Part 1 - The Black Ship
Chapter 2 – Doctor Gunn
It was quite some time later that Master Churgeon Saoirse Deatrix Gunn opened the door that separated her office from the infirmary room into which she had guided one Giselle Reiker. She undoubtedly dreaded the conversation to follow.
The Lieutenant – 'Lieutenants,' she corrected herself with her slightly upturned nose still buried in the file of one Lieutenant Jezail Reiker who had, the good Doctor had decided, far more by way of beauty than backbone if her response to her husband's decree was any measure thereof. The alabaster-skinned woman's agate-blue eyes had lingered fractionally too long on the door to her child as if for a heartbeat she had considered staying the extra moments to say goodbye, despite the new fracture to her lower arm, before shunting the thought aside.
As it were, the Lieutenants displayed an inclination to explain neither their abrupt and complete disappearance from their daughter's life nor the reason for her equally abrupt seclusion. 'Quarantine,' she again amended her thoughts with the word the girl's father would have used, 'as if the waif could spread a medically undetectable genetic mutation by sharing air.'
Perhaps that was how he rationalized leaving her office as if his wife had never borne him a child; or perhaps it was that a stern Imperial Navy officer with a pedigree on the Battleship Lacertus regarded his sole, fragile progeny as a poor enterprise on his behalf and was glad for the opportunity to begin afresh; or perhaps, she considered, she herself, a psyker to boot, made him as uncomfortable as his daughter had, and he had decided it would be better – safer – for the youngest Reiker to remain 'with one of her own kind.'
She glanced over her heavy handful of files to find the girl asleep, curled into herself for warmth and huddled on the same straight-backed metal chair in which she'd been left, though a bed and blanket lay not a meter away. Surely she couldn't be six… the slim, deft hands of the skilled churgeon flipped through her stacks in hand to medical charts. Her intense, turquoise eyes flicked rapidly over a height and weight modest for a child two years her junior; perused scans of bicuspid valves and renal fusion; and landed finally on a karyogram missing the final chromosome.
Turner's Syndrome – as she identified with a further moment's thought – was considered a rare but harmless anomaly: an omission, not a mutation, something that would be monitored, but go unreported to the Ordo Hereticus. Ironic, she thought, that being spared despite one condition, young Miss Reiker would be condemned for another; and funny, she considered, that Fate would see such a pretty thing, destined by genetics to remain tiny and childlike (and should her uncanny resemblance to her mother hold, elegantly delicate), supplemented with an intense (certainly tripping the border of 'dangerous') psychic potential.
It was that extreme potential, in conjunction with certain other factors such as the talent's hitherto expression, the child's age, and what she could only mentally classify as 'hardiness,' that had dimmed her hope that little Ellie would survive the arduous process of Sanctioning, even if she wasn't (as the doctor half expected) summarily chewed up and spit out by the enormous sea of mostly mad humanity that inhabited the holds of the Black Ships. Trixie Gunn, herself, had been a sturdy girl, born to grox farmers under the open sky of a quiet, agronomic backwater. At ten when, tall for her age and with a lean toughness bred down to the calluses on her fingertips, she was taken by the Black Ships, those inhabitants she didn't charm with sweet country etiquette and jokes she roughly rumbled with, securing her unassailed passage back to Terra. Sanctioning at the Scholastica Psykana exhausted her double what reigning in a stampede five times a day every day would have, and she pushed herself to avoid the fate of some of her classmates, who fell behind – and were tossed aside. This wisp of a girl didn't stand a chance.
"No-" the girl had spoken in her clear, mellow voice as if to refute the last thought that had crossed the churgeon's mind. Curious, the woman raised her head from her reverie to find the child still sleeping. Despite this, Miss Reiker emitted a panicked, plaintive noise, and her curled form began to rock in the chair without physical effort, as if buffeted by an enormous gale. She repeated the close-mouthed whine higher, her breath becoming heavy, and Trixie was quite suddenly, wholly aware of the Immaterial disturbance centered on – no, her psyker's sixth sense corrected her mind almost immediately – coming from her new ward. By the time she'd made it across the narrow room it seemed as if the induced gravity of the ship had weakened enough for everything not bolted down to float a few inches from the deck.
Though the doctor's psyniscience reached out to dampen the girl's stronger surges of power, such raw, unpredictable talent rendered the effort modestly effective at best. Kneeling before her in her gentlest bedside-manner, she spoke as if the girl were awake and she merely wanted her attention, "Giselle?" There was an almost imperceptible hitch in her breath, which mounted louder and shallower, and the floating objects in the room commenced jittering uncontrollably. "Ellie, can you hear me?" she tried, this time with a warm and firm temperance; a few of the heavier objects in the room thumped down to their rightful place. Trixie's slim, steady hands came to curl lightly around the hyperventilating girl's bony, rocking shoulders.
"I need you to breathe slow for me, darlin'," she prompted, like a mother coaxing a child; the girl's breathing finally steadied with a sob-like whimper of fear.
"Ellie, I need you to sit still'n put your hands down for me." The rest of the room's accessories clattered back into place, and her body settled with tears streaming down her face.
"And now, Ellie," the churgeon said, "I need you to wake up."