It felt like his head was on fire with pain. In fact, his whole body seemed to hurt. Gaeta opened his eyes, and realized with fear that only his left eye opened at all and even then it was dark. He was lying on his back, it was hard and when he tried to sit up, he hit his head. " Ow!"
He started to panic. He was locked in one of the morgue body lockers, he was sure of it. "Let me out!" he shouted as he started to thrash around, which only made him panic worse since the space he was in was so small.
"For frak's sake, stop moving!" Suddenly it felt like the slab he was lying on was being rolled out and a bright light blinded him. " You just had to wake up."
" Doctor Cottle?" He blinked a few times, and slowly the gruff older man came into focus. " What's… what's going on?" Sickbay made sense considering how awful he felt but for the life of him, he couldn't quite figure out what happened. He'd been playing a game, Starbuck was whooping it up and then… " I think Smash hit me."
" Either that or you rammed your face into a meat grinder for kicks." Cottle took a long puff on his cigerette. " Look, we need to do a brain scan to make sure that the only thing you have to worry about is how pretty you'll look for the next few weeks. So stop squirming and freaking out."
" I thought… that I was in a locker in the morgue," Gaeta said sheepishly. Now that he knew where he was, he felt pretty stupid. A fight, Smash had hit him with… something. Of course he was in sick bay.
" Sure you did. Everyone thinks it's a morgue locker or a coffin, or that the walls are slowly moving in to crush them…" Cottle stopped after a moment. " Well, you probably didn't need that idea in your head, but don't worry. Just don't move. Moving triggers the killing mechanism." With that, he rolled the slab that Gaeta was lying on back into the machine.
Sometimes, Gaeta thought worriedly as he tried to relax, it was hard to tell when Dr. Cottle was kidding.
Commander Adama waited patiently while Dr. Cottle examined the scans. It had been a given that something would happen. Even in normal times, a ship in wartime was a powder keg. With every area understaffed, the crew didn't get to blow off steam with leave. There was really no place to go on leave, anyway. Sure, he could dangle a pass over to the Cloud 9 as a reward for a rare few, but the entire crew was burning out from overwork, and there was next to nothing he could do about it. Fights were going to happen. He just wished this particular fight hadn't happened.
" Well?" he asked. Cottle glared at him, but Adama didn't back down. Cottle didn't scare him. " Good news? Bad news?"
Cottle lit a cigarette. "The good news is that Lt. Gaeta isn't pregnant."
Adama rolled his eyes. Cottle was a damn fine doctor but he could be a real pain in the ass at times. " Good to know, although I hadn't realized that was a concern. Now, the bad news?"
Cottle tapped the scans. " Could've been worse. He's seriously concussed and not going to see out of his right eye for about a week, but no bleeding in his skull and no fracture. You probably don't want him doing any higher math for a while, but he'll be fine."
"Hmm, higher math is why we keep him so busy," Adama said. It was a problem. It wasn't that they didn't have anyone else who could plot an FTL jump, they just didn't have anyone who could do it so fast. Add in the fact that Gaeta was the senior watch officer, and it made him difficult to replace. Impossible actually. " Your recommendation?"
" I recommend you give him a week off to recuperate." Cottle said with a cynical chuckle. " What you'll end up doing is letting me keep him for the next 24 hours for observation, and then eight hour shifts instead of twelve for two weeks. Barring, of course, another life and death crisis." Cottle puffed on his cigarette. " You know, this sort of thing is going to get worse before it gets better. You're lucky we're not talking over a dead body."
" I know." There was always an undercurrent of tension between the airwing and people who supported it. There was blame on both sides. In the old world, it never would have gone so far. Jerry "Smash" Dondel would never have been allowed near a Viper, and Gaeta would have been enjoying his third month of duty on the command staff of Admiral Varley of the Battlestar Olympia. But that world was gone and he was living in the world where not only did he need every man and woman willing and able to sit in a Viper, he also needed his staff officers badly enough that even letting Cottle keep Gaeta for twenty four hours was a hardship.
" What are you going to do?" Cottle asked after a long moment. " You know it'll be bad for discipline. Gaeta looking like someone took an ambrosia bottle to his head is bad enough but it'll be worse if you don't send a message to the crew. The morgue is full up already, and I have better things to do than deal with than the crew assaulting each other."
" I'll send a message," Adama promised. The problem, he thought as he stalked out of the sickbay, was that it wasn't the message he wanted to send.