Contents

Cover

Broken City – Extract

Prologue

One

Two

Three

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eBook license

BLEEDOUT

ROBERT RATH

Prologue

Her fist bangs on the door, leaving a bloody mark with each strike.

No answer.

She casts a shaky, over-the-shoulder glance at the wet alley, then hitches over in pain at the twisting movement. The blood is coming fast now.

She raises her fist again.

One

At first it’s just two knocks. Bang-bang. Then a pause Statim interprets as hesitancy.

Then:

Bang-bang. Bang-bang-bang. Bang. Bang.

Staccato. Like the tap-codes she was taught in the Astra Militarum – in case she got taken prisoner and had to communicate cell to cell by knocking on bars and pipes.

Statim already has the Rakov auto-snub in her hand, one finger lying alongside the trigger, not on it.

She’s been robbed before. Mostly by twitchy screech-heads who can’t find their regular connection and are desperate for pharms. They’re sick, and Statim’s sympathetic, but let one twitcher knock you over and you get a reputation as an easy score. She doesn’t want that, hence the pistol.

The banging has stopped when Statim puts a hand on the armoured door’s vision slit and brings the pistol up to the eye-height gap. Usually, just seeing the barrel is enough to scare off anyone dumb enough to arrive with bad intentions.

Slam. Statim slides open the vision slit and sees… no one.

Apart from the bloody fingers, clinging to the bottom of the slit’s ledge.

She works the two deadbolts. Turns the wheel that pulls the slide-pins out of the ceiling and floor. Shoves the hydraulic plasteel bar out of its cradle and opens the clinic door.

The girl falls inside, spilling blood on Statim’s white tile floor.

The kid turns her head, brown hair falling across her face like a funeral veil.

Brown eyes, so big, looking at Statim with dilated pupils.

‘Help me,’ the kid whispers.

Then she’s out.

Two

Most people would stand there for a second or two if a bleeding girl fell through their front door. But Statim isn’t most people. She doesn’t even think about it, just grabs the kid by the shoulders of her bloodstained bodyglove and pulls her inside, careful to lift her trunk so the abdominal wound doesn’t drag on the floor.

Then Statim closes and relocks the armoured door, not even pausing to stick her head out and see if someone’s around. Local gangers have declared Statim’s clinic safe ground – a place free from the gang wars that periodically ravage the habclave – but this girl isn’t from the district. If someone’s chasing her they might not be briefed on what is and isn’t allowed. And if the kid has been mugged by screech-heads, well, they don’t follow gang rules.

She does see the bloody handprints, though. Heel and palm impressions left by the kid’s knocking, bright red on the plasteel like some Administratum servitor went haywire with its ‘REJECTION’ stamp.

The scene secure, Statim slaps on her rubberine gloves. Goes into field-medicae mode. Turns the patient over, slow and gentle, using her whole forearms so she doesn’t bend the kid’s torso. Scans with her eyes, crown to boot. Triage diagnosis.

‘Hello there,’ Statim breathes, unsure whether the kid can even hear her. ‘I’m Statim. I’m going to help you.’

It’s an abdominal wound. A bad one. Catastrophic haemorrhage. Statim pushes that aside for now.

With abdominal wounds, it’s important not to get sucked into treating just the trauma site. Do that, and an undiagnosed secondary trauma can kill the patient – especially if the bullet has rattled around or broken up in their chest cavity, ploughing through organs and glancing off bone.

She slips a pair of angled scissors under the bodyglove’s neck and slits the garment down to the girl’s waist. The tough fabric growls as it parts under the sharpened blades, forcing Statim to work the shears a few times to keep the blades moving.

The girl’s brown midriff is smeared with blood. It seeps from a fingertip-sized hole just above and to the left of the navel. Venous bleeding. A steady stream of dark red oozing out like an overflowing drain.

This is good. No spurting or spraying. This means the bullet – and now Statim is sure it’s a bullet – hasn’t clipped an artery.

Statim tears open a sterile bandage and compresses the wound, satisfied that she doesn’t feel any suck or bubbling that might indicate a damaged lung.

The girl moans, head rolling to one side, eyelids twitching as the pain registers through the haze of shock and blood loss.

‘I’m going to move you,’ Statim says, ‘and it’s going to hurt like a bastard. Can you hear me?’

No response. Statim keeps the pressure on, checking the girl’s airway, breathing and circulation. The first two are good, but the pulse is weak. She feels for an exit wound in the back and doesn’t find one, meaning it’s a piercing injury, not penetrating.

‘Bad news – slug’s still in there,’ she says. ‘Good news? I don’t think it hit your spine.’ She straps down the bandage with compression tape. ‘I’m going to leave you for seven seconds while I get my spine board. Understand? Seven…’

Statim continues counting as she grabs the board. In the Guard, she’d learned that it helps the patient if you keep talking. It keeps them present. Makes them less likely to give up and stop breathing.

‘…three, two…’ She comes back, rolls up one side of the girl’s body and tucks the board underneath her.

No reaction from the patient. Not good.

She jacks up the spine board, wheels it to the centre of the room and rolls the kid gently onto the cold porcelain surface of her trauma table. The glossy ceramic, shiny under the surgical lumen array, is stained pink from the quantity of blood that’s passed over it in the past four years.

So much blood. A river’s worth, dribbling out of warm bodies and rolling down the table’s surface, into a pipe that channels it to a drain in the floor. Through that copper pipe had passed the vital fluid of half the district. Brothers, sisters, gang rivals, the homeless – whatever their hatreds and tragedies, their blood ended up commingled in the underground tank buried beneath Statim’s hab-clinic.

They came here; they always came here. Bodies mangled in street fights and skulls crushed from blunt-force trauma. Shot. Stabbed. Shattered by the groundcars that tear through the narrow streets way too fast, heedless of pedestrians and the kids that play in them.

And when someone gets messed up, they come to Doc Statim, and her fortified clinic. The only medical practitioner in the Low Dredge, apart from the folk doctors, missionaries and cunning women. Because while Statim is just as unlicensed as those that prescribe chewing herbs and prayer cycles, she has framed papers on the wall, carrying official seals of the Astra Militarum. Anyone who bothered to read them would find that Akeso Statim had been honourably discharged for Special Services to General Symphonie Ravellen, and Conspicuous Gallantry in the Face of the Enemy.

Whether the papers are fake or not is a subject of speculation on the hab-block. After all, Doc Statim doesn’t look like a war hero – but war hero or not, word of mouth brings them here.

They knew that if they made it to the doc, they were safe. On neutral ground. They knew she’d treat them before asking for money, might even let them pay in instalments or not at all. Every flux season, the doc would give free vaccines to the district’s kids. It’s always expired stock that had gone unused uphive – but better than anyone in Low Dredge could get.

So it isn’t entirely a surprise for Statim to find a gut-shot ganger on her doorstep.

Red begins seeping through the gauze, and Statim piles on another pad before securing a plastek strap to the table and belting it over the wound. With a button press, the strap inflates – a clear balloon belly band – to keep pressure on the wound.

Hands free, she fetches a bag of plasma and hangs it from a hook in the ceiling. Carefully plays out the tube so the clear fluid forces the air out of the needle. She pushes up the girl’s sleeve to spike her.

That’s when she sees the tattoo.

And stops.

On the kid’s forearm, an Imperial aquila spreads its wings, claws gripping a pair of crossed lasguns. A scroll above the double heads reads ‘ANTICUS AD MORTEM’. Below it sits a serial number and blood type.

It isn’t a gang tag. That kind of ink is only seen in the Astra Militarum.

Statim plunges the needle right into the eagle’s heart.

Three

Two bags of plasma. One of precious real blood.

The vitals monitor is singing along to its high peaks and long valleys: Beep. Beep. Beep.

Statim fought fifteen minutes to get the bleeding under control. Couldn’t stop thinking about the ganger’s ink.

No, not the ganger – the soldier.

But that isn’t possible. She’s what, fourteen? Fifteen? Well below enlistment age. Still working, Statim looks sidelong at the kid’s face.

The kid is slight and wide-mouthed, a small constellation of pox-scars decorating one side of her face and a scar on the chin. Dark brown hair pulled back in a bun, the preferred style for soldiers and factory workers. Her features are not yet adult, and like all adolescents she seems like an awkward caricature of the woman she will become – still might become, if Statim works fast.

Still, a teenager or not, she’s Militarum, and Statim feels a surge of retroactive guilt over thinking of her as a kid. She’s not a child, she’s a child soldier. Which isn’t much like a child at all.

‘How did you end up here?’ she asks. ‘Shore leave? New recruit? That ink looks fresh, judging by the inflammation. You steal your gear, sell it and desert?’

The kid doesn’t answer.

Statim searches the lower abdomen, fingers pressing the bruised flesh to diagnose internal injuries. Whatever bullet she’d taken was probably an autopistol or stub-round, at long range. A higher-speed bullet or a closer range would’ve meant a greater degree of cavitation, the shockwave of impact rolling through her abdominal flesh and causing its own secondary injuries. There is some distention, giving the skinny soldier a swollen little pot belly.

‘Looks like a stomach hit,’ Statim says. She reaches above herself and pulls down a battered vibro-sound scanner. Snaps on the power, then whacks it against her palm a few times when the pulse refuses to start. Feeling the buzz, she plays it over the kid’s distended belly. Looking at the screen above her, she whispers, ‘Come on, come on.’

There. A slug. Hard black amongst swirls of fuzzy grey. Fragmented only slightly, with two shards lying deeper in the gut.

‘Sorry, soldier, we’ve got about five minutes to treat this. It’s going to hurt like the hells and I can’t have you waking up to fight me mid-probe.’

She sends the scanner back into the ceiling array and grabs an obscurine syrette from the shelf below the trauma table. Cracks the cap, gives it a shake, spears it into the kid’s jugular.

Muscles knotted tight from pain start to relax.

Statim comes around the table to get a better angle, picks up a pair of probe extractors in her left hand, brings down the vibro-sound scanner in her right. She finds the bullet, the image juking and juddering with the involuntary shakes of her right hand.

There’s a regimental tattoo on Statim’s own forearm – a crusader’s sword, point down, with an aquila for its hilt. Two vipers curl around the blade in a helix, facing each other on either side of the hilt, the name ‘Markus’ on a scroll beneath.

Sirenian Grenadiers, Fourth Battalion, Medicae Company.

The tattoo twists oddly as Statim moves the scanner, the big burn scar she’d hidden underneath it pinching and pulling the image out of shape.

With her good left hand, she slips the angled extractor probe under the inflated band and over the rim of the entry wound, eyes glued to the vibro-sound monitor.

She wouldn’t do this unless it was medically necessary. She isn’t up to it.

Ever since the wound, she’s been working with her left hand. The right one has a mind of its own, dancing and fluttering from nerve damage. Keeping it still enough even to hold the scanner takes supreme concentration, and its grip strength will never fully return. Not bad enough to necessitate an augmetic – not that Statim could afford one – but definitely not coordinated enough for her to pass the Inspectorate of Medicae Practitioner boards and join any of the licensed uphive clinics.

On the monitor, the black probe slides into the gory tunnel of the slug’s passage.

‘Slow. Slow.’ Statim murmurs it to herself. Half direction and half prayer.

The bullet had passed by blood vessels, possibly nicked one. Jabbing or abrading the wrong thing might lead to irrecoverable blood loss. In fact, she shouldn’t even be doing this with her clumsy left hand. She should be taking this soldier uphive, or perhaps to the nearest barracks. Get her worked on by someone with access to surgical servitors or at least an assistant and two functioning hands.

But the kid hasn’t got that long. The distended belly suggests there’s a hole in her stomach that’s dribbling digestive acids into her abdomen. If she’s unlucky, it also clipped her intestine, spilling faecal matter into the body. Instant infection. Take off now, and she won’t make it ten blocks.

The bullet needs to come out.

On screen, the black shaft of the probe slides towards the slug. Slow as a viper, low in the grass, coming up on its prey. Sweat trickles off Statim’s brow, stinging her eyes.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Another knock at the door.

The sound startles Statim and her right hand begins to wobble. The image slews back and forth. She growls and refocuses, pressing the scanner in hard to anchor it.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

‘Operating!’ she shouts, sending the image spinning as tension cramps the half-dead nerves of her hand.

The probe gets closer. Closer. Kisses the slug with a little tic of metal on metal.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

‘One lost soul at a time,’ she mutters.

Statim takes a deep breath, readies herself for the speed and precision that must come next. She squeezes the trigger on the probe, watching its little serrated jaw unhinge. Eases back on the pressure so the jaws clamp down on a shard of the slug that’s torn slightly, creating a good grip point. Prays the bullet won’t tear or fragment.

She eases the shell sideways. It had tumbled when it hit the soldier, and now sits almost perpendicular to the gory tunnel of its passage. She gets it aligned, can see fresh internal bleeding flowing in to fill the vacuum in the flesh.

Statim breathes in and out, runs a visual check to make sure she knows exactly where the can of flesh sealant sits on the table.

‘One,’ she counts.

Wham. Wham. A shoulder against the door. Shouting voices.

‘Two.’

A rattle at the view slit, someone trying to force it with their fingers.

Statim’s fatigued right hand shakes, rattling her view of the bullet’s path like an earth tremor.

‘Three.’

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