Tiny looked worse, something Jason hadn't thought was possible.

"Talk to me," he said.

Tiny just groaned, and Jason peered into his face, wishing this had happened to any other member of G-Force so he wasn't the one making the medical decisions. "You need some fluids in you."

"Jump?"

"We've got five minutes." He knew exactly where the rehydration solution was, though he'd never fed it to anyone else before. Normally he was the one puking to the point of dehydration.

Tiny didn't even reach for the cup when it was passed to him, just closed his eyes and heaved. Jason's stomach tensed in sympathy. Been there. Never this bad, though. Ten minutes to jump, give or take. Ten minutes in jump. Forty minutes back to base on the other side. Jason considered again just how bad Tiny looked, just how sunken his cheeks were, and realised he had no choice any more. Their medic needed fluids, now, and that meant an IV. He needed to be in sickbay.

"Any chance you can stand?" he asked.

"Not a hope." That was flat despair, and Jason went to the bracelet.

"G-1, I need your help."

Mark wasn't the ideal candidate for this - he was still, to put it kindly, slow and shaky on his feet, still a mile away even from participating in standard G-Force physical training sessions. But he was the only one of the three on the flight deck who was tall enough to be any use.

He appeared in the doorway within seconds, and promptly went white. Human after all, then.

"We need to get him to sickbay," Jason said. No need to comment on the seriousness. "If I get him up, can you give him a shoulder? Tiny, you're going to have to walk a bit. We're out of other options."

The ten yards felt like a hundred. Jason didn't want to think about how far it must be seeming to Tiny. He could feel the big man flinching with every step, hear the thin, thready gasps which were bordering on whimpering.

He'd seen people in a shedload of pain. Been there himself, a few times. Knew how tough Tiny was. The obvious conclusion was something he didn't want to think about.

They carried Tiny rather than supported him over the raised threshold - at least Jason did. Mark clearly couldn't do much except prevent him falling. His commander had a rigid grip on the doorframe, and a look of worried concentration in his eyes which Jason had learned to interpret over the past few weeks. I'm at my physical limit, that look meant. It didn't matter. He'd done what was needed. Jason lowered Tiny's upper body onto the narrow bunk and lifted his hips and legs to follow, as gently as he could.

"Still with us?" he asked.

He got a groan in response, which was better than he'd expected.

"It's your call when we go to jump," Mark said, heading out. "But I'll need you on the weapons if the Spectrans come back."

Jason didn't answer. He'd put IVs in people, of course. Standard paramedic training. But he'd never done it to anyone who needed it for real.

Or anyone this dehydrated. He couldn't feel any veins in Tiny's arm at all. Neither arm. Not even when he'd stripped off his own gloves and tossed them with Tiny's into the storage bin under the bunk. Not even when he'd used the emergency partial birdstyle deactivator and bared the other's arms to the shoulder. Tourniquet didn't work. Flicking it didn't work. Swearing at it didn't work. Nor did swearing at himself. He didn't have time to mess about with hot towels. Asking someone else to have a try wasn't an option. He didn't know any other tricks apart from fish around with the needle and hope, and that didn't work either.

It's got to go in. He tried again, achieving nothing. Tiny was going to look like a pincushion tomorrow.

Tiny might not be alive to look like a pincushion tomorrow.

Time for the emergency techniques. The ones you didn't practice, but were told about for completeness. The ones that, dammit, part time paramedics who only did the course in the first place so the paperpushers could tick the "there's a qualified backup for this role" box weren't ever supposed to need.

Sterile scalpels were individually packed in the drawer under the bunk. Jason peeled one out of its plastic wrapping, set up to make the cut, and stopped. The way his hands were shaking, he'd either cut Tiny's arm off or miss it entirely. Time for relaxation breathing and a lean on the implant. And another disinfectant wipe of his sweaty hands.

He tried not to think about what he was doing as he inserted the scalpel above where the vein had to be and sliced. Not too long, not too short, and absolutely not too deep. His first attempt still didn't reveal the vein, and he didn't want to poke about in the bottom with the needle. Chris could always sew it up later. He took a deep breath and sliced deeper, and finally there was the vein clearly visible at the bottom of it. Jason dropped the scalpel into the sharps bin, grabbed the needle, and it went straight in first time. He'd practiced what to do from there. Check valve, withdraw the needle leaving the cannula behind, flush the line and connect the saline feed. No decisions required here. The only fluid he could put into Tiny this side of jump was saline, and the only option for someone so dehydrated you had to do a cutdown to get an IV into them was to run it wide open. Which, with their IV pump system, meant lining up the arrow on the dial with the little red dot.

The pump started humming contentedly, and Jason set to strapping his patient down in case they should be thrown around. He really should have done that first. It was fortunate that his patient hadn't woken up enough to flinch while having scalpels stuck in him. That would have made even more of a mess than Jason had made on his own. He needed to think much more clearly. Tiny's life was depending on it.

And his bracelet lit up. Bird Scramble. Mark needed him right now. Jason swore again, and yanked the last three straps into place. He couldn't leave Tiny unrestrained in here.

"I'll be back," he promised. "Hang in there, Tiny."

He didn't get a response.