Catherine Asaro - Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

Lizzie tried to tell herself that the Gineer had it coming. But then she imagined losing her home, seeing her Momma dead, and her anger dissolved into pity.

“You can’t listen to their stories, Lizzie,” said Momma. “It takes too much time. We need to get them out of the station as soon as possible.”

Then there were the soldiers. Whether they were Web or Gineer, they were all lean-limbed, clean-cut, eager; they each told Lizzie how the other side had started it, and they pumped their fists at the idea of dispensing proper justice.

Lizzie bit her lip when the Gineer soldiers trash-talked the Web. Smart-mouthing was bad for business.

After a few months, a sour-looking Gineer with a bushy white mustache limped out of the airlock. His patched white suit hung in unflattering rags off his stick-thin frame. He chomped at a ganja cigar with malice, his wrinkled cheeks pulling in and out like a pump.

He sniffed the air and scowled.

“Smells like ass in here,” he said.

“I’ve lived here all my life,” Lizzie shot back, forgetting to be polite. “And if there was a smell, I would have noticed.”

The man chuckled, bemused; it set Lizzie’s hackles on edge. “You vacuum rats are so superbly cute ,” he said, ruffling her hair. “I’m Doc Ventrager. You must be my apprentice, Elizabeth. Inform your Momma of my presence, and update her that I shan’t physic anyone in this sauerkraut fart of a place until I get a fresh deodorizer in my quarters.”

Momma was slumped over her comm unit, half asleep. “That’s right,” she said, gulping a cup of tea. “I forgot he was arriving. It’s time you learned medicine, Lizzie; in these times, it’s good to have a sawbones handy. From now on, your spare time will be spent with Doc Ventrager.”

Lizzie nearly suffocated from the unfairness of it all. “But I was supposed to learn how to fly !”

“Circumstances have changed, and so must you, Elizabeth. Instead of paying us rent, the doc is earning his keep teaching you to set bones—and you’ll both do good business here, sadly enough. Now show him to the medbay.”

Though Lizzie had dutifully run their syscheck routines once a month, she had no idea what all of the headsets and plastic wands in the medbay actually did—but judging from the harrumphing noises Doc Ventrager made as he picked them up and slapped them back down, he wasn’t impressed. Momma stood behind him anxiously, chewing her lip. The Doc had Lizzie unlock the doors to the medicine cabinet, then peered in at the neat rows of antibiotics, opiates, and sutures.

“Well, at least that’s well-stocked,” he said.

“My great-grandma installed all this herself, after the pirates came,” Lizzie protested. “It all works.”

He flicked ash on the floor. “Thank the stars that despite their predilection for genegineering, the Gineer haven’t altered the core organs of the human body in the past century.” He turned to Momma. “Install that deodorizer and give me a free hand over pricing, and I’ll educate your offspring with these antiques.”

“Sold,” said Momma. Lizzie said nothing. She wasn’t sure she wanted to be under Doc Ventrager’s tutelage.

As it turned out, Doc Ventrager had brought his own equipment, and he expected Lizzie to carry it all for him. He pointed out where the leather satchels and tanks should go as Lizzie struggled under their weight. As she ferried them out from the ship, Doc Ventrager seemed to sum up everything that was wrong about Gineer folks—even if Ventrager’s pockmarked face meant he wasn’t exactly a normal Gineer.

The next morning, she checked the hydroponics and then went to the medlab. “Right,” the Doc said. He pointed to a tank, where child-sized things with gray, wrinkled flesh floated in a stinking green fluid. “Let’s see what you’re made of. Fish one out, deposit it ’pon the table.”

They were so small that at first Lizzie thought they were children—and then she realized their ears and noses were funny. Lizzie ran her palm across the stiffened flesh, feeling its hard, horned hands, its antenna-like ears, the little snippet of flesh on its butt that looked like a leftover from a bad vacuu-forming job.

“What are these?” she asked.

“Pigs,” said the Doc. “A lot cheaper than anatomy clones, that’s for damn sure.”

She frowned. “I thought you were supposed to teach me about humans.”

“Pig bones and organs are close enough to hum-spec for the rudiments of injury repair,” the Doc said, absent-mindedly cleaning a sharp knife on his gown. “You know how to stitch a wound? To set a bone?”

“No.”

He handed her the knife. “Time you learned. Now cut.”

Doc Ventrager was a hard but efficient taskmaster; Lizzie learned that he’d spent years training girls and boys at stations all around the ’verse.

“You’re damn lucky,” he said, after a long day treating simulated decompression injuries. “Most kids have to learn this all in theory. They can’t call me when someone’s EVA suit rips; it’d take three weeks to get there. So their first major field operation is on their dying Momma—holding her down while she’s thrashing, shrieking, soaked crimson in blood…”

Lizzie sensed the test buried in the Doc’s words; he was trying to frighten her with thoughts of her Momma. She said nothing.

The Doc nodded and took a long drag off of his reefer cigarette, blowing the sweet smoke into the room to overwhelm the “gangrenous reek” he smelled.

“But you, missy,” he said, tipping his cigar at her, “Will acquire a chance to watch the real show. By the time this conflict’s ebbed its course, you shall be qualified to teach.”

She found out what he meant when the first Gineer warship arrived, one engine nearly shot to splinters.

Gemma immediately started working up an repair estimate, but the sergeant was more interested in cornering Doc. “We received some specially withering fire in a rear-guard action,” he explained. “We had to escape before resupplying, and so several soldiers have severe infections. What’s the charge to cleanse gangrene?”

“Allow me a gander,” the Doc said, looking satisfied for the first time since Lizzie had known him. Doc walked, preening, into the ship, but Lizzie almost threw up from the smell.

Twenty soldiers rested on pallets against the wall, most with broken limbs that had healed in horrid ways. They bit down on pieces of plastic, trying not to shriek; the last of the painkillers had been used up weeks ago.

“Oh, that’s a fine mess,” the Doc said, rubbing his hands together. “The quote is one-ninety per head.”

“ One-ninety ?” the sergeant said. “That’s three times normal rate.”

“You possess superior alternatives?” the Doc said. “No. You do not. You can sew ’em up now and have ’em heal en route to the next battle… or you can keep your funds walleted and remove them from your roster. Either way’s acceptable to me.”

“One-ninety’s blackmail.”

“Excuse me,” Lizzie said politely, ostensibly to Doc Ventrager but speaking loud enough that the sergeant could overhear her, “Don’t forget that Momma said the Gineer get eight percent off at Sauerkraut Station.”

“I never heard of that. Even if I had, it wouldn’t apply to me.”

“You’re on the station, aren’t you?”

“Goddammit,” he said. “I will speak with your Momma.” But didn’t; instead, he went down to one-seventy. Lizzie felt a malicious price at seeing the Doc’s greed quashed.

And she felt pride when she cleaned her first batch of wounds. Though she’d drained pus on the dead pigs, Lizzie hadn’t been sure how she’d take to it once she was working on live men. Judging from the sergeant’s pleased reactions, she did a fine job.