Chapter 1

So, contestants, today's puzzler. Given the opportunity to whack off some poor guy's leg without anesthesia, would Elizabeth Lense rather:

a) chow down on a bowl of wriggly gagh chased with shots of piping hot bahgol while simultaneously squatting naked as a jaybird with Tev in a mudbath and being tortured with Klingon painstiks;
b) have Captain Gold as her therapist forever because there's no way in hell she's going to be anywhere near normal if she ever gets off this dustball of a planet;
c) gladly go anywhere in the known universe with Julian Bashir while he gabs on about being a Remarkable Frontier Doctor;
d) all of the above;
e) What, haven't you been listening? Julian Bashir is dead; Lense is stuck somewhere hell and gone; people are trying really hard to die right and left; and you're worried about some dumb stupid game? Get out of my way.

Blood drizzled in a sludgy brown stream, soaking thin linen thrown over a makeshift surgical table, a wood pallet balanced on twin stacks of flat rocks. The wound site was a mess: a gory crater of pulverized bone and blasted flesh midway below the right knee. There was no way in hell Lense could save that leg.

You know, d is pretty damned attractive.

"Okay, okay, hold him still," Lense said. They were nine in all: Lense and the patient as well as the seven others she needed to hold her patient thanks to that lack of anesthetic. To Lense's left, Mara controlled the leg from the knee down, and Saad stood to Lense's right. The leg was flexed at a right angle and Saad pulled down on the knee until it canted fifteen degrees from horizontal.

Reeling in a deep breath, Lense spread the fingers of her left hand over the man's inner thigh. His skin jumped and his head snapped up, and his knee wobbled as he strained to kick free. "Please," he said. His teeth were bared in a grimace of fear and pain, and he was sweating so much his gray-blue skin shone as if oiled. "Please, please, please, don't take off my leg, please don't take my leg, please, don't—"

"No, I'm sorry, got to do this, just hold on," Lense said, and then simply whipped her scalpel over his skin. The knife bit through skin, slashing open his thigh and cutting fat, fascia, and muscle in the first pass.

The man let go of a high, keening shriek. Chocolate-brown blood spurted from severed veins and arterioles, and he bellowed with pain. The pallet shifted, and she heard the squawk of wood grating on stone.

"For God's sake, hold him!" she shouted. Last thing she needed was to cut herself, or send the blade through the artery before she was ready. "All I need is a couple more minutes!" This was a lie; she needed a lot more than two or three minutes. There were muscles and tendons to cut; nerves to suture to muscle; an artery to find, clamp, and then tie off so he wouldn't bleed to death—to say nothing of sawing through bone. And that was just to get the leg off.

"Hurry." Saad, at her right elbow. He was a big man, easily two meters tall and muscular, but even he was struggling. "You must work faster, Elizabeth."

She slashed through muscle and fascia. Talked herself through it: Okay, coming across the top now; there goes the semimembranosus, and then I got to be careful because of the sciatic nerve; got to cut that fast and then tag it so I can suture it to the short head of the biceps femoris; yeah, that'd be best….

She tagged the sciatic nerve, then clamped and tied off the saphenous vein. (Were these the right names for here? Probably not. But with some significant exceptions—the heart, the left lung, a thick sternum, their very large spleen and thymus, and their queer blood—this species' anatomy was virtually identical to humans'. Lucky her, she'd had plenty of casualties to practice on, do a couple half-dozen autopsies to get the anatomy down.) She was drenched in sweat; the back of her khaki tee was plastered to her shoulder blades and the front spattered with blood that came fast and brown. But no pumpers, thank Christ, though the femoral artery wasn't too far away now.

Trickiest part; got to clamp it off and make sure you got plenty of artery there or else it'll retract….

She made her next cut and saw the femoral artery now: a fat, bluish-brown, pulsating tube wedged close to the bone medial to the knee and between two large thigh muscles. The tube throbbed a rapid staccato, her patient's heart rate ramping up with fear and pain. He was still screaming and trying to kick, and she kept praying that, please God, he'd pass out because this was insanity, she was out of her goddamn mind….

First proximal, then distal, because if the artery tears, at least you've got control of the business end of things. Clicking open two arterial clamps, she gently eased the teeth of one around the artery at a point closest to the hip and then snicked a second clamp shut two centimeters distant. She was already thinking three steps ahead: Tie off the artery, then get rid of the rest of the tissue, cut the bone.

So what happened next probably occurred because she wasn't focused, wasn't reading how his few intact muscles kept jerking and twitching, wasn't listening to how much he screamed because everyone screamed. So Lense slit the artery in two—at exactly the wrong moment.

"Stopstopstopstopstopstop!" he shrieked. The thigh above the cut bobbled, and Lense flinched, her scalpel snagging in the handle of the proximal arterial clamp.

"Hell." Can't lose the artery, can't lose it. Then she heard a warning yelp from Mara and looked up just in time to see her patient's left foot angling for her face.

"Jesus!" Lense ducked but not fast enough, and the blow caught her left temple, slamming her back. She went down hard; her scalpel skittered over rock, and she lost her grip on the clamp.

"Elizabeth!" It was Saad. He'd caught hold of the patient's left leg and was forcing it back, passing it off to the men opposite. "Elizabeth, the artery!"

Copyright © 2005 by Paramount Pictures.