Chapter Notes: A slightly longer chapter, but hopefully also a bit more exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who's reviewed and/or faved and/or simply read this story, I appreciate it more than I can say.
Chapter Four
The first two days go great, and Katara's starting to think they might actually get out of this without strangling each other; the thought that something entirely unrelated might go wrong isn't one she's really been concerning herself with, so it's a surprise when she gets pitched out of her bunk in the middle of the night.
It feels like she's falling straight down, so when she hits the opposite wall of her quarters, and then almost immediately falls to her feet on the floor, she knows there's something wrong.
And, sure enough, halfway up the collapsible ladder to the corridor, she starts feeling like she's clinging to the ladder from below, and she hears something fall behind her. A second later, it's more like she's doing a pushup just holding herself away from the rungs, and her mattress slides off her bunk - the bunk's bolted in, like the other sparse furniture in her quarters, or she'd probably have been flattened the first time she fell.
But then everything steadies out, and she takes advantage of the opportunity and rushes up the rest of the ladder.
Toph's there already, hurrying toward the bridge with one hand braced against the wall - not so she can guide herself, her screenreader has a built-in object scanner, but in case of another shift.
"Artificial gravity controller," she yells back to Katara over her shoulder, "something's borked," and then they're falling again, and Katara twists just in time to land on the ceiling on her shoulder, instead of her head.
"Yeah, I'll say," she mutters to herself, as they start sliding toward the wall.
Most of the large things on the Appa are like her bunk, secured, because you never know when a landing sequence might go awry, and if that happens, you need to concentrate, not get stuck running around trying to tie things down. But she can hear some bangs and thuds from the rooms around her, loose tools and boxes and stacks of clothes.
She manages to reach the wall with her feet pointing the right way, and she's just started to steady herself when all the vents start spewing mist.
"There's something wrong with the water recyclers, too," she yells to Toph.
"No kidding!" Toph shouts back, crawling along the wall a little more slowly - the mist must be obscuring her scanner, Katara can hear her earpiece saying, "Obstacle status uncertain," from all the way over here.
Jet's coming up from the stern. He's looping his deactivated shock hooks through the handles of locked panels, and it's working pretty well; he's got a grip no matter which direction he falls next. "Help Toph!" Katara yells at him, and hurries past him, toward Aang's quarters, feet skidding on the wet metal as the gravity changes again.
When she climbs up the floor to pull the hatch over his room open, he's only a few feet away, crouched on the wall and rubbing his head mournfully; but he grabs her hand when she reaches for him, just in time for her to pull him up before another new gravity setting can drag him down to the opposite wall. "Come on, come on," she says, and she's already scrabbling to open the nearest console panel with one hand as he climbs up.
When the panel finally swings open, Aang presses his hand against the glowing keypad beneath it, which is already slick with mist; but almost as quickly, he yanks it back. "There's something wrong," he says, "something in there that shouldn't be-"
"You have to get it out," Katara says. "Whatever it is, you need to get it out - if it gets to the airlock controls-"
Aang turns to stare at her with round eyes, and swallows. "You have to keep me from falling," he says, and she forces her feet - still bare, she didn't even have time to get her boots on - into the wide slanted grate that forms the floor of the corridor. One hand's still wrapped around the panel handle, and she curls the other around the lip of the panel frame.
"You got it," she says, just as the gravity changes again, and he sets his hand against the screen and slumps back into her shoulder as his eyes film over with blue.
By the time Yue manages to fumble her way to the bridge corridor, whatever's gone wrong has hit the environmental controls, and everything is covered in frost - every time she slips her way through another change in gravity, she leaves streaks of bare metal scraped clear behind her.
The mist must have been here, too, because when she looks up at what used to be the wall, Katara is there, hanging half from the floor and half from a panel, and her hair is rimed with ice, looking almost as white as Yue's own. Aang is caught between her arms, against the wall, and his eyes and tattoos are blue and bright as a welding flame. He twitches, a helpless unpleasant motion, and then his brows draw together in a frown of concentration; Yue is watching so intently that the next sudden swing in gravity catches her by surprise, and she almost slams into Katara's back.
She hears a bang behind her, and turns; the last change evidently caught Zuko off-guard, too, and he hit the corner where the corridor leads out toward the hold and caught himself with his forearm. Nothing looks broken, though, and he is clearly far more interested in gaping at Aang, openmouthed.
It is suddenly at least a hundred degrees, streams of water wending down the walls, and Katara's frost-coated hair turns dark again, now dripping wet. Yue remembers herself, and kneels down beside her, ready to brace her - but the artificial gravity hasn't shifted in nearly fifteen seconds, now. A moment later the air suddenly cools to a more ordinary temperature and goes dry as sawdust, the environmental settings struggling to soak up the excess water; and a moment after that, Aang's hand slips from the panel, and he lolls back against Katara's shoulder, eyes closed.
"Is he all right?" Yue says, hushed, as Katara eases him away from the wall.
"I don't know," Katara says, equally quietly, and she lays a careful hand against Aang's forehead. "He's never done anything like that before - never so much at once. Then again," and her voice goes dry, "that much stuff has never gone wrong at once before, either." She stares down at his face for a long moment. "I should go check with Toph - see whether she's figured it out-"
"I'll take him," Zuko says.
He's come up behind them along the corridor, gazing down at Aang pensively before he meets Katara's eyes.
"I can carry him down to the infirmary. Stern, starboard, keep going instead of turning toward the passenger quarters."
Katara sucks in a breath, and nods.
It makes her uncomfortable, to leave Aang behind; but, she reasons, it's not like she's just dumping him on the floor and wandering off. Zuko knelt down and slid an arm around his shoulders, slow and careful, and he's carrying him away down the hall now, easy, like he weighs nothing.
She makes herself turn around, and takes the steps up to the bridge two at a time, shoving the curtain brusquely out of her way.
Toph made it to her chair successfully, and Jet's standing behind her, one fist on his hip, idly tapping the shock hook in his free hand against the wall as he frowns down at the displays in front of her.
"Well?" Katara says. "What was it?"
Water is seeping uncomfortably down her back, and she's started wringing her hair out by the time Toph grunts. "Virus," she says, "somebody slipped my system a virus, the-"
Katara cuts her off before she can get the curses flowing. "How? We haven't been near anybody in days. Who could have transmitted it?"
"I don't know," Toph says, "give me a second to finish tracing it back." She taps twice on her screenreader's pad, frowning out absently at the ship's front viewport as she listens. "It got into - navigation first, it sounds like. I had to re-fix our course when I got in here, we were suddenly headed to Qinwu by way of Seok-Sang-Kwai. Which is a completely ridiculous route," she clarifies, when Jet pokes her in the shoulder. "It must have been a sleeper, set to activate at a specific time: middle of ship's night, and a few days after we got it."
"But where from?" Katara reminds her, shifting closer to Toph's chair so that Jet can slip out of the bridge behind her.
"The nav-fix," Toph says. "I don't know why - I can't think why anybody on the Lanse Xing would've given it to us on purpose, so maybe they got infected someplace else and just passed it on by accident. For all we know, they just had exactly the same problems we did, except a thousand lightyears away and somewhere in hyperspace."
Katara shivers to think of it - if the virus attacked their navigation systems, odds are it did the same to the Lanse Xing, and if their nav-fix to regular space gets disrupted, who knows where the fleet might end up. Everybody knows the story of the Ming Daopian, how a miscalculation led it and the fleet it was towing into the middle of a star; only the ships on the furthest edges escaped destruction, hundreds of thousands killed in an instant. "But it's gone now?" she says.
Toph nods decisively. "Not that I won't be double-checking," she says, "but I'd be surprised if Aang left anything behind."
"I thought you said it was cheating to code with your brain," Katara says, elbowing Toph's shoulder.
"Well, it is," Toph says. "Doesn't mean it doesn't work, though."
Yue still isn't sure exactly what happened, but she can piece together a bare outline for herself: something went terribly wrong somewhere in the Appa's computer systems, and Aang repaired it. Precisely how he did it is beyond her, but it's obvious that it was difficult for him - he's still and quiet in Zuko's arms the whole way down to the infirmary, not so much as fluttering an eyelid, and the only reason she knows he's still alive is because she can see his pulse speeding in his throat.
Zuko sets him down carefully on the bed, and Yue helps unhook his knees from Zuko's elbow. It's funny; he's not that much younger than she is, or all that much shorter, but he looks odd and small lying there. Fitting, Yue supposes. Before, even circled by Katara's arms, with his eyes and tattoos blazing and that determined look on his face, she wouldn't have been surprised if he had stood up and been twice her height.
She only knows the basics, but she does what she can; checks his pulse, his breathing, looks for visible injuries. There aren't any, so she decides to wait. If there is any damage, she suspects it will prove more mental than physical. Whatever he did, it was not the kind of thing that would break something as trivial as bones.
"You saw it, didn't you?" Zuko says quietly. "His tattoos, his eyes?"
Yue looks at him; he is staring down at Aang's face, his expression somewhere between desperate and ill. "I did," she says. "It was an extraordinary feat; I hope he didn't hurt himself badly. It would be a poor reward for saving us all."
Zuko's gaze leaps up to her face when she says it, and she almost shakes her head - what, does he disagree? What does he think happened back there?
"A poor reward," he echoes after a moment, evidently in agreement, and then sighs. "Well, it is his ship," he says.
"Do you really think that's why he saved us?" Yue says, startled. She'll readily admit she doesn't know Aang all that well, and perhaps Zuko's seen something in him that she hasn't.
But after a moment, Zuko shakes his head slowly. "No," he says, "I suppose I don't." He looks down at Aang again, this time in consternation, and Yue can't help but grin; it's a very peculiar reaction to being reminded that your life has been saved for its own sake.
"Hey, back off," someone growls, and Yue turns around to see Jet, the man who's always carrying those hooks, crowding in through the doorway. "What're you doing in here?"
"He's the one who carried Aang down," Yue says, but Jet's expression doesn't change a jot.
"Yeah, well, you're done now, Confederation," Jet says, and swings a hook up. Zuko's resting one hand on the edge of the infirmary bed, and the curve of the hook just brushes the side of it; Yue realizes what Jet's about to do only a moment before he does it, and she's too late to stop the line of blue sparks from coiling up the hook and spitting out over Zuko's fingers.
But she kicks anyway, and Jet has to duck away from the hook as it comes whirling up toward his face, deactivating it with a sharp curse.
Zuko has already bitten out half a cry and yanked his hand away; but he looks all right now, shaking his hand out and glaring at Jet.
Jet is crew, and Yue only a passenger, so she restrains herself. "That was unnecessary," she says, as politely as she can manage.
"Extremely so," Suki says from the doorway behind Jet, and even before she turns her head, Yue can hear the hum of her laser fans igniting. "I realize you're busy, but do you think you could have your little attack of the paranoids somewhere where we aren't trying to make sure Aang stays alive?"
Jet sneers at her, but only a little; he's been on the ship long enough to know better, Yue surmises. "Fine," he says, "but I'm not the real problem here."
"Right this second, there's only one guy waving a shock hook around in the infirmary," Suki says. "Out."