So. New galaxy.
If anyone had asked Scott Ryder six hundred years ago, he would have joked about installing a snooze button on his stasis pod. Was the cluster still too inhospitable and hostile? Just smash that snooze for another couple hundred years.
Of course, after a medically-induced coma, it seemed in poor taste, now.
Scott did not awaken to the fully realized Andromeda they'd been promised, nor did he awaken amidst a crisis like his dad and sister had. Not to say that the dulcet tones of Doc Harry's voice were not without their charms while he removed Scott's vent tube, of course. Airways were important.
It was just he'd missed a lot. And based on the preliminary assessment from Doc Harry, it was very likely he'd miss out on even more. Scotty passed his post-vent swallow eval, at least, so no more clear liquid diet as he tackled PT. All he had to focus on was rebuilding muscle mass and he supposed that, that was better accomplished through therapist-led exercises and the mass consumption of steaks and potatoes instead of FTL travel and saving the galaxy with his not-so-big sister.
But a weight room with a burly meat head of a physical therapist cheering him on just seemed so depressingly mundane comparatively. It had Scott vowing that whatever the doc had predicted he'd accomplish in months, he'd do in weeks and the benchmarks measured in weeks would have be met in days.
"Easy, easy!" the PT, a man named Vic Acevedo, urged. "Stop worrying about the weight. Focus on your form."
"Yeah, yeah." Scott tried to laugh it off as the other man lightened his load. One hundred-twenty pounds. That was humbling.
"You'll get there," Vic told him. "And you'll get there a lot sooner if you don't tear a muscle being a show-off."
"Show-off, huh?" Scott exhaled through a leg extension, careful to make it sound even and not strained. "So my reputation precedes me?"
"Just a little bit."
"How much is 'a little bit,' exactly?" Scott asked. "Is this how you treat everyone in your care or am I special?"
"You're special, alright," Vic snorted, before tapping a command into his omni tool. "Focus on your form, Ryder. I'm obscuring the weight amount so you can stop obsessing."
"I'm not obsessing-" but the screen went blank regardless and Scott felt a familiar twinge of irritation, so maybe Vic had a point. "Okay, fine. How many reps are we at?"
"For today? I was thinking-"
The overhead lighting fluttered off in a brief brown out. Just as Scott and Vic shared a nervous chuckle, alarms began wailing overhead.
"Growing pains of a new station?" Scott suggested.
But Vic wasn't smiling. The other man shook his head. "This has never happened before."
"First time for everything, right?" Scott reassured even as his hackles rose in the time it took for him to hop to his feet.
"This is Captain Dunn of the Nexus Hyperion." The intercom crackled over the alarms. "Intruders are boarding. This is not a drill. Get everyone to the med bay now."
Intruders? It must have been serious if Captain Dunn was introducing herself as such when everyone on Hyperion knew who she was.
Vic slung an arm around Scott and started helping him along. "What the hell is happening?" the PT wondered aloud.
Scott shook his head. "I have no idea-"
"Hello, Scott." It was his implant, he knew it the moment the AI's cold voice circled his skull, but it didn't make it any less unsettling.
"...SAM? How are you..?" Vic continued to drag Scott along, so it became clear Scott was the only one SAM was contacting. He steeled his excitement and walked more purposefully. "What's going on? All I know is we're being overrun."
"Kett forces are sweeping the ship," SAM explained. "They're looking for you. Scott, the Pathfinder needs your help."
"This is crazy-" and yet, alarms were blaring in spite of his protests and his sister's AI was conversing with him. Scott rounded a corner and could see the open med bay doors in the distance. "Sara's closing on Meridian!"
"The Archon has severed my link to your sister's implant. If basic function isn't manually restored, she will die."
"What?"
There was something off about the AI's voice. A pause or some sort of fluctuation- impatience, maybe? When SAM spoke again, he was softer if no less insistent. "Scott please. Proceed to depot K-4 to secure a weapon."
This was serious. And the goddamned artificial circuitry and wires in Scott's skull sounded worried.
"Son of a bitch-!" Scott pushed himself free of the crowd funneling into the med bay and darted off in the direction of the weapons depot. Behind him, he could hear Vic call out, but he didn't have time to respond.
Sara was dying. Sara needed him.
Scott was off sprinting and shouting at the bolts in his head. "Context SAM, come on!"
"The Archon isn't stealing the Hyperion. He wants you and me." SAM must have realized that made literally no sense. The hallway shook as the AI continued, "Your implant is the same as the Pathfinder's. He'll use it to control Meridian, and your sister will die."
Away from the civilians, Scott spotted some APEX members geared up and clearing out of the depot. He scurried over there, hopeful that they'd be too busy to wonder at his sweat-soaked activewear, or to point out he had yet to be medically cleared.
They didn't even give him a second glance as he strode over to the loadout. Scott lowered his voice. "The Archon will kill her?"
"No. Losing me will."
"What? SAM?" The stupid machine was distracted. Dad would have gone with a pistol or a sniper rifle- the old man liked clean precision. But Scott didn't have time to even gear up, much less ensure that he killed every last kett aboard the Hyperion. He needed to get to the comm override, because the sentient computer in his brain told him his big sister was deader by every second he didn't get there.
Scott snatched up an assault rifle, ignored how the elastic of his sweatpants sagged beneath the weight of the extra clips he crammed into his pockets, and he prepared to spray and pray his way to his destination.
"Hostiles are ahead, Scott. Be ready."
"Born ready," he replied automatically and was met with an awkward pause on the AI's end.
"I am sorry I can't help you fight. I took over too much of your sister's implant and losing me will kill her."
"Born ready, SAM," Scott repeated, hefting the assault rifle. "I've been waiting six hundred years for this; I'd be disappointed if you made it too easy for me by helping."
SAM didn't have anything to say to that. In the corridor up ahead, all Scott could see was a wave of kett pushing against the APEX units dug in behind railings and decorative planters. His objectives were more complicated than simply securing the Hyperion and only the thought of his sister slipping away- whether the image was an actual memory from the AI or Scott's own overactive imagination- kept him from drawing attention with a spray of defensive fire. He darted past the corridor and left APEX to their fate while he got one step closer to his goal.
"So when the comms dropped, she did too?" he asked.
"Hurry Scott."
He felt his lips peel back in a snarl, "I am." Scott pressed on and as soon as he rounded the corner, the radio frequency in his omni tool started screaming.
"Look out!" Captain Dunn? Scott fell flush against the wall as a wave of kett opened fire. A biotic field around him ensured that the bullets flirting with him only singed his sweatpants. "Scott, shoot them!"
The woman didn't have to ask him twice. Scott dropped to a knee to stabilize any kickback and let it rip. The damn rifle was punching bruises into his tender shoulder and chest, but it was worth it to see those bastards scattering- some hit, some scrambling for cover.
"Scott!" he could hear Dunn's voice raw and in real time from her own makeshift fortifications on the opposite side of the corridor. "SAM said you're fighting to the comm override? You can't!"
Like hell he couldn't; that was his sister.
"I know!" he hollered back. "SAM isn't making sense!"
"No!" Dunn popped her head up from cover long enough to wave toward some open panels in the wall. "I mean take the access route. If the Pathfinder's in trouble, that's all we need to hear." And like that, the woman turned and immediately began barking into the radio, "Hold them! Scott needs to get to that maintenance access!"
Scott was up and sprinting. "Thanks Dunn!"
Like any good captain, her answer was a terse, "Goddammit, get going!"
Lungs burning, he dove into maintenance and slammed his shoulder on the wall as he righted himself. He bolted as if immeasurable lives were depending on him, only talking between frantic gulps of air. "SAM, Dunn won't last long. What's the plan?"
"Manually send a reboot signal. It will reset your sister's implant."
"Like a factory reset?" Creeping out of the maintenance tunnels, Scott was greeted by the rows of consoles in comm override. Outside the sealed room he could hear gunfire in the distance. "Okay, we're here."
"One pulse, Scott. That's all the Pathfinder needs."
"Okay." A single command, a wave of his fingers. The Pathfinder lives, the Pathfinder dies, his sister's fate in his hands. Scott didn't even give himself a chance to breathe before he was at the console, relinquishing control to the AI, allowing it to reach across stars and save his sister.
Of course signals that powerful weren't magic. If the pulse was strong enough to factory reset Sara, it was going to be screaming loud at its source with Scott.
"That alerted the Archon, didn't it?" Already Scott could hear pounding against his door. "He knows where I am."
"I am sorry." The AI didn't sound surprised.
Scott glanced at the assault rifle in his hands. Instantly, he understood his father's preference towards pistols. "Me too, SAM. Me too."
In a spray of sparks, the door was wrenched open and as the kett flooded in, Scott swung the rifle tip to his temple. He got as far as, "You fuckers want me alive-!" with the heavy assault rifle shaking in his overexerted arm before he was overwhelmed by kett.