Ion Trail 18: Wake Up

I woke up with great difficulty, climbing upward through suffocating layers of fluff, until I could finally open my eyes. My mind felt like it was still encased in those thick layers of fluff, but everything else simply ached. I moaned softly and heard someone moving nearby, then a shadow leaned over me, indistinct in the dim light.

“Hey Captain,” the shadow said softly. It took me a good several seconds to place the voice, filled with a weariness and shaky in a way I’d never heard before; it was Harper. “How are you feeling?”

“Ow,” I croaked at her, wishing I hadn’t woken up. I felt like I should say something else, ask questions, but my mind was nothing but that hazy fluff. My eyes closed and for a while I lost the pain in an encompassing darkness.

When I woke again an unknown amount of time later I felt more than one presence sitting nearby and there was a soft murmuring, which I think is what woke me. I tried to turn my head, which spiked the pain, and found that it had been immobilized.

“Hello?” I rasped, trying to catch sight of whoever was nearby with my eyes alone, but my voice sparked a reaction and I immediately saw a face hovering over me.

“Hey Lorna,” I heard Diaz’ voice say. “She’s awake again.” The figure above me smiled and though my vision was blurred, I could make out the white flash of teeth in the darkened room. After a moment, Diaz withdrew and I could make out Harper’s face above me.

“You feeling a bit more awake now, Captain?” she said, but unlike Diaz she didn’t smile. In fact, her face was haggard, tired and defeated; nothing like the tough medic I’d come to respect over the last weeks.

“Hurts,” I responded, then coughed weakly, which brought new spasms of pain. “Thirsty?”

“Of course,” she said and a moment later I felt a straw between my lips. I sucked greedily, though the water was tepid and felt blessed moisture course down my throat. “Not too much now, Captain,” she said after a moment, pulling the straw away.

“We’re alive,” I said. “What happened?”

“We made it to jump,” Harper said, glancing at Diaz. “Barely.”

“Interdiction cut out just as we got caught by the explosion,” he added. “I thought explosions were supposed to be impossible in space?”

“Nuclear,” I said, though I was guessing. So far as anyone knew, self-destruct was nonsense you only saw in holovids, but it seemed likely that the explosion would have come from the drive core; after all, we’d barely scratched the black ship. Conventional explosions were limited to the point of uselessness in space, but nuclear was a bit of a different beast, and we’d been pretty close to the black ship. “Anyone else hurt?” Oh, I was so tired.

“Some scrapes and bruises across the crew, Omar’s broken leg, and you,” Harper said. “You’re the worst injury we got.” She looked away as she said that last bit, and I could sense that something was off.

“You okay?” I asked her.

“I’m fine,” she said, her tone suddenly angry. She actually swiped a hand across her face and stepped out of sight. The third figure, who’d been largely silent until now, spoke up.

“Lorna blames herself for leaving you alone,” Sister Estrada’s warm voice was pitched for my ears alone. “She found you wrapped around one of the legs of the table and she hasn’t left your side since.” She glanced over at Diaz before continuing. “Diaz had to use his authority to get her to even sleep, though it was on the floor beside your bed.” My eyes flickered over to Diaz, who dipped his head bashfully.

“Your authority, eh?” I said, arching a brow; somehow even that hurt. What had happened to me?

“Well, you made me First Mate, so I thought, uh, I mean, she was almost asleep on her feet anyway,” he trailed off and I laughed softly.

“No, it was a good call, Julio. You did good.” I saw his smile flash again and tried to smile back.

“Alright,” Harper had turned back, her face a mask once again. “I think that’s enough talk for now. The Captain will need to rest while she’s recovering.” I’d wanted to ask more questions, but honestly as tired as I was, she was likely right. I waited while she shooed them out before coming back to sit by the bed, just barely on the edge of my vision.

“How long’s it been since you slept?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she replied shortly.

“That’s not what I asked,” I responded, letting a bit of steel creep into my voice. “I need you functioning, and as no one appears to be bleeding to death right now, that means sleep for you.” She started to protest, but I raised my voice enough to override her, though it cost some of my dwindling strength. “You will not sit in this room for more than four hours at a stretch, and you will eat and sleep, just like you’d advise anyone else to do.” Another of my mother’s pithy phrases came to mind. “Physician, heal thyself.” She flinched, and I could see the stubbornness settle over her face, but instead of arguing she pursed her lips and nodded shortly.

“Of course, Captain,” she almost snapped at me. “I will arrange for someone to be here when I’m not. But for now, you also need to rest.”

“Oh, I plan to,” I said, feeling my consciousness begin to fade. As I let my eyes drift shut, I asked, “Did we win?”

“Yes, Captain,” I heard quietly, “we won.”

=+=

Harper was true to her word and when I woke next, it was Shanna sitting with me and later on, Clinton. It turned out that I’d been unconscious for three days, and the next few days weren’t exactly pleasant. I slept a lot and tried to converse with whoever was sitting with me whenever I was awake. I got a lot of polite small talk, but it seemed that there’d been orders not to ‘upset’ me whenever I asked for anything more substantial. Eventually I had to put my foot down, figuratively speaking, to get information at all about the aftermath of our tangle with the black ship. We were barely limping along through hyperspace and Diaz didn’t have the skill to calculate our arrival time. Clinton had done the best he could to keep the drive running with the damage, but once I got him to talk, he was very frank in his worry about how long we had before it died completely. We needed to get into a proper shipyard for repair, as soon as we could. Shanna had the only good news, which was that the cargo seemed more or less intact; if we made it to Terra Primus, we’d have a healthy paycheck coming.

“Ugh, this is so stupid!” I grumbled, dropping my hand, still holding the datapad, to my lap. “Are you sure I can’t get up?”

“Captain, it’s been less than a week since your injury. In another day or so I’ll get a proper sling on you, and you can do some walking around, okay?”

“It’s just, how am I supposed to run a ship from the medbay?” I complained. She glanced pointedly at the commlink in my ear, and I flushed a little. I’d been running Diaz ragged with constant demands, but I just felt so helpless stuck in this bed.

“You’ll survive,” she said sardonically. I snorted, but honestly I was glad that she was feeling better enough to pick on me. I didn’t ever want to see her looking so shaken and uncertain ever again, if I could help it. So I grumbled and went back to calculating our arrival time on the datapad. Then I brightened, looking up from the datapad, schooling my expression into my most charming smile.

“Tomorrow, then?” I said optimistically. She narrowed her eyes at me as I cranked up the smile just a little more, and she sighed.

“We’ll see, Captain.”

The next day, I wheedled and cajoled Harper into finally letting me take a short walk around the ship. I might have been able to get away with making it an order, but honestly, it was more fun this way. Besides, it made her smile for the first time since I’d woken up, and that wasn’t nothing, either. My first stop was to check in on Omar. He too was chafing at being stuck in bed, but without anything to improvise as a crutch, he’d likely be stuck until we arrived; apparently he’d done a real number on his leg, starting with dropping the drone on it when we’d been hit by one of the missiles, and then disregarding it while he finished deploying the drone and making his way back to the engine room to crash it into the black ship. I gently chided him on it, but couldn’t help but credit his courage.

“So, Captain, about the gun,” he started, looking awkwardly.

“Forget it,” I said. I had wanted to yell at him, but given what he’d gone through for the ship, it didn’t seem important anymore. “Unless… Is there more?”

“No,” he flushed as he spoke. “Just the one. Sorry. I just… At first I wanted a little insurance, but after I got to know everyone, there never seemed to be a right time to hand it over.”

“I’m glad you had it,” I admitted. “I would have liked to know about it sooner, but it’s water under the bridge.” This was yet another of my mother’s sayings, and one that’d never really made sense to me.

“Thanks Captain,” he said, and I waved it off. Clinton arrived shortly after that, and they chatted animatedly about everything from asteroid mining to mechanical engineering. They made an effort to include me, but soon enough I started to feel like a third wheel, so I took my leave. They both acknowledged me, but they’d gone right back to talking before I’d even closed the door.

My next stop was to survey the damage from the fight. The engine room was first, followed by the hallway just down from the airlock, where most of the fighting had occurred. The engine room was as I’d been lead to expect, with black marks on the walls from flame and electrical arcing, but otherwise functional; the unstable rumbling from the engine was definitely troublesome, though.

The hallway was another matter entirely. I shuddered when I saw the galley, though it had mostly been cleared out and cleaned up, but the corner before the airlock was a mess that would take proper construction to fix; there were tiny abrasions everywhere from the flechette pistol, several large burns and holes from the heavier rifle, and stains in the cracks between the floor tiles. While the worst of the damage had been repaired, there was no mistaking that incredible, desperate violence had occurred here. My biggest surprise, however, was upon turning the corner to the airlock. Instead of short corridor I expected, there was a hastily erected wall of plasteel, with thick welds securing it to the walls, ceiling and floor of the hall.

“What the fuck?” I said, leaning hard against the wall to stop from running straight into the plasteel barrier. Harper reached out to steady me.

“This is, uh, why I didn’t discover you until a bit later,” she explained. I’d gone to ensure that the lock was sealed and found that it, uh, wasn’t. The inner door was closed, but the seal had failed and we were leaking atmo into space.” She exhaled heavily as she recounted the memory. “I tried to get a seal, but beyond yanking on the manual closure or the inner door, I didn’t really know what to do. The outer door was toast, though.” I nodded at that; we’d covered such things only briefly in training, but force breaches rarely left the doors functional.

“So you welded it shut?” I said, acknowledging the obvious.

“I got Clinton to help, once he’d put out the literal fires in the engine room, but yeah.”

“Fuck,” I said, impressed and kind of terrified. There was very little reason we should still be alive right now, but for the quick thinking of my crew. I shook my head and gasped at the pain that the reflex brought on. Harper’s hand on my good shoulder urged me back down the hall, and I complied.

“Wait, so what about our uninvited guests?” I asked, surprised that it had taken me so long to think about it.

“I was wondering when you’d get around to that,” she said with an air of amused apprehension. I looked at her, trying to get a read on what she thought about that, but couldn’t figure it out; her reserved, stoic mask was mostly intact again. “Come on then,” she added. “One more stop, if you’re up to it.” I scoffed, though the truth be told, the trip had taken its toll on me. She led the way.

We went to the one empty room remaining; I’d insisted on leaving it up for Janice, though she’d refused to sleep there; instead, it had been turned into a morgue of sorts. I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw.

The armor had been removed from both of our ‘guests’ and sat piled in a corner; one of the suits was barely recognizable, it was so shredded and burnt. The other looked mostly intact, and I flinched realizing that it was probably from the one that had fallen on me. Then I turned to the bed, which had a figure laid out upon it, partially covered with a sheet.

The first thing that struck me was how pale she was- and it was definitely a ‘she’, so far as I could tell. A slender, feminine figure was discernible under the sheet, and delicate features that were strikingly similar to our own, two eyes, mouth and nose where you’d expect them to be, tiny human-like ears, and a cropped shock of reddish hair that left her head bare on both sides. As I looked at her, the obviously human traits became more and more disturbing, probably because they weren’t quite right; her ears were too small for one, her eyes too big and widely spaced and no body hair that I could see except that on her head. Her neck and arms were too long, honestly her whole body seemed stretched out, but otherwise seemed well-formed. Harper stood quietly while I studied her.

“She almost looks human,” I said softly, as though I might wake her if I were too loud.

“Yes,” Harper replied simply. I glanced at her, a weird suspicion forming in my head.

“You examined her?”

“Of course,” she replied. “Both of them, though the other was too badly damaged to be much use.”

“She doesn’t look quite human, but she looks more human than I’d expect.”

“Why is that?” Harper asked, and the tone of her question made me glance at her sharply again.

“Because she can’t be human, right?” I said. “Humans wouldn’t look like that.”  I hated to admit that Diaz’ alien theory might be right, but this woman wouldn’t have fit in anywhere I’d ever been, even if she was almost pretty.

“They might,” she said, then paused, obviously searching for the right words. I narrowed my eyes at her.

“What do you mean, ‘they might’?”

“If they’d modified themselves to live in other environments,” she said. I snapped my head back to look at the body on the bed so quickly that the sudden stab of pain nearly took my balance. I stared, taking in all of the details again, and slowly nodded my head.

“So you’re saying she might be human?” I said.

“No,” she replied. “I’m saying she is human. I ran blood and tissue samples, and while I can’t really sequence her DNA with what we’ve got on-board, I can say with a fair amount of certainty that she’s as human as you or I am.”

I turned and stared at her. A hundred thoughts ran through my head, most of them variations on ‘how?’ and ‘why?’. How come I’d never heard of anyone doing this before? Why did they attack us? The question that burst from my lips wasn’t nearly as profound as all of the rest.

“Why the fuck am I just hearing about this now?” I demanded. I realized that I was angry, though I couldn’t immediately explain why.

“I thought you needed to see her with your own eyes,” Harper said quietly. “It’s… kind of a lot to take in, and I didn’t even know how to begin explaining.” I closed my eyes, just letting my thoughts run wild for a moment and I realized that there was a continuing stream of outrage running through all of the rest.

I wasn’t mad at Harper, not really. I was mad at her. I opened my eyes to stare at the dead woman on the bed again, the one who’d nearly killed me in the hallway, the one who’d tried to kill us all. She wasn’t some unknowable alien menace from beyond the stars. She was human, though a bit weird to look at. She could have been just like me but for a few strange features and she’d tried to kill us all. No explanation, no demands, nothing. Her people, humans, had attacked us with no warning or provocation. I turned my gaze back to meet Harper’s, and saw some of the same fire reflected in her eyes.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice as steely and cold as mine had been hot and angry.

“This changes…” I left the sentence unfinished, not even sure what I was going to say. It changes what? Everything. But does it really? I took a deep breath and spoke again, my words hard with certainty.

“This changes nothing.”