It was back again. As he exhaled his breath caught, trapped in his chest. He forced it out like a bellows, and it finally escaped his body with a high, pathetic whine. He wanted to cough, badly, but did not. His chest rocked as he suppressed the sensation. But he couldn't stop it, of course he couldn't, and he coughed in tight, dry hacks. This had happened before, and it would get worse before it got better. He regretted visiting the barracks. Fever ran rampant through the ship; it was almost impossible to staff a shift. He was barely getting by himself but for the stimulants that dulled the fatigue. His fever had broken two days ago. The wheezing was distracting. Scouting reports had just come in and he needed to figure out how to man the hangar with a skeleton crew, but he couldn't concentrate. The papers on his desk seemed to rise and fall with the heaving of his chest. He would order some tea. Sometimes that helped.
The wait was interminable and finally he grew so irritated that he stood and stomped towards his door, intending to glare down the hallway and if he did not see his tea being brought to him he would grab the nearest droid or storm trooper and browbeat them as fiercely as his endless coughing would allow.
The door opened and he almost walked directly into her. She sprang back from him quickly, clutching her file folder to her chest and they did not collide.
She wore the grey of a medical officer; he didn't know their bar system as well as he should have so he didn't know her rank. The medical corps required little oversight so he essentially let them manage their own little fiefdoms of the fore and aft infirmaries. She was Alcean, but that was an easy guess; almost every First Order M.O. was culled from that stock. Tiny whisps of dark hair escaped from the severe bun that was regulation, and she wore eyeglasses. Her frame was petite: her hands clasped her little wrists over her files, and she had to tip up her head to look at him. As she shifted her folders to her side he tried not to notice that the utilitarian uniform did not disguise that she was busty as well as it should have. She also had no reason to be creeping around the officers' wing.
"What do you want?" Alceans had a reputation for inscrutability, so he was surprised to see her look affronted, even momentarily.
"I was told to give you a report on the virus and its impact on the Finalizer," she said coldly, in control of her affect once more.
"Ah. Yes. Come in." He beckoned her through the door into his office, his words staccato as he tried to bite back a cough.
His quarters consisted of a small living area, his bedroom, and a private bathroom. The living area was dominated by his desk and all of the books and consoles that he required. For more informal meetings, he had two armchairs and a sofa that folded into the wall. Some officers had art or mementos on display; he had maps because those at least had a function. He did have some personal effects in his bedroom, mostly books and good bottles of wine, better at least than the swill they occasionally served in the commissary. He didn't want her standing over him where she could hear his wheezing, so he dragged an armchair across to his desk, becoming short of breath even with this exertion. He motioned for her to be seated just as the damned tea finally arrived. He did not offer her a cup. As subtly as possible, he tried to inhale the vapors without her noticing. It did help the tightness, at least a little. He gestured for her to begin.
The virus had come in with the latest batch of recruits and soldiers from certain planets (including, unfortunately, Arkanis) were particularly susceptible. The infection was incapacitating but no one had died yet, so if he stopped breathing in the night, which at this point was possible, he would be the first to succumb to it. She had a cadre of first-level medical officers overseeing the quarantined D and E block barracks and she anticipated the soldiers would be fit for duty within the week. However, if they were hit again, she noted that those who had already been infected would go into organ failure and then it would be a much larger issue.
"My concern is that if the Resistance found out about the outbreak, they might resort to bioterrorism. There is a vaccine that mitigates the effects of reinfection and reduces the mortality rate to almost nothing, so it is my recommendation that we inoculate the crew," she said.
"That is the obvious solution. But how do we pay for it?" It seemed his days were full of gunners requesting more explosives, janitors more toilet cleaner, and drill sergeants more and better recruits. The food was bad and the rats were bad and the thrusters were going bad and everyone whined that the air circulators made the air smell stale. They didn't see that the credits had to come from somewhere; there was barely enough as it was to make payroll. This woman was clearly no different. Hadn't they justdone an expensive mold mitigation in the ducts that fed the OR? And he had just approved a requisition order for sutures, syringes and those little bowls meant to catch vomit. He sighed but it was the pitiful wheeze of an accordion. She heard it; he saw it in her face. She had been steely but polite, perhaps even a little afraid of him, now she looked at him as though his skin were made of glass and she could see into his chest and had identified every weakness there.
"Are you alright?" she asked, all her fear gone as she took over the conversation confidently. He had jurisdiction of the Finalizer, but it appeared that his body was under her purview.
"I'm fine." He intended to spit this out with vehemence so that they could focus on the matter at hand, but he was caught by a fit of coughing between the first word and the second. Without asking him, she came around the side of his desk and knelt on the floor beside his chair, placing her fingers on the underside of his wrist, underneath the cuff of his jacket. Her fingers were deft, the touch light. She withdrew her hand, and in a smooth, practiced movement, hung the stethoscope she'd retrieved from her pocket in her ears. With one hand on his shoulder and the other resting the bell on his back, she gently eased him forward.
"Breathe, Sir." He hadn't been aware that he had been holding his breath, and he wheezed pitifully at her direction several times. "You need to go to the medical bay."
"No," he answered.
"General Hux I must insist-"
"You will insist nothing." She didn't look afraid or insulted any more: instead, she regarded him with that gaze that vivisected him. He met her eyes, an unnerving blue that was almost white, glaring up at her from his chair with as much threat as he could muster.
"I'll send you something, discretely. It is up to you if you want to take it. It will help your breathing, though I'd take it easy with the stims while you're on it."
"I don't want anything in my record."
"With your permission, Sir, I can make a dummy record and do all of my documentation there. No one will know that you need inhalers."
"I don't-" he started to insist but realized that fighting was pointless. She already knew about his weak lungs. And if relief was a possibility...her solution was sound.
An hour later, a transport droid showed up with a brown bag from the infirmary containing five little pills and an inhaler. The instructions were made out to a maintenance worker named Cornelius;he laughed aloud, triggering another spell of coughing. He took a pill first. It was bitter on his tongue and didn't do anything, so he placed the inhaler in his mouth with skepticism. But he felt his lungs opening as the medication filled them and he was grateful then that he had allowed himself to submit to her ministrations. Perhaps now he wouldn't die in his sleep tonight. There was an additional note folded at the bottom of the bag with some tidy figures written in pencil proposing that an every other day vitamin regimen would make up the cost of the bulk vaccination program in five months with almost no deleterious effect. It was signed MO II B North.