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* * *
"Now, this is not good," Honal said sharply. The upper compartment of the tower was a mass of wheels, belts, and chains. "We need some Diasprans up here, or something."
"Nah, you gots me," Poertena panted as he made it up the last stairs. He grabbed the wall and his side. "Jesu Christo, I t'ink t'ose step kill me!"
"It wasn't the stairs; it was your pack," Honal said. "But now that you're here, we need to get the gate open. You have any idea what any of this stuff does?"
Poertena took a look around, then another. He frowned.
"I ... t'ink t'at big wheel in front of you is t'e capstan."
"You think," Honal repeated. "And what is a capstan?"
"It what you turn to open t'e gate," Poertena replied. "Only one problem."
Honal looked at the wheel. It was, as far as he could tell, devoid of such minor things as handholds.
"Where do we grab?" he asked.
Poertena shoved himself off the wall and walked forward. There were embrasures on the northern side of the room, and he walked over and looked down through them. They were clearly for pouring stuff on attackers, but he felt quite certain that they functioned very well for disposing of u
"Took you a little bit to get in here, huh?" he asked. He turned back to the great drumlike wheel.
"Yes, it did," the Vashin nobleman admitted.
"Looks like t'ey had time to strip out the actual capstan," the Pinopan said, gazing at the capstan thoughtfully. It was nearly four meters across, clearly impossible to turn without a massive lever. On the other hand, there was a very convenient nut right at the top. "I jus' need a lever... ."
"Big enough to move the world?" Roger asked, stepping through the door. "Time to get the gate up, Poertena. What are you waiting for? A metaphysical entity?"
"No, You Highness," the Pinopan said, stooping to pick up a long baulk of wood. "A physical notion."
The dowel was wide, nearly ten centimeters, and longer than Poertena—probably a replacement for an interrupting rod. The armorer contemplated it for a moment, then dropped his pack and dove in.
"Okay, first you get out the metaphysical entity extractor," Roger agreed, and glanced at Rastar's cousin. "Honal, is this room secure?"
"Well, we haven't been counterattacked," the cavalryman said. "Yet."
"Hell, on t'is pocking planet, t'at t'e definition of secure," Poertena said as he extracted a roll of tape from the pack. "And of course I wasn't going to get a metaphysical extractor!"
"Of course not," Roger said as he went down on one knee and picked up the dowel. "I should have known it would be space-tape. That, or drop cord. What else? And what, exactly, are we going to do with it?"
"Well," Poertena replied, reaching into the top of the pack. "You know when we first met."
Roger eyed the wrench warily, remembering a recalcitrant set of armor and the armorer who had gotten him out of it so quickly.
"You're not going to hit me with that, right?"
"Nope," Poertena said as he laid the haft of the wrench along the dowel and began to apply tape, "but we going to see if it can move t'e world!"
* * *
Doc Dobrescu shook his head as he ran the sterilizer over his hands. They had over two dozen wounded, but of the ones who might survive, Cord was by far the worst.
"All I wanted to be was a pilot," he muttered, kneeling down beside the shaman. He looked across at the local female, who had shed her enveloping disguise somewhere along the way. "I'm going to need six arms for this, so you're elected. Hold out your hands."
"What is this?" Pedi asked, holding out all four hands as the human ran a wand over them.
"It scares away the demons," Dobrescu snapped. "It will reduce the infection—the gut-fever, you'd call it. He's hit bad, so it won't stop it entirely. But it will stop us from increasing the infection."
"He'll die," Pedi said softly. "I can smell the gut. He will die. My benan. What can I say to my father?"
"Screw your father," Dobrescu snarled. He tapped the female, who seemed about to drift off into la-la land, on the forehead. "Hey! Blondie, look at me!"
Pedi snapped her head up to snarl at the medic, but froze at his expression.
"We are not going to lose him!" Dobrescu barked, and thumped her on the forehead again. Harder. "We. Are. Not. Going. To. Lose. Him. Get that into your head, and get ready to help. Understand?"
"What should I do?" Pedi asked.
"Exactly what I say," Dobrescu answered quietly. He looked at the mess in Cord's abdomen and shook his head. "I'm a goddammed medic, not a xeno-surgeon."
Cord was unconscious and breathing shallowly. Dobrescu had intubated the shaman and run in an oxygen line. He didn't have a decent anesthetic for the Mardukans, or a gas-passer, for that matter. But he'd given the shaman an injection of "sleepy juice," an extract of one of the most noxious of Marduk's fauna, the killerpillar. If he had the dosage right, Cord wouldn't feel a thing. And he might even wake up after the "operation."
"Here we go," the warrant muttered, taking the spear by the shaft.
He started by using a laser scalpel to elongate the opening in the abdominal wall. The shaman's muscles had bound around the spearhead, and it was necessary to open the hole outward to extract the weapon. He applied two auto-extractors that slowly spread the opening, pulling away each of the incised layers in turn.
He finally had a good look at the damage, and it was pretty bad. The spear was lodged on the edge of the Mardukan equivalent of a liver, which was just about where humans kept one. There was a massive blood vessel just anterior of where the spear seemed to stop, and Dobrescu shook his head again at the shaman's luck. Another millimeter, a bad drop on the way back, and Cord would have bled out in a minute.
The spearhead had also perforated the shaman's large, small, and middle-zone intestine—the latter a Mardukan feature without a human analog—and ruptured a secondary stomach. But the damage to each was minor, and it looked like he wouldn't have to resect anything.
The worst problem was that a lesser blood vessel, a vein, had been punctured. If they didn't get it sewn up soon, the shaman would bleed to death anyway. The only reason he hadn't already was that the spear was holding the puncture partly closed.
"I'm going to pull this out," Dobrescu said, pointing to the spearhead. "When I do, he's going to bleed like mad." He handed the Mardukan female two temp-clamps. "I'm going to point to where I want those while I'm working. You need to get them on fast, understand?"
"Understand," Pedi said, seriously. "On my honor."
"Honor," the medic snorted. "I just wanted to fly shuttles. Was that too much to ask?"