Interstellar Medic: The Long Run

Book : Interstellar Medic

by Patrick Chiles

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact; Hard Science Fiction

Synopsis

Being a paramedic is a tough job; it’s tougher when you stumble onto a crashed alien spacecraft.

Melanie Mooney thought she was just doing her job when she came upon an unusual accident in the deep woods late one night. Acting alone, what she found was nothing like she’d expected. What followed was even more unexpected.

Recruited by emissaries of a galaxy-spanning civilization, Melanie is thrust into a world she thought only existed in supermarket tabloids. As the first human in the Galactic Union Medical Corps, she cares for extraterrestrials in desperate need of a medic who can ignore the fact that they’re nothing like any patient she’s ever seen, even on their best days. And in emergency medicine, it’s a given that every patient is having the worst day of their life.

Each run takes her deeper into the galaxy and farther from home, navigating alien cultures that only get weirder with each call. It will take all of Melanie’s experience, instinct, and grit to prove herself—and the rest of humanity—to be worthy of the Union. That’s a lot to put on a woman who’d just like to end the day with a cheeseburger and a cold beer.

Release date: March 5, 2024

Publisher: Baen

Print pages: 448

Sample

1

Delivering babies is the highlight of a paramedic’s career, a welcome respite from the daily parade of illness, injury and death that otherwise defines our existence. Bringing a new life into the world is transcendent, a near-magical affirmation of our profession’s essential goodness, a welcome reminder that we are more than mere escorts for the dying into whatever afterlife awaits them.

All of that happy horseshit goes out the window when the baby has tentacles and fangs dripping with toxic goo.

It’s nothing personal, mind you. The kid can’t control itself, and I certainly can’t expect much from the parent at this point. She (or he; with this species it’s interchangeable) is strapped to a gurney in the back of our bus, with her tentacles pinned beneath a makeshift concoction of restraints and her fangs safely concealed behind a breathing mask. Childbirth can drive a human mother half crazy, but a hextopus in labor is like wrestling snakes and there’s no referee to call foul when the teeth come out.

At this point I should mention “hextopus” isn’t what they call themselves, but it’s the best English classification I can think of for a species with six elongated, retractile limbs: If an octopus has eight tentacles, then six makes for a hextopus. If I’d paid better attention to Latin in college I could probably come up with a more scientific-sounding taxonomy, but at this point I’m just trying to get the baby out alive.

Hextopods are technically amphibious, but they strongly prefer water. Our immediate problem is that we’re in a standard atmosphere of oxygen and nitrogen, which is what most Union races breathe, but I’ll save the exobiology lesson for later. This species normally gives birth underwater, and I’m told it goes a lot more smoothly in their natural environment. That makes sense, and it also explains why the mom-to-be is damned near out of her mind right now, to the point of being dangerous.

I take my eye off the job at hand for a split second to check the cat’s cradle of cargo straps holding her back. Each of her tentacles is a couple meters’ worth of pure muscle and could tear me in half like prying apart a mollusk. The oxygenated fluid we’re pumping through her mask calmed her down enough for us to get her into our cobbled-together restraints, so at least I don’t have those appendages to worry about.

The baby is another matter. It won’t be nearly as strong as a full-grown hextopus, but it’s absolutely complicating things. Thankfully our scanners show the head is coming first, because I don’t want to reach up into Mom’s birth canal to wrestle with a writhing mass of tentacles, much less have to deal with the fangs. Our anatomy instructor warned us that these things come out instinctively snapping at whatever’s close, which in this case is me. And while they’re not venomous, their saliva is toxic to most other races, including humans.

The normal reflex would be to close my eyes as I reach into the birth canal, but that’s something I learned to control a long time ago on the farm. I tell myself this is no different than delivering a calf, while the carbon-flex protective sleeves I’m wearing ought to shield me from the pointy parts and their poisonous slime.

I find the head, and here’s where I have to be extra careful. The birthing process is a lot less complicated underwater, where Mom naturally spits the baby out when the time comes. Here, they have to work at it because they’re averse to delivering in open air. That means going elbow-deep up her birth canal, finding the baby, and pulling it out. It’s almost all head but for those flailing tentacles, and my hands quickly find something about the size and shape of a football. I start massaging it toward me, gently coaxing it along with my fingertips.

Thing is, you have to be cautious with the head because these creatures are smart. And I don’t mean “smart” like trained horses or dolphins; hextopods are fiercely intelligent. Beyond human intelligence, in fact beyond a lot of other Union species. Their method of communication is so subtle as to have been overlooked for centuries, at least by my notion of time. It wasn’t until they’d built vehicles to finally leave the confines of their underwater homes that the powers-that-be realized these beings were deserving of membership

in the Galactic Union.

The Union’s not quite sold on humans yet, which is why I’m here, but that’s another story.

I feel my way forward until my fingers move past the crown and the first baby tentacle wraps itself around my hand. This is not a pleasant sensation, and I fight the urge to recoil in fear and disgust. Before long both of my hands have these wormy little appendages wound tightly around them, and I’m safe to start applying some force. I take a deep breath, my translator tells Mom to do the same in a burbling speech I can’t begin to understand, and I pull back in one smooth, continuous motion.

In my hands is a writhing infant hextopus, its skin frantically changing colors as it reacts to the shock of its new environment. This kaleidoscope of hues is the baby’s silent cry as it emerges into its new world. Mom begins changing colors in rhythm with her baby; this is how they communicate. There’s no time for me to marvel at their strange symbiosis, so I place the baby in a makeshift tank and am immediately rewarded by its tiny tentacles releasing their death grip on me. The newborn is now in its natural environment and I watch its colors settle into calmer shades of pink and blue as it breathes for the first time. I realize I’ve been holding my breath as well and collapse onto the floor with an exhausted groan. I’ve been on shift for barely an hour.

Back home, this would’ve earned me a stork pin for my EMS uniform. I don’t know what the Union awards for delivering an alien squid baby.

 

My name is Melanie Mooney, and on Earth I was a paramedic. That’s also what I do here, though the job is equal parts medic and veterinarian. I realize that sounds either contrary or redundant, but stay with me. The Union tapped me for this job because I’m something of a unique asset in their view.

In case you haven’t already figured this out, the answer to the longstanding question of whether there’s other intelligent life in the universe is unequivocally yes. Lots of it, in fact. At present there are over two dozen different intelligent species in the Union, with many more lingering on the outskirts who’ve yet to be selected for admission.

Ours is one of them. I mentioned they weren’t entirely sold on humans yet. There are a lot of criteria the big brains in charge (and some are literally just that—big brains) have for judging a species’ readiness, but the main one is culture. If they don’t believe your species is prepared for the shock (and trust me, it’s shocking) then they’ll keep their distance and quietly observe until they think you’re ready.

That doesn’t always work out as planned, which is how I got here. They might be smart, but they’re not infallible. That should offer our own species some encouragement.

The reason I’m a “unique asset” is because I have an ability that is considered rare in

the Union: that is, I’m able and willing to care for a wide range of species. For being so technologically and culturally advanced, when it comes to medicine a lot of the various Union species can be surprisingly provincial. Very few are willing to provide medical care to anyone outside of their own kind. They have reasons, sometimes not particularly good ones, but it’s heartening to know that civilizations more advanced than ours aren’t perfect either.

I don’t know if this is a quality all humans share—many surely don’t—but if it’s widespread enough then that’s a big check in humanity’s “plus” column, so I’d better not screw up this gig. I attribute my own flexibility to growing up on a farm and being a veterinary student before switching gears to become a medic. Being able to diagnose and treat creatures who can’t tell you what’s wrong with them turns out to be a valuable skill in the rest of the galaxy.

 

The “bus” I referred to earlier is our ambulance. On Earth we’d also call it a “squad.” Cops usually called it a “meat wagon,” but we hardly ever use “ambulance.” Too many syllables.

In its former life it was a Union Class III executive transport, with the comfy interior stripped out and replaced with an adjustable gurney and every type of life support we might need. Air ambulance services on Earth would do the same thing, equipping old private jets for rapid patient transport.

As the name implies, an interplanetary transport can do a lot more than a boring old jet. And I’ve learned “interplanetary” doesn’t do it justice either. It’d be like calling that Earth jet a puddle jumper. I’m no rocket scientist, but these things can zip around in ways that would make actual rocket scientists need to change their shorts. 

I understand enough to know that the distances between worlds are almost beyond comprehension, and the technology used to bridge that gulf is even more so. I never paid much attention to this kind of thing before, but I’ve learned the reason it takes our puny space probes years to reach other planets is because our methods are antiquated by Union reckoning. It was explained to me that our probes are passively coasting between worlds, whereas Union pilots can keep their feet on the gas, so traveling across a solar system can be done in a matter of hours. I’ve been able to grasp that much.

Getting to planets in other star systems is a whole other feat which I don’t begin to understand. Translated into English, they said it’s best described as creating a bubble in space that lets a ship move almost instantaneously between stars. However it works, they don’t even describe the technology as an engine; it’s a “drive.” After it was described to me, I asked, “Like warp drive?” and they said that’s essentially correct. I may not have paid much attention to the actual science before, but I have watched a few sci-fi movies.

If I’d taken more physics in college I might understand it better, but I’d been in veterinary school, so biology it was. My Union mentors assured me that even if I’d done better in freshman calculus it still wouldn’t be fully explainable. But thank goodness I had at least that much, because I’ve learned that math is the true universal language. The symbology may vary, but in the end two plus two equals four and the first derivative of any whole number is zero, no matter which star system you’re from.

It kind of has to be. I remember my old math professor said that calculus is the key to understanding nature, which I didn’t fully grasp until much later. It’s been used to do everything from determining that the speed of light is a universal constant, down to setting the ideal price for a bag of chips at Walmart.

He also said there was some debate as to whether Newton invented calculus or discovered it, since it can model pretty much everything in nature. The longer I’m out here, the more I’m convinced he discovered it. It’s just too perfect.

My hosts patiently explained our transport’s basic functions in a way I could comprehend. Knowing that is kind of essential to the job, for the same reason a flight medic needs to understand how the aircraft she’s riding in works. Doesn’t mean I can fly the thing, but when the pilot tells me why we have to do certain things in a certain way, I get it. For the same reason a flight medic knows that taking a helicopter into severe icing is suicide, I know that certain phenomena in space are off-limits to us even though I’m not able to pilot the ship. Black holes would be the most obvious example, but there’s more ways to get yourself killed out here than I thought possible. Of course vacuum is bad; that’s what space suits are for. What I didn’t know was how dangerous the radiation environment can be—there are limits here despite the Union’s advanced technology, and where we can go depends a lot on what our little ship is equipped to withstand. Just as you can’t use a fishing boat as an icebreaker in the Arctic, we can’t take a Class III transport anywhere near a pulsar: the radiation would overwhelm our plasma shields and cook us in our own skin. That’s one of many no-no’s.

 

I’ve been doing this going on six months now, but I was an earthbound medic long before that. Ten years seems to be the point when most of us get burned out and either move on to other work or stay on as jaded losers. I hadn’t reached that point yet, but had sure felt it coming. Getting tapped by the Union might have moved the timeline further out for me, but it’s on my mind as we clean up the back of the squad from our messy hextopod delivery.

Cleanup after a big run is never pleasant, but this one’s even more difficult thanks to the cumbersome hazmat suit I’m wearing. Among all of the water and alien bodily fluids is the creature’s toxic slime. It’s nothing personal on their part, it’s a natural secretion that helps them digest their food. Like stomach acid, just highly concentrated, and it happens to come out of their mouths which are uncomfortably close to their birth canals. I try not to imagine the prospect of having my mouth that close to my privates as I mop up the mess, wipe down every surface, and sweep a glowing decon boom over the remaining nooks and crannies to finish the job.

As I strip off the hazmat suit and stuff it into the recycler—nearly everything’s recycled

on a spaceship—I take a look around. The bay is all gleaming silver and pristine white composites, lit by ceiling panels that hold some type of organic illumination I don’t understand. It looks like something out of a science fiction movie, which is kind of my life now.

It didn’t start out this way. 

 

2

I was headed home after the end of my three-to-midnight shift, driving down an empty country road to our farm. I inherited the property a couple of years earlier, but have never been able to think of it as mine. It still feels like my father’s, while I’m only the caretaker until I figure out what to do with it.

After coming around a bend in the road, I noticed a glow off in the woods. The forest here is dense, and the treetops had been sheared off in a path leading straight to those lights. My heart sank—this looked like a plane crash, and those flickering lights could’ve been a fire.

I’d been off duty for almost an hour, but the medic switch in my brain flipped itself back on right away. We’re legally bound to assist in any emergency we might come across, on duty or otherwise. I was spent, but the adrenaline surge woke me up as if I’d pounded a half-dozen espresso shots.

This area had always been a well-known dead zone, and sure enough my phone was useless. I kept an emergency-band radio in my pickup, but when I tried to call in there was nothing but static. That was strange, but I couldn’t lose time fussing over things out of my control. I hopped out and grabbed my personal first-aid gear from the tailgate, and pulled a headlamp from one of the outside pouches. I put it on and began picking my way through the woods, toward what I hoped wasn’t a burning aircraft.

It was a rough couple hundred yards of crashing through underbrush. My feet kept getting tangled in vines and I stumbled, falling flat on my face. I reached up to feel the fresh cut on my right cheek—wet, but not too bad. So long as I wasn’t dripping my own blood onto the patient, I would deal with it later.

I made it to the crash site, which had pummeled a clearing out of the trees. Thankfully there was no fire, but there was an awful lot of smoke. The lights which had looked like fire from a distance were coming from the aircraft itself, some steady, some pulsing intermittently. Planes have running lights so this wasn’t particularly surprising, but these weren’t the familiar red and green strobes. There was a persistent yellow glow coming from one end, which I assumed were the engines. If those things were still turning then I’d give them a wide berth. Getting scorched by jet exhaust or sucked down an intake were things to avoid.

The plane’s fuselage was pretty banged up but still mostly intact, with skin as lustrous as polished silver despite the damage. It was shaped like a flattened cigar, so I assumed the wings had been torn off on impact. No tail, either. Maybe it was military?

Hopefully none of the passengers had been thrown clear, but even more so I hoped none were trapped inside. If I needed the Jaws of Life to pry anyone free, they’d be screwed until more help arrived. Airplanes have emergency locator beacons that automatically go off in a crash, so even if I couldn’t get through to anyone, somebody would be on their way soon.

That part I was right about. Exactly who “somebody” was would come as a surprise, though much later.

For now, I had to concentrate on doing first things first. That meant finishing my survey of the scene to make sure it was safe to get to work, though “safe” is an elusive term when it involves wrecked machinery and there’s no one else on scene. All bets would be off once I crawled inside this thing.

I didn’t see any bodies around the crash site, which made sense as there were no obvious breaches. No windows, for that matter, which made it really odd. Was it a drone? This thing seemed awfully big to be one of those. I called out, announcing EMS on the scene, but nobody answered. They had to be inside. It would’ve helped if there was a door somewhere. Eventually I found a section that had been torn open, and I could see partway inside.

I pulled on a pair of tough work gloves from my trauma bag and started prying away at the damaged section. It was very light stuff, but strong. The crumpled parts gave way as easily as tin foil, but the intact sections wouldn’t budge no matter how much weight I put into it.

Not that I had a lot of weight to begin with, being barely five feet tall and a hundred

pounds soaking wet. The younger firefighters nicknamed me “Tiny,” but my size also made me a prime candidate for confined-space rescues. Think caves, collapsed buildings, mangled-up car wrecks. I can wheedle my way into most anything, which shuts the big guys up when I’m able to get into places they can’t.

I didn’t know much about airplanes other than what we learned in heavy rescue school, in particular what to look out for. One this size would have two pilots, maybe a flight attendant (“stewardess” had long since fallen out of favor). Probably passengers, but not always, so I was looking for at least two victims inside. I pulled aside a section of crushed metal and got a peek into what was left of the cabin. It was all white, or at least parts of it used to be. There’d been a fire, that much I could tell from the partially scorched interior.

That’s when I saw an arm sticking out from beneath a panel. It was thin, with unusually long fingers. I didn’t think much about this, as blunt force trauma can do awful things to a body. It appeared ashen under my headlamp, and gray skin is never a good sign. If this guy was already in pallor, he could have been dead anywhere from fifteen minutes up to a couple of hours.

I reached for his wrist to search for a pulse, but found nothing. I could move the arm, so rigor hadn’t set in yet. That meant they’d been here about two hours at most.

That was when the arm moved.

I recoiled in shock and banged my head on a dislodged panel. Postmortem muscle contractions are a thing, but it was nothing I’d ever experienced firsthand. What was most unnerving was when the hand opened up to grasp mine. Dead bodies can do some weird stuff, but they don’t do that.

Holy hell, this guy was still alive! I unwrapped his unusually elongated fingers from around mine and reached for his wrist again. It took a while to find it, but there was a pulse now. Thready, which explained the pallor. Something I couldn’t yet see had to be pressing against him and restricting blood flow.

It was decision time. Should I wait for heavy rescue to arrive, or keep making my way inside? A crashed aircraft is by definition of dubious structural integrity. I’m no engineer, but those are the kinds of questions we’re trained to ask ourselves before climbing into wrecked vehicles: namely, is this thing likely to come down on top of me?

I pushed against the side panels with my foot and braced my back against the bare metal behind me. Nothing gave way, and I didn’t hear any telltale creaks or groans that might signal impending collapse. It wasn’t much to go on, but it was all I had at the moment.

Besides the headlamp, there was a flashlight on my belt. I took it out and shined the beam into the small opening near my patient’s arm. It looked

like there was enough space to work in, but it would be close quarters.

I shoved the trauma bag in ahead of me before crawling in up to my shoulders. If I could do that comfortably, then the rest of me could make it all the way through. “Hang tight, I’m coming in,” I announced to whoever was inside.

It turned out I didn’t have to worry about space. This machine had plenty of it after I got past all that crumpled metal. This part of the cabin was mostly intact, lined with soft paneling in varying shades of white mounted within a thin metallic framework. I made another quick assessment of the scene, looking both for victims and any signs of immediate danger. Smoke and fire would be the big ones, which were blessedly absent. No petroleum smells, either. Had it simply run out of fuel?

Searching the cabin with my headlamp and flashlight I counted three patients; two were in matching light gray skintight jumpsuits. One of them was the guy with the pinned arm. The third was up front, a long-haired blond fellow dressed in white. He sat in a sleekly curved seat, slumped over what I assumed were the controls. The instrument panel was devoid of any actual instruments, but I knew enough to recall that the latest jets had what they call “glass cockpits” which replace all of the dials and gauges with computer screens. I still had no idea what kind this was, but it was definitely new and very high-tech.

I turned to my first patient, the one with the trapped arm. I wasn’t looking at his face yet; my first impression was that he wore an odd kind of bug-eyed helmet. Again, this was unusual but not a complete surprise. This had to be a military jet, and who knew what sort of funky gear they wore?

He was pinned, but not badly. One of those interior panels was pressed against him. When I moved it I found it was as light as the metal skin outside, but its frame wouldn’t give way easily. It didn’t look like it was keeping anything from falling, so I put my shoulder against it and shoved off with my feet. There were scraping and groaning noises as it finally began to move, hopefully enough to pry this fellow loose.

His arm was free now. I could feel his pulse beneath my fingertips, much stronger with the blood flow unrestricted. A good sign. I began checking the rest of him for any signs of trauma—limbs out of place, bleeding, the obvious stuff. Now that there was a pulse, I pulled out my stethoscope and began listening for heart and respiratory activity. It took a while to find it, and when I finally landed on a good spot there still wasn’t much to speak of. His heart rate was weak and irregular and his breathing was shallow. This guy could crash any minute.

I checked my watch—twelve minutes since I arrived on scene. There still weren’t any sirens, and it’s not like I carried a defibrillator in my go bag. If this guy coded and I had to give CPR, that meant the others would be left to fend for themselves. This was not a good situation,

but I could only assess one person at a time, so I had to quickly finish this guy and move on to the others. I began exploring with my fingertips, looking for more signs of trauma. I needed to check his pupils for response, so I reached for that strange bug-eyed helmet visor.

It wasn’t a helmet. It was hard to imagine how I missed that; maybe it would’ve been more obvious in daylight. That was his actual head, egg-shaped and of the same gray pallor, with glistening almond-shaped eyes, big and black as night.

My mind began racing. Already amped-up from the rush of being first on scene, now my heart was about to burst out of my chest like a creature from one of those space alien movies . . . 

Space alien.

The words tried to escape my mouth but I was dumbstruck. My attention was drawn away from my patient—which should never happen—for another look around this wrecked whatever-it-was.

It hadn’t resembled any airplane I’d ever seen in the first place, and now it looked even less so. To begin with, there were only a few seats. The rest of the cabin was empty, nothing but those spongy white wall panels. Where did everyone sit? It reminded me of a padded cell, of the kind sometimes used for mental patients. Maybe that’s where I needed to be myself, because this was all too crazy. For being in a crash, the interior was remarkably intact. There were a few things that looked like they might be out of place, but then I had no reference to judge against. It looked like nearly all of the damage was absorbed by the outer hull or airframe or whatever it was called. Just this one area I’d been able to crawl into got crunched, but the occupants had obviously been knocked around hard.

I turned back to my patient. He turned his head to face me, but I couldn’t tell if there was any recognition in those jet-black eyes. The adrenaline was really pumping now; my hands were shaking and my stomach felt like it was doing backflips. I wiped my palms on my pants, suddenly aware that I was sweating profusely.

I heard movement. Something was shuffling behind me. A hand gripped my shoulder, firm but not in a threatening way. There was a voice but I couldn’t tell what it was saying. I felt a pinprick on my right temple.

The cabin swirled around me before everything went dark.

 

I woke up the next morning in my bed. Everything was normal, which wouldn’t have seemed odd except that I was on my back with my grandmother’s old quilt draped over me. I never slept this way—I’m almost always on my stomach with the quilt and sheets in a tangle around my legs.

I must have totally zonked out, but that didn’t make any sense either. I was as alert as if I’d been up for hours and finished off the day’s first pot of coffee. My blue utility pants were draped over the back of a chair by the window, ...