Infinity's End: Books 4-6, page 26
“I don’t see that we have much choice. For now we can afford to remain solitary, but for how much longer?”
She made a grumbling noise in her throat. He was right. If they didn’t find a natural source of base materials soon or something they could convert into energy they’d end up adrift before they made it even halfway back to the Coalition. “Have you talked to Zenfor?”
“Not since they got Engineering opened. I was headed there when this genius showed up.”
She stood again. “Let’s get a status update from her. I want to know what the odds are of getting her engine modifications back online. They’re what’s stranded us out here.” Zenfor had provided them with the technological means to cover a great distance of space in a short amount of time with proprietary technology from the Sil. Except it had been damaged during the attack and hadn’t worked since.
He stood as well. “I’ll check. But if we can’t even keep the undercurrent in place I doubt—”
“Just…let’s not make any more assumptions until we know all the facts.” She dropped her head, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“How’s the big chair working out?” Cas asked.
“Not exactly like I’d hoped,” she replied, her voice muffled by her hand. She snapped her head up again and blinked a few times. “I’ll be glad when he’s back.”
“Have you been down there lately?” Cas relaxed his posture. All semblance of formality between them was gone. In an instant they’d passed back into that easy relationship they’d shared from the beginning. She shook her head. “Maybe it will do you some good to get off the bridge for a few minutes. We can talk to Xax, check on his prognosis.”
“Yeah,” Evie replied, even though she had half a dozen things that needed taking care of on the bridge. Maybe a break was what she needed.
Chapter Four
“You said our visitor looks Sisskian?” Evie asked as they got out of the hypervator on level fourteen. She seemed to be making conversation to fill the uncomfortable silence between them.
“One of them anyway,” Cas replied. He hadn’t met a representative from each of the Sisskian’s dominant species, but he had seen one that resembled their new prisoner. “Back on my parole board, there was a reptile Sisskian as one of the board members.”
“They hate that,” Evie replied, a smile in her words.
“I know, but I can’t help it. They look…reptilian. What other word is there for it?”
“They prefer the term simmilist. As do all the species on Sissk. If you go around calling people reptiles, mammals, or anything else you’re bound to get the shit beat out of you. But the proper name for the species you’re describing is Ashkas.”
They turned the corner that headed down to sickbay. “How long did you live there?”
“Fifteen years. It’s like a microcosm for the Coalition itself. All those different species, sharing the same planet, the same resources.”
Cas laughed to himself. “Now I see where you get it.”
“What?”
“Your eternal optimism.” Before she could counter with a quip of her own, he continued, “Well, he looks Ashkasian then. Except he doesn’t have a tail and his skin, or his plates—whatever they are—are thicker.”
“That’s fascinating,” she replied. “All this way out here and there’s another species not too different from one in the Coalition. Maybe they’re distant cousins.”
He shrugged again. It wasn’t impossible. There was plenty of evidence of ancient species migrating all over space, there was no reason a species from this region couldn’t have found its way to one of the Coalition’s outer planets. Many of his ancient maps were from civilizations long gone who used to chart the stars before humans learned how to farm.
As they reached the doors to sickbay Cas noticed Evie wasn’t beside him anymore. He turned and saw she’d stopped a few meters away, staring at the door. “Hey. You okay?” She nodded, but the movement was short and sharp. “Have you been here to see him since it happened?”
She shook her head. “Not since that day we got the news. I’ve been too busy.”
Or this was harder for her than he’d thought. Maybe she hadn’t been trying to fill the silence between her and Cas, but her and what she was about to face. She and the captain hadn’t served together a long time, but they’d developed a respect for each other. That’s how it went when a captain and their XO matched up well; it was something he thought he had with Rutledge. But it had all turned out to be nothing more than lies. For Evie, though, he suspected it was real.
“We don’t have—”
“No,” she replied. “I want to. I just…needed a second.” She stepped past him and the doors slid open for her, revealing the inside of sickbay. It was a wide space, with a lot of stations around this side of the room with tall ceilings. Three of the beds were still occupied by injuries from the attack a few weeks ago. Cas hadn’t realized some people still hadn’t recovered. He’d need to pay more attention to the personnel reports coming through to him; it was something he shouldn’t have missed.
Off to the side stood Box, his companion for five years and newly minted “doctor” for the USCS Tempest. Since passing his written tests and earning the title six days ago Cas had heard of little else when the robot decided to drop into whatever he was doing. Box turned upon seeing them and his yellow eyes flashed in excitement.
“You came! I assume you’re here to see a top-level medical demonstration from the Coalition’s newest and most experienced doctor. I’ll just take Henderson over here—” he strode over to one of the crewmen lying peacefully on the beds. “And we’ll induce some mild cardiac arrhythmia—”
Both Cas and Evie jolted forward before Box stopped mid-stride, his eyes blinking at them. Cas recognized it as his version of laughter.
“He’s been pulling that crap all day,” Crewman Henderson said from the bed, coughing. “Anyone who comes in—” He coughed again, harder.
Box finished making his way over to him, adjusting one of the sensors on his bed. Henderson’s coughing subsided. “I told you, pretend to be asleep. It’s much more morbid when they think I’m going to do it to a sleeping man. You’re not supposed to be talking anyway.” Box glanced back up at them. “He’s been my best patient so far.”
Evie went over by the crewman’s bed. “Thank you for humoring him.”
Henderson shook his head. “He’s a…delight. Keeps a smile on my face.”
“One more word and I’ll induce a coma,” Box replied. Henderson nodded, smirking. Box turned to them. “He inhaled a lot of actinium and it’s taking his lungs a while to heal. But he’s doing much better now that we’ve started the second treatment.”
Cas took stock of his friend. Most of the time he’d known Box he’d been barely more than a lazy, self-centered ass, concerned with little else other than watching net dramas. But ever since they’d come aboard Tempest he’d seemed to have found his calling as a healer. Though he cringed at the idea of referring to him as “doctor”.
Box finished adjusting some of the readouts on the display beside Henderson’s bed. “So what can a doctor do for the captain and her first mate?”
“Don’t call me that,” Cas replied.
“Arrrr,” Box said.
“We’re here,” Evie asserted, glancing between the two of them, “to check on the captain. I wanted to get a status update.”
“Oh,” Box said, his tone neutral. “Sure. This way.” He led them through the large partition separating one side of sickbay from the other. On the far side sat the chief medical officer, Xax, where she sat inside her office, working on her terminal. She glanced up when she saw them come into view.
“Captain. Mr. Robeaux, I wasn’t aware—” She stood from her desk. Cas noticed she had not one but two different input terminals. One set on the desk itself and one she held in her second set of hands. He bet she could write reports faster than anyone on the ship. Except maybe Box.
Evie held up her hand. “This is unscheduled. We wanted to see how he was doing.”
Xax’s face fell slightly. “I’m afraid there hasn’t been much change. And since we won’t be getting back to a starbase soon I’m taking the situation into my own hands. I’m working on developing a new treatment right now, one that I hope will allow me to get a better look at the kind of damage the captain has suffered.” She turned the face of her terminal to them. “See, the captain suffered a lot of trauma in this area,” she pointed to the longitudinal fissure that separated the two halves of the brain.
“The central sulcus,” Box whispered to no one in particular.
“There’s some deep bruising in there. I’m hoping this new round of calorcium will allow us to figure out how much damage we can heal and how much we can live with. Otherwise, his condition hasn’t changed.”
“How long until the treatment is ready?” Evie asked, her voice betraying its anxiousness. If Cas noticed, he bet Xax did as well.
“I don’t want to say,” she replied. “This is experimental, and I can’t give a timeframe or even a guarantee it will work. But I’ll keep you updated.”
Evie nodded. “I guess that’s all we can hope for. Thanks, doc.”
“Anytime.” Xax took her seat again while Evie turned and left. Cas and Box followed, close behind. That hadn’t been what either of them had wanted to hear. Captain Greene was the foundation on which the crew was built. Without him in the captain’s chair, Evie was left to do it on her own, despite Cas’s “promotion”. His role here was temporary, which is why he assumed most of the crew followed his orders and did what needed to be done, because they knew they’d be rid of him soon enough and they didn’t want Evie coming back to her job and finding out they hadn’t been pulling their weight. He was a substitute, temporary and replaceable. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to do a good job. This ship needed all the help it could get, and until things returned to normal, he would do his best to ensure their survival.
Perhaps it would help to take Evie’s mind off the subject at hand. As they reached the doors to sickbay he leaned over to Box. “Hey, you remember that time the Erustiaan boarded the Reasonable Excuse and tried to steal her from us?”
“Absolutely. The first thing you did was cower in the corner; your arms wrapped around your knees. Classic Caspian,” Box replied. Evie turned and eyed him with interest.
“Obviously that didn’t happen,” Cas replied, his face growing red.
“Sure it did. He blew the hatch and you screamed this really high-pitched scream, so loud that I thought I’d lost an audio processor,” Box said. “And then you ran into your room like a child.” Box lifted his chest. “I, of course, had to fight him off in hand-to-hand combat, in which I managed to overpower him and take his weapons. I then unceremoniously tossed him out the airlock.”
Cas crossed his arms. “Oh really? Because if I recall correctly, he shot you three times, blowing your main power source and it took me two weeks to get you back on your feet. Was all that what you dreamed while I was in the middle of taking you apart and putting you back together again?”
“You mean I bravely allowed him to shoot me to give us more time to formulate our counter-attack,” Box replied.
“What does this have to do with anything?” Evie asked, tapping her foot.
“The point I was trying to get to,” Cas said. “Was that I managed to send a distress signal to one of Veena’s ships nearby. They made it over to us and together we took care of the Erustiaan while the tin man over here was out cold. I didn’t scream. I want to be very clear on that point.”
Box huffed. “It wasn’t my fault you didn’t upgrade my armor. And he had split-point rounds. Those could penetrate unprocessed alchuriam ore.”
“You’re not going to give up on this, are you?” Evie asked, ignoring Box.
“I think it’s worth exploring. At least until a better option comes along.”
“Give up on what?” Box asked.
Evie stared up at his yellow eyes. “Caspian thinks we need allies out here. That if we continue like this we won’t have a chance to make it back home.”
“He’s not wrong. In our current state there’s no way we’re making it back to Coalition space. We’ll probably be destroyed long before then, or dismantled, or get sucked into a dark fissure, or—”
“Box!” Cas yelled. “You’re not helping.”
Evie took a deep breath. “Get down to engineering. See what Zenfor and Sesster say about the engines. Then I’ll make a decision. In the meantime, I’ll have one of the science crews go over our new friend’s shuttle, just in case you missed something.”
“Just tell them to wear enviro-suits,” Cas replied. “In case one of those things had egg sacs or something.”
A smile played at her lips. “I’ll make sure they know.”
Chapter Five
Evie took the hypervator up one level to thirteen, alone. It would have been just as easy to comm science lab two, but she had another reason for visiting in person. And since the day had been terrible so far, she felt like she deserved a little indulgence.
She’d hoped the news about Greene would have been better. Though, had there been any significant developments Xax would have commed her instead of waiting for her to visit. It was wishful hoping on her part. The slow realization of the situation fell on her like snow, blanketing the ground. There was a good possibility Greene wouldn’t wake up and she would need to take on this mantle permanently. She wasn’t even sure how she was supposed to do that. Being captain was a lot different from being first officer. The first officer always had someone else there to help guide them, and while a seasoned XO might not need any guidance, Tempest had been Evie’s first posting as second-in-command. She’d fully expected to spend four or five years getting used to the job before being offered her own ship. She’d imagined something much more formal, something with more gravitas to mark the occasion. Not that she wanted the pageantry, but she did want it to be significant. More than just an assumption of power. He hadn’t even been able to transfer command to her due to his injuries. She’d just assumed it. Assumed she was qualified.
She needed more sessions with Sesster. They were helping to calm and focus her mind, even if she couldn’t quite remember all the images from when they were close to the alien ship. Evie had managed to get them out of that situation by tapping into something deep within herself, something she couldn’t even explain. And in what little downtime she’d found since, she’d worked with Sesster inside his mind-place to try and figure out what it all meant. Unfortunately she hadn’t made much progress since that very first session. And now that he was back in Engineering it was unlikely he’d be able to find the time for her. All of which fed into the anxiety of what-if. What if the hallucinations came back? What if she couldn’t sleep again? What if she just couldn’t do the job?
Evie reached the primary science labs and made her way over to science two, tapping on the door. It slid open to reveal the large space in disarray. After one of the mines had exploded it had eventually caused a power conduit to rupture in this section, blowing out half the relays on the deck. Which technically wouldn’t have been a problem since the science wings weren’t essential to the ship’s operation, except that two of Tempest’s main weapon systems: the dart controls and the blade generators ran behind the same bulkheads and had ruptured along with the power conduits. They’d had to remove half the equipment so they could start tearing the bulkheads away to get to the affected systems.
A maintenance crew had the entire wall exposed while Lieutenant Laura Yamashita directed them as to which systems needed their attention first. All the scientists who worked in this lab had already migrated to other areas to assist in repairs. Laura turned when Evie entered, and a smile flashed across her face before hiding it again. “Yeah, right there,” she said, “Between the backup vacuum chamber and the muon prism. Remove those and get the plating off to expose the conduit.”
After the weapons systems had gone down, Lieutenant Uuma had assigned Laura down here to oversee the repairs since she was familiar with both the weapons and the science systems, having come from exobiology. Evie couldn’t have made a better call herself. “Lieutenant? May I have a word?”
“Of course, Captain,” Laura replied. She had to hand it to her, Laura was good at keeping her emotions under wraps. There was barely a hint of anything in her voice other than a standard reply. “Keep working on that and I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She turned and sauntered her way toward Evie, throwing in a little extra emphasis in her walk, but not enough to be readily noticeable unless someone was really paying attention. Which Evie was. She’d been paying very close attention ever since Omicron Terminus when Laura had helped her through her episodes.
“What can I do for you, Captain?” Laura asked, a wide smile on her face. She had specs fluid dotting her face, like one of the hydraulic systems had ruptured too. But it didn’t detract from her beauty. Evie had always found her attractive, but ever since she thought Laura might have died in the attack she couldn’t suppress the feelings any longer.
Evie glanced up at the maintenance crew. All of them were focused on the power conduits, not paying them any attention. She leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on Laura’s lips before pulling away quickly. Laura barely had any time to react, but her smile grew even wider.
“I just needed a friendly face,” Evie said.
Laura’s features shifted into understanding. “How bad is it?”
“It’s not getting any better. And I just came from sickbay. There’s been no change with the captain.”
Laura rubbed her arm sympathetically. “You’re the captain. And you’re doing a great job.”
Evie sighed, lowering her voice, “The ship can’t keep withstanding these attacks. If we don’t do something drastic—”
