Amazing as it is, I've actually managed to finish my third piece of fanfic. This is it. Last chapter. Thanks for reading. :-)
"So, do we know anything about what's waiting us down there?" Randall, the med technician asked.
Sarah Chambers shook her head. "Not really. Captain Gideon's there, since he contacted us, and there's an emergency of some sort, if he asked for a medical team. My best guess is that Galen's there too, considering that no one has heard from him in a while, and he was supposed to be looking for the Captain."
"I've got visual," Trace called from the shuttle's controls, and Chambers left her chair, moving to the one next to him.
He showed her an outside camera picture, and magnified it to reveal two figures huddled close to the ground. Matthew and Galen, as far as she could tell from the hazy zoomed image, so her guess had been a good one. They were wearing regular clothes – no breathers, no suits, nothing at all to protect them from the unfriendly atmosphere and the freezing surface temperature. Incredible, she thought to herself. What were they doing out there like that, hadn't they got the least bit of common sense? Or perhaps this was why Matthew had asked for a medical team. Had he known in advance that they'd be forced to spend time outside? She couldn't know until they got there.
"All right, people," she addressed her team – Randall plus two nurses. "It seems they're out there on the surface without protection, and if they've been there ever since the Captain called, well, you all know that's not promising. Even if they haven't, we're probably facing some degree of hypothermia and oxygen deprivation. Thermal blankets and O2 at ready."
Trace Miller brought the shuttle down elegantly, like a ray of the rising sun, landing just some feet away from their target. "See? When Matheson says fifteen minutes, I can bring her down in eleven," he said, quite pleased with himself.
When he took a closer look at the target of their rescue flight, and his smugness faded. Unlike he had expected, the Captain and the techno-mage hadn't stood up to wave and greet their saviors – instead, they looked still as dead. "Oh, no."
The rescue team jumped out of the shuttle, wearing breathers and thick parkas, and ran to their patients. The first question was, as always, whether it was safe to move them. There was something oddly touching in the posture they were in, Matthew lying with his face resting on Galen's chest. Chambers almost felt sorry to disturb them. But since a quick check showed no indication of spinal injuries, they quickly loaded the two men on stretchers and carried them into the shuttle.
"They've both stopped breathing – start the oxygen – Trace, take us back, quick, and keep it smooth," Chambers yelled.
"I'm always smooth, ma'am, and I bet I can get you there in nine minutes," Trace replied, but she wasn't really listening.
It didn't take her long to check Matthew, and she didn't find anything critical. He had already started breathing on his own. Aside from the circumstantially understandable lack of oxygen and low body temperature, he had what looked like a PPG burn in his leg, one that had probably been very painful, but wouldn't be difficult to fix. She asked one of the nurses to clean and dress it, and since he'd lost some blood, she called for a transfusion. Chambers didn't think any of this was why the Captain had called for a medical team. She turned around to see to her other patient.
Randall shook his head from Galen's side. "Doesn't look good. He's in shock, and O2 sat just refuses to go up ."
Someone was yelling. "It doesn't matter what I said before we got to them! You don't waste time wrapping blankets when you've got every sign of serious chest trauma right in front of your nose!"
Gideon just wanted to go back to sleep. He could afford that, now. He recognized Sarah Chambers's voice. They had made it. Those critical fifteen minutes had passed. They were in good hands, and they'd be back aboard the Excalibur in no time. But then, why was she shouting like that? And where was Galen? Had he really made it as well?
He turned his head, trying to blink the worst of the remaining sand away from his eyes. Galen was right there next to him, his back propped against the wall. He wasn't looking much better. Maybe even worse. Most of the rescuers were working on him. And Chambers seemed angry at them. Or extremely worried. Probably both.
Gideon grabbed the oxygen mask someone had placed over his face and tore it away. "Doc? Doc! What's going on? Is he going to be okay?" He knew he was babbling, but he went on. "He got stabbed in the back, I pulled the knife out with my own hands, and he's been coughing up blood, I'm pretty sure he's been bleeding internally for a good while – he wasn't breathing – I couldn't hear his heart-"
"Captain, we're working on it. Just take it easy. Randall, I want to hear some results right now!"
"I'm sorry, Doctor, I didn't – whoa," the technician she'd been yelling at let out, peering at his scanner readings. "Massive hemothorax on the left side. Can't pinpoint the bleeding, seems to be coming from multiple cuts."
"Trace, how long until we're there?" Chambers called out.
"Uh, the Excalibur's in orbit and moving away from us, so I'd say seven minutes," Gideon heard Trace Miller's voice coming from the cockpit.
"That's seven minutes too long. You've got to be faster, Trace. And Randall, we've already wasted enough time. Prep him for chest tube insertion."
"Doc? What's it?" Gideon asked anxiously.
In the blink of an eye, Chambers was right there, her face in front of his, her steady hand on his shoulder. "There's blood around his lung that really shouldn't be there, and we've got to get it out. Matthew, this isn't going to be pretty, but he's going to be just fine. The injury really isn't that complicated, it's nothing we can't handle. Just go back to sleep, all right?"
Gideon didn't want to go to sleep, not really. He needed to see what they did, he had to be sure that Galen would be all right. But it was so pleasantly warm here, and he was so tired, and his leg wasn't aching anymore. And Galen would be fine, Chambers had said so. Gideon closed his eyes.
Something wasn't quite like it should've been. Galen couldn't point a finger at it, but something was off. He hadn't opened his eyes yet, but he knew well enough that he was in the Excalibur's MedLab. Not for the first time, Sarah Chambers had had to step in to take care of injuries that his organelles hadn't been able to mend. And now that he thought of it, he realized what was wrong, though that wasn't quite the word for it. He was breathing, deeply, and it didn't hurt. He had grown so used to the constant pain during their escape that he had almost forgotten what it was like to breathe normally, without needing to think about it at all.
"Galen?"
"Matthew."
Galen opened his eyes and looked up. Matthew was standing next to his bed, leaning on a crutch. Galen didn't need to use his sensors to see that Matthew had recovered well, though he wasn't wearing his uniform yet. Sarah had probably wanted to keep him off duty for a while, knowing that 'take it easy' was a phrase that none of this crew really understood.
"How long have you been standing there?"
"Well, on and off, maybe a bit less during the last few days than the few days before that, but I'd say at least twenty-four hours altogether, give or take a few. You've really kept us on our toes. Doc said they'd fixed everything and that you should be fine, but you just wouldn't wake up. Had us afraid of brain damage, though nothing else pointed to it," Matthew said.
From what the tech told Galen, he'd been out longer than would've been absolutely necessary, not because of Sarah, but because of the tech, though the basic reason was pretty much the same. The tech had wanted to keep him from straining himself until he had enough organelles to cover for those he had given to Matthew. Since it was an act of self-preservation, something necessary for his recovery, the tech hadn't bothered to wake him up and ask his opinion about it. Perhaps that'd been a good thing, since it had been quite successful. Taking a quick look through his organelles, Galen saw that the severe internal injuries he had suffered were completely healed. There wasn't even the slightest sign of the cut in his side where the Excalibur's medical team had put a tube through to drain the blood.
"So, how're you feeling?" Matthew asked.
Galen pushed himself to a seated position, and Matthew sat down next to him.
"I'm fine. Very good, actually. Sorry to have kept you waiting, it certainly wasn't my intention. How's your leg?"
"Fine. Just a bit itchy. Doc says it won't even leave a scar. You know, she was pretty amazed when I told her how long you'd went on during our escape, running and climbing stairs and all with a neat set of holes in your chest. She almost didn't believe me."
"Why Matthew, I didn't have much choice – of course I couldn't have left you to face all that trouble on your own. And yet, to be honest, I believe I'd have died down there without your help."
"If you hadn't come to get me out of there in the first place, I'd have died in one of those fights without even understanding who I was and what I was doing."
"Had I come up with a better plan, neither of us would've got hurt at all."
"If I'd had enough common sense not to go to a suspicions back alley just because of a rumor and with only two men, none of this would've happened."
"Well, had I come earlier, we might have saved the others as well." Despite the guilt and failure he felt, Galen tried to keep his tone light, as if joking with the endless what-ifs, but Matthew saw right through him. Of course, that was because he felt exactly the same way. Yet it was Matthew who found the right words to end it.
"And if pigs could fly... Galen, never mind. I think we're even. We both did some stupid things, and we both fought a pretty damn good fight down there, and we survived. That's all that really matters."
Galen spent a moment considering the details, and then, with a series of suitably showy gestures, cupped his hands and brought them together.
"Do you think this would do?" he asked Matthew, and opened his hands to reveal a tiny, but otherwise perfectly well-proportioned pig. It spread out its pink dragon-like wings and took off, flying a few neat circles around them, before it vanished through the ceiling.