THE SPACE NAVY AU (18+)

It's like getting gut-shot by a pity-bullet, and you do not need that right now, but it's not like you get a choice. "Get a phone or an earpiece, Galley, we'll have to use voice. Warn Arguus. If the ship's systems are infected, and he's doing research --" Yeah, he knows better than you do how bad that could be. "Do you know if she did it wirelessly, or did it only happen once the ship physically docked with the carrier? Because we can cut off the power couplings once I get those extra hands."

Thinking about what might be approaching from outside the Sunslammer while her pilot is blinded... well, that can wait until you can DO something about it.

 

"No, I don't— I don't— I don't— I don't—" Galley snaps out of it with a hoarse scream and throws your phone at the wall. You go pick it up and give it back to him.

"Tell me where Arguus is," you order. "I'll have him set up in here, the two of you can work on restoring— whatever it is that needs restoring. In the meantime my, my phone, it's connected up with nearly everything, hold on to it for now. Do you think you can coordinate with the Department Heads?"

It's asking a lot. He generally doesn't talk to anyone but you, or, recently, Kadros. 'Bel'.

Galley clutches the phone to his chest. He nods, uncertainly, and then again more bravely.

"Douma's locked down in Gawker's hive right now," he tells you. "She's— she's in Medical."

"Good man." You pat his shoulder. "Talk to K— to Bel if you get overwhelmed, that's an order, he'll get you through it. I'm counting on you, to, to put off trying to kill me until at least tomorrow, right?"

He nods.

You raise your voice to Bel— Kadros. "Did you get all that, Commander?"

((upon hearing a yeah, erskin will set off to fetch arguus and that bit will go just fine and take about 20 minutes))

 

"Yes, sir. Things are a little less frantic down here, you can probably hear that. The ghouls got distracted --" You cut yourself off. No one else needs to know what they got distracted by. "Their assault's slacking off a bit," you amend. "I'm going to send my wounded out now. Medics in place? Ready. You and you, lift. Urbine, take my position. Authorizing manual open of blast door North Cargo 6 in five seconds." The walking wounded and those carrying the not-so-walking get ready on your side, and presumably the medical team gets ready on the other side, while you key in the override. You give it your thumbprint for authorization and the door slaps open.

Thank god, there are indeed medics waiting with gurneys. The wounded go out -- and, to your surprise and pride -- the ablebodied crewmen who were carrying them come back in. They meet your eyes half-defiantly as they get out their toolkind specibi. You give them a nod of respect.

"Wounded are on their way to medical. Everyone left in here is good to fight. As soon as the extra hands arrive we can start pushing back."

 

Lainey speaks up on Bel's line.

"Blue— Commander, I picked out the top thirty crewmembers with relevant combat experience and asked for volunteers, and they all volunteered. They— oh, ok, one of them just got dragged off to quarters by her moirail. Haha. Uh." She recovers. "How many do you need, sir? I mean this isn't normal, is it, the more we send the more we're going to have to, like, treat. Afterwards, so like. I don't know if we should send all of them but they all want to go— do you want me to forward you their records? So you can pick? Sir?"

 

"I don't have time to read personnel files right now, Lieutenant, I am a little bit under fire." Annoyed as you're trying to sound, something in you that's lain dormant for perigees is coming back to life right now, and you have a feeling she can see right through you.

A few busy moments later, after discouraging the ghouls from trying to climb over the barricade yet again, you speak up again with the answer, interrupted irregularly by pauses to fight: "Find out which one's best qualified to lead small-unit incursions. Anyone with boarding party experience, say. Have that one pick out their six favorites, and those seven are the reserve team. Send six bruisers to me, plus a couple-three engineers to relieve these ones in here, they're pretty tired and I'll need doors jimmied and stuff. The rest, have them check other possible incursion points, in case Zero-Sum had more to throw at us than just herself."

 

After a few minutes she comes back on the line.

"Done and done, sir, tell us when to open the gate and we'll pop your guys in— Erskin, no—"

The gate cracks open a bit and Erskin shoves through at the head of the requested crewmembers, looking determined and carrying a revolver. He glares at Bel, all puffed up and ready to fight.

 

Fear, anger, and a kind of hissing, spitting, furious love all crowd through you as you get right up in his face, blocking his way. "Only one of us can go into that ship, sir," you growl very softly, for his ears only. Well; his, Lainey's, and Galley's.

He knows it has to be you. He knows.

 

"I can— I can stay here, I can do something," you argue. "It's my crew, dash it all! You can't possibly ask me to sit behind safe doors like some fucking potted plant!"

 

"I can and I am, sir," you say fiercely. "I'm asking you to get ready to save everyone who got bitten or -- or will get bitten. Risking yourself is irresponsible."

 

You feel just about ready to cry with helpless frustration, but you're damned if you do it in front of Kadros— who's right, as he manages to be infuriatingly often. You push your horns against his chest.

"You had damn well better come back," you say unsteadily, feeling like some pathetic little shore-bound love interest from the movies, waving his heroic partner off to the front. You hate this.

 

You do something very unprofessional, right in front of the troops.

And when you're done kissing your superior officer dizzy, you give him a big shit-eating grin to be mad at. "I'd say you can fight the next shipload of berserkers, but frankly I deserve a bit of an outing for wading through your paperwork every night, so I'll probably dibs the next one too. You can punish me later. Sir." You wink like a jerk, then turn away to start organizing the push forward.

 

You take one or two last, pathetic steps after Kadros, then steel yourself and go back out the blast doors. Lainey tooks one look at your face and wraps you up, and you cling to her for a long moment. Around you, as they scurry, friends are knocking horns, partners squeezing one another's hands. This kind of stress makes a romantic out of anyone.

"Right, Medical," you say. "How's Arguus?"

"Getting Galley back online. Neither of them want to look at, talk with, or listen to the other one, so, you know, that's fun to watch."

You summon a wobbly smile, then force yourself to go off to Medical. You're well enough at first response sorts of things, and you spend the next several hours cleaning and stitching and patching and, in a few rare miserable cases, cauterizing. Somewhere else Kadros is fighting his way room by room through a hellish dayterror with a bare handful of your crew, and that's agonizing to think on, but with your hands full you can at least feel like you're helping.

After the badly wounded are stabilized and the other casualties seen to and sent off with pillows and snacks to temporary quarantine blocks, it's time to sit down with Sal and plan.

"Dialysis," he explains, showing the schematics on his tablet. "Spore takes over blood. Clean the blood, slow the progression."

"Slow? We can't clean it out entirely?"

He shakes his head sharply. "Too small, too fine. Needs antiparasiticals, which we don't have."

"Don't suppose the Zero-Sum has any, either."

Sal snorts. "Get in touch with ground troops. They'll have."

"Sal, we've been switching fronts, we're parsecs from anything more substantial than a stray asteroid! The Zero-Sum was to be our only encounter for the whole bloody perigee!"

"Yes," he says flatly. "A problem."

"Fuck. Well— let's get to work on the dialy-whatsits, round up the engineers and so forth. I'm sure everyone's desperate for something to do. Hell, I am."

You spend the next several hours holding metal plates together, cutting lengths of tubing, breaking up stress-fights, loading various materials into various hoppers, brewing ten thousand pots of cheap coffee, and passionately loathing the shrill, endless tzzzzt tzzzzt tzzzzt of the dimensional printers.

Then Kadros comes back.

 

You're limping, leaning on Murfey's shoulder; he's got his chewed-up arm tucked in his shirt for a sling. Two of your guys are coming back on stretchers. But all of you are alive, at least for now.

Seeing Erskin, so busy and grumpy and disheveled, makes you smile like an idiot. He's gorgeous, and you just want to bite his ears until he squeals -- ah. But that would be a terrible idea. You're probably contagious already, it's been a couple hours since the first bite. Still, with all this medical equipment, you just might live through this. Your rival is a pissy little miracle.

"We all came back," you smile at him. "As ordered, sir. Lot of survivors from the Zero-Sum, too, they quarantined themselves and welded the doors shut, they're filthy and dehydrated but uninfected. At least a dozen of those are healthy enough to help out once we get some food and water into them."

 

"Oh, thank god," you say fervently, rubbing your face— you want to grab Kadros and shake him till his teeth rattle, drag him off and fuck him dry— hell, you'd take Murfey along at that, but— not a good idea. For any number of reasons. You probably couldn't stand back up, afterwards, for one.

"Sit," you order, waving at the rows of waiting cots. Feeling a bit like a yapbeast nipping the heels of bugbears, you herd the two bluebloods into sitting down alongside the rest of their men, hook over a stool, and start stripping apart Murfey's shirt to get at the dripping mess. Sal and Lainey will take care of getting the rest of everyone seen to, but these fellows are yours.

"Trousers off, Kadros, while you're giving your report," you order as you set about clearing crusted black filth from the tattered flesh. Murfey whistles and you spare him a quick, agreeing smile.

((erskin's most interested in growing and healing stuff, the big hippie, so while he's poor mechanic and a genuinely shitty engineer, he's pretty good at basic nurse-type cleaning and patching and setting in ivs. he'll have learned to do at least a few steps of the dialysis procedure by now, too.))

 

You drop trou without embarrassment, and grab a squeeze bottle so you can start cleaning the tooth marks on your own calf muscle. Save him some time. It's easy to reach and doesn't hurt all that much, so you figure you can take care of it yourself.

Giving your report isn't as easy. What you saw in there was enough to give even you and Murfey nightmares, and the rest of your team had only ever seen unequal combat with aliens; clean laser burns, unreadable expressions, unrecognizable anatomy. It's different seeing trolls torn up like that.

 

You nod and grunt at the right places as you get Murfey's arm pieced back together, then strip him down to his underthings and fix the other scattered bites— nothing more pressing than a few stitches here and there, and a good deal of tape. You're about done you catch Kadros eying the stitching materials and you smack his bruised knuckles.

"So many quarantined is a real stroke of luck," you say, attending to his leg. "Well, as these things go. They'll need to be quarantined for a few days more, though hopefully they'll find our spaces a bit more amenable. No one else has died since you set off, though poor Loreli's in a bad way, and it's just your team that's been further infected, that's— that's also good."

Not... great. Not enough. If the Zero-Sum had— has?— too many additional cases you'd be able to eke out only a few extra days for everyone from the machines. With things as they are now, you've the resources to hold off the full flowering of the infection, and concurrent fatal madness, for a week, maybe as much as a week and a half.

It's still half a perigee to the nearest occupied planet, and hailing the very few ships in the parsec that might reach you in time has turned up no one willing to risk it.

 

"You don't look like it's good, sir. Are we... not able to get the medicine? I knew we wouldn't have any on board, but I hoped..." You clear your throat. You're being a pity sponge, and he doesn't need that on top of everything else. You need to get hold of yourself, set a calm example. "I knew the risks. We all knew the risks."

Murfey's not so diplomatic. "They hangin' us out to dry, boss? Cuz if I'm fucked, there's some emails I wanna send before I start trying to eat the keyboard."

 

"We've the equipment to slow the onset of the final— untreatable— stage of the infection," you say, very carefully. "To a week and a half, at the outset. Galley is accelerating us to the nearest planet as best he can right now. It's... half a perigee. Best estimate. And no one between here and there wants to risk infection, or— or, or more likely, Galley. That our planet-killer might be infected. The Zero-Sum fooled us, you know, why wouldn't we— be— fuck. It's not good odds we'll be allowed a close approach of the target solar system, either."

You scrub your eyes roughly, dare to look up at Murfey. "Do you have— do you have any contacts that might risk this for us, Sergeant? I would blow a crew of filthy pirate right now if it'd get us the antiparasiticals. Alien pirates. Do you know anyone."

 

You and Murfey look at each other. You say, "Pancho's transfer went through, we could probably bluster her CO into letting her leave right away with a load of meds if Aspera flapped those near-tyrian fins at a few people. But that doesn't solve the distance/time problem."

"Whitey's got a fast ship," Murfey points out. "Or so I've heard."

You groan. For Erskin's benefit, you explain, "We know a guy who won't shut about how fast his ship is. I was debating asking him in to start a casino, but he's a weirdo. Money-grubbing, opportunistic, and around as close to tyrian as you are, sir. We wouldn't be able to pressure him. He'll gouge us for every caegar we have. But he'd get her here."

 

"Right," you say thickly. "Okay. Right. Talk with Lainey. Make it happen. Tell me when I need to sit in front of a viewscreen and look rich and angry. Because. I am. I am incredibly rich and angry."

Your hands are shaking, and you watch them with detached confusion for a moment, before realizing— yes, right, alright. It's very likely going to be okay. You're all very likely to get out of this alive. You pat the last bit of tape down on Bel's skin and— and— just sort of huddle against him pathetically, working on taking one breath after another without completely humiliating yourself in front of everyone.