Chapter IIa: Absolute Disaster

More detail than I needed. It's feast or famine around here these days.

"Cassano to Bruce." She takes a deep breath before continuing. "Moira, Marbo was attacked by the parasite during the surgery. He's in bad shape. I'm telling your security detail to let you go to sickbay. He should have a good friend there. I..." She pauses again, makes sure she has control. "I can't leave the bridge right now. So you'll have to take me with you in spirit."

Moira has never run so fast. She might have trampled the security guards. If she did, she didn’t notice. Fear and rage burn her gut more than the scotch vial in her hair. Everyone tried, dammit. Everyone tried!!!

As she sprints though the halls, she comms Cassano.

Ah’m leavin’ tha comm open. He’d understand. An’ Commander?

She practically growls.

Yeh’ve tried everything.

She storms into the medbay and hastily throws on a face mask and gloves. She hopes it hides her face’s strong reaction to the wound.

Sitrep. An’ how can ah help?

No, Cass thinks. Not everything.

"Re-establish contact with the pirate ship."

"What the hell just happened?" Cass yells. "Cassano to Tulak. What was that? What did you do?"

Cass feels her mouth working, trying to form words, but there's no brain input there to contribute substance. She had been fully prepared to blow that ship out of the sky herself under the right circumstances, but now that someone else has done so, she feels both cheated and relieved.

A sudden thought finally manages to form and she barks, "Location of Kendall F'brei and her ship - now."

Moira takes a deep breath. She speaks calmly, yet loudly, with the hope that, at least as a collective, they hear her.

His planet's got ethanol in tha atmosphere. Folks heal better when their bodies can relax. When it's not fightin' itself.

She steps over to Marbo, forcing herself to look at his face. She holds his hand, and takes her pa's scotch out from underneath her headband.

180 proof. Fusion-distilled. Ah got this back at mah graduation from tha Academy. Ah was goin' ta save it fer a special occasion. Mah silver anniversary, ah was thinkin'. But, well, plans change.

She opens the vial and dabs a small amount just below the wound. Might as well aim for what's left of the airways.

Ah'll have ta take yeh ta Scotland some time, Marbo. It's all green an' water. Yeh'll love it. An' what we lack in atmosphere, we make up fer in single malts.

She takes a deep breath and leans in close to him.

Commander Cassano has ordered yeh ta pull through.

Inside marbos mind, as he lay on the floor of sickbay, throat gaping open and surgeons surrounding him, his mind has gone to a peaceful place. Something has registered the artificial warmth of the plasteel floor in his body. He feels safe, comfortable. Whatever portion of his brain is responsible for unconcious thought and dreams is reassuring him that he will be fine. He can feel pain in his body, but it is dull,pulsing.

His racing mind flashes visions of his crew, Cass, Moira, Even that mysterious woman Kendall. Visions of Nemur II, The ethanol lakes under the water surface that he used to bath in as a child, The great spire cities, The submarine floatillas that brought trade all over.

One memory fills his mind more than the others though. His first day on the Potential. He remembers standing aboard it next to M1-K3, Zephyr, Cassano, and Moira, in front of Captain Darcy. All of them being shown the ship, given their assigned stations. He remembers the excitement in the air, even though he was too nervous to say anything to anybody. He remembers losing the tour when he saw the state of the art medical suites inside sickbay, and staring at them so long that everybody else had walked off Without him. The ship was full of youth, and vibrance. Everybody was happy to be there. Now though. Stress ran high, conflict filled the ship, both internal and external.

That feeling of being far away haunted him though. Even in his dream, if you can call it that, surrounded by everybody he cared about, he felt alone.

"No" He thinks to himself. "This is my family. They are with me."

Something in one of his hands tightens, and for a brief moment he is able to respond to the stimulus.

He squeezes back.

His brain goes back to Nemur II, he can practically smell the mist that the hover skis would kick up on the surface of the water. He can feel it on his skin.

The feeling of loneliness begins to drift away. Hes not alone. He knows hes not alone. The warmth and the tightness in his hand. It could be entirely hallucinatory, but something in his chest is telling him that its not.

Moira silently obeys, lingering a moment before letting go of his hand. She clutches the scotch vial and is surprised, and not surprised, that her throat is tighter now.

Cass hears Moira's comforting speech at Marbo's sickbed through the comm the engineer left open. She lets it run past her like a breeze just over her head; she just can't afford to lean into her anguish for Marbo right now.

She's too busy leaning into her rage.

"Captain Tulak," she says, "the pirate parasite that came to our ship on the pretense of a diplomatic mission, who used that visit to try to kill me, has now potentially murdered my chief medical officer. He was in the process of surgically installing the parasite into a prototype mechanical body when the parasite viciously attacked him. The surgery was being performed in an airlock as a precaution, so they were jettisoned. When we retrieved our doctor, the parasite had been..." Her jaw tightens, but she continues,"...eating its way into him. The parasite was killed by the transporter, but our doctor is catastrophically injured."

Captain Tulak begins to speak in response, but Cass just runs over her. "The data that I sent to you some time ago contains a wealth of information about the remaining ship's recent travels, including a location that could possibly lead us to my missing away team and what could well be the home base of the 'pirate queen.' I propose that we make a decision regarding the disposition of the remaining pirate ship and crew and then rendezvous to draw up a plan for retrieving my lost crewmen. And then..."

Cass feels the grafts on her face being tugged and stretched uncomfortably, and she realizes that she's smiling, but it doesn't feel like a smile, not her smile. This expression, this face, belongs to someone new. "And then we will discuss taking down these pirates once and for all."

Once Kendall is done replaying the destruction, she will comm Cass: "I saw what happened to that doctor. I am sorry for your loss.

"Those assholes got what was coming to them. They are nothing more than monsters, and lucky for you, I’m a monster hunter.

"Anyways, I have been thinking about how to get the rest of those bastards for what they did to that poor eccentric doctor. How’s about I come to you?

Cass moves to a part of the bridge where she's unlikely to be overheard and says quietly. "Give me fifteen minutes. Because I have a powerful urge to punch you right now, but by then, it will have passed. Probably."

Cass re-establishes the comm link again. "And... thank you."

Cass grits her teeth. "Well, I guess we know where they got a foothold in using humanoid hosts. So there are potentially thousands more. Do we know how many thousands of colonists there were?"

Cass thinks. "I don't suppose you've had time to have anyone work on translating that language of theirs? If we could use that remaining ship, pose as members of their own kind, communicating in their language, then we might be able to stage another ambush, perhaps capture another ship or gain more useful information."