"It Burns!" Duty Log

[Vex Xiang 0]

"It Burns!" Duty Log

 

      "It burns!" a twitching body screamed next to him.

      Dox knelt over one of the injured. Smoke began filling the room from a broken plasma vent. The warm acrid clouds spread out like a fog, and Dox could see less and less around him. Soon the walls of the spacious promenade were indistinct. He could barely make out Drake a few meters away, her back to him, leaning over a body. Above the distant sound of aftershock explosions and the moans and screams of injured people, he could hear the environmental vents humming frantically to clear the smoke.

      Just one deck below them the hull had breached. He could see the objects outside the huge bay windows before the plasma smoke had entered; bodies desperately flailing as they drifted away from the station, tears frozen to their faces, bottles, chairs, plants, terminals and podiums that had been ripped from their foundations.

      Dox looked down at the man he was treating. He had no instruments but for an emergency tricorder Drake had lent him from her medical kit, and a hypospray he had taken from it filled with morphesthezine. Dox knew that the station's main infirmary had been on the lower deck. It was safe to assume that its facilities were now open to the empty vaccum of space. They would have to wait for medical help to arrive, or to begin transporting the injured to the Republic. The Republic was sitting out there, monitoring the situation. From what he heard from Drake's comm, they were not yet bringing anyone on board. What were they waiting for?

      The woman Dox was tending to had a large burn on the left side of her body. She had many cuts on her stomach and legs from shrapnel that had burst through the open expanse like hot bullets. Her injuries were severe, but Dox knew she would live. If they could get her to a medical facility in time, they may even be able to save her arm.

      The man beside him, still screaming at the top of his lungs about the burning, was worse off.

      "You'll be fine!" Dox lied, raising his voice to an unheard of decible to breach the background chaos. The man wouldn't survive. Dox leaned over and grabbed the mans chin, tilting the head to the side. He looked briefly at the back of the skull -a fast moving metal plate had done it, acting like a sharp blade- it was a corpse that had not yet realized it was dead.

      Dox stood up from the woman, who in his opinion was stabilized enough for a few more minutes at least. He stepped past the outstretched arm of the man. It was pointless to try to help him, and was a waste of medicine to give him the morphesthezine. There were people who needed it more. Most nurses would have given him the injection, to end his pain for the last thirty seconds of his life, but Dox knew better. He knew what would happen if he did, and the look of horror on the last patient's face when he had to confess that he didn't have enough morphesthezine to give him because he had spent it on a corpse.

      The next person was better off. There were about 15 people total in the room they were in that had been seriously injured by the blast. They fanned out from the explosion point in a radial arrangement. Dox had rushed to the center of the group, and would make his way outward.

      This is what Maturin knew. He wasn't a surgeon, he wasn't even a doctor. But he knew this.

      Still no word from the Republic. If they couldn't get them to the ship soon, all of these people were going to die.