Part One
"Hey! Denella! Klath! Sunek! We've got a problem down here!"
Jirel supported Natasha's limp body where she had fallen into his arms in the Bounty's dining area, struggling to lift himself up from where they had both collapsed and pick her up properly.
He looked away from the disconcertingly blank expression on her face and her unblinking eyes, not wanting to give a second's thought to the possibility that even as he was calling for help, it might already be too late to save her.
It had all happened in an instant. One second, they had been talking about their misadventures back on the Makalite planet, where they had made an impromptu stopover to repair the Bounty, only to get caught up in an improvised scam at the expense of the pre-industrial population by stranded con artist Martus Mazur.
The next, Natasha had started to look unwell. Jirel had barely had time to stand up from the dining area's table and catch her before she had slumped down to the floor.
He staggered through the door, grunting with exertion as he carried her unmoving form the short distance to the ship's medical bay. He had just placed her onto the bay's single bed before the others arrived.
"What the hell happened?" Denella, the ship's Orion engineer, asked as she raced through the door.
In her wake, the rest of the Bounty's motley crew followed. Sunek, the rangy and uncharacteristically emotional Vulcan pilot, and Klath, the burly Klingon weapons chief. Even they, usually the last to show too many outward signs of worry for other people, looked concerned by what they saw.
"I dunno," Jirel babbled as he desperately powered up the medical computer, "She just collapsed. She said something about a plant? Or a thorn? On the Makalite planet?"
"She was injured by something," Klath recalled, "When we were returning to the ship. But she did not seem concerned at the time."
The Klingon had been with Natasha when she had been pricked by some of the local plant life back on the planet they had just departed from. But he also remembered that she had quickly checked herself with a tricorder and determined that there was no cause for alarm.
"Really am gonna have to remember to leave that place a bad review when I get a chance," Sunek quipped.
Despite his usual jokes, as was his reaction to most things since he had opted to embrace his emotional side, the Vulcan moved over to Jirel's side to work on the medical scans.
"Hope you know what you're doing," Jirel muttered.
"Me too," Sunek replied, this time without a trace of humour.
In truth, he was the best option they had. Before Natasha had joined the crew, he'd been the ship's unofficial field medic, utilising his core of Vulcan competence and logic that still lurked underneath the external barrier of laziness and bad jokes. He certainly wasn't a doctor. But given that the Bounty's entire roster of qualified medical personnel was currently unconscious, he knew he had to step up.
After a moment, the computer returned the results of the first set of scans, accompanied by a worrying series of urgent alarms. Sunek's informal report only added to the mounting sense of worry in the room.
"Ok, so, what the hell?"
"What is it?" Jirel snapped back at the baffled Vulcan.
Sunek took a second to pore over the results again, but failed to improve on his initial diagnosis.
"Sorry guys," he signed eventually, "I can't make head or tail of this. Computer says she's in a coma, I guess? Most of her vital signs are super weak. But…there's an insane level of brain activity. Like, totally off the charts. Look!"
He pointed at one section of the readouts on the screen as the other three craned their necks to take a look, though the details he was referencing may as well have been written in ancient Iconian for all the sense it made to any of them.
"Meaning?" Klath boomed out.
"I have absolutely no idea."
"That is not useful."
Sunek sighed in frustration and looked over at the persistent Klingon.
"Ok, Klath, let me tell you the story of how I got all my medical degrees. Don't worry, it's gonna be a really short story-"
"We don't have time," Jirel butted in.
It wasn't an annoyed comment directed specifically at Sunek, more of a general statement delivered with an air of detachment. His focus was entirely on where Natasha lay prone on the bed.
"Klath," he continued, "Get back to the cockpit and find the nearest medical facility. A starbase, a ship, a friendly port. Hell, I'll take an unfriendly port if they've got a doctor on their books."
The Klingon nodded and silently exited the room, feeling a little more comfortable inside himself now he was able to actually proactively assist in some way.
"We're not exactly in a busy sector here," Denella pointed out with a worried expression, "Could be a day or two from the nearest port."
Sunek looked up from the scans, obliviously pointing out the part of the problem that Denella had deliberately left unsaid.
"Not sure our patient's gonna hang on for a day or two-"
"Yep, got it!" Jirel snapped immediately, shutting the Vulcan up for the moment as his previously benign demeanour evaporated in an instant.
The Trill forced himself to relocate some residual traces of inner calm, momentarily pulling his gaze away from the comatose figure on the bed and across to Denella.
"Any chance we can get something more out of the warp drive? For when Klath does find us somewhere to head to?"
Denella picked up on the plaintive edge to Jirel's expression, and allowed an understanding smile to cross her face.
"Are you kidding? I can always get something more out of the warp drive."
Jirel mustered a smile back as his engineer departed the scene, leaving him with just Sunek and the comatose Natasha for company. He looked back down at her immobile form and instinctively balled his fists up in frustration, feeling a wave of familiar feelings surfacing inside.
He still wasn't sure how genuine the feelings he had for her were, and how much they were just a combination of the loneliness of space coupled with the night they had spent together shortly after the Bounty had rescued her.
The night he may have misinterpreted as meaning something more than it really had. The night that she had insisted had merely been her scratching an itch after spending six months marooned and alone on a hostile planet after escaping the destruction of the USS Navajo.
Either way, ever since then, his feelings had shifted around and evolved in different ways, but they had never threatened to disappear. And right now, they seemed stronger than ever.
"There has to be something else we can do," he said eventually, looking across and gesturing to the confusing brain scans on the screen, "There has to be some way we can figure out what the hell all that means."
Sunek looked from the worried face of his colleague back to the maelstrom of brain activity on the scans. And his occasionally unreliable sense of tact decided that it probably wasn't the best time to offer the latest quip that he had on the tip of his tongue.
Instead, the Vulcan simply sighed. Because the truth was that one idea did occur to him. An especially stupid and risky idea.
And he had a horrible feeling that Jirel was desperate enough to go for it.
'*'*'
'*'*'
Splendour Island Resort, Wrigley's Pleasure Planet. Stardate 47984.3
"So, yeah, that's about the size of it," the face of Sunek on the body of Salus Hadren concluded as a perplexed Natasha listened on, "The good news is that none of this here is real. And right now, you're actually back on the Bounty, in the medical bay, in a coma."
He paused and ran his entire summation back over in his head.
"I mean…some of that was the good news."
"So, you're saying that this," Natasha replied, gesturing to Sunek's oddly blended appearance, "Is a mind meld?"
"It was kind of a Hail Mary," Sunek shrugged using Salus's broad shoulders, "Although, honestly, this is like no mind meld I've ever initiated before. Usually it's like, I dunno, a great big murky soup of thoughts and memories and feelings. But as soon as I melded with you, I was here."
Natasha blinked to try and clear her mind. Or whatever her mind was in this situation. She did her best to make sense of what was going on, now she knew where she was. She was in her own mind, inside one of her own memories, with the Bounty's irrepressibly emotional Vulcan pilot for company.
She was here, with Sunek.
In bed.
With Sunek.
She quickly pulled the sheets tightly up to her neck in a rush of embarrassment. The thin silk material, which had previously felt so decadent and soothing, now felt cold and fragile. She felt her face burning red.
"Yeah," Sunek inevitably grinned at her reaction, "I was gonna get around to asking about the whole nakedness aspect of the situation…"
His attention drifted down to the impressive body he had found himself attached to, and he prodded at his new chest with one of his new fingers with no small amount of appreciation.
"Also, how'd this guy get muscles like this? I mean, this has gotta be genetic engineering, right? Or does he have some medical condition where he has to do six thousand pushups a day otherwise his head explodes?"
Ignoring the sensation of her ever-reddening face, she pulled the thin sheet even more tightly around her and kept her focus on the considerably more pressing issue.
She was dying.
As unsettling as the sensation of finding herself lying in bed with Sunek might have been, she had to admit that stark fact was significantly worse.
"But," she managed, looking back at the Vulcan/Betazoid hybrid alongside her, who had moved on to flexing his new biceps with curiosity, "What the hell are you doing here?"
Sunek forced his attention back over to her and shrugged again.
"Like I said, Hail Mary. We're trying to get to some sort of medical facility, but we're not sure you're gonna…y'know. Last that long."
Natasha suppressed a shudder, but accepted the Vulcan's candour, even as he started to inspect his new, perfectly manicured fingernails.
"So," he continued, "All we had to go on was the mass of crazy brain activity the scans had picked up on, and I suggested the meld as a dumb idea to see if I could figure out what the hell it all was. Apparently, it was…"
He paused and took in the intimate scene that he had unwittingly gatecrashed.
"This."
Natasha was now sure it wasn't possible for a human being to get any redder without spontaneously combusting.
"Still," the Vulcan continued breezily, "This might actually work to our advantage. I mean, we're back on the Bounty, desperately searching for a medical opinion. And here you are."
She stared back at him, a little nonplussed.
"You want me to diagnose myself?"
"Best person for the job, right? I mean, who else is there? I know my way around a medical scan, but that's about it. Klath'll just ramble on about Sto-vo-kor, you know what he's like. Denella'll probably end up wiring you into the impulse engines. And Jirel's too-"
He stopped himself, recalling the Trill's clear and overtly personal concern for her back on the Bounty, and surmising that this might not be the time to get into all of that.
"Jirel's too what?" she asked.
"Oh. He's, y'know, too much of an idiot."
Natasha shrugged and nodded at the entirely plausible cover story that Sunek had come up with.
"Point is," he continued, "We could definitely use someone to tell us what to do back there. And we don't exactly have a lot of time."
She sighed, again feeling assaulted by the disconcerting situation she had found herself in. But she quickly realised that the Vulcan was right.
"Ok, if what you're saying is-On the assumption that what you're saying is true, then…I need to think this through. And I'd really, really appreciate it if we got dressed while I did that."
She looked around her memory of the suite and saw her clothes where they had been frantically discarded on the other side of the room some hours before, in the throes of passion. Sunek followed her gaze and grinned.
"Hey, be my guest, doc," he replied, gesturing at the long, undignified journey she had in front of her to recover her clothing.
She rolled her eyes and sighed.
"Grow up."
With practised grace, she kept a tight hold of the silk sheet, swung her legs off the side of the bed and walked over to the pile of clothes, pulling the entire sheet along with her, still wrapped around her body. Leaving Sunek lying in bed, with an entirely different display of impromptu nudity than the one he had been hoping for.
'*'*'
'*'*'
Natasha emerged from the bathroom a few moments later, now clad in the light blue dress she had retrieved from the floor. The one she remembered she had replicated for this particular vacation all those years ago.
She returned to find Sunek, still in the body of her ex-lover and still very much naked, flexing in front of the suite's full-length dress mirror.
"Seriously," she sighed, "Get dressed."
"What?" Sunek replied innocently, as he continued to strike a series of elaborate Mr Universe-style poses, "I've never had a body like this before. It's interesting. Hey, you got anything around here I can use to measure this guy's-"
"Get dressed!"
With a fresh flush of embarrassment, she picked up Salus Hadren's trousers from the carpeted floor of the suite and flung them at Sunek. The Vulcan looked at them, raised a reluctant eyebrow, and started to pull them on.
"Fine," he grunted, "But, mind out of the gutter? I was gonna say biceps. Anything to measure his biceps. Not his-"
"Hippocampus."
"Excuse me?"
"You wanted a diagnosis. I've thought about everything you've told me, and you should target the scans on my hippocampus."
"Why?"
"You said my brain activity was off the charts, even though everything else pointed to a coma. Well, that's the area of the brain that deals with managing memories. And that's clearly still working."
She gestured around at the scene as Sunek buttoned up the dark grey trousers and pulled on Salus's tight short-sleeved top.
"Ok. And how will that help?" he asked eventually.
"I remember, just before I collapsed, I felt a tingling sensation in my leg. Exactly where I was stung by that thorn back on the Makalite planet."
Sunek nodded, remembering what Klath had mentioned about that incident.
"I scanned myself at the time," she continued, "And the tricorder didn't detect any toxins or poisons, but there was still a lot of residual radiation around. It's possible the scan missed something, and…I didn't think to check when we got off the planet."
Inwardly, she cursed herself for that. Back in her Starfleet days, she performed those checkups after an away mission on countless occasions. It was standard procedure. And even if one crewman forgot, there was a tight chain of command that would correct any oversight. But life on the Bounty wasn't like that. And she wondered if the lack of protocol onboard was starting to rub off on her. She was definitely getting sloppy.
"Ok," Sunek replied, "Weird plant. Got it. But what are we scanning for?"
"Anything the computer sees as out of the ordinary. Specifically, get a full toxicological profile. Look for any trace of a foreign compound or substance. Whatever toxin might have gotten into me, I'm betting it'll be most concentrated around that brain activity."
Sunek raised an eyebrow at this, and nodded in apparent understanding as she continued.
"There's plenty of biological toxins throughout the galaxy that have psychoactive or psychotropic properties that target the brains of the infected. If the computer can isolate a sample, then it can hopefully synthesise an antidote. Or at least tell you what you'll need to make one."
She paused for a moment, certain that there was something else she was forgetting. Oblivious to her additional concerns, Sunek shrugged his borrowed shoulders.
"Ok, sounds like a plan. I'll just-"
"Sunek," she said quickly, ignoring whatever it was she might have forgotten and looking to address a different concern she had, "Can you-If that doesn't work, will you be able to come back? Meld with me again?"
She tried to keep the question as professional sounding as possible, but she couldn't help but allow a modicum of fear to creep in. Now she knew where she was, and what was happening, she didn't want to be left alone. Trapped in her own mind.
"Wish I could tell you," Sunek replied, betraying no evidence he'd picked up on the deeper aspects of her question, "Like I said, this is a weird one. There are examples of Vulcans sharing specific memories with others via a meld…"
He tailed off for a moment, suppressing his recent experience of such a procedure, when one of his old colleagues from the V'tosh ka'tur had forcibly melded with him to share a number of painful memories which had effectively brainwashed him into joining his quest for vengeance.
Satisfied that he'd buried that particular issue, he focused back on the immediate situation.
"But, um, that's not what happened here. I guess when I initiated the meld, I just tapped into whatever was going on in your brain right now, this one vivid memory."
Natasha nodded, without entirely understanding. She knew that, while mind melds had been practised for thousands of years on Vulcan, there was still an awful lot that medical science couldn't fully explain about them.
"Y'know," Sunek continued with a telltale grin, "A vivid memory of the time you hooked up with a Betazoid with a huge-"
"Sunek."
"Fair enough. That time I was actually referring to his-"
The Vulcan's latest lewd comment was interrupted by a sudden loud knock on the door. Natasha froze in horror as she immediately recalled the rest of this particular night, and suddenly all her fears about Sunek leaving her alone disappeared.
"Hey! Assholes! I know you're in there!"
The slightly slurred shout was accompanied by another angry knock, punctuated by the odd scratching sound. Natasha whirled back to the Vulcan/Betazoid, eyes wide with urgency.
"Ok, Sunek, you need to break the meld. Now."
Before Sunek responded, a helpful computer panel on the wall of the suite activated automatically, displaying a video feed from the other side of the door. It was another perk of the Splendour Island resort, allowing guests to see who was calling for them without even tapping a button.
In this instance, the screen displayed an image of Ensign T'Vess, impatiently clawing at the door. The Caitian was teetering uncertainly on her feet, her usually perfectly styled fur was matted and unkempt, and her light summer dress was creased and ruffled. All of which suggested that the young ensign had enjoyed plenty of the resort's available intoxicants before this impromptu visit.
"I said open up, Nat! I wanna word with you and your loverboy!"
Natasha glanced up at the ceiling and sighed, idly wondering if it was possible for her to forget the rest of this memory.
"You never told me you were friends with a Caitian," Sunek grinned, ignoring the earlier suggestion for him to leave, "I've always had a bit of a thing for Caitians."
"This was supposed to be our vacation!" T'Vess continued to rant through the door, "We were supposed to be sti-hic!-cking together! Just us girls!"
The angry ensign paused for a moment. The video feed showed her doubling over and making an unfortunate sound that was either a very drunken belch or a very badly-timed hairball.
"Sunek, please," Natasha persisted, "You really, really need to leave. Do the scan, and start the treatment."
"Ok, But weren't you worried about me not being able to get back if-"
"I've changed my mind," she said quickly, grabbing his arm for effect, "You're not seeing any more, ok? This is absolutely not something I want you experiencing with me."
She wasn't quite sure why she had grabbed his arm. It wasn't like she could frogmarch him out of her own mind. Still, she wanted to keep him away from the door.
"If you keep ig-hic!-noring me," T'Vess persisted, "I'm gonna tear this door down!"
To back up her threat, she returned to clawing at the metal of the door with her claws.
"Come on, doc," Sunek offered, "Let the nice cat lady in. What's the worst that could happen? It's not like the three of us are gonna end up-"
He paused as he saw a flicker of something on her face, and he grinned wider than he ever thought possible. She groaned softly as she realised she'd betrayed the truth.
"Fine, yes, ok! There's your memory! Me, her and him! Happy now?"
She paused and rubbed her face, trying to ignore quite how happy Sunek did indeed look now.
"I felt guilty about ditching T'Vess on our vacation. So I invited her in, we talked it out, we had some more drinks-a lot more drinks, as it happened, and-Ok, I was young, I was having fun, and I'm not gonna have you shaming me for my sexual history, ok?"
"Hey, who said anything about shaming? This is amazing!" the grinning Vulcan replied, "You know, I had you down as being kinda boring-"
"I mean, the first thing I did when I met you was take you on a treasure hunt, but ok?"
"-But now, I'm seeing you in a whole new light."
"Sunek," she sighed, "Please, just break the meld and run the scans?"
"Ah, I'm sure I've got five minutes to say hello-"
"Now!"
Just as her eyes flashed with exasperated anger at the Vulcan, she heard something. Not coming from him, or the drunk ensign on the other side of the door, but from somewhere else. She couldn't pinpoint the source exactly. It echoed in a slightly unsettling manner, and in a way that didn't match with the acoustics of the suite itself. But regardless of where it was coming from, she recognised the sound itself immediately.
It was the whine of a starship's red alert siren.
She winced slightly as she felt the beginnings of a headache coming on, and turned back to the man alongside her in confusion.
"You hear that-?"
She stopped herself in an instant. Looking back at her, atop the body of Salus Hadren, was the face of Salus Hadren. Sunek was gone.
And then she felt a surge of pain in her head. Her vision blurred, The whole scene around her started to distort. The alarm sound grew louder.
She screamed.
'*'*'
'*'*'
USS Navajo, Kesmet Sector, near Cardassian space. Stardate 52749.3
The deck shook wildly beneath her feet as another wave of firepower struck the crippled vessel.
She couldn't help but stumble as the ship lurched around, her head slamming into the cold metal wall to her side.
Just as she had stumbled nearly a year ago.
Natasha was struck by the horrible clarity of the memory. The smell of burning, the distant screams of pain, the violent twitches of the Navajo's shuddering death throes as shot after shot of Jem'Hadar ordnance struck home on the hull of the once mighty vessel.
One second, she had been at the Splendour Island Resort, and now she was here, aboard the Excelsior-class starship.
"No," she whispered to herself, "Not this…"
She was reliving the destruction of the ship. The deaths of all her colleagues. The disaster that only she was destined to escape from. To run away from.
She was reliving the one part of her life she never wanted to relive.
"This is the bridge," she heard the voice of Captain D'Vora sound out over the alert sirens, just as it had done at the time, "I repeat: Abandon ship. All hands to the escape pods."
The captain's voice was exactly as it had been. Calm, measured and clipped. A picture of dignified and orderly serenity to the bitter end.
The deck shook again. Another scream sounded out from somewhere in the chaos. She knew that in reality, she had continued to walk on. That just around the next corner would be a bank of escape pod doors, all lowered and ready for boarding.
And he would also be there. The bloodied and dying junior officer that she had left behind. The ensign in the corridor.
"Warning," the Navajo's dispassionate computer sounded out, "Structural integrity failure in progress."
She screwed up her face and forced herself to concentrate. To concentrate on anything but the memory that was playing out all around her. If she really was dying, she was damned if this was going to be the last thing she remembered.
As the Navajo burned all around her, she felt the headache return with a vengeance, and the scene began to distort.
And she kept on running.
'*'*'
'*'*'
"Seriously, why are you grinning so much?"
Sunek's demeanour had a tendency to annoy at the best of times, but given the circumstances right now, it was seriously getting on Jirel's nerves.
Since he had broken the meld with the unconscious Natasha, the aforementioned grin had remained resolutely plastered on his face, and he seemed in no hurry to explain it. Despite how little about their current situation seemed to merit such a reaction.
They were working side by side at the medical computer. Or, more accurately, Jirel was watching on as Sunek worked to put Natasha's diagnostic plan into action by focusing the scans on the hippocampus. Their patient remained motionless on the bed in front of them, but Jirel was finding it too difficult to look directly at her, so he kept his focus on the computer screen.
And on Sunek, and his grin.
"No reason," the smiling Vulcan shrugged as he worked, "Just, y'know, thinking about how there's three of us in here at the same time. Three people, all together. That's cool, right? When there's three of you?"
Jirel had no idea what to do with any of that. He knew that it had to be at least the tenth time that Sunek had made an unsubtle reference to the number three since he had broken the meld, and he was beginning to wonder whether it was some sort of hidden code that Natasha had somehow managed to imprint on the Vulcan. A code that needed to be cracked in order to solve the mystery of her ailment.
But before the Trill had time to venture much further down that rabbit hole, the computer chirped out an urgent sound, indicating that the tests were complete.
Jirel's hopes of a swift resolution to the crisis were immediately extinguished by Sunek's grin giving way to a look of confusion as he studied the results.
"Huh," he mused as he chewed his cheek.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Jirel urged, peering at the mostly unintelligible series of charts and readings that were displayed on the screen.
"Computer can't find anything around the hippocampus. Nothing conclusive enough to give us a full analysis anyway. Tox screen, chemical breakdown, nothing worked."
"So?"
"So, this plan sucked."
Jirel shot daggers back at Sunek, making his opinion on that comment abundantly clear.
"What?" the Vulcan said defensively, gesturing to the unconscious Natasha, "Don't look at me, it was her plan."
The Trill shook his head in frustration, still avoiding looking down at the patient.
Truth be told, he had kept a close watch on her all the time that Sunek had been in the meld, while he had been the only fully conscious person in the room. At one point, the swirling mass of worries he was feeling inside even caused him to reach out and clasp her hand, to try and offer some sort of support to the immobile patient.
Almost as soon as he had done it, he had thought he heard a noise outside, and had quickly pulled his hand away again, doing his best to adopt the demeanour of the sort of person who would never consider holding a coma patient's hand for moral support.
Still, in a weird way that he couldn't quite fathom, just for that second or two, it had felt like he was helping.
As he contemplated their latest dead end, he felt a sense of palpable frustration join the worry he had inside, but he elected not to take it out on Sunek any further. The Vulcan, while he could be lazy, and insubordinate, and annoying, and everything else, was clearly trying his best on this one. And right now, he was the only available medical option the Bounty had.
"So," Jirel sighed in the end, keeping his tone measured as he idly itched his spots, "We've still got nothing?"
Sunek felt the need to check over the results again, but he soon looked back at the Trill with his best approximation of an apologetic face.
"Sorry buddy," he offered, with more than a hint of sincerity, "There's definitely some sort of foreign compound in there wreaking havoc, but the computer can't get enough data on whatever it is to get a full picture. It's like it's…hiding from us or something."
Jirel suppressed a shudder at that comment, and felt his tone growing a little less measured.
"So that's it?" he grimaced, "We've got no plan? No ideas?"
Before Sunek could reply, another alert chimed out from the computer. And even Jirel knew that this one hadn't been planned.
"Crap," Sunek reported, "It's worse than that. Her lifesigns are dropping again. Like, way down. Whatever the hell she picked up from that stupid plant, it's spreading."
Jirel gripped onto the side of the computer monitor with enough force to make his knuckles glow white. It wasn't an action that was lost on the observant Vulcan.
"We've got to do something," the Trill muttered, half to Sunek and half to himself.
Sunek sighed deeply and mustered a shrug.
"We do have one option," he pointed out, "I could go back in."
'*'*'
'*'*'
Denella bounded into the Bounty's cockpit, her face streaked with its usual coating of grime and dirt after a prolonged period of engineering work in the Bounty's small engine room.
"Try increasing speed now," she said as she slid behind her engineering station at the rear of the cockpit.
At the front of the cockpit, Klath sat somewhat incongruously at Sunek's usual pilot's console and tapped at the controls in front of him. After a second, there was a slight, but perceptible shift in the procession of stars streaking past the cockpit window, and Klath turned back to her with a satisfied nod.
"It worked," he reported, "Our speed has increased by 4.7 percent. ETA now 19 hours."
Denella couldn't help but smile with pride. Not so much at herself for managing to squeeze out another improvement from the Bounty's ageing systems, but for the Bounty itself.
"Attagirl," she said with satisfaction, gently tapping the top of her console for effect, "I said you could do it, didn't I?"
Klath stood from the pilot's chair now their course was steadied, and made his way to his tactical console to re-check the latest sensor information.
It hadn't taken long for him to locate a destination for them. They were headed for a well-established neutral port facility in the Beta Ramis system, where they were sure to find medical help.
But he wanted to keep a close eye out for anything he might have missed. Because both he and the Orion alongside him knew that they were still a long way off their target, and it was unlikely Natasha would last that long. Even if Denella had managed to trim some three hours off their flight time.
Their efforts were, in a lot of ways, performative. But as neither had been able to offer much assistance in the medical bay, at least here they could feel as though they were being useful. Even if they had both conceded in their own minds, perhaps not useful enough.
As he sat down at the more familiar tactical console, Denella continued to butter up the ship.
"You never cease to amaze me, you know. Always got a little bit more to squeeze out of that warp drive of yours, haven't you?"
Klath couldn't help but express a grunt of amusement at the continuing theatrical performance from the engineer. A grunt that wasn't missed by Denella herself.
"Problem?"
Klath paused in his latest check of the sensors to glance over at the green-skinned woman. He had always been baffled by the apparently universal predilection for engineers and technicians, regardless of what fleet they served, to anthropomorphise their vessels.
Even Klingon engineers were not immune. During his time in the Klingon Defence Force, he had once served on the same ship as a chief engineer who insisted on performing the Death Howl whenever he heard one of his former ships had been destroyed in battle. He had never dared ask whether he truly believed that a Bird of Prey could enter Sto-vo-kor.
Klath knew that Denella's own relationship with the Bounty wasn't quite that delusional. But on occasion, he felt it might be a close run thing.
"Your conversation is…unnecessary," he offered to her as an explanation for his grunt.
"Hey," she said defensively, "It works, you know? The old girl definitely responds better if you say the right thing to her."
"The ship is not responding to you, Denella," he countered, feeling himself slipping into the argument despite himself.
"Then explain the 4.7 percent increase in speed. Yeah, ok, a bit of tinkering, maybe. But also a hell of a lot of compliments. And you deserved every last one, didn't you?"
She patted the console again, as Klath rolled his eyes to the ceiling.
"I suspect," he offered, "The…tinkering had the more substantial effect."
Having got his comment in, he quickly snapped his attention back down to the sensor readouts, before she could offer a further retort. Instead, a moment of silence descended.
"We're still too far away, aren't we?" Denella said eventually, entirely more seriously.
Klath considered her comment as he tapped the sensor controls. He knew that it was important for him to temper his reactions to such medical emergencies onboard the Bounty.
Back before his discommendation, such crises rarely afforded too much concern inside the Defence Force. If a warrior was badly injured or sick, either they would recover to fight another day, or they would not, and instead gloriously enter the afterlife. It was usually as simple as that.
But he knew that those options offered no comfort for the Bounty's crew. So, instead, he took a moment to find some appropriate words of support to ease Denella's concerns.
"She is a strong fighter," he pointed out, recalling what he had seen of Natasha since she had joined the Bounty's ragtag crew, "I am sure she will endure against this disease."
"Still," she persisted, "We're nearly a day away. That's a hell of a long time to endure."
Klath went to offer another response, but then spotted something curious on the long-range sensors that gave him reason to pause and verify the readings.
"Perhaps," he grunted, "Not as long a time as that."
"What do you mean?" she asked, jumping up from her own station and bounding over to check the readings for herself.
"I have detected a ship, six hours away. Intercepting them would take us off course for Beta Ramis, but I believe it is likely they would have the facilities to assist us."
"What makes you so sure?"
Klath gestured down to the sensor readings as Denella arrived next to him, and she immediately realised that Klath might be onto something.
'*'*'
'*'*'
"The Son'a?"
Jirel stared back at Klath and Denella with a distinct lack of credulity as they stood side by side in the doorway of the medical bay.
"Makes sense to me," Denella shrugged, "We need medical assistance, and who better to ask than a bunch of people whose lives are one long medical procedure?"
"Yeah," Sunek quipped from next to Natasha's unconscious form, "But isn't their field of expertise more in the, y'know, facelift area? I know you're getting on a bit, but we haven't exactly got time to stop for a nip and tuck."
Denella patiently ignored the Vulcan's predictable comments and persisted with her dubious pitch.
"You know what their ships are like. Huge sickbays, trained staff, medicines, drugs. Plus we can be there way faster than we'll get to Beta Ramis. Or anywhere else."
Jirel reluctantly forced himself to consider the facts. It was true that, when you needed as much treatment as the Son'a did, their ships would be filled with the most advanced medical facilities in the quadrant. They would be hard pressed to find a vessel better equipped to deal with their emergency this side of a Federation hospital ship.
But it was also true that the Son'a were not exactly the most friendly and understanding of people to deal with. Decades of increasingly desperate efforts to extend their lifespans and treat their ailing bodies meant that they could never be entirely trusted. And whatever their ships possessed in terms of treatment facilities, it was usually matched by what they possessed in terms of weaponry.
In summary, he definitely had some issues with Denella and Klath's plan.
"What kind of ship are we dealing with here?" he asked eventually.
"It is a small cruiser," Klath reported, having diligently completed a tactical analysis as soon as he had identified the ship as a possible destination, "It will be heavily armed, but we will be able to signal our intentions before we enter their weapons range."
"Plus, we should have enough spare parts onboard to bargain with," Denella added, "Even if we're a little short of latinum right now."
Jirel still didn't look convinced. He itched his spots thoughtfully.
"And this'll all put us further off course for Beta Ramis?"
"Yes," Denella admitted with a tight nod, "But, even if we keep on that course, you know there's a good chance that she won't…"
She didn't finish her sentence, but she didn't have to. The implication was clear. Jirel looked down at Natasha, suddenly feeling the pressure of every set of eyes in the room waiting on him to make the call.
Sometimes, he hated being in charge.
"Ok," he nodded eventually, keeping his focus on the patient, "Alter course. And signal the Son'a ship as soon as we're in comms range. If they're not gonna play ball, I wanna know right away so we can get back on our old course."
Klath and Denella both nodded back at the Trill.
"And in the meantime," Sunek piped up from the other side of the bed, "I'll see if the doc has any other ideas up her sleeve."
He theatrically cracked his knuckles and lined up his fingers across Natasha's face.
"Boy," he muttered to himself, "I hope that Caitian's still there."
The others in the medical bay glanced at each other. None of them really wanted an explanation for that particular comment.
'*'*'
'*'*'
Starfleet Medical Academy, San Francisco. Stardate 45459.8
Natasha Kinsen felt stressed.
She could feel her heart pounding inside her chest, and the sweat beading on her brow. There was a sense of isolation hanging over her, a feeling of choking, restrictive pressure building up around her with every passing second.
She licked her lips and tried her best to keep her hands from shaking, as she looked down at the body on the operating table in front of her.
Despite every rational part of herself knowing exactly what she was in the midst of, she found herself having to remind herself that this wasn't real. The body in front of her was merely a holographic representation of a patient, specifically designed for her final practical exam for this course.
As a general rule of thumb, Starfleet didn't let even their final year medical students operate on live patients.
"Cadet Kinsen," the man at the head of the operating table motioned, "We are ready to begin."
She looked over and managed as confident a nod as she could muster, despite the turmoil of worry that raged inside her.
Doctor Rahman had been her teacher throughout the duration of this intense final year course on non-humanoid surgical procedures. Under the stern tutelage of the grouchy but brilliantly gifted grey-haired man, she had learned how to successfully identify, diagnose and operate on a myriad of common ailments from species all across the galaxy.
"This examination will count towards 33% of your final grade on this course," Rahman continued.
She had repaired a ruptured bile duct in a juvenile Gorn, reset a damaged Tholian exoskeleton while inside a specialised pressure suit, and even performed emergency surgery on a female Horta to remove a blockage in her cloaca and save an entire clutch of eggs.
Doctor Rahman's course was considered to be the most difficult course in the entire Academy prospectus, and given the rarer lifeforms covered in it, it was not a required section of any cadet's path to graduation.
Indeed, almost everyone who graduated and went on to serve in the fleet could go their entire careers without once having to treat a single one of the species covered in the course.
But Natasha had signed up for it immediately. Out of a sense of confidence, given how high her marks in all of her other classes had been so far, and also out of the need to be challenged.
But, deep down, there was another reason she had jumped at the chance to take part in this most taxing of courses. One that she didn't entirely want to admit to herself.
Ultimately, when all was said and done, she was actually finding life as a cadet far less interesting than she'd been expecting. And more than anything else, taking Doctor Rahman's course was an attempt to alleviate that growing sense of boredom.
Right now, given the stifling panic she felt inside, she had to begrudgingly admit that she'd been successful on that front. Of all the things she was feeling right now, boredom was certainly not one of them.
The operating room, just as fake as the patient in front of her, was empty save for Rahman and herself. He was in position to assist with the procedure, and ultimately to grade her work. It was a holographic facsimile of a standard Starfleet operating area, all antiseptic white and meticulously clean, efficiently laid out and stocked with all the supplies and equipment she would need for the forthcoming surgery.
It was far from the best facility that the fleet had to offer on the latest ships or starbases, but part of Rahman's philosophy throughout his course was to drill into his cadets that, in the real world, things will never be perfect. All the better to prepare them for their long careers in the fleet.
He knew that, from more than twenty years of service on a variety of transport ships and border cutters, that doctors in the field never had the perfect conditions, or the perfect patients, at their disposal.
"The patient requires a triple heart bypass," Rahman explained, continuing his briefing for the upcoming procedure, "He is sedated with 20 ccs of diphenylmethane, administered ten minutes ago, and has been prepared for the procedure. You may commence with your initial incision."
Natasha nodded back at him, taking a moment to try and calm herself and let her heart rate settle before she turned her attention to her patient.
The Bzzit Khaht male lay in front of her. An amphibious species, the body was still slick with water from the preoperative soaking to maintain skin moisture. Or, at least, that's what would have happened had this not all been a projection.
She reached for the small laser scalpel that had been prepared for her, and carefully checked the detail of the readings on a computer screen to her side to locate the correct entry point. Just as she had practised and rehearsed.
It was set to be a long procedure. A triple bypass for a Bzzit Khaht wasn't a reference to the number of heart vessels to be operated on, but the number of hearts themselves. But she had been preparing for this for weeks. She could do it.
She took a deep breath and flicked the scalpel on, bringing it down towards the damp skin of her patient.
And then she paused, just before starting to cut.
This didn't feel right.
She had an unerring feeling that, not only wasn't the patient or the room around her real, but she wasn't real either. Nor was Doctor Rahman. There was a flicker of something in her mind. A memory of being somewhere else. Of being on Wrigley's Pleasure Planet. Which didn't make sense, because from Cadet Natasha Kinsen's perspective, she'd never been there.
Or had she?
"Please proceed, cadet," Doctor Rahman intoned from her side, entirely oblivious to whatever existential crisis she had stumbled into.
She felt her heart rate quicken again. Licking her lips, she brought the scalpel back down to the incision point.
And then she felt something else. A memory of being onboard a Ju'Day-type raider. And Cadet Kinsen was definitely sure she'd never been onboard one of those.
She shook her head to clear her thoughts, and tried to focus on the procedure. She gently cut along the pre-planned entry point, making the first incision into the Bzzit Khaht's damp skin. And then, as she finished the incision, she happened to glance back up at the patient's face.
And she saw, to her horror, that his eyes were open. And, more importantly, that the patient's face was no longer that of a Bzzit Khaht.
Sunek looked down at the fresh incision in the chest of his latest newly adopted body and winced.
"Gotta be honest, doc," he managed, "I preferred being the other guy."