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The human died in my arms. At first, the slackening of the muscles might have been unconsciousness (understandable, given the lacerations and punctures Hostile One had inflicted on her before I'd managed to extract her from its mouth). But in combination with the loss of regularity in her already elevated heartrate, and the lack of breathing … yeah, she was dead.
There wasn't anything I could do about it. Mensah was still minutes away with the hopper and what was wrong with Bharadwaj went so far beyond my paltry first aid modules. I'd already been applying pressure to the wounds. MedSystem had confirmed that was best. Now, it spit out a dispassionate summary indicating loss of life, recommending I put her aside like so much defective equipment and pick up Volescu.
I didn't need to pick him up. He was walking – unevenly and slowly, but he was walking. If I put Bharadwaj down, he was likely to stop walking and stay with her. Stay with … the body that had been her. Because … yeah, this wasn't her anymore.
That body gave a wheeze that could have been mistaken for a breath. I could tell through her suit sensors that her heart was vibrating, twitching in desperate, hopeless spasms due to the low blood pressure brought on by massive blood loss. There was still electrical activity in her, causing a few other muscles to activate and release. Including her bladder. MedSystem told me it was agonal, which sounds agonizing and it was (to me, if not to her), but not a sign of ongoing life. She was dead.
On the feed, Dr. Mensah's leadership clearance informed her Bharadwaj was gone. Death is rarely instantaneous and this one was no different, but the company systems are programmed to recognize, or create, a bright line to indicate irretrievability, when the human is dead and there's no point to devoting more resources to them. That line had been crossed.
Most of the others didn't notice, or so I surmised by how they didn't react. Mensah hadn't locked the information yet (she was a little busy) but they weren't monitoring Bharadwaj's vitals nor did they have a-No, wait, Gurathin, back in the habitat, changed the MedSystem prep he'd been overseeing to post-mortem. The system would have done that itself well before we got there, but since he was actively interfacing with it at the time, his directions took priority and it had been playing along with the surgical prep he'd told it to do earlier. (Well, earlier it was valid. When she'd been alive.) Through the feed, I saw him do a query for Volescu's vitals and then for the footage from my field camera.
I didn't feel like sharing, so fuck him.
I was already sharing the video with Dr. Mensah. I'd started that before I'd even leaped in the hole to attempt rescue. (Did it count as a successful rescue if she'd been alive when I'd picked her up after the hostile retreated? I didn't think so.) It occurred to me that if I didn't give him what he wanted, he might ask Dr. Mensah, who had taken over piloting the hopper and didn't need the distraction. I sent him the footage. He was quiet while he reviewed it.
I could see the hopper now, coming in for landing. Bharadwaj's body temperature was starting to drop. Weird how fast that happens. I tried to activate my internal heating system. It was something I could do for humans as a comfort measure and occasionally it worked to stave off shock or hypothermia. It was nonsensical because Bharadwaj didn't need it and it wasn't like I was trying to conceal the state of her body from the others. I tried anyway.
It didn't work. I'd taken a lot of damage, too, and … it didn't work.