“No change then. Have the med bed send me a visual I can monitor in real-time.”
Janwar grabbed the datapad he’d set aside earlier and tapped the requisite commands into it.
A small ball the size of a reama berry floated down from the ceiling and positioned itself behind Simone.
On the Segonian ship, a screen lit up beside the one Adaos was using and displayed a clear image of Simone’s wound.
The medic studied it. “Excellent.”
Janwar stared at Simone’s face.
Nothing about this was excellent. Her pretty features still reflected pain. The pulse in her neck was so slow he feared it might stop at any moment. Was the transfusion helping at all?
His gaze went to the gash on her stomach. “I’m going to tend her other wounds and give her a silna to speed their healing.” Standing around doing nothing certainly wouldn’t help her.
“No!” Eliana, Adaos, and Dagon all cried at once.
He stared at them. “Why? The silna may not be useful against the poison, but it—”
“You can’t,” Eliana blurted. “A silna wouldn’t help Simone. It would hurt her.”
Janwar and his men exchanged a puzzled look. Silnas had been tested on multiple alien races and had always generated the same results: faster healing.
Why would they think Earthlings would be harmed by it? If Segonian blood was compatible with theirs, how different could they be?
“Trust me, Janwar,” Eliana implored. “I love Simone like a sister. I would never say or do anything to cause her harm.”
She seemed sincere in her pledge.
“Can I at least clean her wounds and bandage them?” he asked.
Eliana nodded. “Yes. I would appreciate that. Thank you.”
Janwar swiftly went to work, spraying each injury with retsa, a powerful disinfectant that swelled into a thick foam, dissolved all dirt, congealing blood, and bacteria, then melted away without damaging healthy tissue. “What about the wound in her back. Can I clean it, too?”
Adaos nodded. “The retsa won’t halt the poison, but it will prevent infection from worsening her condition.”
Janwar carefully tended to every injury, relieved when he found no broken bones on top of everything else. Once each cut was clean, he sprayed it with imashuu to numb the pain, added a bandage, and topped it with kesaadi.
“What’s that?” Eliana asked as she watched him.
“Kesaadi,” he mumbled, moving on to a burn mark on one arm. “It holds the bandage in place.”
“It looks like rubber cement,” she commented. “Is it stiff, or does it move with you?”
“It moves with you.”
She glanced up at Dagon. “That’s so cool.”
He arched a brow. “Let me guess. You want some?”
“Yes, please.”
Smiling, he drew her tighter against his side.
At Adaos’s request, Janwar left the poisoned wound in her back bandage-free after cleaning it. Once he finished his ministrations, he stepped back. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to check in with my men on the Gathendien ship.”
He didn’t wait for an answer, just strode from the room as he tapped his ear comm. “Krigara, report.”
“One moment,” his cousin rumbled. Footsteps carried over the comm. “How’s Simone?”
“Not good. Find anything on an antidote?”
“Nothing yet. But I drew some blood from three Gathendiens in case we can’t find one.”
Impatience nearly dragged a growl from Janwar. “What’s taking so vuan long?”
“None of us are fluent in Gathendien,” Krigara said, his frustration evident. “We know enough to converse with them if they refuse to speak Alliance Common, but deciphering medical terms and phrases…” Unfortunately, translators only enabled one to understand spoken languages. It didn’t allow one to read them. “And a lot of this bura is passcode protected.”
“Can you break it?”
“Srul yes. I’m plowing through every obstacle. It’s just the language thing that’s slowing us down. I keep having to hold my datapad up in front of the screen to help me translate it, and not everything translates because the vuan scientists use abbreviations, acronyms, and symbols I’ve never seen before. Do you know how to spell bosregi in Gathendien? Because the translation matrix doesn’t. Nor does it know what symbols they might put on a vial of bosregi antidote. These grunarks have a whole room dedicated to nothing but the cold storage of serums, medications, and—I’m guessing—bioengineered viruses that I sure as srul don’t want to unleash by inadvertently removing the wrong cap.”
Janwar swore. “I’ll see what I can come up with. What about the interrogation? How’s that going?”
He grunted. “The three highest-ranked grunarks refused to cooperate. But now that they’re dead, the grunts seem less worried about reprisals and are more worried about making it out of this alive. They’re all huddled together. And I heard one mention blaming whatever intel they leak to us on the officers.”
“Good. Get what you can from them. Janwar out.” He tapped his ear comm to close communication and entered his office. Dropping down in the chair behind his desk, he began typing on the console embedded in the surface. A clear screen rose above it.
Moments later, Prince Taelon of Lasara’s visage appeared on the screen. “Janwar,” he said with a wry smile. “I’m not going to ask how you managed to bypass our security protocols and contact me directly on my personal comm unit.”
Janwar waved the words away. “I found another Earthling. Simone. She’s hurt, and I need to know if I can trust Chief Medic Adaos on the Ranasura.”
His attention sharpening, Taelon nodded. “You can. Commander Dagon and his crew are strong allies. It’s why they’re still searching for more Earthlings instead of ferrying those they’ve found to Lasara. We trust them implicitly with their care.”
Relief loosened the knot of tension in Janwar’s shoulders a little bit. “That’s all I needed to know. I’ll contact you later with additional details.”
Taelon opened his mouth to speak, but Janwar shut down communication and returned to Med Bay.
Simone lay unconscious where he’d left her.
Janwar took a moment to peer at the wound on her back. He couldn’t be certain, but the black lines didn’t appear to have lengthened in his absence. That was something, wasn’t it? He eyed the blood steadily flowing into her arm from a tube in the ceiling. Could the blood transfusion be helping her? Diluting the poison, perhaps? Or was the progression slow enough that it was difficult to detect this early?
Straightening, he looked toward the screen.
Adaos continued to tap on his console. Commander Dagon held Eliana, who wore a pensive expression.
Another Earth female burst into the Ranasura’s med bay and skidded to a halt beside them. “What happened? Maarev said someone found one of our friends. Who is it?” Ava was the Earthling Eliana and the Segonians had rescued. Janwar had aided her in sending a message to Earth.
Eliana motioned to the screen. “It’s Simone. Janwar found her. But one of the damn Gathendiens got her with a tail spike laced with bosregi poison.”