Carbon didn’t respond to him immediately. She fished the first cannister of drugs from the dispenser tray and loaded it into an injector. She winced as she pressed it to her arm, holding it in place until it beeped empty. When she replied, her voice was ragged and tired, teeth tinged a dark red already. “Eight hundreds. One thousands. Between.”
Alex didn’t know what unit she was using. Definitely wasn’t Gray, which would have rendered her dead a few times over. Roentgen? Could be. Probably some Tslao measurement he’d never heard of. “That’s a lot.”
She nodded and repeated the process on her other arm, exhaling a long hiss. “It is.”
“How bad is it?”
Carbon set the injector back into its cradle and curled up into a ball. “It is... The knife’s edge? Radiation will kill me, treatment might kill me.”
Dread spiked in his gut. “Might kill you?”
“The... medication is... Nh, lung restrictor?” She paused, breathing heavily. “I do not know biological words. Physics, engineering.”
“It makes it so you can’t breathe?
She nodded and began to wheeze quietly. “Also interferes with discharge of carbon dioxide.”
Alex wasn’t previously aware of any sort of medication that gave it’s user asthma and prevented them from exhaling the poisonous gasses that built up in their blood. “That’s fucked up.”
Carbon gave him a watered down version of her usual glare when he said imprecise things, even as her breathing got worse. “If equipment, not problem.”
“You need a dialysis machine?” Alex’s eyes swiveled down towards the bright yellow medical kit mounted next to the door. “Get the trauma surgeon. It can do that.”
She shook her head as she started gasping for breath, managing to get out one word. “Different.”
Tslao ran on the same basic chemistry as Humans. They could breathe the same atmosphere, eat the same food and drink the same liquids, for the most part. Things got a lot more complex when you started dealing with synthetic drugs, so they added a mode that could operate on Tslao but without any sort of anesthetic. “It will work with your physiology, like the mediboard. It won’t be comfortable, but it will do the job.”
Carbon watched him as she struggled for breath, then reached out and gave herself a push towards the kit. She caught the handle and pulled it open, the shelves within folding out to offer their bounty of medical supplies. The Tslao just hung there in front of it, gasping for air and twitching as her head scanned the packages in front of her over and over again.
“The big one at the bottom.” Working in space, one of the first things he learned was to recognize hypercapnia. Confusion and tremors are pretty close to the ‘dead’ side of the symptom list. Sure would be handy if he could get up right about now. “Select Tslao then press the base to your abdomen.”
That, at least, worked. She got the shoe-box sized autonomous surgeon out of the kit, pressed the species option on the screen and hugged it to her body tightly, curling up around it.
The translucent machine beeped and went to work. Aside from the occasional twitch or grunt of pain from Carbon, there was no real indication it was doing anything. She just floated by the door for some time, rotating slowly from a particularly violent jerk of her body away from the machine.
Her breathing steadied and slowed, not normal by a long shot, but Carbon no longer gasped for breath. She steadied herself and came up beside the mediboard, where Alex could see her more easily. “Thank you. I did not know- I did not even know this existed.”
“No problem.” Alex would have shrugged if he had control of any sizable portion of his body. He couldn’t think of anyone he wouldn’t have at least tried to help out - it was the right thing to do. Tslao didn’t think that way though, according to the primer. Given Carbon’s actions since the attack, he wasn’t sure how accurate that was any more. “I’m not going to watch someone suffer.”
“It is deeply appreciated.” She tipped her head in assent.
“There is one thing, though.”
“Yes?” Her head tipped to the side, antennae raised slightly.
“Next time you have to do something like that, talk to me before you do it.” Alex looked her straight in the eye. “I’m not exactly active right now but I still know a lot. By all means, put that to use.”
Carbon dipped her head again, the motion deeper this time. There may have been a hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. “You have my promise.”
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