Chapter Text
I have, once again, found myself in a situation. One of the worst ones yet.
There’s a large, thick glass window in front of me with a bunch of screens that flash various information in reds and yellows. Beyond that, a body in a hospital bed. Tubes in his arms, in his mouth, under his clothes; I can’t help but be disturbed by the fact that I was hooked up to machines like this, too, once upon a time.
His chest rises slowly, holds for a second, then eases back down, and repeats the process. Face pinched in a permanent state of agony, nearly unrecognizable through what must be gallons of caked-on blood, a feeding tube and some sort of oxygen line. It slicks his hair to his blistered, sick face. Stains scrubs and bedsheets a congealed, disgusting brown-red color.
None of it is his; another thought that makes my stomach churn. Thank God I already threw everything up several hours ago. Really, I’d like to keep embarrassing myself to a minimum here, especially after how I reacted when I came back to consciousness.
The woman to my right is less affected. Standing with her arms crossed like this is just another Tuesday—succumbing a man to certain death just to drag him back up looking like…this. Like someone dropped him in a vat of acid. Corrosive, human blood acid. Holy frick. Holy frick.
I swallow the urge to gag again. The itch to pick my nails buzzes behind my eyes, but attempting to makes the handcuffs feel tighter than they actually are. Surely, the cold metal is drawing blood by now. They're already past bruised. I thoroughly regret kicking down a door in an attempt to escape, which I guess is the point of the restraints and the guard at my back.
“He’s alive, for now,” the woman—the captain of this ship, I think—says, low and controlled in a way that reminds me explicitly of Stratt if she were a sci-fi dictator instead of a cagey European special-forces-whatever. “We pulled him up just a few hours after you showed up. Thought he wouldn’t survive the night, but…here we are.”
The room stinks of iron, even through the glass. Like wet metal and pennies. I turn my nose up at it, unable to tear my eyes away from the sight of him. There’s an entire patch of skin sloughed off his forehead, the rest of him is burned and blistered to the point that the man underneath is unrecognizable. Too-sharp teeth embedded in his cheek from the inside of his mouth. An entire arm missing, flaps of loose meat and a visible bone in its place although he isn’t bleeding. He’s alive, but he isn’t bleeding.
I close my eyes and swallow a third time.
My God, the mummified corpses I woke up with on the Hail Mary were easier to look at than this.
“I don’t…” My voice is rough. I have to force the words from my tight throat. “I don’t even know where to…where to start. I mean—this is far beyond anything I’ve ever seen. This is far beyond my understanding of this stuff.”
I’m very, very far in the future—that much I do know. About as far away from anything I know as I can be. All my instruments might as well be wooden hammers and wheels compared to the flashing monitors and complicated tech of the Consolidation of Iron. Honestly, the absolute horror of my ever-worsening situation hasn’t really hit me yet. My thoughts are way too preoccupied with Rocky.
“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?”
I laugh. I can't help it. “I have a doctorate.”
“In Molecular Biology,” The captain returns, leveling me with a look. Her one milky eye feels like it can see straight through my soul like an x-ray. “You figured out how to breed alien lifeforms, surely you can figure out what the fuck is keeping him breathing.”
A sigh leaves me before I can stop it.
“Thats different. That's biology,” I argue. “This…this isn’t, I think. I don’t know what this is. I don't know—...”
The captain’s eyes narrow and the rest of my words die on my tongue.
“Then figure it out.” Her words are final. Calm. Cut and dry. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as she drops her arms and steps past, pacing.
“We can keep your alien-friend alive for as long as you need,” she continues. “But if we don’t see progress, or the Convict’s condition worsens…”
She shrugs. Like it's nothing. Like it's no big deal, hurting Rocky.
“Something’ll have to happen to encourage you.”
My lips purse. They’re quivering, I feel it, and I try my best to clench my jaw to hide it. Dig the blunt ends of my nails into my palms. My nerves are so shot it is getting increasingly difficult to think clearly without getting emotional.
God, Rocky.
I can’t let Rocky die. He’s got a mate, family. We’ve both got entire planets to save. I can’t die yet, and I can’t lose anyone else, so he can’t die either. I have to get him out.
I turn to the Captain.
“If I do this for you, you have to help us get back home,” I tell her, trying and failing to keep my voice from cracking. “Both of us.”
A beat.
“A-and I still want access to my lab while I do.”
She crosses her arms again, concealing bandaged hands in the armpits of her beat-up bomber jacket. Bites the inside of her mouth when she thinks, nodding to herself like she should’ve expected the request. It takes some consideration but eventually she speaks.
“Tell us what you’ll need. We’ll grab it for you,” she decides. “Figure out what happened to him, and I’ll figure out what happened to you. Deal?”
My eyes flicker back down to the man in the bed. His chest rises. Falls again. Blood drips onto the linoleum. The heart monitor beeps rhythmically. My hands tighten until my knuckles creak, metal biting my skin.
“Deal.”
The Captain sighs and nods her head to the guard behind me. He drops a couple boxes of random supplies to the floor. There’s a jingle of keys before he unlocks my cuffs. The release of my wrists actually pulls a breath from my throat, the freedom heavenly on my stiff shoulders.
“Thank you,” I’m so relieved I could cry. I just barely hold back but, still, I think it shows in my voice. “Thank you so much.”
“Make a list of everything you think you’ll need from your lab, someone will be by tomorrow to pick it up. The red button on that machine by your arm will call the nurses if anything abnormal happens. The yellow one automatically calls me.”
“What would be considered abnormal?”
“Just—hell if I know. Seizure. Choking. Breathing irregularities. That kinda thing. We can treat everything but pain. Just use your best judgement.”
She goes to leave, but I grab her arm before she can even touch the door. The guard tenses.
“Wait,” I breathe. “I’m staying here? With—with him? I don’t get my own room?”
The captain huffs. There’s something in her eyes I don’t trust, like she knows something I don’t. Stupid, I know. There’s a lot of things she knows that I don’t.
“Relax,” she says, almost amused. “As long as he’s asleep, he’s harmless.”
She shuts the door behind her.
…
It’s quiet. Far too quiet. The Hail Mary was quiet too, but at least there was enough to do there that I could exhaust myself to the point I'd fall asleep standing up. No need to think, no need to toss and turn. Just work until sleep swept me off into the dark. Rocky hated it, but it worked. Successfully dodged any unwarranted catatonic spirals from thinking too hard.
Here, there wasn't much to occupy my time. I scratched all the supplies I could possinly need onto the little, stained piece of paper that was handed to me with a charcoal pencil. Took stock of everything immediately available to me across the desk on the far side of the room. Some sterile general first-aid, lots of bandages, blood sample tools and a bunch of other instruments I’m not sure how to use.
Surely, there’d be a nurse or something willing to take blood samples for me. I’m not confident I won’t hurt him. Surely, Ava’s got some records I could look at, or any information beyond the fact that there’s a man who’s alive, comatose, fatally wounded but not bleeding.
Hopefully, they’d be willing to give me something to go off of.
I pull the thin mattress and an extra blanket out from underneath the desk and try to sleep. No shot. I stare at the ceiling for over an hour, thinking about Rocky. About Earth. About how far away I am from everything. I barely realize I’m crying, too, before I wipe at my face and pull my hand away damp. It's then that the floodgates open.
The Hail Mary is damaged, I don't know how bad. Rocky is imprisoned somewhere and I can’t find him. I know he’s probably panicking, or worse, injured. I don’t remember anything past visiting Tau Ceti and the planet Adrian and the ship spinning out of control. I’m locked in a room with a dying man I probably can’t save and my head hurts so bad and I don’t know where I am.
I turn into the pillow and cry for a while. It helps.
When I’m done, I sit up and decide that sleep is a long way off. Grab a chair from the corner of the room and pull it up to the window. Turn the light back on.
I squint. Wait a second.
During the few hours I was laying down, the worst of the blisters shrank. The teeth got smaller. His brow twitches, a natural reaction to the sudden change in lighting, but otherwise he’s still. I sit forwards in my chair, blinking. Am I crazy? I have to be crazy, right? There’s no way his wounds improved that fast.
I glance at his vitals. There’s a section labeled SP02 that’s gotten lower, heart rate just a little higher. His temperature hasn’t changed, still normal. On the bottom right corner is a name.
“Simon,” I say aloud to myself, voice rough. “She never told me that.”
His chest rises. Falls.
Frustration pierces my chest. This guy went through something so clearly horrifying and they never even told me his name. What the heck is going on?
I glance at his vitals again. SPO2. I don’t know what that means, but it has oxygen in the name, so I can only assume the fact that its lower means it's bad. Maybe oxygen absorption?
My hands itch for the button, but he doesn’t show any physical signs of worsening, so I let it be for now.
“Wish I knew what happened,” I say. I don’t know why I’m talking to him. If someone talked to me while I was comatose, would I have heard it? “Maybe then I could actually get a clue on what's wrong with you. Even just some info about whatever planet you were on might help—even just a name. Then again, I’ve never heard of a moon harboring an ocean of human blood.”
No response, of course. I rest my chin on my hand and scratch at the itchy stubble forming there.
“Is it from GCRs?” I wonder, leg bouncing as I brainstorm. “No, couldn’t be. Radiation doesn’t act like this and you’d most definitely be dead…Is it even human blood? Or is it, like, maybe mimicking it? Like a parasite or something? Dang, maybe that's why you’re not bleeding. Maybe that’s why you’re—…”
A thought occurs to me and I stop in my tracks. Look once again at the SP02. It's not dropping fast, only by two percent since I laid down. I look around for a clock and find one mounted above the locked exit. 0100 hours.
I fumble through the information on the screen until it brings me to a graph. There, I learn his vitals have been dropping slowly—about 1-2% every five hours.
“Okay,” I sigh, sitting back. The chair creaks, and it sounds loud in the quiet. My hand dims the lights again and his expression relaxes just a fraction. Sorry Simon, I’ll keep the lights off.
Pressing the yellow button requires a couple minutes of internal pep-talk. Ava is really, really intimidating. Despite the late hour, though, she picks up almost immediately.
“Doctor,” she greets. “You find something?”
She sounds excited. Way too much energy for this late at night, or—this early in the morning. Way too much faith in me. Deja vu pierces through my mind like a bullet.
“Hi. Yes, hey, uh…Captain,” I clear my throat. “I think so. But it's just a theory, right now. I don’t have any solid evidence. Just a hunch.”
“Go on.”
“I need samples of whatever that ocean was made of—”
“Human blood.”
A shiver works its way down the whole length of my spine. Disgusting. I’m sure I’ll be having nightmares about that for months. “Um…yeah. That. I need a lot of it. His vitals have been dropping, even with treatment, since you hooked him up. This sounds absolutely crazy but I think it's…keeping him alive?”
She’s quiet, for a moment. There’s some shuffling on the other end.
“We know,” she says. “Our scientists don’t want to pump more of it into him because we don’t know what it’ll do. Don’t want a mess on our hands if the mutations continue.”
Then what do you need me for? I almost ask, but I bite my tongue.
That’s it, then. My first lead.
“You say this like you’ve witnessed it yourself,” I say. She just hums in a way that suggests I’m treading a thin line, then changes the subject.
“Any other observations?”
I shove my hand under my glasses to rub at the soreness in my eyes. One of the lenses is cracked from getting my head smashed against the dash on the Hail Mary. Huh. In all the chaos, I hadn’t noticed.
“Uh,” I sigh. “Well, what medication do you have him on?”
“Antibiotics. Fluids. Sedatives. Pretty much everything,” She explains. “The only thing that’s worked on him is the radiation treatment and the sedatives.”
Radiation? How the heck did he get radiation poisoning? Was he exposed to something on the planet? I shake the thought away. Later. I’d get into that can of worms later.
“That’s good,” I nod. “Means it was unrelated to whatever’s happening to him now.”
I wring my hands together, nervous.
“It also means we should take him off everything he’s on. It could be…I don’t know…maybe hindering whatever the blood is trying to heal. Except whatever you’re using to treat the poisoning, I guess, that can stay.”
She’s silent again. There’s the sound of a page turning, fingers drumming against a desk in thought.
“And what if the opposite happens?” She proposes. “What if the mutations continue? What if he dies?”
I glance back at Simon’s body. At the blisters that are trying to shrink, the slowly-easing swelling around one of his eyes.
“I don’t think they will,” I murmur, unsure. “But…I guess it's a coin-toss. I don’t know for sure.”
“How much of the blood do you need?”
I sigh, relieved. “As much as you can give me.”
She’s quiet for a moment. Considering. Recording, maybe. Relaying commands. The moment is tense. My hands ball my pants tight in my palms.
“You have my full permission to administer the blood into his system, if and when you’re absolutely sure you’re right,” Ava says. “Let someone know and they’ll halt all his medications. I’ll deliver you his medical reports, too. Your orders are my orders.”
My eyebrows spring up. Wow. A whole medical team at my disposal. That’s a lot of trust in a weird science teacher from the past.
“Uh, thanks.” The chuckle I let out is strained, “But I hope it doesn’t come to that.”
“Me, too.” The Captain says, and then hangs up.
Twenty minutes later a doctor shows up with three totes. One has samples, the other two have countless I.V. bags of the stuff. They’re all transferred to an industrial fridge in the corner of the small laboratory I’m camping in. He doesn’t say a word to me. Doesn’t even look at me when I say thank you before shutting the door in my face.
Another nurse over the medical line shuts off his medication remotely. She at least speaks to me, but she’s cynical. Doesn’t say more than she has to. She leaves me with a message to call someone in to hook up the transfusion line for you, if it comes to that. Don’t do it yourself.
Okay. Seems like none of the COI has been friendly so far. Good to know.
Now, though, I just have to wait.
I don’t want to give him the blood. Not if I don't have to. Maybe, if I just let his body alone and turn off the medications that are clearly hindering him, the mutations will disappear and he’ll start to heal.
My eyes flicker endlessly between the screen of vitals and the man on the other side of the window. Nothing happens initially, not for hours. Not a twitch of his face or a hitch of a breath. It's hard to tell whether or not he’s still healing, not with me staring him down like he’ll suddenly get up and walk away if I so much as blink.
My leg bounces. I wait.
The PSO2 stops dropping.
I wait and I wait.
The teeth definitely seem to be getting smaller.
I wait and I wait and I wait some more. Some time between 0500 and 0600 is when I doze off, eyes sinking shut against my will. I only know this because the next time I open them, everything is beeping. Screaming. Flashing. When I look over, Simon’s body is convulsing. The entire bed is shaking. His eyes are open—milky white and bleary, beneath pale eyelids. Pale skin now visible beneath his burns.
“O-Oh my gosh!” I leap up and slam my hand against the red button.
Almost as soon as I press it, doctors in tan coats flood the room. Some grab my arms. Others in masks and hazmat suits go to enter the man’s enclosure. I kick and thrash, heart pounding in my skull.
“Wait—!”
“We’ll take it from here, Doctor.”
“No! Wait! Please—listen to me before you give him more blood,” I struggle. “I-I’m not entirely sure I’m right. I need to look at some studies, run some tests, just something before we barge into this—”
I’m pinned roughly against the wall by the same guard as before. My glasses fall off my face when he forces the cuffs around my wrists again.
“There’s no time for tests,” he tells me. “Come with me.”
My pleas are ignored as I’m forced back through the door, tripping over my own feet as my heart pounds in my ears. My mind floods with one thought and one thought only, one that sends my head spiralling as the hallway starts to spin.
Did I just kill a man?
I need to throw up again.