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As the smoke cleared and the dust settled from the latest artillery barrage, Julian Bashir pulled himself to his feet and realized two distressing facts: his left arm was burned from the shoulder to the fingertips, rendering it useless, and he had lost track of Jake Sisko.
With an increasing sense of foreboding, he ran for the runabout, crouching down around his injured arm, which he held wrapped around his midsection in a vain attempt to provide it some sort of support and protection. It hurt like hell; plasma burns were reputedly some of the most painful injuries a human could suffer in war, he had learned at Starfleet Medical. It hurt terrifically now; the pain would escalate further over the next several hours if he didn’t get himself and the generator back to the cave. He had to act quickly, before the injury rendered him unable to move from the intensity of the pain.
Julian arrived at the runabout and practically dove inside. “Jake! Jake?” he yelled. Surely, the captain’s son had made it back to the runabout in the confusion and was already preparing the generator for transport.
But Jake wasn’t here either. Julian began to pick the heavy generator up with both arms, dropping it instantly with a hiss of pain. Clearly, his injured arm was going to be no use; he’d have to hope these Starfleet-issue portable generators were as battle-ready as advertised, he thought as he grabbed the side handle and began to drag it behind him out the door of the runabout.
He only had to make it a kilometer back to the cave. That was nothing. That was a warm-up distance before a run in the holodeck or a nice stroll with a date on the grounds of Starfleet Academy. But suddenly, Julian thought of Pheidippides, the mythical Greek messenger who ran from the battle at Marathon to Athens to deliver the news of the Persian defeat before collapsing and dying. Julian had never given much thought in the past to the validity of myth, but he found himself believing wholeheartedly in this one.
The trip back to the cave seemed to take forever. He struggled between looking for Jake behind every rock and trying to choose a clear path through which to drag the generator, all while trying to ignore the throbbing, tearing, acid-edged pain that ran up and down his injured arm, radiating into his pectoral muscles and making him want to cry out. He had the sense that he was doing nothing well: not looking for Jake, not carrying the generator, and certainly not choosing a straight path back to safety.
He saw the opening of the cave at the same time one of the guards spied him. “Doc? Dr. Bashir?” the man yelled, lowering his phaser rifle and running out to Julian’s side. Together, the pair manhandled the generator the remaining meters into the mouth of the cave, where Julian collapsed against the cave wall, sliding down until he was sitting still, breath heaving, waves of rainbow-hued pain pulsing in front of his eyes with every heartbeat.
“Julian! Dr. Bashir, my God!”
The voice of Dr. Kalandra rang in Julian’s ears as he looked up to see the doctor and Kirby leaning over him. Julian tried to help, gritting his teeth.
“Plasma burns, left arm, shoulder to fingers. Doubtless some wound contamination from all the dirt; nothing you haven’t seen a hundred of today,” he said with a forced smile. “I’ll be fine.”
Then, Julian grabbed Kirby’s arm. “But, Jake. Jake Sisko; has he come back yet?”
Kirby shook his head.
“I lost him. In the attack, I lost track of him,” he said, struggling to his feet with Kirby’s help. Julian began to pull toward the cave entrance as Kirby tried to guide him the opposite direction into the cave interior. “I need to go find him; Kirby, we can’t leave him out there.”
Kirby pulled gently on Julian’s right arm as Dr. Kalandra wrapped an arm around his back, careful not to touch the mangled left arm that he cradled in front of him.
“We can’t do anything while they’re attacking, but as soon as it stops, I’ll go out and look,” Kirby said. “I promise. I’m sure he’s just laying low until things settle down.”
Dr. Kalandra continued to guide Julian toward a stretcher, saying “Right now, you’re our priority. We need every surgeon we can get, and you’re not going to be much help with that arm the way it is. Now, lie back and let Kirby prep you for surgery.”
Julian did as he was told; it was so much easier to let someone else take charge. He startled as he felt Kirby administer a hypospray.
“Here’s something Dr. Kalandra said I could give you for the pain,” Kirby said as he put the hypo on a nearby tray and began to cut Julian’s uniform off. Julian felt an sense of distance and relaxation, but, oddly, the searing pain in his arm did not abate. He gasped as Kirby gently pulled the uniform and under-shirt fabric away from the oozing wound.
“Yeah, I know,” Kirby said as he worked. “All the painkillers we have, and none of them really touch a plasma burn. But we’ll get you into surgery, and Dr. Kalandra will have you fixed up in no time.”
So this was what it was like, Julian mused. He had been on the other side of the medical relationship hundreds of times, had spouted the platitudes and the meaningless bits of comfort automatically as he worked. He thought he had a good bedside manner; he’d scored highly on that part of his training at Starfleet Medical, and he really did believe that he cared for his patients. But he’d never really understood what it sounded like to hear those words as they filtered through a confusing fog of pain and drugs. He always found medicine to be a place of comfort, but he had never looked at a hospital from the perspective of a stretcher; the way the trip to the OR heightened the disorientation as he looked mostly at the ceiling of the cave passing by. The sense of vulnerability as he lay under a sheet, his injured arm carefully extended by the OR nurse into position for surgery. All of it accompanied by nausea and panic and an all-pervasive worry that, in spite of its intensity, started to shatter and slip from the hold of his mind.
“OK, Dr. Bashir, let me set this inhibitor, and you’ll be asleep before you can count ten,” the OR nurse’s voice said as she snapped a device onto his forehead and dialed up the settings. Julian couldn’t make out her face; he looked up into lights and faces and smears of white-hot pain as he felt himself slowly lose consciousness. His last thought was of a niggling concern. There was something he was worried about; someone he had lost track of. Maybe it would all make sense when he woke up.
***
Julian felt Dr. Kalandra remove the inhibitor from his brow and forced himself to open his eyes.. He was no longer in the brightly-lit OR; instead, he was bundled into a cot in a quieter alcove of the cave. He found himself dressed in a patient pajama, settled back onto pillows and covered warmly. His arm was slightly throbbing but it was no longer screaming; instead, it was immobilized in a brace and bandages that wrapped from his shoulder down to his palm.
“And there you are,” Dr. Kalandra said warmly.
“Jake?” Julian said immediately, starting to lever himself up from the bed and swing his legs over the side. “I’m supposed to find Jake. Has he come back yet? Did they find him?”
Kalandra held him immobile with a palm to Julian’s chest. Somehow, he had the suspicion that he shoudn’t be this easy to restrain, but he was still having trouble putting all the pieces together.
“No, Jake hasn’t come back yet. The guys went out looking, but they had to stop at dark,” Dr. Kalandra said gently.
“So I have to go,” Julian began, once again trying and failing to sit.
“Julian, no,” Kalandra said. “I don’t have to tell you this, but you’re in no shape to go anywhere, let alone out looking for Jake.”
Seeing that she finally had Julian’s attention, she continued. “The surgery went fine; you’ll have full function out of your arm in a day or two. Probably won’t even have a scar.”
“But you know how plasma burns are on the body. There was a lot of tissue necrosis, a lot of waste byproducts released in your body. We did a complete hemofiltration, but that doesn’t get everything, and your body needs time to deal with the remaining waste products. You need to stay here in bed until tomorrow, and then you need to take it easy for a couple of days,” she said gently.
Julian began to resist, but Dr. Kalandra cut him off. “What would you tell your patients? What have you told every plasma burn patient that you’ve treated since you got here?”
“To stay in bed and take it easy for a couple of days,” Julian said grudgingly.
“OK, then,” Dr. Kalandra said with a smile. “Now, I’ve got to get back to work. Can I get you anything before I go?”
“Water, maybe?” Julian asked. Dr. Kalandra poured him a glass and watched him drink, making sure he tolerated the liquid before she left.
Julian sighed, placed the cup on the bedside table, and sank further back into the pillows. He’d failed. He’d lost Jake. Jake was dead; he just knew it.
And, he realized, it wasn’t so much that he would have to tell Jake’s father and his own commanding officer that his son was dead, although that thought was horrifying enough. It was that, somehow without his knowing it, Jake had gone from being an annoying adolescent kid causing trouble with Nog on the Promenade to being a young man that Julian could almost see as a younger brother. In spite of their differences in experience and outlook, Julian had enjoyed spending time with Jake, finding him an intelligent companion. He had been looking forward to learning more about the adult Jake had become.
Living and working on DS9 had been Julian’s choice; he had wanted to practice “frontier medicine,” with everything that implied. But practicing frontier medicine meant living on the frontier, and that meant living in what was essentially a small town with a highly-transient population. Friends were hard to come by and even harder to keep.
Julian had been delighted to discover a friendship with Miles O’Brien, and he was surprised at the beginnings of one with Jake. And now he had lost it, in the worst way possible. No matter how many lives he saved on this mission, it would never change the fact that he had lost Jake Sisko when he was supposed to be protecting him. It was all his fault.