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“I don’t have ti—I ness flooded over hio passed through hiain, and he closed his eyes All the words the doctor had been saying—crushed spinal cord, diffuse blood pooling, paraplegic—finally reached his brain To his sha the wo,” the doctor said, “the daned to heal in zero g We’re built to let things drain You have a bolus of blood and spinal fluid putting pressure on the wound We have to drain that, and we have to get the bone shards out of the way We could start the regrowth now, but there are about a dozen people who need the nootropics just to stay alive”
“I understand,” Bull said around the lu, but her inertia kept her going on
“If we can stabilize the daet you under at least one-third g, we have a good chance of getting you back to soround of ency air recyclers stood in for real silence “What’s your recommendation?”
“Medical co “We can slon your system Stabilize you until we can evacuate”
Bull closed his eyes, squeezing the tears between the lids All he had to say was yes, and it was all soo away, and he’d wake up soether Or he wouldn’t wake up at all Thethe defunct solar collectors Cli a ceramic beam with his knees while one of the otherHe re on Tycho Station, and the way his body had felt against her He could get it back Or soone
“Thank you for your recoe report now”
“Bull, no,” Sarows back wrong? I burn it out and start over This is biology We can’t just yank out your wiring and reboot you And you can’t ?” Bull said, and he almost sounded like himself
“I’m serious,” Sam said “I don’t care what you prooing to be a big boy and take your nasty e of crying now Blood was darkening her face Some of her team were surely dead People she’d known for years Maybe her whole life People she’d worked with every day With a clarity that felt alrief and felt it resonate within hi to be there now Everyone who’d lived on every ship would have seen people they cared about broken or dead And when people were grieving, they did things they wouldn’t do sober
“Look where we are, Sas don’t go back to normal” Sam wiped her eyes with a sleeve cuff, and Bull turned to the doctor “I understand and respect your ht now Once the ship and crew are out of danger, we’ll revisit this, but until then staying on duty is ?”
“For a while, I can,” the doctor said “But you’ll pay for it later”
“Thank you,” Bull said, his voice soft and wariveBull could say after reading Sa with the doctors and his own re security forces was that the Behemoth had weathered the storned and constructed as a generation ship meant that the joints and environ-ter at under 10 percent the slow zone’s previous e came
The massive deceleration had happened to all the ships at the sa them fro toward the station’s captive ring in just under five seconds If it had been instantaneous, no one would have lived through it Even with the braking spread out, it had approached the edge of the survivable for many of them People asleep or at workstations with crash couches had stood a chance Anyone in an open corridor or getting up for a bulb of coffee at the wrong moment was simply dead The count stood at two hundred dead and twice that nificantly faster than the Behe, and the rest reported heavy casualties The big Earth ships were inally better
Toback out of the Ring to as left of the flotilla were bent enough that communication was just about impossible Not that it would haveof it that way too—was doing everything it could to remind them how vast the distances ithin it At the velocities they had available to the as it had to reach it from the Belt Months at least, and that in shuttles All the ships were captured
However many of therip was pulling the blue structure, and no amount of burn was able to affect their paths one way or the other They couldn’t speed up and they couldn’t stop No one was under thrust, and it wascorid, already weakened and patched after the torpedo launch debacle, had suffered a cascading shipwide failure Sa the tripped safeties, adding new patches to thecore containh an auto off batteries, another was battling an environmental systeht be fine or they