The Lukara Edifice
Novat, Qo’noS
B’Oraq clambered to her feet, the smell of burning plastiform and acrid smoke climbing into her nostrils. The aircar, she remembered from seeing its descent toward Novat, was an old Yivoq—those things had thruster packs that burned quickly and catastrophically with any kind of impact.
She ran toward the pyramid structure of the office building that the car had crashed into. Most everyone else was either running away from it or standing and staring.
There was a guardsman talking on a wrist comm, and when he saw B’Oraq, he whipped out his painstik and said, “Stay back! The guard will be by to put this out.”
Although she was in civilian garb—a brown tunic and loose black pants—B’Oraq had thought to wear her rank insignia on the sleeve of her tunic, and she turned her right arm toward the guardsman. “I am Lieutenant B’Oraq of the Klingon Defense Force, and you will let me pass!”
The guardsman hesitated. Had she been in uniform, there would have been no question. Even a lowly bekk in the Defense Force outranked anyone in the Imperial Guard.
“Who is your supervisor,” B’Oraq then said, “so I may tell him that his subordinate is a foolish little chuSwI’ who—”
The guardsman lowered the painstik and stood aside.
“Tell the fire crews to wait for my signal before em-placing the force fields.” The Imperial Guard’s mandate included not only maintaining Klingon law on the homeworld but also disaster control. In case of a fire, they had ships that would project a force field around the fire until it was smothered. Technically, they were under no obligation to wait until people were evacuated, but that, B’Oraq knew, was due to a tendency to think that anyone caught in a fire was automatically dead. B’Oraq knew better, and she was not going to let any more people die than she absolutely had to. It was for that reason that she swore an oath to personally maim that guardsman with his own painstik if his delay caused her to lose anyone.
B’Oraq ran toward the conflagration. She heard a scream to her right and ran toward it. Klingons tended not to scream when in pain, so this had to be a critical case. In no time, she traced the scream to a man lying on the pavement, a twisted, charred chunk of metal impaling his left leg near the groin. Blood soaked the pant leg. She watched for a quick moment, trying to judge if the blood flow was pulsatile or not, but she couldn’t be certain. Could be the artery or the vein. Of course, I don’t have my hand scanner with me. She knelt down next to him and said, “I’m a doctor. Hold still.”
“I was trying to run away from that khest’n lunatic, and this thing hit me. Get it out!”
She took the man’s wrist in her left hand and found his radial pulse. It was tachycardic, to her lack of surprise. Then she lightly touched the protruding end of the shrapnel and felt the metal throb. Closing her eyes, she focused on the thrum of the metal that transmitted to one hand and compared it to the flow of his blood from the radial pulse going to her other hand. She was hoping for a disconnect between the two, because the venous return should lag by a mere fraction of a second.
But they matched perfectly, which meant it hit an artery.
Quickly, she made a visual inspection of the man and patted down his back—to his obvious annoyance. Miraculously, there were no other visible wounds. With the amount of debris that had been flying around, he was lucky to be hit only once.
“Stop touching me and get this thing out of me—if you truly are a doctor,” the man said with a snarl.
“If I remove it, you’ll bleed to death in a matter of minutes. Not that that isn’t tempting. However…” She unholstered her disruptor, smiling at how appalled her teachers at Starfleet Medical would have been if they knew she was armed while giving a talk at a medical conference. But given the reception I was expecting…
She used the disruptor to slice off the ends of the shrapnel, which reduced the danger of something or someone hitting the protruding ends and making things worse until she could get him to a proper medical facility. In aid of that, she activated her wrist comm with the intention of having this man beamed up to the Gorkon—she did not trust any planet-based medical facility, especially since most of the planet’s physicians were a quarter qelI’qam away at the conference and not at their posts. Of course, they could be there in an instant, but then there was the issue of their catastrophic lack of competence.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t send him to the Gorkon right now, because the only trained medical person currently assigned to the ship was B’Oraq herself, since Gaj had been put to death.
“I’ll get you to a medical facility soon. Wait here,” she said.
“I am not likely to go anywhere,” the Klingon said through clenched teeth.
Smiling the most encouraging smile she could manage—which probably confused the man, but human medical training had corrupted her in several ways—she got up and ran to see who else needed her help. The smoke was thick, and she ran in a low crouch. No point in both polluting and flash-frying my lungs while trying to save lives. The heat, which had started out intense, was starting to build, baking her face and hands.
“B’Oraq to Gorkon.”
“K’Nir.”
Grateful that the second-shift commander had answered rather than, say, Kurak, B’Oraq said, “Lieutenant, is there power to the medical bay?”
“No.”
“Please make it so—there was an aircar crash in Novat and I’m about to send several patients to the ship.”
“Doctor, that’s not authorized by—”
“It’s authorized by me, Lieutenant. If you want, I’ll contact Captain Klag at home and disturb his leave to authorize this, but how do you think he’ll react—”
“I’m diverting power to the medical bay now, Doctor.” A pause. “And when Commander Kurak lodges her inevitable complaint, I’ll direct her to you. Out.”
I suppose I deserved that, B’Oraq thought as she ran toward a woman lying facedown on the pavement. And I wish that just once I could get something accomplished without having to resort to intimidation.
As she got closer, she smelled the stench of burning hair and saw that the woman’s shirt had been burned off. Those same burns probably took her hair, which was singed at the ends and quite short.
A single glance at the woman’s back and spinal ridge confirmed her worst fears. The skin of the affected region was white, nearly translucent, with wormy ropes of purplish-pink blood vessels visible beneath. But she knew that the blood inside those veins and arterioles could no longer flow. These were third-degree burns, and the blood in those vessels had been boiled and then had coagulated. As expected, an area of second-degree burns—skin reddened, blistered, cracked—rimmed the perimeter.
She checked the woman’s breathing and then her radial pulse—with all those burns, B’Oraq didn’t risk contaminating the woman’s damaged flesh any further by touching her neck to try for a carotid pulse—and it was thready and rapid but strong enough. The woman was unconscious, which B’Oraq saw as a blessing, given how painful the burns probably were.
Then she heard a wonderfully familiar voice. “What may we do to help, Doctor?”
Getting up and turning around, she saw Kandless and Valatra, the latter still in her full Defense Force uniform, which had no doubt got them past the guardsman. “I need you two to beam to the Gorkon with this woman and that man over there.” She pointed to the man with the shrapnel. “You’ll find state-of-the-art equipment there. If you need anything, talk to Lieutenant K’Nir on the bridge. I’ll keep doing triage down here and will send up patients as I find them.”
“Of course,” Valatra said.
Kandless hesitated. “I’m not authorized to perform medicine on a Defense Force ship—”
“I’ll authorize it, Kandless, and I’ll take responsibility,” B’Oraq said. Then she hesitated. “But it’s probably best if Valatra takes charge while on board. Valatra, go stand with the other patient. Signal the Gorkon when I nod to you.”
“As you command, Doctor,” Valatra said with a quick salute, then ran over to the man with the shrapnel.
B’Oraq reactivated her wrist comm. “B’Oraq to Gorkon. K’Nir, there are two people with me—beam them, but not me, directly to the medical bay. You will then be contacted by a Defense Force doctor named Valatra—beam her and the person next to her to the medical bay. I will be sending more patients as well. Treat any request from Valatra as if it were from me.”
She nodded to Valatra, who activated her own comm. Shortly thereafter, all four disappeared in a red glow.
Running closer to the flames, now crouched even lower, B’Oraq found more bodies, but these were beyond her help. Some were being consumed by the fire, some had shrapnel that penetrated the heart or head or spine.
Then she found someone who still had a weak, hitching pulse and shallow respirations. She had him beamed to the Gorkon with instructions to take him ahead of everyone else.
Finally, she got to the crash site itself. Flames danced all around her, heat conducting through the metal of her armor and boots to make it feel as though her flesh was being boiled. I can’t stay here much longer. And if these flames start to spread, I wouldn’t put it past the guard to go ahead and activate the force field without my signal.
Looking up, she saw that an Imperial Guard ship was approaching this position. I’d better hurry.
There was only one place left to look: the aircar itself. Climbing over debris, she pushed her way into it, jumping over burning consoles, coughing half a dozen times as she inhaled smoke. She cursed herself for not holding her breath, as she knew full well what kind of damage that smoke and heat would do to her throat and lungs, but done was done. She had to find the pilot—if he was alive, he needed to answer for his crime. If he was dead, then he already had.
She found him draped over the flight console. He had no pulse and wasn’t breathing. She pried open his eyelids, and both pupils were dilated.
That gave her pause. Pupillary dilatation normally did not occur for approximately seven hours postmortem. If his pupils are blown now, it could be herniation of the brain stem through the foramen magnum. An intracranial bleed?
She swept her eyes over the surrounding area: the console, the viewscreen (currently showing the static of a destroyed image translator), the chair. Of course, there was no restraining harness—that was a battle even she gave up fighting. She saw no sign of an impact on any of the bulkheads or equipment.
Lightly brushing aside the pilot’s shock of black hair, she saw a stellate bursting of the skin along his crest. A moment later, she was able to pick out a minute stain of blood amid the static on the viewscreen. The wound itself showed only oozing, nothing that suggested a massive bleed. But head wounds bled insanely. Which means his heart had stopped pumping prior to his impact with the viewscreen. The impact itself was certainly enough to kill him all by itself. And then there were the blown pupils…
So perhaps an intracranial bleed, something that would create enough pressure that the only direction the brain could go is down. A herniation of the brain stem through the foramen magnum, and death would’ve been nearly instantaneous—no chance for him even to react.
To make matters worse, this wasn’t just some Klingon flying an aircar into a building. He wore Defense Force armor and had the rank insignia of a captain. Under other circumstances, she might be willing to let the flames consume his unworthy corpse, but all was not as it appeared here. She needed to perform a proper autopsy, one that she knew would not happen unless she took it upon herself.
A whooshing sound, and then B’Oraq found herself thrown backward for the second time in ten minutes. The hatch to the aft compartment had collapsed, and the fires from the thrusters that had built up back there exploded into the fore compartment.
Ignoring the pain in her head, the nausea that started to well up her throat, and the way the aircar was suddenly jumping all around, B’Oraq signaled the Gorkon to have her and the body next to her beamed up.
As soon as the transporter beam caught her, she felt relief at being out of the heat of the fire. Materializing in the comparative cool of the medical bay was a relief. But why did the nausea remain? And her head was pounding…
“B’Oraq to…to K’Nir.”
“Doctor?”
“Signal the…the Imperial Guard ship hovering over Novat…tell them they’re…they’re authorized to…to put the fire out.”
“Yes, Doctor. And Commander Kurak wishes to speak to you.”
Two Valatras walked up to her and said, “B’Oraq?”
“I’m fine, Valatra, I—”
Then the world went black.