Chapter 27 - Important People[]
Palace Hospital - Advanced Medicine Ward
Tharkad City
Tharkad System
Lyran Commonwealth
November 30, 3097
"...okay, so we know what it's supposed to do." Amanda found the experience of radiation treatment to be long periods of boring mixed with periodic hours of great discomfort followed by lots of waiting.
Filling time with technical sheets and engineering specifications on one hand. With network access to the Nagelring Technical library on the other, was at least a reasonable distraction from getting her blood drawn, filtered, and replaced.
"Ja." Irena wasn't as easily kept busy. "We're going to die, aren't we?"
"Everybody dies." Amanda said, "I doubt we're going to do so soon...so, the new arrays...there are a lot of extra channels here. It's going to need replacement of large portions of the cabling harnesses from bow to mid-ships. We were putting in some of the extra conduit.."
"They've already killed somebody over this!"
Amanda looked up. "Yeah. They did. I can't do anything about that and neither can you. Irena, look at me."
Irena looked at her, "What?"
"I spent two months doing everything I could to save people." she said, "We saved them for two months. We couldn't save them for good, but we saved them for two months. Do you want to know what I learned?"
"Is this going to be some lame moral lesson?"
"YES." Amanda snapped, "The lesson is, 'do what you can, while you can', and don't let the shit you can't do stop you. Now, come on, we've got around twenty extra circuits to figure out here, and what they need to plug into to make them useful!"