STO'B 38

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Over on the Badger, Dr M’Mullen asked a little boy where the wounded were taken, and was shown to the cockpit, a dim, cramped, triangular space, wedged into the bows far below the waterline, and accessible only via a ladder. The place smelled like a cross between an abattoir and a distillery. The wounded were laid out on the deck above in the order they had arrived. “Dr Foster,” Patrick called down from above, “I should be happy to assist if you would like.”

Whatever reply Foster may have made was drowned out by the rising scream of the man whose leg he was then driving his saw through. Patrick climbed down the ladder, slipping on the blood on the bottom rung and accidentally knocking into Dr Foster as the surgeon finished his cut. “Get out!” said Foster, picking himself up and wiping bloody sand from his hands, “get out now!”

“I beg your pardon,” began Patrick, “I merely thought -”

“Get out!” roared the surgeon again, this time reaching for a heavy surgical knife, and Patrick retreated up the ladder.

Back on the deck above, he looked at the wounded as they lay there. Perhaps he could do some good here. One man, with a massive chest wound and surrounded by a pool of blood, was already dead. Of those remaining he judged that all of them had survivable wounds, though one man, recently brought and bleeding from a thigh wound, needed immediate surgery if he was to live. He placed his hand into the wound, feeling for the severed artery and pressing on it. “You there,” he called to a passing sailor. Once he had the sailor’s attention, though, he paused, considering his options.

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GLOSSARY