Free The Sunborn by Gregory Benford Page A

”
    Julia heard a humming from the capacitor. Green sparks jumped out from the iron seam. “What’s—” Then it exploded.
5.

THE STROMATOLITE EMPIRE
    B RINGING V IKTOR UP had taken forever, like hours ticking in the back of her mind. Julia had lost it once, shouting at them, pulling at his harness to get it right, trying to be everywhere at once. Literally—she ran up beside him on the monofilament, holding on to the yoke and hanging beside him to see that the pressure seals on his wounds did not come off or start to leak.
    Early on, she had popped one of her emergency pills, called blue devils by the crew. Hers were custom-designed and kicked in within a minute. She ordered the rest of the team to follow suit and was surprised to find that they already had. Way ahead of me…
    It was hard treating injuries inside a suit. The only thing to do was to apply pressure wraps around it and seal off the fluid seepage through the woven skinsuit. Still, blood oozed through. Somehow. She spent the whole ascent tending to him, getting them around rocky obstructions, calling to Gusev for help when his shoulder wound opened and started spattering blood onto her visor.
    It sprayed from the pressure differential, not because he was suddenly blowing an artery. She learned that only minutes later, of course—no help when the blood spattered on her visor and helmet and she could not see much, then smeared it trying to clear her field of view…and she panicked. Flat out panicked, no apologies, just plain losing it in the middle of a dark vertical cavern with only her to look after him.
    He was unconscious, thank God, and could not hear her frantic panting, her spitting-mad swearing. She had clicked off her comm, anyway, out of pure carelessness, a clumsy amateur error.
    Only her training saved her, and maybe him. She moved quickly. Halfway up, leveraging him around a tricky turn, she realized that she was calm again. And though she was fretting below the surface, on top she was alert, quick, crisp. The blue devil at work. But even it couldn’t stop her from worrying.
    The trouble with doing in-suit medical was you couldn’t see more than the patient’s face, or the wound, couldn’t do any diagnostics much beyond blood pressure and pulse rate—which were visible on the suit backpack readout. Plus you were fighting the damned vacuum all the way. Slapping biomed patches on, and then self-sealants, was just about all anyone could do.
    As they came over the lip of the vent, residual moisture on their suits froze to rime and fell as a dusting of snow. The flakes fumed away within seconds, but Julia lost her hold on Viktor and he spun out over the mouth and groaned. She cursed herself and let the others secure him. She felt exhausted, heart hammering. They got Viktor into the rover at last.
    They split up into the four who would remain to finish the descent research and the four who would fly Viktor back. Vaquabal knew plenty more medical than Julia, so he did most of the work on Viktor, right after liftoff.
    Three wounds, all bloody, seeping. Blood pressure low, unconscious, heart rate rapid, and Viktor’s eyes jerked alarmingly behind his eyelids. Vaquabal moved with assurance. Julia handed him things from med-stores and did not have nearly enough to do, so she fidgeted and checked the med display screens, most of them unintelligible. Just before they landed, Vaquabal said, “He’s stable. I will do the surgery.”
    “It’s necessary?”
    “We must dig out bits of shredded suit and capacitor.”
    “How far in?”
    “Not far, I think.” Suddenly he beamed. “He is in no real danger now, you know.”
    She made herself take a long breath. “No, I didn’t.”
    Despite Vaquabal, the operation took a long time, and, worse, he would not allow her in the surgery. There were qualified nurses, after all, he argued. And she was tired and needed to lie down. All this was doubtless true, but none of such advice could she seem to make use