FLIGHT MEDICINE
“Drop it on the cot in the corner.” the doctor gestured to the far end of the room, not even breaking eye contact with the terminal anymore.
“Will you take a look at it first?” the Sergeant asked, the slight hint of frustration creeping into her voice now.
“No. I’ve been specifically ordered not to examine or administer care to this class of pilot unless it is for ‘immediate life saving action’.” she said, waving a hand dismissively. “Unless you want to give it another few hits with the bar of soap or whatever it is you used tonight it’ll lay there until the flight surgeon comes down.” She looked back up with this, pointedly staring down the infantry troop.
The sergeant frowned, eyes narrowing at the accusation. “They fell off a gantry.” she repeated, almost like she believed it.
“Pilots tend to have poor balance on days they leave infantry maimed in the field. Maybe someone will do a study about that.” she came back, then turned away again with a snort and resumed typing.
“You can go.” she said, when the sergeant didn’t immediately turn away. Your one-time ambusher looked from your place in the back of the clinic, back to the doctor and then turned smartly and stalked back through the bulkhead door and into the halls she’d dragged you in from.
You laid there on an examination cot for hours, still aching with the pain of the beating and wincing with every hitched breath as something previously solid seemed to shift around with every rise and fall of your chest. You still had on your interface suit from earlier, but without it you would have been freezing in the clinic. The supervising doctor never even looked back at you, and neither did the lone nurse that you saw make the rounds once. They checked every cot and berth except for yours, always careful to make sure the privacy curtains never opened too wide for any one of them. The curtains around the small square of space you were in remained tucked away against the walls, like the half dozen unoccupied ones were.
You didn’t sleep. Pilots usually didn’t sleep. You cycled down, instead, slipping into a low-power, low-signature state. Heartbeat dropped and breathing slowed to a crawl, eyes glazing over as the brain began to pay less and less attention to active signals, like a mech in passive-only mode letting the world recede to just a few sensory pin-pricks around it.
It was the most relaxed you’d been in weeks, and it was gone as soon as motion in your peripheral shattered the calm and sent you jolting back to full alert, the sensor-line tripped like a perimeter alarm as a man in the same nondescript utility uniform as everyone else on base with the same medical emblem on his lapels as the doctor at the front stepped up to the cot next to you. You sat up, unbidden, as he slung a heavy looked pack off one shoulder and set it down on the edge of the bed.
“You are…” he started, reaching down to the ID tag collaring your neck, pulling it and you with it into a better position under the overhead lights. “Amsel. Amsel-5.” he let go and you slumped back.
“Strip.” he ordered, pulling a stethoscope out of his bag and a pair of examination gloves out of a box taped haphazardly but effectively against the wall. As he slipped on the gloves you slipped out of the suit, unlatching the seals and sliding down the recessed zippers and fit-toggles. You wore nothing beneath it, had no need to wear anything beneath it. You stepped down from the cot just long enough to slide the interface suit the rest of the way off, then set it down in a neat pile on the far side of the cot, away from the little workspace the doctor had established for himself. Naked except for the ID collar around your neck, you hopped back up onto the cot.
He wasted no time on pleasantries. Support staff never did with you. Nobody ever did with you. Already he was poking and prodding at different parts of your exposed body, pressing fingers into already darkening bruises, dragging them across bright red marks of new injuries and the discolored scar tissue of old. To his credit he only groped your breasts for a moment longer than necessary, a thumb trailing just a bit too long over one swollen nipple before they fell back to his own chest and grabbed the stethoscope.
“Ah, I see that, uh…” he said while pressing the instrument around on your chest, peering down to read the thing that had been branded onto your stomach months ago. “Sergeant Robach must be taking good care of you.” Your crew chief, the dedicated one that was assigned to the same Assault Gun you were assigned to, had left it. The same style as the one on every other frame in the hangars, the tiny flourish that announced the pilot/crew-chief pair’s names. Sergeant Robach was taking care of you, for the most part.
After a few more minutes of examination, a few deep breaths and pauses, a rooting around of a finger in your mouth to feel for any breaks or looseness in your teeth and the physical was over. You didn’t move to re-dress, and the doctor didn’t order you to either.
“Spread of hematomas and a cracked rib, you’ll be fine after a Vit-shot. I’m going to run a diagnostic on your neural ports, though. Make sure nothing got knocked too loose in there." the doctor said, gripping your chin with one hand to move your head and waving a bright little flashlight in front of your eyes. The light hurt but you didn’t squint or try to blink, just sat passively while you were handled.
“Just a quick sequence, I’m only looking to graph out your response pathway.” he said, in a way that felt more like aircrew verbalizing a pre-flight check than a doctor’s bedside banter. He was pulling a handheld terminal from his pack while he talked, the diagnostic cable trailing out of it.
“Count of three. Three.” his free hand brushed aside the hair that fell across the nap of your neck.
“Two.” the same hand gripping your neck, firm but not choking.
“One.” the cable slid into the neural port and your vision blinked out, just for a heartbeat and a ragged gasp. When it came back it was jolting & confused, your stomach flipped and threatened to empty as you tried to resolve the dual-input ghosting.
Without the benefit of the blackout helmet you could see two worlds laid across each other, the walls of clinic meshing into a rapidly moving field, the world tilting wildly around the medical cabinets & relief cots as the neural inputs replayed a test sequence. You screwed your eyes shut before it made you wretch and the clinic disappeared from view. Only the view from the WARSPRITE remained, strangely truncated from its regular 360-degree field by the limitations of the field test unit, the only sliver of the full experience that these mock-OFNIRs could replicate.
It was enough to make you twitch. Enough to salivate, as you realized which one this was. From the training set, from the template-pilot. It played out like it had the dozen times you’d been run through it in training, the sudden twists and turns around the point-defense fire, skidding one back-bent leg around in a perfect turn and then rocketing off with a boost through a wall of rubble. On the other side was the enemy walker, a bloated quadrupedal heavy burdened with a crown of artillery barrels that were like signal fires in your thermal overlay. The burn of your assault boosters bloomed across your back. The acceleration rattled your frame, vector nozzles spasming as they asserted control. The target was so slow. Lumbering, threat-response suite clearly struggling to even lock in your existence let alone a firing solution on you. The tracer lines of point-defense weapons came too late, railed against an afterimage of where you’d been. Your arm flexed with the movement of the pilot, with the movement of the pile-driver riding along your left arm. You were a missile, a javelin, an arrow fired into the heart of this fucking monster. Your teeth were bared, snarling with hate for the thing in front of you as the pile-driver’s charge fired and the tungsten rod shot forward with the force of an artillery shell, directly into the mech’s reactor assembly in a-
In a… In nothing. The pressure on your neck was gone, the cable withdrawn and the sim over. Cut short just before the kill. You could hear something whine, pathetically, and only realized it was coming from you when you finally opened your eyes again, mind fully returned to the base and the clinic, and suddenly aware of the way you were grinding against the air in desperation. You actually barked this time. Even just this little of the feeling, this distant echo of the real thing, had ruined you. Flooded your brain with such a concentrated rush of endorphins that drool ran down your chin and tears threatened to stream down your newly flush cheeks.
The flight surgeon was looking at you from his place on the side of the examination bench, glancing up from the diagnostic readout scrolling across his terminal with a look of only slight disgust before he turned back. You continued to unconsciously whine, panting slightly from the neural exertion.
“Alright, that checks out. No damage to your ports that I can see.” he finally said, tapping at the terminal with one hand and reeling the diagnostic cable back with the other before sliding the whole unit back into the pack he’d brought with him. He leaves the pack, and walks back up to the front of the clinic to the little front desk. Your curtains are still open.
You were still shivering, still hard and still leaking between your legs and onto the cot. He didn’t even seem to notice. As the dedicated flight surgeon he’d seen you and every other pilot on the outpost, on any number of outposts, like this a dozen times each at least. You dimly recall the few times he’s rutted you, even though it comes back to you hazy and dream-like the same as every memory outside the cockpit does. He still doesn’t tell you to re-dress, and you still don’t make a move to do so.
Eventually he seems satisfied with whatever work he’s done, whatever report he’s filed, returning to you with an unsealed auto-injecting hypodermic in hand. It’s a field model, the kind of combat-shot that they issue to most of the force, a concentrated version of the feed of drugs that flow through the input lines in your cockpit. “Vit-shot.” is all the doctor says, grabbing your thigh and then pressing the injector against the widest part of it. The stim hisses as it fires, and you can’t contain the gasp as it hits. The familiar itchiness is back almost immediately, riding along with the wave of heat that seems to grow from your thigh to your chest and then out again.
“Good as new in a few hours. Stay here the night, then back to your unit.” he instructs, while slipping the pack back over one shoulder and dropping the emptied injector into a red can in the corner.
“Well, actually they might need this room for someone.” he adds, pausing, then smiles broadly. “Grab your clothes and follow me, you’ll be in my quarters for observation tonight.”
You nod, picking up your interface suit but not putting it back on. That wasn’t what he’d told you to do. You follow after him out into the clinic and the rest of the prefab outpost, barefoot naked and covered in bruises. You can already tell you won’t rest tonight, or most of the next morning, but you’ve had worse recoveries.
