Fic: Fair Trade part 5

[so_jang]

Title: Fair Trade part 5 (yes, I'm all spammy tonight, sorry!)
Author: me!
Rating:PG-13, technobabble, blood, angst
Notes: Remember that clip I was obsessed with? The one with Beverly's crazy hat? Yes, well... Link to TNG clip

Betaing & thanks:miriel helped me with the idea and gave me happy thoughts when I got stuck. **lanna_kitty** the hallowed and loved, betaed this like there was nothing else going on in her crazy life. She helped with characters, plot, grammar...everything!!! She rocks. (and put up with a lot of me being stuck.)

Summary: When Captain Picard disappears on a shore leave on a nonaligned world, the away team goes under cover to try and find him. Worf uses an unorthodox cover story and it spirals out of control. Crusher/Picard with significant Riker/Troi leanings. (yes, I wrote another damn babyfic...)

|| part one || part two || part three || part four ||


Worf’s incredibly strong hands plucked her out of a hell of phaser fire and dragged her around the corner into the relative safety of the alley. “I’m all right,” Beverly assured him breathlessly as he deposited her behind the corner of another building. “Get Deanna,” she begged him as she felt the fear and desperation cloud her mind. Tears were stinging her eyes and the smoke in her throat had ripped it apart. “She was right there.”

Worf was already gone. Jean-Luc was in his place, checking her for injuries as he held her face. “Deanna!” she urged him, trying to shake him off and convince him she was all right. “You have to get Deanna.”

Satisfied that she was uninjured, Jean-Luc hauled her back to her feet and pressed her against the wall as an errant phaser blast fried the air behind them. “Can you get out of the dampening field?”

Forcing herself to nod, she pulled herself away from the wall and started running down the alley. Adrenaline made each breath and the beating of her heart possible, but her peripheral vision was nearly gone and the numbness that had been toying with her extremities had now completely taken them over. Jean-Luc had told her to run, and she was going to run until she was safe.

Fifteen meters wasn’t that far, but it felt like an eternity. The hands that slammed into her knees when her dizziness made running impossible were completely numb. Cold sweat covered her skin and she swayed on her feet. Slamming her hand into the communicator in the pocket of her coat, Beverly heard the comforting reply of the Mendel’s computer.

“Auto-transport acknowledged.”

“Set timer for sixty-seconds,” she answered. Stumbling back towards the dirty steel wall of one of the cheap warehouses that filled this section of the town, she sank down against it. Pulling her phaser from her pocket, she pointed it around the corner and waited for her crewmates.

Jean-Luc was the first one to reach her and he threw himself down next to her. Clutching his right arm to his chest, he held his phaser in his left hand and kept it aimed around the corner at the alley. “The runabout?” he asked breathlessly.

She could only nod, her breath hadn’t returned to a point where she could speak. His brown tunic was singed on his right side. The lighting in the alley was weak and her eyesight was too damaged to diagnose his injury.

“Superficial,” he promised her as he followed her gaze to the wound on his side.

Will and Worf appeared a moment later. Deanna’s limp body was tossed over Will’s shoulder and Worf was dragging them both. Even through the acrid smoke in her nose, she could smell the blood suffusing Will’s tunic. Will dropped to his knees and Jean-Luc lunged forward to help catch Deanna as her unconscious body fell from his shoulders.

Tumbling to her knees, Beverly pressed her nearly useless hands over the wound in chest. The heat of Deanna’s blood brought feeling back to her hands momentarily as the transporter caught them. For a moment of bliss, Beverly felt nothing, not Deanna bleeding out beneath her hands nor the rolling sensation in her own skull.

As they rematerialized in a heap of limbs together on the transporter pad of the Mendel, everything came back in a rush of suffering. In the cramped space the air immediately began to fill with the smell of blood. Worf detangled himself first and ran to the controls. Jean-Luc’s phaser clanked to the pad and Will’s head nearly hit her elbow as he ran for the med kit.

“Her heart’s beating,” Beverly promised Jean-Luc before he asked. With her hand pressed against Deanna’s chest she could feel every precious jolt of her ribs. “I can’t stop the bleeding.”

“Here,” Jean-Luc’s left hand took over for hers. His right hand reached for her coat, and even with his injury he managed to help her shrug it off. Pressing the heavy material to Deanna’s chest, Jean-Luc was able to put much greater pressure on Deanna’s injury than she’d been able to.

Will returned with the medkit. Beverly fumbled with the clasp for a moment. It wasn’t the blood on her hands that was causing the problem, her hands just weren’t functioning as they should. Will’s eyes were haunted as if the life had been sucked completely out of them. She could still move her fingers, slowly, but fine motor control was beyond her abilities. Finally, Will had to open the med kit for her.

Jean-Luc watched her fumble with the medical tricorder and brought her out of it. “Beverly?”

“I can’t feel my fingers,” she whispered as she bit her lip. Through the blood covering them she could see that the skin beneath was entirely white. “Jean-Luc, my circulatory system is going into shock. It’s not life-threatening.” She snapped as she stared down at the pool of blood darkening the transporter pad.

“She needs blood,” she demanded as she glared at Will. The blood beneath Deanna was getting less red in her vision. Jean-Luc’s tunic was starting to look grey instead of brown. Her blood pressure was failing to the point where her eyesight was starting to go. “Or plasma, Betazoid type ZA positive, as much as you can get from the replicator.”

Will didn’t move. Watching Deanna bleed out had shell-shocked him. Jean-Luc nudged him with his elbow.

“Blood,” Will replied as he slipped past her and ran for the replicator in the back of the cabin.

“We’ll need to keep pressure up long enough to repair the damage,” she continued for the captain’s benefit. “The auto-transfuser looks like a small grey and green pump. Plasma or blood is attached to round gasket on the top of the device.”

Keeping his stronger left hand on Deanna’s wound, Jean-Luc turned to dig in the med kit with his right. “Beverly, circulatory failure is not to be taken lightly,” he chastised her as he turned back with the device. Curling into a ball, she dropped her head between her knees and tried to force the blood back into her extremities.

“My blood volume didn’t increase fast enough. I thought I’d compensated,” she explained weakly when he wouldn’t take his eyes off of her. “I’ll be fine,” she assured him firmly. “My body’s pulling blood from my extremities, trying to protect the fetus. I’ll be fine but I can’t perform surgery. My hands, my eyes, Jean-Luc, I’m losing the ability to see.”

His concern boarded on a terror she could recognize in the set of his jaw but his commitment to duty kept him functioning. “Mister Worf,” he called towards the con. “How long to the Enterprise at maximum warp?”

“Fourteen hours, sir,” Worf replied sharply from the front of the runabout. “I have signaled Commander Data, if he can, he will meet us halfway.”

Jean-Luc nodded to Will as he returned with the first armful of blood. “Beverly,” he nudged her. “Can you keep her alive that long?”

“I’ll try,” she sighed heavily and tried to focus. Even with her eyesight slipping away from a lack of blood pressure, she could see Deanna’s lips going grey. She could hear her friend’s respiration slow and weaken. Her own head was starting to roll as if the runabout was trapped in a deep dive.

“Will,” Jean-Luc ordered as he finished attached the auto-infuser to the large vein of Deanna’s thigh. “Get Beverly to put her head down. We need her conscious to save Deanna.”

Will’s mute hands wrapped around her shoulders, pulled her out of the transporter alcove and guided her down to the deck. Lying centimeters from Deanna, she could no longer see her, but she could still hear Deanna’s respiration faltering.

“You need to regulate her breathing,” Beverly urged him as she shut her eyes against the lights on the ceiling. “Tune the neural stimulator to setting three, put it on her forehead.” Will disappeared into the back of the cabin and returned to drape a blanket over her stomach and lift her legs. “Jean-Luc, how are your hands?”

“They’re fine,” he replied as he finished with the stimulator. “Her breathing’s getting better, blood pressure is passing ninety over forty but the wound’s still bleeding.”

Without the ability to check the injury, she had to guess. “Her vena cava must be nicked,” she thought aloud. “If it were the aorta, she’d be dead by now. Jean-Luc--” Swallowing helped clear her voice, but she was tired. Her brain barely wanted to function. “Jean-Luc, I need you to read the medical tricorder to me or have Will hold it where I can see it.”

“Will,” the captain’s voice cut through the fog surrounding him. “Help her see.”

Years of experience helped her recognize what she was seeing, even with the color leeching out of her vision, she could tell what they needed to do. Wrapping her hands around Will’s arm was useless, but it made her feel like she was doing something on her own.

“Aside for her left lung, her major organs are intact,” she reported with a weak smile of relief. “Her left lung has collapsed and the vena cava has been seared. After you heal the vascular damage you can re-inflate her lung.”

“What do we do?” Jean-Luc prodded her as he attached a second bag of blood to the auto-infuser.

Blinking once, she managed to clear her eyes slightly. Picturing Deanna’s body in her mind, she started to picture what she needed to do. “You need to move the infuser to one of the large veins in her neck, somewhere above the damage.”

The captain nodded, translating her words into action. “Will,” Jean-Luc directed him with a gentle tone. “Keep pressure on the injury while I move the infuser.”

The vena cava ran down near the spine and she could thought she could picture the likely place of injury just above the fifth thoracic vertebrae. As long as circulation continued, no permanent damage would be done to the nerves or muscles of her legs.

“You need to do the surgery without opening her chest,” she began to explain. “If you go in beneath the diaphragm, you shouldn’t need to stop her heart.”

Meeting her eyes calmly, he managed a dry smile. “That does sound like something we’d want to avoid. Beverly, how do I begin? Should I sterilize--”

“No,” she cut him off and felt herself start to loose focus. Someone’s hand, Will’s by the feel of it, shook her back into reality. “No, no. Sorry. Jean-Luc we can deal with possible infection later. Whatever she gets won’t kill her in fourteen hours. Feel along her rib cage until you find the first floating rib. You’ll use the laser scalpel, make your first incision there, along the line of her ribs. Will needs to help you. He has to stop her breathing, so you can work around her diaphragm.”

“Stop her breathing?” Will repeated in disbelief. “Captain, Beverly’s been out of it all day. She’s barely conscious. She’s the only one who knows what poisons she’s pumped into herself. What if she’s wrong?”

Biting her tongue had never been something she was good at. The sudden surge of anger was almost enough to bring color back into the center of her vision. “Your only other option is to fill her full of emergency vascular polymers then pray her legs and kidneys still work when you get her back to the ship,” she snapped at the ceiling.

She could hear Jean-Luc’s hands moving along Deanna’s body. “Will, I cannot speak for Deanna. If you wish to make this decision for her, I believe she would not hold that against you.”

Both of them stopped talking and eventually she heard a rustling in Will’s direction and she thought she’d heard him nod. “Do you think you can do it? Perform surgery?” The movement near Deanna’s head was Will’s hand on her forehead.

“We will do our best,” Jean-Luc replied simply. “It’s your decision Will. If you place it in my hands, I suggest we make the attempt to heal her. Even blind, Beverly’s still one of the best doctor’s in the fleet.”

Biting her lip brought blood into her mouth but it hauled her back again from the strange darkness where all she could hear were their voices. “You’ll need more blood, at least five units. The vascular grafter is in the medkit. You can use the laser scalpel and the auto-suture to repair the damage to her lung. It doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to hold until we get back to the Enterprise.”

The runabout jolted viciously and the sudden change in stability wasn’t just in her head. For a moment, Will was almost on top of her as he tried to hold her steady. He shoved off the deck, making for the console at the front of the runabout.

“Worf!” he yelled as he slipped in to the other seat in the front of the runabout. “What’s going on up here?”

“We are taking phaser fire,” Worf reported gruffly. The runabout shook harshly, jolting like it had been kicked by an intergalactic horse.

“I take the them,” Will said as he took over the controls. “You return fire.”

“Jean-Luc,” getting his attention was her best bet. She wasn’t sure her voice would reach all the way to Will. “You have to keep the runabout steady. Shake it up at the wrong moment and she’ll die.”

“Number one,” Jean-Luc’s voice cut through the sound of proximity alarms and phaser fire in a way hers would not. “I don’t need to tell you I’m going to have my hands in a rather delicate place. I appreciate you keeping the ship steady.”

Will’s voice sounded like granite, “Yes sir.”

Her right hand was marginally better than her left. Lying down had helped some circulation return. Reaching up for Deanna’s head, she managed to feel the warm metal of neural stimulator controlling her breathing.

“Open her chest,” she begged him as she watched the him lift the laser scalpel over Deanna’s chest. “Cut her outfit and tear it away.”

Jean-Luc looked down at his counselor in mute apology before he ripped open the tight black fabric of her costume, exposing the white skin beneath.

Tapping the neural stimulator on the top left corner, she paused Deanna’s breathing, keeping her chest still. “Make the incision, you’ll need about ten centimeters, enough to get your hand inside of her peritoneal cavity.”

The laser scalpel activity with a hum and Beverly was oddly proud of him for resisting the urge to hesitate. It cut neatly through the unmoving skin of Deanna’s abdomen.

“She’s bleeding,” he exclaimed. “Blood’s running down her side.”

“That’s from the internal bleeding; the damage to her veins.” she assured him trying to get the fear out of her face. Closing her eyes helped her concentrate. “It’s not from the incision. Increase the rate of transfusion. You should see a large mass, dark colored, three times as big as your hands, that’s her liver. Run your hand along it and look for damage. If it’s bleeding, it’ll be black”

The wet sound of flesh and blood was eireely familiar to her but Jean-Luc looked faintly nauseated. He swallowed and obeyed, carefully searching for damage as she'd ordered. "Seems fine," he announced when he was done.

"Good," she continued as she let herself visualize what he must be seeing. "Reach down, follow the underside of the liver, you should be able to see the spine in the center of her abdomen. Next to it should be a thick, bluish white vein. You might need to move her liver or intestines out of the way. They'll move, just be gentle."

"They'll move," he repeated as he buried his hand further into her abdomen. "They didn't cover this in my emergency medical course at the Academy."

His attempts to keep her spirits up were rather sweet and she tried to share his optomism. Her lips were too dry when she licked them. "If you follow the blood," she explained and swallowed in a dry throat. "You should be able to find the problem. If you need to, go back to the liver and feel for the large vein feeding into it. You should be able to follow the hepatic vein back to the inferior vena cava."
Lowering his face to Deanna's abdomen, Jean-Luc dealt with the smell of scorched flesh better than most. "All right," he gasped in surprise. "I can feel blood here, underneath her liver, like you said."

"Keep your hand there," she ordered. Cold sweat was starting to break out over her skin and she mentally placed herself in the second stage of distributive hypovolaemic shock. Deanna came first in triage. "I'm going to use the neural stimulator to control her breathing manually. It'll feel strange but don't loose that spot."

Jean-Luc's tiny sound of surprise as he felt Deanna's chest expand around his hand nearly disappeared into the sound of screaming engines. Whatever Will was doing to keep them out of harm's way was stretching the Mendel to the limit of its abilities.

"Hold it," she breathed praying he could keep it steady. Inflating Deanna's chest one more time, she stopped her breathing again and brought her eyes to Jean-Luc. "The vascular grafter looks like a tiny set of clamps attached to a handle, you need to bring that to the vein and activate it."

His grey eyes barely concealed his fear but she could hear the wonder in his voice. "As simple as that?" he mused as he searched for the vascular grafter in the medkit with his right hand. Holding it up to the light, he paused only a moment for her nod of approval before he buried it in Deanna's abdomen.

Turning her head towards the medical tricorder, she checked the scan of Deanna's brain again and let herself sigh in relief. Oxygen levels there were still high enough. "When it's in place, activate the center switch, then wait for the graft to take hold.You'll be able to tell that the bleeding has stopped because it won't be seeping around your fingers anymore. The blood will be everywhere, but it'll clean itself up. Then we can tackle reinflating her lung."

His eyebrows narrowed viciously as he concentrated. "I didn't realize you did so much of this by feel," he mused.

"Normally I can see," she argued with a weak sigh. Closing her eyes was easier than keeping them open. Watching the glittering lights that represented her failing blood pressure move in sick circles through her vision just made things worse. "And I have the computer."

"The device," he began to report as the tension in his forehead eased. "The grafter hummed for a moment and stopped."

"Good," she agreed and felt for the stimulator. "Keep your hand there for a moment while she breathes." Deanna's chest moved once and the sound of Jean-Luc's breathing remained steady. If the bleeding had started again, she would have heard him startle. "The graft should feel like a hard tube inside the vein. Has the bleeding stopped?"

"I think so," his voice was almost a prayer but she thought he was right. "It doesn't feel as wet as it did."

Daring to pull her head up, Beverly had to drop immediately when she felt what was left of the blood in her head run away from her head. Licking her chapped lips again brought her back somewhat. "Pull out your hand and see if her blood pressure is improving," she ordered. Listening to the soft sound as he wiped the blood from his hand on part of his tunic, she tuned everything out except for the sound of the monitor on Deanna’s head.

The look he gave her when he saw she’d tried to move was disapproving. Wondering if she looked as miserable as she felt was useless, his concern was written all over his face. “Doctor, it seems you’re my next case,” he reminded her dryly.

Ignoring him, she concentrated on the next step. “You’re going to use the laser scalpel to release the air from of Deanna’s chest. Don’t worry, this is much easier than the last part.”