laid it all out. He described how, a few months back, he was approached by someone calling themselves "Rising Damp" to procure, and facilitate the transport of, an important package from the Al Mina system to someone he knew who could analyze the potency of high explosives.
"Now," he said. "Mining is my business and the best way to crack a rock open is to core down into it with your mining beam and drop a charge down inside. When you're in the mining game, explosives are just more tools for the job. So it's no surprise this "Rising Damp" sought me out."
"And you were more than happy to take their money..." said Aly.
"Credits are credits where I come from," he says with a shrug. "What do I care what the package is for?"
"And this "Rising Damp"... are they male? Female?" asked Aly.
"Hard to tell with a helmet on and a blackened out face plate. Didn't matter to me anyway. As I said, credits are credits. They all spend the same, regardless of where they came from."
"So where did you send the package?"
"Loha is a mining system, okay? Everyone makes their living cracking rocks there and Astral Projections isn't the only mining outfit in the game. Any payload, any mining charge, it all has to be evaluated prior to use. It has to do with safety. Potential yield, radiation effects... blah, blah, blah... it's all a bunch of bureaucratic bullshit if you ask me. All meant to suck another credit out of another legitimate operation."
"Legitimate operation?" Aly says sarcastically.
"Mostly... legitimate," he replies. "Anyway, if you're going to send your charges out and you want to keep the credits in house, then you have to control the inspection. That's why we send ours to RenenBellet."
"RenenBellet Labs? On Loha C4?" asks Aly.
"The very same. The facility is run by a man named Frederik Abbott. A degenerate gambler. Got himself so in debt with us, he agreed to do the inspections. We pay him, he clears the explosives and we launder our money at the same time."
"Not bad," Aly said, which Lorencian responded to with a grateful, but slight, nod of the head. "And that's as far as your involvement with this "Rising Damp" went? You don't know what happened after the package was sent to RenenBellet?"
"None of my business," he replied. "I did my job and collected my money for it. What happened next was someone else's problem."
Aly followed me to the flight deck where The Chelsie was docked. We said our goodbyes and parted ways, but not before she gave me a parting gift.
"Liberal Command ID's?" I asked.
"They're not legitimate," she said. "But they'll get you through the door and past security. Not bad fakes, I don't mind saying. Of course, if you're captured..."
"I know, I know... you don't know us."
"Good luck Commander. It's been a pleasure working with you. Hope to do it again someday."
Fast forward to Finn and I standing across the desk from Dr. Frederik Abbott as he reads the headlines on the data pad I'd set on his desk. He reaches up, fingering at the full mustache below his nose with one hand while removing his thick glasses with the other.
"Ardulo, much like the rest of his operation, are in custody Dr. Abbott. You don't answer to them. Not anymore," I said, placing my Liberal Command credentials down next to the data pad. "Tell me what I want to know. Tell me what was in the package and where it went."
The doctor let out a long sigh before leaning back and sinking slowly into the chair behind him. Reaching out, he drops the glasses on the desk before reaching up with both hands and digging his palms into his eyes.
"I should have known," he said, with an accent I hadn't heard before. "I should have known it would come to this. I try to tell him. Over and over, I tried. 'This WILL NOT work forever' I say. 'Sooner or later, the Federation will come down on us for what we do here.' But does he listen? No. Now look where we are."
"You have an opportunity here," Finn interjects. "You can do the right thing. It's not too late to clean the slate. Restore your name. Help us Doctor. Help us before more people get hurt."
The doctor lowers his hands into his lap before reaching for the digital projector in the center of his desk. The projector illuminates out in the space between us as the doctor begins flipping through various files. He stops on one titled Cirillium CB-4. Opening it, an image of a chemical formula comes into view for all in the room to see.
"This… is Cirillium. It is a chemical compound typically found in mining ordinance," he says. "That is what I found inside the package I received from Lorencian. I do not know where it came from, but a sample this potent is very rare."
"What did they ask you to do?" I ask him.
"Verify it's potency," he says. "Try to predict the yield from such a payload. A sample this size would be quite... substantial. I can't imagine anyone would have any purpose fit to use all of this at once."
"Unless you're planning on blowing up a building," Finn says, looking over at me.
"Has something happened with this?" he asks.
"No," I reply, turning back to him. "Not yet. Not if you tell us where it went..."
Before he can reply, the window making up the eastern wall of the room, it explodes. In what felt like an instant, the well manicured office disappears, replaced with shattered glass and flying debris as golden flashes of light rip through the space between the doctor and us. Time slows to a crawl as my focus narrows. My tunnel vision zero's in on the space in front of me so tightly that I can see the golden outline of a large caliber round slowly rotating through the air, splitting a broken fragment of glass before moving through the room and into the wall on the other side. I'm so focused on what I'm seeing, that I fail to notice that Finn is tackling me to the floor, that my face mask had sealed shut or that there was a Viper attack ship hovering outside the window emptying it's multi-cannons into the room.
As Finn and I land, time races back to normal speed as our ears are deafened by the loud swirl of the spent cannons outside the window. The room fills with a loud roar as the ship's engines boost, sending it up and over the roof of the building, out of view. A moment later, the door behind us falls open and into the room, cut almost entirely in half from the barrage of bullets. Two men in combat gear enter through the smashed in door with rifles at the ready. They overlook Finn and I, who are still on the floor, turning their weapons instead toward Abbott lying motionless across the room, air from the escaping atmosphere rushing past his body and fluttering the tail ends of his lab coat. Finn and I raise our pistols, quick to empty the magazines, before dropping our assailants and standing back up.
Finn races over to Dr. Abbott, rolling him over to find he'd been hit multiple times.
"Oh FUCK!" Finn yells. "DOCTOR? DOCTOR?! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!!"
"He's gone Finn!" I yell. "We need to get the fuck out of here... NOW!"
"HE'S STILL ALIVE!" Finn yells. Looking over his shoulder, I can see Abbott's still breathing. The doctor was still alive, for the moment. Finn removes a secondary mask from his suit, fitting it over the doctor's badly lacerated face, to protect him from the missing atmosphere the former window had been holding in.
"Brandson!" I yell into the communicator on my wrist, "We have the doctor! He's hit! Power up the medbay and prepare the ship for immediate dust off! Finn! Let's get him out of here!"
"He's trying to say something! Abbott?! What is it?!" Finn yelled.
Abbott summoned what strength he had left, frantically gasping for air inside the facemask. Reaching down, I try to pull him up over my shoulder, in a vain attempt to save his life. As Finn and I begin to lift, Abbott manages to gather enough air for four words.
"Paresa... system," he said, choking on the air and fluid in his throat. "Nova... Matella."