Free Battlespace by Ian Douglas Page B

Marine’s bronchial tubes into his chest cavity—a condition called pneumothorax—and the air, mixed with blood, was bubbling away into space through the punctured suit. As the air drained away, the condition became the opposite of pneumothorax—vacuthorax—and massive lung tissue trauma.
    And suddenly, things were getting much worse very quickly. As Lee rolled the armored form over, a crusty, glittering patch of frozen blood and water clinging to the wound suddenly dissolved in a spray of red vapor. He caught his mistake immediately. When he’d changed the Marine’s position, he’d moved the wound from shade into direct sunlight. The wound had been partly plugged with blood-ice, but in the harsh light of the sun just above the eastern lunar horizon, the temperature on that part of the armor soared from around -80° Celsius to almost boiling. In seconds, the ice plug had vaporized, reopening both the wound and the partly plugged hole in the armor.
    There was no time for anything but plugging that leak. Reaching into the case mounted on his right thigh, he pulled out a loaded sealant gun, pressed the muzzle up against the hole, and squeezed the trigger. Gray goo, a quick-setting polymer heavily laced with programmed nano, squirted over the hole and wound together, almost instantly firming to a claylike consistency, then hardening solid. He checked the Marine’s suit readout again. Internal pressure was low, but steady.
    But the guy was still bleeding internally—probably hemorrhaging into his thoracic cavity—and his heart was fluttering, atrial fibrillation. The patient was on the verge of going into arrest.
    Lee reached for another tool, a Frahlich Probe, and slammed the needle down against the armor, directly above the heart. The probe’s tip was housed in a nano sheath, which literally slipped between the molecules of the man’s vac armor, then through skin, muscle, and bone to penetrate the patient’s chest while maintaining an almost perfect airtight seal. Leaving the needle in place, he pulled off the injector, then attached a reader. The device fed his implant a noumenal image of a glistening red, pulsating mass—the beating heart—and let him position the tip of the needle more precisely, at the sinus node at the top of the right atrium. Easy…easy… there !
    Now he could program the probe to administer a rapid-fire series of minute electric shocks directly into the sinus node, regularizing the beat. He watched the readout a momentlonger as the probe’s computer continued to feed electrical impulses into the patient’s heart. The fibrillation ceased, the heartbeat slowing to a fast but acceptable 112 beats per minute.
    The patient’s breathing was labored. He couldn’t tell, but he suspected that the left lung had collapsed. Certainly, it had been badly damaged by both wound and vacuum trauma. With the wound sealed over, the best Lee could do for the patient now was evacuate him.
    â€œNightingale, Nightingale,” he called. “This is Fox-Sierra One-niner. I need an emergency evac. Patient has suffered massive internal vacuum trauma. Suit leak is plugged and wound is stable. Heart monitor in place and operational. Over!”
    A voice came back through his implant a moment later. “Copy that, Fox-Sierra. This is Alpha Three-One , inbound to your position, ETA two-point-five mikes. Ready your patient for pickup, and transmit suit data, over.”
    â€œWe’re ready to go at this end. Uploading data now.”
    He spent the time checking for other wounds, monitoring the patient’s heart and vitals, and entering the computer code that caused the man’s armor to go rigid, locking him immobile against the chance of further injury. The patient’s condition continued to deteriorate, and Lee was beginning to guess that he’d made a wrong choice, a wrong guess somewhere along the line.
    His patient was