Fear is strange. It haunts a soul more relentlessly than any ghost. But when horrifying prospects are shoved in your face daily, your mind grows numb to fear. Fear is easier to ignore. In fact, it even goes away.
That's how it was on Destiny. A person would go mad if they thought of all the what ifs constantly. There were just too many of them. Death by any means was a possibility; to worry about what would happen in the future had become pointless. If the crew had anything to be afraid of, it was the moment. The moment was all they had to worry about; moments were what they had to get through to have a future at all.
Knowledge kills fear for most. When you know the facts of a matter, it's suddenly not so scary. When you know the facts, you begin to trust yourself – and that's where real bravery comes from.
Right now, in that moment, the facts were grim: two people on the ship had already died of a fever; T.J. projected the number would grow significantly in the next few hours.
The virus had likely been brought aboard after an expedition to a recent planet; it rapidly spread through the crew. The only thing more frightening than the speed of the contagion was the early symptoms of its onset. The warning signs were typified by a feeling of excessive heat quickly followed by a severe lack of judgment. It got to your mind. Hallucinations were common – particularly before unconsciousness set in.
Chloe helped T.J. take care of the sick. There were too many to comprehend. Eli and Matt, both on the away team, were among the first to show symptoms; neither one seemed ready to open his eyes anytime soon. All Chloe could do was sit between their cots and mop the sweat of their brows at regular intervals. She felt helpless; she wasn't alone in that, though.
"Chloe, I need you!" T.J. called; her voice carried sharply over the moans and groans of infected people.
Chloe jumped to her feet and hurried over to T.J. who was knelt beside Greer.
"You're going to learn how to start an I.V.," T.J. said.
Chloe would've protested under normal circumstances, but these circumstances were far from normal. In normal circumstances, only a deranged moron would let her poke people with needles. And now she had to; there wasn't really anyone left capable. Tamara Johansen was drowning, and she would begin to lose people very quickly if she didn't have some very hands-on help.
Chloe took the alcohol prep and wiped the dirt and sweat off of Greer's arm. T.J. handed her the needle and walked her through the process of getting the I.V. going. She missed the vein on the first try, which elicited a grimace from Greer's barely-conscious lips. She took a deep breath. She wasn't going to mess up again. She refused to. After a few heart-pounding moments, she found the vein and relief swept her adrenaline away.
"Now repeat the process on Brody and the colonel," was the cold order that hit Chloe's ears.
She took another deep breath and did as she was told.
Looking around at all of the helpless people laying in the sick bay, Chloe realized something very important for the first time: they were in hell. Destiny was hell. And there was no escape. Her own father was the first to die on that ship. She should've known then it would be their tomb.
But maybe she did. Maybe she knew that it was their fate to rot on this ship and fester together in a cesspool of filth and illness. There really was no hope. That realization didn't scare her. What scared her was in that moment. What scared her was how pale Matt had grown and how high Eli's fever was. What scared her was that people she had quickly come to love were going to die in front of her eyes. No one but a handful of people back home would know of their struggles. No one would know how hard they fought to stay afloat. No one would know that they were there – that, for a brief time, they defied the odds. Everything that had happened would be for nothing. Her father died for nothing. That was the scariest thing of all.
She wouldn't cry, though. No matter what happened, she wouldn't cry. She didn't have any tears left to waste on this life.