VRDF – Kannon Medical Armor
"MAN DOWN!
Medic needed at..."
Those words over his
radio triggered an unconscious response from Sergeant Pierce, the closest
medic. He jumped from cover, and dashed with myomer-powered speed across the
battlefield, ignoring the flying shots and bursting shells. An explosion threw
him sideways; he rolled with it as shrapnel pinged off his white-painted Kannon
armor, came quickly to his feet and kept moving with long bounding strides.
When he reached the area called on the radio, he had stop and look around. He
knelt as tracers and missiles crisscrossed past him, trying to determine which
foxholes were just craters and which craters were manned foxholes. A man waved,
and he was there in three swift steps.
The situation was easy
to see as Pierce dropped into the small trench. Two men had been manning this
position, a heavy weapons team. One was one his feet, the one who had made the
call. The other lay on the bottom of the trench, blood soaking his uniform. His
gritted teeth and heaving chest showed that he was still alive, even before
Pierce activated his medicomp. He slapped a pain-killing patch on the man's
neck, right over the pulse point, and slowly scanned his sensor-laden right
hand over the man while he opened the bloody uniform with his left.
Inside his helmet,
Pierce saw a wireframe outline of the man's body. The area around his hand was
delineated on the outline, showing bone structure and blood flow. In just a few
seconds, he had a complete picture of the man's basic internal situation, a
picture that matched with what his experienced eyes told him from the outside.
The man had taken a round (most likely a support machinegun, he thought)
through the upper left chest, breaking ribs and scapula on the way through and
resulting in a sucking wound. He quickly sat the man up, and covered both holes
with his armored hands. He looked over at the man's terrified
companion...Mother of God, Pierce thought. The boy couldn't be much over twenty
years old. A new recruit seeing his first real casualty.
"Come here, I need
your help."
The soldier didn't move.
Pierce turned on his
Sergeant's voice. "NOW, Private! Unless you want to stand there and watch
your friend die!"
That got the young
soldier's attention. Pierce directed him to hold the man's wounds, keeping the
holes covered so the man could breathe. The boy was clearly upset by the feel
of the bloody flesh under his hands, but complied. With his own hands now free,
Pierce dug into his medical supplies for what he needed. The boy watched
silently as Pierce then went to work, stuffing the soldier's wounds with
coagulant and antiseptic, then applying airtight dressings. Pierce talked as he
worked, explaining what he was doing as he went, trying to keep the lad calm.
"Sucking
wound," he said. "Machinegun, right?" The boy nodded. "He's
lucky, it was a clean hit, one round hole straight through. If it had been
shrapnel, the wound would be more ragged and harder to deal with." A shell
screamed overhead, and Pierce quickly covered the wounded man with his armored
body as the explosion boomed behind them. He kept talking as he went back to
work. "I know you're upset about this, but you have to keep your head on.
Out here, this is for real. When someone is wounded, you can't hesitate, you
can't panic. There isn't time for that. All you can do is react, or your friend
will die. It's that simple."
The sounds of battle
were growing more distant now, as the tread of marching Mechs pushed the enemy
lines back. Pierce finished up his work as an ambulance screeched to a halt
nearby, come to pick up the wounded soldier. The boy watched in a silent daze
as the medics loaded his friend into the back of the swift little hovertruck.
Pierce patted him gently on the shoulder. "He'll live." He then
stepped up and latched on to the side of the ambulance with his magnets, taking
the easy ride back.
Finally, the boy spoke.
"Thanks for your help, Sergeant."
Pierce looked at him.
"Thanks for yours." Then he got a sudden idea, and added it as an
afterthought. "If you learned anything here today, you might be interested
in my job. The medical corps is always taking transfers; let me know and I can
put in a good word for you."
The boy nodded.
"Thanks, Sergeant."
Pierce waved, and the
ambulance pulled away, accelerating towards the MASH units to the rear. Another
life saved, another job done.
And he had a feeling, he
would be seeing that young boy again.
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BattleTech Battle Armor Technical Readout |
CUSTOM EQUIPMENT NOTES:
The medicomp is based on the canon Improved Sensors. It takes up one slot, and
weighs 65 kg. It does medical diagnosis at close range. The sensors are in the
right hand, the computer itself is in the upper arm and it displays inside the
helmet. It can't do specialized details of soft tissue (like an MRI, for
example) but it can find broken bones, shrapnel, moderate levels of internal
bleeding, and stuff like that. It also reads out vital signs; it can do
temperature, heart rate, blood pressure (by grasping a pressure point), and so
on.