It amused Tex greatly that the great Dr. Rachel Scott had a soft spot in her heart for movie musicals. It was something that no one would have ever guessed about Rachel and probably wouldn't even believe about her. She was so buttoned up usually, but alone she had a sense of humor, which she was opening up to other people.
He stowed away in the lab looking at the media on her computer, trying to pick out something to do later that night. They would have a night to themselves thankfully. It didn't seem like the Captain was going to take them into another battle for a bit.
She squeezed his shoulder and smiled as he looked through the titles. It was nice to have him in here. Bertrise gave him a kind smile and Milowsky gave him an eye, but no one paid him any mind since she was there with him. She still had a lot to do to with the other labs. She answered all their questions at her desk, while Tex had her personal computer.
"So you find anything good?" She asked as she looked over to him.
He nodded. "Oh like you wouldn't believe. Who knew what you were into silly doctor," His wild grin appearing, a rather normal staple of their conversations.
She looked over to Milowsky who was seeing what he could do for the autoclave. He had some experience with the machine, thankfully. Bertrise was standing there beside him, handing him things as they became necessary. They did not care about what was going on in the office part of the lab.
"And thankfully, my privacy has its advantages," She told him as she came over and rubbed his shoulders. She looked at the movies. So far his cursor hadn't moved past Mama Mia. "Sounds like someone else likes things that wouldn't be guessed either,"
"Oh, well you know Meryl Streep, she's great in anything," He stuttered, trying to look past her, see if anyone else was looking. When he saw that they were looking at the Autoclave, he looked back to her, "But yeah, I think I found something," He said. "I should get out of your space so you can work?"
She looked back at the other two who were now looking at them and looked back to Tex and nodded, "Take that," She said as she pointed to her personal laptop, "And I will see you tonight in my cabin," She said as she gave him a kiss on the cheek, which he thought, left just a trace of her lipstick through his beard.
When he came out, he saw Burk and Ravit who looked at him with big smiles, "Look, I don't know what you guys think you saw, but you can leave now," He said as he walked backwards and almost into a hatch. He caught himself right in time though and kept going the proper way around, back to Rachel's cabin.
He could have swore he heard laughter coming from down the hall, if it was because he nearly got himself tangled in a hatch or because of whatever they thought was funny about him and Rachel, he didn't worry too much about it.
As he opened up the door to Rachel's cabin, he got the order that they were going to Quiet Two, which meant no shoes and no talking, which was a little weird to him, but as they say when in rome, do as the romans do, so he did what he was asked of and took his shoes off. He was allowed his cards, because who knew how long they might be embroiled in quiet two.
He was set up with Chung and a few others who had been in the officers quarters, while he assumed that Rachel, and Milowsky were allowed to stay in the lab, but had their door opened. That was the good thing about her lab being on an open air deck. The whole thing could find quiet. And they weren't going to stop the flow of the vaccine just because of an order to be quiet.
He nodded to Chung who nodded back, and flipped cards. He made a completely silent, but complete show out of what cards were good for him and what cards were bad. He mouthed words which Chung agreed with or not by mouthing back to him.
This stayed that way for awhile, an hour or so, he thought as he checked his watch. He just kept flicking his cards into the pile. He would restack them in different patterns trying to make the stack a different way.
Someone tip-toed into the lab and demanded that Rachel come quickly. They did the best they could go as quietly as possible through the open air decks, but they had to go through some hallways too and unfortunately, she had not been asked to take off her shoes. She did however keep them as on the ground as she could, trying not to make noise in the process. She understood the aspects of this situation which made it untenable to be caught by a submarine.
When the soldier looked through the hatch and stopped, moving out of her way, she opened it, to the open air deck and looked at the situation that was appearing in front of her. It was a bloody mess. A man who appeared to be choking on something, Slattery standing over him, Doc Rios giving him an ultrasound.
"What's going on here?" She asked.
"You're right," Doc Rios confirmed to Slattery. "There's something there. It's causing damage."
Slattery looked to her and looked down at their prisoner. "We have to open him up. You're the most qualified," He told her plainly.
She looked around the deck and saw nothing at all to set it up, and they were at quiet two. "What?" She asked. "Here?"
"Can't take him below decks. Not while he's thrashing around like that," He told her without looking at her as he kept his eye on what Doc Rios was doing.
She looked at the man who was clearly resistant to the sedation that he was being given, something that given the way that he was patched up, he should have been begging for.
She shook her head. "I'm not in the habit of operating on somebody who's clearly resistant to help," She told Slattery. "I'm not even sure that it's legal," She told him.
Conversations around ethics often happened, more often on this ship than perhaps in the real world. After all, there was the ethics of lying to everyone in order to preserve the nature of the mission. There was the ethics of who needed to know what and when. It was the complicated nature of their work that managed to have so many conversations about the ethics and legalities. Slattery wanted her to wave all that away when it was in their best interest to keep someone who they imprisoned, a decision she already had weird feelings about, alive at any cost?
"He could've been broadcasting to an enemy sub this whole time," Slattery said in his deepest commander voice.
Doc Rios was informing them of the patient's status and it wasn't good. He was bleeding internally and the pressure was dropping in his body. He was going to die if he didn't get help.
Burk and Slattery were in favor of just throwing him overboard, letting the poor bastard drown.
She couldn't do it like that, "Alright, I'll do it," She said, cutting that conversation off at the root. "Where's the equipment?" She asked.
Doc Rios volunteered to get it, first being a backboard so it was easier to move him around when they had to. The next was getting various things from medical into the open air deck. It took a chain of people including Tex, who were instructed to look at each other when they were moving the equipment, but still under strict instructions not to talk.
When O'Connor hit the oxygen tank against the railing everyone stopped for a minute. Tex gave him a look to be more careful as he passed it onto the next person, who kept the chain going until it got to Rachel.
Rachel sliced the patient open as she worked with Doc Rios and Doctor Milowsky to keep the work steady. "It's an incredibly large bleed," She said looking at the screen as they poked through his system. "We don't have time to blood type him. We have a universal blood donor onboard? Somebody with O-Negative Blood?" She asked.
It was quiet for a few moments, before he spoke.
"Hell, he can have my damn kidney, if it'll get that thing out of there any quicker," He said as he rolled up his sleeve and one of the other doctors prepared the blood bags. He did it easily the blood pouring into the bags.
She continued working on Juan Carlos, they used the blood when they needed it. She had been working for awhile when she came to a medical conclusion about whatever was in the man, "It's punctured the esophagus. Currently lodged in the wall of the lower left carotid just above the union at the ascending aorta,"
Doctor Milowsky explained to Slattery what needed to happen. He was not going to get anything immediately. She directed Dr. Milowsky further through what she needed to happen. It was a tricky business this one. Juan Carlos had managed to make quite a mess of insides.
They were still going when the ship rocked to one side and a big noise came up from the side. "What was that?" She asked, horrified about what the answers could be.
"That was our torpedoes," Mike said.
She closed her eyes and took a breath. She had to focus on doing the surgery or else Juan Carlos would definitely die. She couldn't worry about torpedoes or what the Captain was saying over radio, except brace for impact. They had to as much before that impact.
Mike went to the railing and looked out over the water. "You're clear, doctor," He said as he looked back to her, once he was sure that they would not be hit by an incoming torpedo. That would have been just their luck, but for once, luck was on their side with this.
When the surgery was finished, she got to work on getting the foreign object out of Juan Carlos. She probed quickly and precisely and picked it up delicately with her medical tweezers. She pulled it out gently, so as not to undo all the work that they had just done. "I'm not exactly sure that this is precisely what you were looking for," She said as she brought it out, "It's a…flash drive," She said as she examined it, just to make sure she was really seeing the right thing. "Not a beacon,"
When Juan Carlos had stabilized and it was okay for them to be away from him, she went further out on the open air deck and looked to the sea. This had been home for so many months and now they were actually home and why did it still feel like they were adrift, no further with their plan?
After all of that they were able to take Juan Carlos back to medical, his blood pressure was dropping. They needed to let him rest and actually be in a sterile environment. Hopefully operating on him in an open air deck like that wouldn't fill him with bacterial infections, but she didn't know.
And then again, he started slipping away. She and Doc Rios did everything they could to try and keep Juan Carlos there, but it was no use. He was just gone. It was like he realized he would never get his mission completed and so he simply stopped caring. Along with that Mike was the one delivering even worse news.
She chucked her gloves off, "Why would they want to destroy all the labs? It doesn't make any sense," The bitterness in her voice. It was palpable. They had done all that work setting everything up, making sure that the world started off better than it was and now all of it was gone? That didn't make any sense. How could anyone want that?
"Unless they already had the vaccine. Maybe that's how they conquered Europe." Mike asked as he looked between Juan Carlos and her. Doc Rios wondered about the possibility too.
"I don't see how anyone could have the primordial but me. Europe was decimated. It was one of the hottest zones thanks to Neils." She said, anger and bitterness in her voice. She took a second to breathe and calmed herself down, "But yes, I suppose it's possible,"
Mike talked about how Juan Carlos had never asked for the vaccine. What the thought process might have been. But then he said something very interesting, that Juan Carlos had said 'everyone on my ship is like me,' and she made sure to get some extra vials of his blood.
She went to her lab with the vials and analyzed his blood with the tests that she had produced to see the immunity of people. It did not show the cure. It showed something much different.
She went to Tom's office immediately. She shut the door quietly and he looked at her with earnestness, "No response yet on the roll call for the labs," He told her. "It's possible they lost their comms-"
"I know. I know why they bombed the labs," She stopped him. She didn't need to hear the gory details of what the labs might look like in the best case scenario right now. "And why they're trying to destroy Solace. It's not because they were vaccinated," She told him as she sat down on his couch's armrest, uncomfortably so, but she needed to be able to get up at a moment's notice.
"Quite the opposite," She added. "I just tested Juan Carlos's blood. It turns out that he's naturally immune," She told him.
"None of the mercs on Solace wore CBR gear. Is it possible they're all immune? Everyone's like him?" He asked.
"I cross referenced his blood against Bertrise's," She continued as she got up and pushed the hair out of her face, "Natural immunity, as it turns out is a tad more common than I initially thought. Anywhere between one and five percent of the global population,"
Tom, who was just doing his job, laid out the bad news in front of her. They had an army of maniacs who conquered Europe, bombed the labs, on a nuclear powered submarine that never runs out of fuel, and that's what they had to contend with. The only thing that she did not understand about it was that they didn't have the flash drive with the coordinates, so how would they have known where all the labs were?
She was dismissed from Tom's office and she made her way back to her cabin in a fog. When she opened it up, Tex was there and she just started crying.
He held her in his arms, and brought them both back till he was sitting in the chair and she was leaning against him, just sobbing. She had been able to do nothing of value today. Her labs might be gone. Juan Carlos was dead. Potentially nothing that they did mattered when it came to this band of crazies.
They did not end up watching Mama Mia, that would have to wait for another time. Another day when things weren't so frantic on this ship, if they ever got one again. Tex smoothed her hair and let her cry it out. She needed this. She needed so much to be vulnerable. She was the immovable object to everyone else, but with him, she let him in. He didn't know why it had happened, but he loved her so much. To be allowed to be let in like this was a gift.