"Lucas!" The captain woke up with a start.
She pushed him down and smiled, "Mike, you're going to be okay. We've got you." Others gave similar words of affirmation to him as they looked at the man. Most notably was Doc Rios who told him that it was over now. That was a little weird, but she thought nothing of it.
She looked to Doc Rios and whispered the word sedative to him, hoping to get a response. She didn't get any. It was fine. This was his patient. She was only here to assist with the surgical elements when needed. There wasn't exactly a bounty of hands these days.
"The seeds,"
Rachel nodded and took them out of the refrigerator for a second, "Thanks to you, we might all survive this after all," She said as showed them to him as if they were her baby. They kind of were. She didn't think too much about that.
Once he calmed down and pushed his head back down on the medical mattress, she locked them back up again. Those would be the key to bringing agricultural life back to the world. She didn't want anyone getting any funny ideas that they could just take them. Not that anyone on this ship would. These were upstanding people who could have found other jobs that didn't take them away from everything that they loved. But here they were in the Mediterranean, just hoping to find a way to save the day. Still, never a bad idea to be careful, she thought.
She took her leave and went back to her cabin where Tex was anxiously awaiting her imminent arrival. She closed the door and leaped into a big hug with him and in this place and moment, she was not afraid to cry. After everything they'd been through, they could just take the seeds home when they had a plan. Not a bad day at all.
Tex knew what the tears were about. It wasn't about him, that was most certain, and they weren't even sad tears. They were happy tears. They were joyful tears. All this time didn't have to be wasted hunting for things. They could just take them home and have her start working on a cure long before people starved themselves out.
The pain of starvation was one close to their hearts. When they met the people on the train in California, their government had been willfully starving them, making them easier pawns, and the looks of people without full bellies, it was terrible. It had pulled at deep heartstrings. And so he knew solving this problem, it was close to her heart. She never wanted to see people like that. And yet, there were so many people who were starving again.
He brought her back out of the hug and wiped tears from her eyes and grinned. He was the luckiest man in the whole world to have her by his side. This woman who loved the people on this earth so much that she devoted her life to making sure that the worst of the worst never hit the majority of the population and those who were affected could be cured, healed, or in some other way helped.
"How's the captain?"
She shrugged and sighed. "His wounds are healing nicely, but he's still in and out of his hallucinatory state, but it's mostly just dreams now." She looked around the room and then back to Tex, "When he wakes up, he's still slightly there but it's much easier to bring him back to reality."
This had to be weighing on her. The effects of the drug were heavy. And she couldn't do much about it other than wait it out. It was not like her to just sit around and wait when things were this desperate.
It's why they got back in the business of saving the world. Things were desperate and they couldn't just sit around and watch it happen, hoping that someone else could save the world. There was always that chance, but they never liked it. They'd rather be on the frontlines of saving it than waiting for things to happen.
"You know, you should sit down a minute. Relax," Tex said with a big grin. They were possibly in the last stage of saving the world. She deserved to have some time where she wasn't constantly thinking about the next big thing. It would never happen, especially here, but he could try.
She gave him that look that told him that she thought he was crazy for even suggesting it. He put his hands up in the air and sat down in the only chair in the room and stared at her, in awe of her. He loved her so much. She looked back at him with a smile. "I'd love to, but I have no idea when the meeting about the seeds is,"
"Just a minute? You can't do that?" He asked.
She shrugged and blushed a little, "Maybe just a minute," She told him as she sat on his lap and put her arms around his neck and burrowed in. It was nice. Just to be in this place with him and worrying about nothing for the moment.
"Ravit and Wolf are back to their old ways, training like nothing ever happened." He told her. "That explosion didn't slow her down at all,"
Rachel smiled. Ravit was family. They loved her like one of their own. She was practically a sister to Rachel, and to see her happy again with another person, it was so good to see. Wolf loved them too. But it was different. He needed the chase. They had different priorities now.
A knock came at the door and Rachel groaned as she got up. Tex just smiled. She'd gotten comfortable.
She opened the door and there was Kara, "We're ready for you now," She told Rachel.
Rachel nodded and looked back to Tex, "Well, my chariot awaits,"
"Best not keep it waiting too long."
"I love you," She said to him, blowing him a kiss.
He made a gesture to catch it, and smiled, "I love you too,"
"...The fault dear brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves." The man on the screen announced. "Climate, disease, famine. They terrify us. And our terror begets chaos, aggression, and violence. And there's your end of days, man. The world of hazards shifts at the speed of light," He snapped his fingers, "And we are neither poised, facile, or quick enough to adapt, thus we panic, accelerate into hysteria, and kill each other."
Rachel didn't get a good feeling about this man. He was not the kind of person that seemed to like humans very much at all. He seemed to be antagonistic about humanity when she found the reality of humanity so very different than what he described.
Hell, the virus taught her that humanity could come together to defeat a common enemy. They just needed to know that the enemy would kill everyone indiscriminately. Okay, so there was nuance, she thought, but still not like this man talking about how everything terrified the human race. Still, she kept watching.
"And this deficiency is exactly what destroyed every single civilization before us and is exactly what threatens to obliterate us now if we do not rapidly resolve ourselves to the hard problems and salvation that lie within evolutionary biology."
He looked at his audience with a smirk on his face after taking a long sip of something from a mug. "And this is where I come in," He smiled. "Face it, natural evolution is a bust, man. Natural evolution used to be smart, but now it's half baked and inefficient. Remember the appendix? Who the hell needs the appendix now? The appendix has just been rolling around inside of us like dead weight for more than a millennium."
He faced his audience, who were loving what he was saying. "Natural evolution is done." He said. "But with transgenic coding, we seize an immediate future, wherein all people of all cultures can acclimate, adjust, and conform to any challenge of a dynamic planet in less than one single generation. And it is not just our bodies that will step on the gas, but our minds,"
And there it was. A single mind of deliverance was never a good idea. Even if you were the greatest mind in the world. He was trying to be the superhero of civilization. And the reality was that there would be no superheroes. There would only be normal people coming together to build a brighter future. She loathed this man. He was clearly brilliant, but the ego on him, it was untenable to the things he wanted to do.
Sasha stopped the video. Thank god, she thought.
"Is that the man you met in the arena?"
"He let himself go," Tom said as he opened the packet that they had all been given.
Rachel looked at the screen and back to Tom for a moment. "You met that man?" She asked him. He nodded and looked back down at the paper.
"Paul Vellek,"
"One of the fathers of modern bio-informatics and computational biology,"
Rachel paled. "I've heard of this man. I mean, practically everyone from my university was buzzing him about him. He was something of a controversial figure to say the least. There were people on both sides. People who hated him and people who loved him,"
Sasha smiled and kept going. "Also father to Giorgio and Lucia Vellek," She brought up all three of their IDs up on the screen now. From what she had heard about everything, this was the family that had tried to buy the world's seeds.
"There's another son, Christos," Meylan offered, "Whereabouts unknown,"
"According to your Nation Security Agency," Fletcher started, "Dr. Vellek wasn't just brilliant, he was also considered morally and ethically dangerous. Apparently he wasn't satisfied with boosting crop yields. He wanted to 're-engineer what it means to be human',"
Rachel nodded. "This is how he became so controversial in the first place. This design of his to redesign humanity, it was always there. We were always hearing about it. Dr. Vellek was a popular figure, as well as infamous. Working on human projects always has that sort of stink to it, especially in the beginning of something,"
"Are you saying you knew this guy?" Someone asked.
She shook her head. "No. Only knew of him. He wasn't from our university, but it's a small community. The gossip and infamy gets around quick." She told them as she looked at the man's picture on the screen. "I'd never even seen his face. Just heard his name. I had an associate of an associate reach out to me, they were interested in my work with therapeutic vaccines, and how they might be used to seed evolutionary discovery, but I declined. It was around the time of the red flu starting."
"Indicted six years ago, he fled the US,"
"And wound up in the Med, with access to a greek warship."
Rachel blushed, not because she was embarrassed by the connection between her and Vellek, there was hardly a thread, but because it was hard to hear those things. She cleared her throat and looked up at the group. "You can see why I didn't want to work with him,"
Tom and Master chief nodded and then it was Fletch's turn to speculate. "Most likely, he bought off the greeks with the promise that they'd be the first to benefit once he cured the red rust,"
It was a balanced theory. Vellek had the motive, and for the means, well a simple look at his infamy through the past six years, it was enough to make his claims that he could do this legit. He had a whole portfolio of increasing crop yields through other manners, why not be able to cure something leading to starvation. It seemed like a simpler job than curing the Red Flu had been at first.
"Imagine, the future of the world in this man's hands," Meylan said, looking up at the screen. Rachel, too, thought that was a terrifying idea.
"How long would it take to engineer disease resistant crops?" Tom looked at her when he asked the question. After all, that's why she was here. She was here to get the seeds, get back to St. Louis and start on the process of feeding the world again.
She cleared her throat once again, "We've got most of what we can do, done already, but even with the seeds, it's going to take some time." She said, "The most realistic estimate is a year, maybe more than that."
"Maybe Vellek can help,"
"You can't be serious," She said.
"Well if he's really the genius everyone says he is," Tom continued, "He may have a solution, or a part of a solution-"
She stopped him right there, "We can't work with him. I can't work with him,"
"Are you suggesting we work with this madman?" Meylan offered up in response to Tom.
Tom just seemed to keep going though, "I'm suggesting we find him, grab him and his research, and convince him of the righteousness of our cause,"
And there it was. The righteousness of the cause. While he had been gone for over a year, it was clear that his conscience hadn't taken the time off. It was so admirable that he thought that everyone could be convinced of the righteousness of causes. She rarely found that to be true. Especially in the new era they all lived in.
Meylan and Tom went back and forth a bit on it, but Tom came out in the end. It was Fletcher who wondered where they could find him and Tom had an idea for that too. "There's a room in Giorgio's mansion. Only he and his sister have the key. There are files inside. Logbooks. Mostly written in code, but in one of the books there was a phrase written over and over, 'sent to lab',"
"Vellek's lab,"
"We find the lab, we find him,"
"Enough," Meylan said. "This man's lunatic army killed dozens of our people at Rota. His greek warship tried to sink us. And now they're actively hunting us in waters where we have dwindling supplies and zero support,"
"Captain-"
"...the seeds are in hand. Rachel is here to take them back to St. Louis. We have orders from the National command authority, to get them and her back to the states, post haste. We'll make port at Naples in eight hours, The C-130 out of Ramstein will meet us there to fly Rachel and the seeds home where she and our other brilliant scientists can get to work on them," Meylan commanded the room. "That is our mission,"
Rachel went back to the room where she would try and get some sleep, she thought. Eight hours and then a plane ride back to the states with the most precious gift on earth, some seeds. And nonstop hours toward finding the cure for their crops.
She kicked off her shoes and got comfortable next to Tex, who had already laid down, any work that she needed to do would be okay to wait until they were safely on the ground in St. Louis. She wondered if Tex would come with her, or if being close to Kathleen would be more his style. They hadn't really talked about it. Either way, she thought it would be okay. They were still a family, even if they were divided by geography.
She didn't know how long she was able to lay there when there was suddenly a knock at her door. Loud knocks. She groaned as she got up and Tex ruffled about too, trying to keep her in bed. She gave him a kiss and got up reluctantly.
She opened the door, it was Ravit, signing with ferocity the moment she saw Rachel in the doorframe. "They need you to help with medical attention for a distress call."
Rachel looked at her, confused, "What distress call?"
"There's a fishing boat. It is stranded. Needs as many doctors as it can get,"
Rachel nodded and looked back to Tex. "Well, wouldn't you know, a lady's work is never done," She told him with a smile. "We'll get some more time," She said softly.
"I know we will," He told her and covered back up as she quickly put her shoes and clothes back on before heading out.
The ride to the boat was an easy one, but everyone except her and Doc Rios practically, had guns and boarded the ship before they did. And they were loud and pointing those guns at people. Only Azima was speaking a language some of these people could maybe understand, but who knew really what language these people knew? She looked to Doc Rios who seemed to have the same concerned look on his face as she did, so at least she didn't feel out of place in the madness.
Clear couldn't come soon enough.
She, Doc Rios, and a couple of others boarded the boat to do basic medical examinations to make sure that everyone was stable enough for transport and to make sure that quick jobs could be done too. Everything was the same though. It was a part of the Red Rust. Food. Hydration. And what little wasn't due to that, needed what they didn't have in their medical kits, antibiotics. Everyone was relatively stable enough though. That was the good thing. Doc Rios ran point with the other Navy crew. She simply tried to have a good bedside manner with people who didn't ask for any of this to happen.
They all made it back with the second Rhib being sent out, it made quick work. And when they reboarded the Nathan James, Tex was standing right there, helping everyone out of the boat and to their designated helo bay. It was the safest spot to put them in and the helo could always stay on one of the many landing pads they had.
Tex gave Rachel a wink and she blushed and tried to hide her smile, but was somewhat unsuccessful in that mission. She, looked around the helo bay, one where she used to do her medical experiments in and it looked gigantic.
Tex stood back for a second, "What you thinking about?" He asked. It was unlike her to stand aside like that. She was always helping. Hell, that was why she was on the James in the first place. But here she was standing around, looking like she had the breath knocked out of her.
"The past," She replied. "Just thinking about the past and how much time has passed. And how things move on," She looked up at him. "I'm sorry, that's probably…"
He cut her off, "Don't apologize. It's weird. I know it." He said as he curled her up in his arms and surveyed the room too. It was a huge room that they had a lot of memories in. And now, Ray was photographing refugees and Sasha and Bacon were handing out food. They were supposed to be helping, but no one would begrudge them a minute to be themselves. "At least there's a past to look back on," He said as he kissed her temple.
She nodded on his chest and took another deep breath. Tex always knew what to say in these situations. It was clear that though people thought of him as just a man with a gun, he was so much more. You just had to get to know him.
"We should get to work," She groaned into his chest.
He shook his head and held her tighter, "Just another minute,"
And that they did. Just another minute. A whole world to themselves. To feel like nothing was happening but being in some old memories.
It was Kathleen that ultimately broke their stride. Seeing her come in, meant it was really time to help. Not that she minded their affection, in fact, she sometimes openly encouraged it, so long as they weren't going overboard.
The first time that Kathleen had caught a glimpse of them in a passionate moment, she simply rolled her eyes and told them to use a condom. While the magic of the passionate moment was broken, there was magic in the moment that was extra special to both of them. Kathleen was important to both of them.
It was Tom looking after her. Tom didn't look at any of them, quite in the eye. He always looked slightly down and around. But he looked at them. When he wasn't paying attention to the rest of the things around him, his eyes would wander to them and look sad. They all understood what it meant. There was still guilt there. Guilt at watching Shaw put a bullet through Tex's abdomen and then more guilt at killing her too. He was a good man who was trying to do his best. And it turned out that even the noble Tom Chandler had limits to what he could see happen.
Tom hadn't been there when Tex was in the hospital like he was with Rachel. He took his family and left. And while they didn't blame him, he'd been through a disaster of a fight, Kathleen thought he should have bucked up.
He approached Kathleen and Tex wanted to tell him that she wasn't ready to forgive. That much was true and evident, but Rachel held him back. Tom needed to know what Kathleen was feeling. "We can't shield him," She whispered to him. Tex humphed and stayed back and they watched as Kathleen cut him down and then went back to work like nothing happened. And they watched the hurt in his eyes as she moved past. It had to happen.
They moved to give people water and medical sustenance. It was the least they could do. Someone relieved them in a couple hours. They went back to their stateroom and got some sleep, something that Rachel desperately needed before boarding the plane in Naples.
About an hour before the scheduled stop at Naples, Ravit was at the door, knocking loudly again. "Another meeting," She signed before them.
In the officer's wardroom, they were given a bunch of pictures. They were pictures of the C-130 blown up. They looked up, Kara started talking. "Satellite captured this 20 minutes ago. There's no evidence of a missile or other aircraft. But Comms was pretty spotty over the apennines,"
"Impact site is easily within range of a standard missile fired from a Hellenic Destroyer off Naples," Meylan explained.
She looked at the pictures, it was terrifying. "So what's the plan now? We have no way to get the seeds to the US." She said as she looked up. Tex rubbed her arm but no one else seemed to hear her. They were more concerned about how Vellek knew about the plane, which was a good train of thought, but not exactly what she had brought up.
"Doesn't matter how he knew," Tex piped up. "Just matters that he knew. And now we have to deal with that. And we have to find another way to get the seeds to the US."
Everyone nodded. Kara looked at the map on the table and gave them a range ring, which gave them more bad news. They were likely headed straight toward the man that killed their way to get the seeds to the US.
"Still think we should cut a deal with this maniac?" Meylan asked Tom. The answer was clear to Meylan, Tex and Rachel could see it on his face. That they should under no circumstances work with Vellek. He was not going to want to work with them. "Are there any other aircraft available to fly the seeds and Dr. Scott to the states?"
Kara shook her head. "No sir," She said, "All our bases in Europe are down,"
"Port of Haifa had a couple of cargo planes, but they're no longer in service,"
"Commander Fletcher," Meylan directed, "does the Royal Navy have any assets it can scramble?"
It took a beat for Fletcher to answer and Meylan had to make sure the man heard him. Not a good sign, according to Tex who set his jaw as he looked more closely at Fletcher. He didn't like the man and he wasn't exactly sure why. He just rubbed him the wrong way.
"Um, I'm afraid our air force is nonexistent, sir. What wasn't destroyed during the immune war, was grounded for lack of fuel and pilots."
"Alright," Meylan said as he looked at all of the information that he had in the wardroom. "We'll deliver the seeds to Norfolk ourselves," Rachel let out a breath, it would be a longer journey to Norfolk, but it would be okay. As long as they had the seeds. And they did have the seeds.
Tom and Meylan fought over the plan. Going over to Gibraltar, the Red Sea, the locks at the suez. And then of course, there was the fight. Fighting, Giorgio loved fighting, and because of the seeds, they couldn't be a target for sinking. Rachel rolled her eyes. She hated this plan.
Tex squeezed her arm and brought her back to the moment at hand. "Told you, we'd get more time," He said with a wink.
That didn't hurt. They got more time together as a family. She got to see Kathleen and Ravit got to be Wolf. That wasn't so bad. The conversation got more heated. Tom still wanted to go after Vellek and his research. It brought a bad taste to her mouth.
"If you really want to be a part of this conversation, then put on the uniform. If not, then let the professionals do their job." And that was basically the end of the conversation. They were dismissed shortly after.