The Treasure of Lei Fong Wu

Chapter Forty Nine

DELTA TEAM -50:21

Simon had had a busy few hours. When Beta Team arrived they had come in with wounded – nearly everyone on the team had been hurt in some way, but two men were particularly bad off – crushing wounds and broken bones, mostly. Lots of bruising. It took him two hours to get them tended to and stabilized, attach monitors and get them sedated. Just as he was finishing up, two more came in from Alpha Team with relatively minor shrapnel wounds. Even Zoe had a cut across her left temple from a near miss. It took another hour an a half of work to patch them up and administer medication.

Hsang was an excellent assistant, and seemed to be always at his elbow with exactly the proper instrument or bandage. It had been so long since Simon had worked with competent support people that he felt, for the moment, like a professional surgeon again, and not a glorified medic working in an antique store. Hsang had been a first-rate field medic during the war, and knew a great deal about treating trauma.

Simon had to admit – to himself – that he had seen a wealth of trauma in the last few months, far more than he’d ever seen on Osiris. And the really good stuff, too: gunshot wounds, stab wounds, burns, all sorts of good stuff. On a busy Saturday night in Capitol City they had to wait for the inevitable crash, or the rare gang-fight in the blackout zones. Industrial accidents and the ubiquitous stupidity that led people to unintentionally harm themselves – sometimes in spectacularly stupid ways – were a highlight. But in general the wounds that came in were boring.

Not on Serenity, though – say what you would about the protein resequencer, the homicidal crew and the mentally unstable Captain, but in terms of trauma surgery, this ship was a gold mine. While the compassionate human being side in him hated the pain and suffering, the pure technical genius surgeon that had been spawned in Medical School and carefully nurtured in surgical resi