An Exchange of Hostages by Susan R. Matthews

Author:Susan R. Matthews [Matthews, Susan R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Science Fiction, General
Publisher: Baen
Published: 1997-04-01T05:00:00+00:00

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She’d planned on keeping an eye on the theater in order to be able to update Chonis if he called. She found instead that she was interested. The screen gave her a close-up on the body: she could see the gray spidery needles walking over the seminude body of the unconscious man, carrying the micro-lasers to the sites beneath the skin where the fault lay. Where the damage had been done. She’d done some microsurgery herself, although most of what they treated here was gross tissue damage; and she was fascinated by the speed, the skill, the confidence that Koscuisko — even enclosed in the operating chair — expressed with every motion of those thin gray wire-like probes. He never hesitated at the dermis level; he never seemed to reposition a probe; he never seemed to probe too deeply by accident, and have to come back out and try again. He knew the angles of approach he wanted, and he hit each and every one of them flawlessly, without a single misstep.

He hardly seemed to be working at all, it went so fast.

And when the laser fingers had traveled up the spine to nestle beneath the brain box at the base of the skull — the site of the most critical damage, where Noycannir had kicked her unconscious prisoner-surrogate in an apparent spasm of frustration — Koscuisko only slowed his pace a bit. The most delicate of all the surgical interventions, repair of critical connections at the cellular level, and Koscuisko only slowed down, as sure — as certain — as he’d been before, only more deliberate in respect to the more dangerous environment.

Then the surgical machine was moving away from the table, backing up against the wall. Chaymalt shot a startled glance at the chronometer on the wall — had it been that long? Already? She’d hardly been aware of the passage of time, Koscuisko’s absolute self-confidence had mesmerized her.

But it was done.

The scanner descended from the ceiling as the operating chair retreated, and tracked slowly up the torpid body on the table. Chaymalt coded the display abruptly, suddenly anxious that she know the criterms now, when she could just as well have waited for them. The scanner report began to scroll across the desk surface: residual bruises, torn muscle fiber, edema — but the neurological damage had been masked by surgical repair.

With the astonishing speed characteristic of successful microsurgery, the normal electrical activity of the nerves was already beginning to recover — for all the world as if the damaged tissue had not been functionally nerve-dead with shock and trauma three scant eights ago.

It was incredible.

Healing was neither instant or absolute, of course. All Koscuisko had really done had been to restore the system’s integrity in the places where it had been compromised by Noycannir’s assault. And he had done it with minimal surgical trauma, although the conventional standards recognized that the surgery could do as much damage as it undid, even in the most skilled of hands.

Ligrose

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