Conquerors' Pride Read Online Free PDF Page B

numbness in his mind and body. "Call the spaceport," he said. "Get me a seat on a liner to Earth. You and the ship can go back to Avon when it gets here."

"Yes, sir," Hill said, pulling out his phone. "May I ask what's wrong?"

Aric leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. "It's my brother," he said. "He's dead."

"Dr. Cavanagh?"

Melinda Cavanagh looked up from the large high-detail plate and her final run-through of the upcoming operation. "Yes?"

"Dr. Billingsgate is in prep," the nurse said. "Room three."

"Thank you," Melinda said, mentally shaking her head. He could just as easily have paged her or called her on her phone, but instead he'd sent someone else scurrying off to find her. She'd never worked with Billingsgate before, but the Commonwealth's surgical community was by necessity a small and tight-knit group, and she'd heard enough stories to know that this was typical of the man. Opinion was split as to whether it was arrogance, stinginess with his own time, or just a simple preference for human interaction over the more impersonal electronic sort. "Tell him I'll be there in a minute."

She finished tracking through the plan and pulled her card from the plate. Prep Three was just down the corridor, and she entered to find Billingsgate poring over the high-detail plate there. "Ah-Cavanagh," he said distractedly, waving her over. "Ready to suit up?"

"Almost," she said, sitting down in the chair next to him. "There are a couple of minor points I'd like to discuss with you first."

He frowned at her from under bushy eyebrows. "I thought we'd settled everything," he said, his tone dropping half an octave.

"I thought we had, too," she said, sliding her card into his plate and keying for the marked sections. "Number one: I think we should reduce the use of markinine in the third phase. We certainly want to lower blood pressure at that point, but with the shorozine drip only four centimeters away, I think we should consider lowering the dosage by at least ten percent."

The eyebrows frowned a little harder. "A ten percent cut is rather drastic."

"But necessary," Melinda said. "Number two: in phase four you have two separate neurobinders being applied at each of four sites. This one"-she pointed to it on the plate-"strikes me as being just a shade too close to the optic chiasma. Particularly given your revised dosage numbers."

"You think that, do you?" Billingsgate said, his voice starting to shade from annoyed to intimidating. "Tell me, Doctor, have you ever performed this operation yourself?"

"You know I haven't," Melinda said. "But I've consulted on five similar operations."

Billingsgate's eyebrows lifted slightly. "For five different surgeons, no doubt?"

Melinda looked him straight in the eye. "That's unfair," she said. "And you know it. The two operations weren't identical-no two operations are. Trying to bypass me that way and just blindly following the first plan was totally irresponsible. And it could have been fatal."

"It most likely wouldn't have been," Billingsgate pointed out.

"Would you have wanted me to take that chance?" Melinda countered.

Billingsgate's lips pursed tightly together. "You didn't have to humiliate Mueller publicly."

"I tried talking to him privately. He wouldn't listen."

Billingsgate turned back to his plate, and for a minute the room was silent. "So you think we should cut the markinine by ten percent, do you?" he asked.

"Yes," Melinda said. "The lower dosage should do the job perfectly well. Particularly given the patient's metabolic baseline."

"I was going to ask if you'd checked on that," Billingsgate said. "All right; but if the blood pressure doesn't respond properly, we're going to jack the dosage back up. Fair enough?"

"Fair enough," Melinda agreed. "Now, what about the neurobinders?"

The discussion was short and civilized, and in the end he acquiesced with reasonably good grace. Like most surgeons Melinda had dealt with, Billingsgate had strong proprietary