The Medusa Chronicles Read Online Free PDF Page A

critters came to the boat. That pilot light was all that was visible beyond the window.
    Hope Dhoni came over and stood at his side. “One of the ship’s most famous features,” she murmured. “The window itself, I mean. An engineering marvel. Rather like you, Commander Falcon.”
    â€œLook,” he said. “I’m sorry. The way I reacted when we met. Those days under the surgeons were difficult for me. Even remembering them—”
    She slipped her hand into his. He could sense the pressure of her ­fingers, measure the moisture and warmth of her palm—he even had a vivid, unwelcome impression of the bone structure. He could not feel her hand in his, though, not by any meaningful definition of the word.
    Suddenly uncomfortable, he pulled away. Too many memories. Too much pain.
    For both of them.
    â€œCome,” Hope said gently. “Sit with us.”

4
    If his recovery from the Queen Elizabeth IV crash twelve years ago had been traumatic for Howard Falcon, so it had been for Hope Dhoni, at the time a twenty-one-year-old trainee nurse at the old USAF hospital in Arizona to which Falcon had been rushed. She had been by far the most junior member of the team.
    When he was brought in, crushed and burned, laid out on the bed’s pale green blankets, Falcon had not even looked human. Hope had spent time in inner-city emergency departments and military trauma wards, and she thought she was toughened up. She wasn’t. Not for this.
    But it was Doctor Bignall, second-in-command, who had helped her through. “First of all, he’s alive. Remember that. Barely, though: his heart’s about to give up—you can see that from the monitor trace. Second of all, don’t think about what he’s lost but what he still has. His head injuries seem manageable . . .”
    She could barely see the head under what remained of Falcon’s right arm.
    â€œAnd that arm he threw up to protect his head might even have preserved his face. Some of it.”
    She watched the team work, humans and machines, as tubes snaked into Falcon’s body. “So what’s the first priority?”
    â€œTo keep him alive. Look at him, he’s suffered well over fifty percent blood loss, his chest is wide open. We’re replacing his blood, all of it, with a cold saline solution. That will cut brain activity, stop cellular activity—”
    â€œSuspended animation.”
    â€œIf you like. And that will give us a chance to get on with the structural stuff. A chance  . . . Oh, wow, he’s in cardiac arrest. Crash team . . . !”
    The structural stuff. When Falcon was stabilised, achieved essentially by shoving him into a room full of machinery that would emulate the functions of his broken body, it turned out that there was little left of him that was saveable but brain and spine—and some of his face, preserved by that flung-over arm. The good news was that was quite a lot to build on. Monitors already showed ongoing brain activity. Hope would soon learn how to tell if Falcon was asleep or awake, and she wondered which state was worse for him.
    What followed, for Hope, was a rushed course in neuroinformatics. As the hours turned to days, the team worked as quickly as they could. They needed to establish a connection between what was left of Falcon and the equipment that would sustain him for the rest of his life. And that meant reading information from, and writing information to, what was left of his broken nervous system.
    Sensors on prosthetic extensions to Falcon’s surviving stump of an arm were able to use his own nervous system to communicate with the brain—but for the rest of his body, his spinal column was so badly damaged that wasn’t an option. New communication pathways had to be built. So microelectrodes were lodged within Falcon’s brain—in the motor cortex area responsible for physical movement and in