Do You Dream of Terra-Two?

During that time, Fae was examining his head wound. ‘It’s quite deep,’ she told Juno, reaching for the antiseptic wipes. ‘Might need stitches and a dose of flucloxacillin; they’re in the cabinet by the—’

‘Why is he not waking up?’ Harry asked.

‘That’s what we’re trying to find out. Juno, what do we do next?’ Juno’s mind flailed for a moment. It was difficult to reconcile the sterile pages of her textbooks, the mnemonics she had memorized, with the scene before her. ‘Um…’

‘This is basic!’

‘Glasgow Coma Scale.’

‘Go on.’

Juno counted the categories off on her fingers. ‘Eyes, verbal… motion? I mean motor. Motor.’

Fae peeled open an eye, and Juno watched Solomon’s brown iris roll under her thumb. The kind gaze Juno was so used to had vanished completely, and when Fae waggled a light above him his pupils did not constrict. The doctor swore quietly in German.

‘Is that bad?’ Harry asked, acutely tuned to their panic. Juno knew that unresponsive pupils were a bad sign.

Fae squeezed one of Solomon’s fingers hard. His eyes didn’t open. ‘One,’ she said. The lowest score. ‘Commander Sheppard?’

The man did not move or make a sound.

‘One.’ Fae said. She rubbed hard on his sternum with her knuckles. Juno thought she saw his arm twitch, just slightly.

‘Some motor response to pain.’ Fae exhaled and then turned to Juno. ‘Can you attend to Harry?’ Juno knew that Fae was keen to get him out of the room, so she did as she was told and examined Harry’s arm.

He’d been hurt badly. Some accident on the shuttle, Juno imagined, a broken instrument or monitor screen, had left splinters of glass buried in his forearm. She took a pair of scissors and cut the arm off his flight suit. Harry paled at the sight of his own blood, swallowed and looked away. ‘This is going to hurt,’ Juno warned him. She’d have to remove the glass with tweezers. Give him a shot of antibiotics in case he developed a skin infection. He’d need a few stitches, too.

‘How did it happen?’ Juno asked, opening a cabinet to gather supplies.

‘Commander Sheppard?’ Harry’s eyes were still fixed on the man. ‘Our shuttle was hit. He must have seen it before I did. He banged his head against the dashboard, really hard.’

Attending to Harry took her what felt like a long time, and when she was finished Fae pushed a cannula under his skin, began the process of examining his blood. ‘What for?’ she asked Juno.

‘Blood gasses, we can do that now. Also FBC, U and E, CRP, glucose, lactate—’ Juno reeled off a page of her notes but then she paused. Solomon Sheppard had not woken up yet, even though his heart rate and blood pressure were stable.

‘What, now, are our main concerns?’ asked Fae.

That he’ll die, Juno thought, the ground listing under her. ‘Two concerns,’ she said, leaning back against the desk to steady herself. ‘He could be having a seizure.’ Her neuroscience module had taught her that seizures were not always limb-thrashing violent affairs. ‘But we’d need an EEG to tell. It’s more likely – considering the severity of the head injury – that he is bleeding into his brain.’

‘How can we tell?’ Fae asked her.

‘How can we?’ Juno snorted at the absurdity of the question. ‘We’d need to do a CT scan. But since this is a tiny room and not a hospital, there’s nothing more we can do. Nothing.’ Suddenly, the inadequacy of their medical resources was not a theoretical fact, but a physical horror. They’d reached the end of their capacity to help their captain. While on Earth he’d be rushed into a trauma unit, examined, taken for brain surgery, here on the ship all they could do was cross their fingers.

‘We could do a lumbar puncture,’ Fae said.

‘What’s that?’ Harry asked.

‘We put a needle into his spine and drain some of the fluid,’ Juno explained, but even as she did she remembered a warning their lecturer had hammered into their little class of second-year physiologists. ‘But if we do that, we could reduce the pressure in such a way that it forces his brain through the hole in the bottom of his skull and kills him.’ A sound of horror escaped Harry’s lips and it was gratifying to hear, because it was how Juno felt.

‘So…’ Fae crumpled onto her office chair, head dropping into her hands, ‘we have a dilemma.’

‘What will you do?’ Harry asked.

‘Juno’s a Christian.’ Fae didn’t look up. ‘She can pray.’

In the silence, Juno listened to the rumble of the machines. It was getting late now, close to 1 a.m. She was bone-tired and terrified. The ship’s main lights had still not switched on, and Juno’s head ached from straining under the dim glow of the single desk lamp.

‘I’m done,’ she said, stepping back from Harry’s arm. Fae glanced over. His arm was in a sling and blood crusted below his fingernails. He still wore the skullcap he’d been wearing when the shuttle launched, so he looked like a bald, wild-eyed alien, eyebrows and eyelashes invisible in the shadow.

‘Go to bed,’ Fae told them. Juno hesitated. ‘You don’t have to stay here all night,’ Fae said more gently. ‘I can take it from here.’