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CHAPTER 37:
Recovery



Beth L @SpaceNewsNetwork

The Percheron crew are healing. Her commander, Colonel Glenn Shepard, reports that all personnel are responding to treatment. Today the ship made several minor corrections to her course to bring them back to the optimum trajectory for return to Earth in just over three months. Several ship’s systems are still undergoing maintenance, but they plan to spin up the habitat ring later this week to gradually acclimate the crew to a return to Earth normal gravity.

Godspeed, Percheron, our prayers are with you.

ChirpChat, November 2043


“Damn it, Christensen, it has to be here.”

“Yes, sir. I understand, but are you sure it didn’t drift out through the hatch while you were getting everything repressurized? After all, restoring air pressure in the tank would have created outward air flow.”

“Sure, but the corridor was sealed by pressure doors at the time. There was nothing out here. Besides, it’s brightly lit out there.”

“Which leads me to wonder . . . If you don’t mind my asking, how did you see the faulty valve?”

Glenn grinned at Christensen and tapped his head beside his left eye. Rather, he tapped his helmet—one with a functioning neck seal this time. “Bionic eye. I shined my light on the far wall and saw an odd reflectance.”

“And that same bionic eye can’t see your arm?” Christensen asked plaintively.

“Sorry, I tried, but I’m not picking anything up. That’s why we have to search ourselves.”

“Okay, sir, but why look for it at all? You have your replacement, what do you want with your old banged-up arm?”

“We’ll be back at Earth in a week. I need to be able to turn it into the lab guys for analysis.”

“What analysis? It’s broken.”

“Ah, but that’s what they want to analyze. I’ve received numerous comms over the past four months asking for particulars about how much force I exerted, what are the materials of the hatch and pressure seal, what was I doing when it detached. It’s all information they could get from shipbuilding specs and my medical telemetry. I think it’s all mainly a reminder that the arm was issued to me, and I have to turn it in at the end of deployment.”

“What happens if they decide to discontinue maintenance and updates? Could they take it all back, since it’s ‘issued’?”

“I suppose. It happened with the guy who got the first bionic arm back in the 2010’s. It was part of an experimental project, and when the project ended, there was no funding for him to keep it. The bionic one was taken away and replaced with a purely passive one. But public outcry—particularly among the researchers involved—convinced the government to find a way to pay for maintenance and give his arm back. So, there’s always that option. Besides, they can’t take everything away. Certain parts are more essential than others.”

Glenn felt a twinge in his chest. For just a moment, he could feel and hear his heartbeat. It was the same odd sensation he’d felt on the Moon and passed off as a muscle cramp. It had happened several times per month since the trip on Bat. It was just another bit of damage he’d have to wait to have repaired.

“Here sir, if you’d help me turn over the hatch, it seems to be stuck to the wall.” Christensen was looking at the pressure hatch Glenn had forcibly removed. The hinges were bent and twisted, and the rim of the hatch was crumpled.

“Aha! So that’s where you’ve been hiding!” Glenn said as he reached out to remove the bionic arm from where it was stuck to the underside of the hatch.

“Why’s it sticking like that?”

“Magnetic bearing at the elbow. I guess it’s still energized.”

“Would have been nice to know that an hour ago, sir.”

“Sorry, Sergeant. I didn’t expect it to still be active after nearly four months.”

“Yes, sir. Now, can we get out of here? Knowing what happened to you, this place gives me the creeps.”

“Me, too, Jonas. Me, too.”


In the first week after the incident in Water Tank Number Three, Glenn asked Philips to set up additional cots in the med bay. Yvette was locked in the isolation room and he needed to use the biobeds for dialysis. There were three patients who needed continued observation. Fortunately, the habitat ring was still motionless, so the cots didn’t need to be located on the “floor.” Unfortunately, Philips was occupied pulling debris from the rotation mechanism and repairing minor issues so that he could get the ring rotating.

Steve Green offered to fill in and assist Philips with other engineering projects—like assembling cots from spare components intended for the shuttles. There was room on the med bay walls away from the monitoring consoles and the lab wall, so quick-dry epoxy and space tape sufficed to provide bedding for mounting four cots on the “ceiling” of the med bay. It was only temporary, since they couldn’t have five people concentrated in one small compartment once the habitat ring was spun up.

Bialik started to show improvement after the first dialysis treatment. She’d gotten up on her own after that first session, although she had still been very weak. Glenn started her on a high-protein, low-carbohydrate diet, and insulin to help stabilize her metabolism. She’d lost almost fifteen percent of her body weight between the pancreatitis and zero gee, and Glenn wanted to start supplementing her diet with additional fats—provided her kidneys and liver stayed healthy.

Daily dialysis was beneficial for Takeda, and after a week, she started to show residual kidney function. She would continue with weekly dialysis until they got back to Earth. As with Bialik, Glenn considered her stabilized—not cured. She would need additional treatment, possibly including stem cells or transplant, when they returned to Earth.

Glenn kept Yvette sedated for most of the first week, until he was certain that the both the copper and excess norepinephrine had been flushed from her body. He hadn’t needed to repeat the haloperidol, which was a good thing, and had switched her to aripiprazole, a much more appropriate antipsychotic for long-term treatment. It meant that she wasn’t sedated full time, so she remained confined to the isolation room, but with increasingly longer durations in which she was allowed out—but only under his supervision, and as long as she didn’t leave the med bay.

Katou was not recovering as fast as Glenn had hoped. Her liver toxicity was advanced, and he feared she’d need a transplant before they got back to Earth. A resection of the damaged portion of her liver and transfusion of stem cells with trophic factors into her hepatic artery might help regenerate the organ temporarily, but it also might not be enough.

Glenn needed to do an autopsy on Gee LeBlanc to see just how badly damaged the captain’s liver had been. If he knew what to expect, he might be able to halt or slow down Mila’s decline.

He had Christensen retrieve LeBlanc’s body from the deep freeze, and slowly warm it back to just below freezing. That would avoid degradation of tissue as it thawed, but would leave the skin and internal tissues stiff and hard to cut. Fortunately, he could do much of the examination with imaging; unfortunately, he would still need to visibly examine the liver.

“Do you want me to scrub in and assist?” This was one of the times when Yvette was calm and lucid, and she’d been helping Bialik store medical supplies from Bat.

Glenn weighed the options between having two capable hands—after all, his bionic hand was still only partially tuned—versus Yvette holding a scalpel in those hands. “No, but I want you to observe. See if I miss anything.”

Imaging showed no evidence of severe damage to any of the organs other than liver and brain. Necropsy—removal of tissue samples for testing—showed copper accumulation, and a severe imbalance of hormones and neurotransmitters. Patches of skin, esophagus and intestines showed signs of bleeding, but those were small and diffuse—consistent with liver damage. The brain scan did not show signs of bleeding—deposits of iron from hemoglobin would show up white—nor any of the dark patches indicative of clots or stroke. There was a faint white rim to the surface of the brain which suggested damage from compression. Liver failure often resulted in cerebral edema, which would compress the surface of the brain, and could explain the captain’s delusions. On the other hand, it could also have been due to neurotransmitter imbalance.

Glenn was finally left with the task of opening the corpse to examine the liver. The normally smooth, dark organ was mottled and lumpy.

“Cirrhosis,” Yvette said.

“Yes, and it’s pretty bad. I wouldn’t have expected this. Was the captain drinking?” Glenn asked her.

“Not that I know of. She looked the other way at Philips and Christensen’s still, but I wouldn’t think she’d be drinking the hooch.”

“It’s possible she’d had a brush with hepatitis. It’s curable if caught quickly, so it might not even be in her records.”

The liver was normally divided by a thick band of tissue—the falciform ligament—which divided the liver into two lobes, and attached the organ to the wall of the abdomen. The surface of the smaller lobe was darker and smoother, with a texture similar to a football.

Glenn lifted the liver and looked at the underside. “There’s some sparing of the left lateral lobe. A resection might have saved her. There’s enough to regenerate.”

“True, but you’d have to leave enough of the caudate and quadrate lobes to support the hepatic artery and vein, portal vein, and bile duct.” Yvette pointed to the small sections on the underside of the liver above and below a cluster of blood vessels. The tissue was almost black. “She was bleeding here. It wouldn’t have been stable.”

“I agree. We’d best do some scans of Katou and make sure she’s not this bad.”

Just then they heard a thumping sound and Bialik shouted, “Colonel, it’s Mila. She’s seizing.”

Glenn turned a bit too quickly and drifted away from the biobed. He kept turning until he was able to right himself with his left hand on the other bed. There was an odd feeling, and he looked down to see that he’d crushed the edge of the bed. Fortunately, it wasn’t where any of the instrumentation was located, but it was a reminder that he still didn’t have very fine control of his bionic hand.

“It’s cerebral edema. I need to . . .” Yvette stopped. “You need to . . . no, let me start again. Doctor Shepard, you may need to relieve the pressure. Dexamethasone and mannitol will help, but they won’t be fast.”

“I’ll need to release the pressure with a drain.”

“Y-yes.” Yvette drew out the word. She was hesitating to say something.

“Spit it out. I’ve never known you to hold back criticism,” Glenn snapped.

She looked as if she’d been slapped. “I know. But if anything, I’ve learned how wrong I could be, too.”

Glenn sighed. “I apologize. That wasn’t called for. What were you going to suggest?”

“You need help.” She pointed to his left arm. “You need my help.”

Glenn held up his left hand and wiggled his fingers. The feedback was just a bit off, and they moved out of sequence. He sighed again.

Yvette continued in a quiet, almost plaintive voice. “I was going to suggest that I help you. If you can find it in your heart to trust me . . . and to forgive me.”


The surgery took several hours. Glenn incised the scalp and cut a small burr hole through the skull behind Katou’s left ear. The membrane lining the brain immediately bulged out, and Yvette threaded a thin catheter under the membrane to relieve the fluid pressure. Once that was done, she carefully repaired the incision with microscopic sutures, leaving Glenn to pack the hole in the skull with sterile foam, and close the scalp.

By the end of the procedure, Yvette was starting to shake and twitch. As soon as Katou’s scalp was closed, she went to the isolation room and locked herself in. Glenn continued to finish the surgery—one handed—and handed off the post-surgical medication and monitoring duties to Bialik.

Glenn looked through the observation glass, and saw Yvette talking to herself and “pacing”—which in zero gee consisted of launching herself from one wall, tumbling and landing feet-first on the opposite wall, then launching herself back to repeat the back-and-forth motion. He grabbed a dose of sedative, and overrode the lock on the door to enter the room.

“Here’s something to help you to relax.”

“No!” she snapped. More calmly, but through gritted teeth, she added, “No thank you. I need to learn to deal with my demons.”

Glenn left the room, and programmed the lock to release in four hours if he didn’t do anything. He continued to watch until she slowed down and moved to the cot. She fastened the zero-gee straps and turned her face away from the window to sleep.

The room camera and microphone were always on, but the volume had been turned up when he entered. Over the monitor he could hear her murmur, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”


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