Nora awoke to a bright light in a very clean and sleek looking room and a team of young males cutting off her clothes. She was bottomless now. The flesh of her leg was gnarled and torn with a transparent flesh like bandage over it. She could see it pulse with her heartbeat. She whimpered in pain. The young men looked alarmed that she was awake. Nora's body started to tremble, and she felt hot with a fever and, as she examined her throbbing leg, in shock. She could see muscle tissue and bone through the clear bandage. Her breath caught marvel first at the bandages technology and then upon the seriousness of her situation.
"I have been exposed to unknown radiation, you might get sick." Nora said feverishly as she started to panic and tried to pull away from her caretakers. She tried to get out of bed. One man pulled out restraints.
"No, no,no please. I would prefer not to use those." Nora pleaded and whimpered. She had lost her grasp on lucidity because of the poisoning from the event that sent her here and infection. She was dying, rationality was a lost cause to her. She finally violently shook her head. They seemed to understand the body language and the restraints were put down. She curled up in a fetal position out of her wits from the pain. Nora whimpered as she pulled her leg up with her arms.
"Grab her, she is going to shake violently again." Cetas said as he ran into the doorway as the woman on the bed started to seize up and shake. The group of men looked panicked and shouted loudly. A couple of them gently restrained her to keep her from falling off the trauma exam bed as the room burst into activity.
"What, what, what, ahhh. It hurts", Nora cried out, distressed. She stopped moving finally, as she looked at the men restraining her gently. They all seemed to be looking at her with sympathy and like she was a celebrity. The pain grew very intense. Her body shook again. "Aghhhhhh." Nora screamed.
The group of males looked at her puzzled, like they were confused about the language she was speaking. They began conversing with one another, puzzled about the patient in front of them. One of them moved away from the bed and called out to the hallway in a foreign language.
"Please. S'il vous plaît. Ça fait tellement mal." Nora said in an anxious tone, her heart pounding.
"Please say something again. Agh! Is this France?" Nora babbled weakly, not understanding where she was at the moment.
"Please." Nora begged as she started to weep. The men looked at her with puzzled, sympathetic looks.
"Pouvez-vous comprendre de quoi je parle?" Nora said desperately. "S'il vous plait aidez moi." Nora pleaded as her feverish eyes started to stream with tears. She heard the men chattering around her. Another man rushed into the room and said something in a frustrated tone to the others. He had a cylinder the size of a bingo dabber in his hand. Nora gave up and let the men work. After that, more staff flooded into the room, all of them male. Nora felt dizzy and weak, she laid her head back on the bed. She was prodded with the cold cylindrical device and felt a prick of a needle and the pain in her leg disappeared. A moment later, she was unconscious again. The group of males sighed loudly in relief and continued their work.
"Sorry, that took so long. I have to give her a dose of her weight. She is underweight. This is going to be an extended shift team. Extra pay." Joreum said, chipper, as he sat the transdermal injector down on the tray beside the table.
"That was startling, she almost fell off. What was she saying? Did any of you understand that?" Cetas asked the room as he watched them work. Her odd behavior made him believe it was not exposure and burns from the weird box. His colleagues looked baffled and shook their heads as they concentrated on removing the soiled and tough to cut through clothing she was wearing. The bottoms were rugged and coarse.
"Oh, it's stuck to her, it burned right to her in spots. Be careful." Fynn told his colleagues. The top layers were tough in spots where there was some burning and melting into her skin. When they removed her chest wear there were crescent shaped burns from the metal that was in the fabric. Cetas felt like something was very wrong. The attire was baffling.
"Her flesh is reacting oddly to the slightest friction. It is sloughing off like she has been in an industrial accident. Can someone configure the scanner?" Cetas asked. Joreum nodded and moved the axis clamp and tapped the side panel of the scanner bed. It was improbable. What were the odds?
"Done. She does not seem to speak the universal tongue. Is it Ildic? How did one of them get here?" Joreum asked, just as puzzled as he updated her file with the correct dosage for pain relief and new updates. He looked up afterward, puzzled about the clothing.
"These rough fabrics are bizarre. No implants either, there was just some hand-sized piece of ancient technology on her. It was inoperable. The power source was toxic. Could it have caused all the burns?" Joreum continued. Cetas looked at him, slightly annoyed. He shook his head.
'It would have taken a lot of energy to cause the burns. But there was nothing, outside a mineral and metal mining operation that could do this sort of damage to clothing other than a weapon. It could not be that. Could it?' Cetas thought.
"She has burns on her body, I need to do some cultures as she probably caught something from the trap and from the soil," Cetas said.
"Blood type, anyone? We have to be ready to get units ready" he asked. One of the staff members testing her looked at the doctor with a surprised look.
"Cetas, I have never seen this before." The doctor handed over the device to him. "Type X Negative. Odd." Cetas read the device and pulled up his Interface and searched the database.
'Why would a female have type X negative? The blood type was only seen in Bitas stock and below. It is the most common blood type and extremely rare in women.' Cetas thought to himself.
"Luckily, there were plenty of us around her that share the same type of blood. Her clans would have to be removed from society at large for at least four hundred years. There would be a note of her if she was born with this blood type in society in the past thirteen to twenty-five years. She looks very young, it is impossible to tell how old she is right now.' Cetas thought. He felt solidarity towards the burned form. She was like them.
"Cetas, look at this." Joreum said seriously as he showed him the results. Cetas eyes widened with alarm. "How could this even happen?" Joreum said in a panicked voice.
"We need to decontaminate her now! Get clear of the room. Now!" Joreum said, alarmed. He injected her with a broad spectrum antibiotic to start work on the infection, and inserted oxygen tubes into her nostrils.
"Clear the room. Now." Cetas ordered from the hallway. Joreum ran out of the door. The door chased as the room was sealed. He started to prepare inoculations for the radiation exposure for his staff and his patient at a rapid pace. He worked nervously as alerts kept going off about her. Andras handed him a bottle with two contact lenses in it.
"These were for her eyes? How uncomfortable?" Andras said with a sad and puzzled tone. He took an image and tossed the vial down the incinerator.
"Just add it to the list. We will have to work on a lot. She will be grateful when she wakes up. Now, get to the decontamination room, I will follow you when all the medicine is ready. Andras, hurry." Cetas said. Water jets coursed over the small female.
She was exposed to two types of radiation; one seen in system miners and a low level man made impure radiation. She was poisoned by it. He could not find anything in their database about the latter. The amount she was exposed to would have been deadly without any treatment. The walls and glass started to rumble in the room as the decontamination started its second phase. The water pooled on the floor vibrated and seemed to dance like a fountain as the machine picked up pace. The drains on the floor opened up. Cetas quickly tore open the packaged absorption rod and loaded it into a port in the wall as soon as it was received from the out of breath Daleth from the docking port. It was fortunate for her that there were so many vessels here. It would have taken far too long to get one from an orbiting ship. They had brought multiple rods, unsure of the women's body weight.