Sterile Room Saved From Patients

Surgeon Mara Vane performed an emergency appendectomy on a dining table in Deck 14's main corridor on Thursday, preserving the three-hundred-year record of the ship's untouched operating room.

The theatre behind her has maintained a zero-dust rating since the freighter left Earth orbit. No human has opened its inner seal since the initial crew blessing.

"If we put a bleeding human in there, the filters would fall out of spec," Vane said, scraping gravy off a plastic tray to hold her clamps. "An operating room is for audits, not sick people."

The patient, a welder named Jori Chen, lay beneath a blue tarpaulin while commuters squeezed past his stretcher with breakfast trays. Fan units blew hallway dust away from his open belly.

Vane has operated in the corridor for twelve years. Her team keeps their bandages in a disused vending machine outside the sealed theatre doors.

The ship council awarded the medical department a gold badge last year for maintaining perfect sterile scores across three centuries.

"A real hospital would be filthy," Vane said, adjusting her face visor as a luggage cart backed past the table. "We have standards."

Next week, Vane plans to move Chen to the engine room so his recovery does not ruin the linen closet's immaculate dust score.