four
The stench of something foul pulled her back from the abyss. Kat opened her eyes and smacked her lips. They felt chapped and raw and the taste... Jesus H. Christ, she'd puked.
"Fuck." The word grated against her throat. Her head pulsed with an ache that spread forward from the back and climaxed at the front. She spoke again, the attempt garbled and half-strangled, and tried to move her arms. Her shoulders shrugged. She activated her omni-tool using the failsafe, three quick twists of the wrist. Light stabbed at her eyes, sending waves of dizziness through her skull to the sore spot at the back. Bile rose in her throat again.
"Kat!" Finch's voice thundered from her tool.
She floated against a wall, or floor, or ceiling. Head and stomach rolling in sickening unison, Kat abandoned her attempt to figure up from down.
"Finch," she murmured in response.
"What the fuck?"
"Touched something." The words were slow and clumsy, as if her lips and tongue belonged to someone else.
"Are you all right? I've been pinging you for ten minutes."
Reflexively, Kat touched her ear. She'd knocked her comm loose. She'd hit her head hard, then. She looked down (or up), stomach roiling as she sought small the piece of hardware.
"The ship rippled, Kat. The damn metal moved like…" Breath pumped through the connection, jagged and short. Kat pictured Finch hauling his large frame through the crawlspace at all speed, bending struts and ductwork. A smile tickled one corner of her mouth. "Like water," he continued. "Activate your helmet, I don't want to lose contact again."
"Aww."
"I'm not kidding around, Kat."
Activating the bubble that would enclose her head and protect her from vacuum, and various other hazards, would enclose the vomit smell. She'd be trapped in a world of puke. An exhalation of disgust scraped past her throat as she moved to do what she was told. Breathing vomit was preferable to breathing nothing. To having her eyes pop.
Fuck.
She made her arms work first, as if they had to pay the price of bile scented air. Her shoulders creaked and pain shot down her spine, pausing to revolve around her tailbone in a sickening swirl. Her stomach heaved. How had she managed to hit her head that hard? The hall was narrow, the walls a resilient mix of plastic and ceramic that was supposed to flex, almost breathe. This was the twenty-fourth century, after all. Ships had skin. They flexed like fucking gymnasts and pirouetted like ballerinas. Even old frigates like the Bataille. Except, this vessel wasn't powered. Flex remained offline. She'd hit a wall of solid glass without her helmet. She had thrown herself into the wall, ass-backwards, and her head had rung like a bell.
Before she activated her helmet, she reached behind her head, half afraid her bare fingertips would sink into a pulpy mess. She found a lump the size of Herschel, but no blood, no brains, nothing but hot and swollen skin to mar the back of her scalp.
The soft scrape of short, sweat-spiked hair touched off a thousand pinpoints of pain across her fingers, however. Kat grunted as she swallowed a yelp and pulled her hand away from her head so she could inspect it. Here fingers were not a black, charred mess. Bitter fluid burned her throat again. In the blue-orange light, her fingers looked as they always did, pale and featureless. Dark smudges at the pad of her thumb and finger tips might be burns. Hesitantly, she licked the tip of her index finger and winced as the shock of contact raced through fried nerve endings. Her suit gloves, if she'd been wearing them, would sense the damage and excrete medi-gel. Her suit gloves, if she'd been wearing them, might have saved her fingers from being burned in the first damned place.
Hand bent to save her fingers more pain, she wiped at her chin, dragging the dense fibre covering her wrist over the mess dribbled from lip to neck and then bumped the tab for her helmet and waited for the bubble of eezo to form around her head, stink and all. Air briefly tickled her cheeks. Kat closed her eyes and floated in a swirl of dizziness while she waited for the recycler to deal with the smell.
Then she flicked her eyes open again.
"Who's there?"
No one answered because no one was there. She'd hit her head pretty hard, not surprising she thought she saw…no, felt a ghost.
"Creepy damned ship."
The empty ship didn't bother her, not really. Was kinda peaceful most days, when she and Finch weren't making noise. In fact, this job, glove expense aside, had been one of the easiest she'd taken in a while. Relaxing, in a way. Good company, good pay. Passable accommodations; having a grav generator in their quarters was a luxury.
Kat pulled a set of gloves from her belt and stuck her hands into them. Her suit embraced the cuffs and a pale green light flickered in the periphery of her vision. Suit containment complete. Her fingers stung and then went pleasantly numb as gel seeped into her skin.
Her ear itched and she ignored it. Couldn't scratch through the bubble. Clumsy suit gloves were good for rearranging boobs and balls, but that was about it. The itch grew more insistent and Kat activated the medic program. She watched the display for a while, head thumping in time with the digits rolling up and off the HUD, none of them really relevant to the lump on the back of her skull or the numb fingers of her right hand. Like a good little program, the suit would start with baseline stats.
She smacked the side of her helmet gently, annoyed by the itch in her ear, and gasped as her vision swam, taking her guts along for the ride. Fuck. She'd just hit her hit head. Don't do that again. She looked over at the panel, the slim outline of one end of it, anyway. It continued to glow, just that one, stupid panel. What the fuck, man? Kat rolled to her side, waited for her dizziness to peak and dip and then pushed gently away from the wall, one hand tugging a tool from her belt. That panel had to come out. Then she could spend her evening filing an incident report, in quadruplicate. And then, Finch could kiss her boo-boos better.
Before she could reach the panel, Kat felt herself bounce backward. She didn't move back, she was pushed.
"Huh?"
She swam forward again and met the same resistance. The lurch back didn't sync well with her aching head. And, of course, the itch in her ear got worse, 'cause being bounced from an invisible wall, every motion jarring Olympus Mons there, on the back of her fucking head, wasn't enough. No. She had to have an itchy damned ear as well. Her bladder would cramp next.
She'd just have to piss in her suit.
Extending one hand, Kat poked at the invisible barrier. The itch in her ear crept toward a sound, a low pitched hum that tickled her memory. Hadn't she heard a hum before? When the panel started to glow.
"Weirder and weirder."
She set her comm to auto send/receive and called the only other person on the channel. "Finch?"
"What's up?"
"Weird shit."
"I'm nearly there."
"I'd come meet you in the skin but I really think I need to get this panel out of the wall first. That's when things started to get weird. I plugged in a panel and it started glowing. Then it shocked me."
"Shouldn't be power, only sync," Finch huffed.
"You're telling me. Burnt my fucking finger." Before throwing her into a wall, where she nearly split her head open and coughed up her breakfast noodles. They hadn't done the sick thing, yet. One of the differences between a hook up and a relationship was the lack of coddling (and cuddling, usually). Wasn't enough time to catch a bug and treat your lover to green-faced and gassy alternative selves. Thank Christ.
She reached out to touch the barrier again. "There's like this invisible bulkhead or something. Maybe it's a failsafe?" An extrusion of eezo designed to protect stupid people from poking their fingers into shorting circuits.
"A what?" Finch asked.