TAZ10

==Chapter 10 - The Absolute Zero==
FWLS Legacy
League III Class Destroyer
Sian Star System
Capellan Confederation
3159 CE
Dr. Pell Havbard worked like a man possessed.  When he got the Ship's Surgeon assignment on the first new League class destroyer, he'd seen that as a fresh start after being de-licensed as a civilian.
The incident was the furthest thing from his mind, as he pulled shrapnel from the Captain General's abdomen.  "Give me more suction!"
"Yes, doctor."
For the interested, Pell Havbard lost his position and his civilian license for failing.  He failed to save the sight of a baron's son after the boy suffered a motoring accident.  He'd been too focused at that time with keeping the kid alive.
Baron's the lawsuit destroyed his practice.
Military service had been the only place he could go.
His deft hands began closing bleeds.  "She's going to lose an ovary..." he said quietly.
Havbard didn't even want to think what giving the Captain-General of the Free Worlds League a hysterectomy to save her life or removing one of her kidneys was going to do to his career chances in the future.
He was too busy doing too many other things-like keeping his patient alive and able to walk-once she'd healed.  The bomb had been undetected, placed on her quarters.
It killed two of the ship's company when it went off,  their bodies were in his morgue-the parts that could be found.
Nikol Marik, his patient, had endured for half an hour in a beach-ball. While the third man killed in the incident, the man who got her into the beach-ball, died of vacuum exposure.
He, too, was in the doctor's morgue.
"Wipe." the doctor worked with precision, extracting the last of the shrapnel and closing the last of the internal bleeds.
Then he set about closing the external cuts.
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