Ice Breaker
Chapter 9
Note: I keep wanting to re-write this whole mess-of-a-fic, but I’m working under threats of some very nasty things happening to me if I don’t at least finish it first. So, here we go. The chars we see here are being developed in ‘Arrival’ but we haven’t caught up to them all yet, so please bear with me. I know they’re new and unfamiliar, but I just can’t avoid using them any longer - it was hard enough to dance around them in the first few parts!
Second Note: All Hail To Thee, praise be sent to Rodlox, for kicking my muse’s ass to get her working again to write this next part. Thanks, dearie. :) And much thanks to Aubrey and Vee, my resident military guides: any soldier-type mistakes are all my own, though they tried to stop me.
PG 13 - for language.
[Shows thoughts]
*Shows emphasis*
~~~~The sun was setting, and he was watching it through the forward viewscreen as they flew. The side windows held only sky and the outlines of the flanking armed flyers that were escorting the shuttle.
His name was Malcom Ali, and at that moment, he felt like he was going to be sick. But that wasn’t why he was being flown towards Proxima City’s best hospital. He felt sick because the shuttle’s pilot had received clearance to fly near the site of the bombing, just long enough to make a long visual pass. Ali had not asked for a close-up view, nor did any of the other passengers, and they were all silent with reverence and anger at what they’d seen. They all had that one thing in common. The second thing was that all the passengers were former shipmates, all previously assigned to the Warlock Class Destroyer EAS Sophocles. The survivors of that crew had spent a number of weeks - months, even - on a Colony-Homeworld that the rest of the universe both hated and feared, and they had come to the near unanimous conclusion that the rest of the universe had a pole stuffed up its ass to not like the colonists. The Sophocles crew had found friends in the settlers there, even family and allies, despite the mutual fear and dislike that was felt at first on both sides.
It may be that the crew had come to this conclusion, but the rest of the Universe hadn’t had several months’ worth of hands-on learning experience in enlightenment. Besides holding a grudge, the rest of the universe also had explosive rockets.
Private first-class Bell broke the silence first. “Did they tell any of you why we were brought here? We’re going to that Hospital, right? The one where - where they brought her. And the rest of them, the ones hurt.”
Bell had no need to say who ‘her’ was. They all knew that, as well. Apart from the spectacular glory of being considered a friend by their much-respected Captain (something in itself that all the crew had once thought an impossible feat for anyone, never mind one suited to being a colonist on that world), this ‘her’ was someone who had in the past months - even before the return voyage on a roughly-repaired vessel - proven herself to be a prime example of what it is to be Human, what it was to be hardworking and stubborn and kindness personified. They considered her a sterling embodiment of what courage was, what sheer tenacity could accomplish, and a good portion of them had even developed crushes of varying degrees on the woman.
Until some group of total assholes had tried to blow her up, anyway.
Her, plus her whole little group, over a hundred Rangers, and too many normals and hotel staff members to count yet. Ali didn’t know who had done it, but he knew that the Rangers were putting on some not-so-metaphorical war paint and getting ready to go scalp hunting. Already some of the trade team was confirmed dead, the news clips had released that much but no names as of yet. The news channels had also released that the team’s leader, Lyta Alexander, had been confirmed to have been present at the time of the detonations. But nothing else, not if she was found in the mess they’d seen, not if she was alive or dead or injured to any degree. It had been almost an hour since Ali had received any news, almost an hour since he and the others had been abruptly gathered up from their re-post locations and been put onto this shuttle. Almost an hour since a very short and entirely unsatisfactory explanation had been given - ‘you were the ones who were healed’.
“They haven’t told us much of anything,” Lau said. “Why us, why not any of the others from the crew?”
“They’re rounding up others,” Chin said. “I was talking to Jocylen over stellarcom and he had a Ranger show up during the call - then I was brought in a few minutes later. He’s days away though, I think we were just the closest ones.”
“Well, why us,” Lau repeated. “What do we have in common that the others don’t have? And what does it have to do with Alexander and the others? We’re not medical staff. We’re not even all in T.D.A. training classes.”
There was a pause while they looked around at each other.
“We’re not from the same department, or even born on the same world,” Lovari observed. “And none of us had family in Sanctuary, did we?”
“I had a couple cousins, but nobody close. That can’t be anything. What about while we were on Teep? Someplace we went, maybe? Some clue?”
“Paul here was a straggler,” Bell pointed at Private Chin. “I ocean-walked, and Andrew here-” her finger moved to Private Mann “-had to stay in the port city and get shuttled over. Ryan, you were with the Captain’s group, right?”
Lau nodded. “I was. And you practically knocked a chunk out of the mountains with your pod, Lovari, so that can’t be it.”
“Shuttle,” Lovari corrected.
“Pardon?”
“I’d damn near been crippled in the attack itself, I was moved from the surgery table right into an evacuation shuttle. That’s why I landed so close to The Wall - it wasn’t a lifepod, though some of the pods did set down really close.”
“Okay, so you di-”
“Hold on!” Mann suddenly interrupted Lau. “Is there anyone here who was NOT badly injured? Have we all had at least some treatment there that seemed almost miraculous to Richard and the other docs?”
Silence, as the other five passengers digested this and nodded.
Mann continued, “Jocylen was almost killed, right? He’s probably been called here - how much do you want to bet that Tribedah and Sembello have been rounded up too? They’re posted only a few days off, right? What about Brooks, Sasha Lewis, or the Zimmer’s? Everyone here was hurt, badly hurt - but - when we got back to the ship and were finally checked over, we were more healed than even the best machines could have done, and that was with the salves and teas the Teeps have come up with factored in. There were other injuries, that had taken the same treatments, but which weren’t so incredible - what makes what we had different from those?”
“This has something to do with the bombing then, something to do with how the colonists could heal severe wounds?”
“Something to help the ones who were hurt, to help them get better?”
“I don’t know, but that’s about all I can figure out. Something we were given that helped heal us,” Mann insisted. “Something we could do.”
“Or the Rangers know that our recoveries were put on record, and we’re additional targets.” Ali said grimly. “If we were contaminated by the colonists.”
“Don’t say that, Malcom!”
Ali did not back down. “I have been told that it would be explained ‘once an explanation is available’. And as you said, the Rangers are apparently trying to gather up anyone, anyone at all, from the Sophocles who had suffered a serious injury that had been . . .”
“What?”
“Alexander’s been hurt.”
“They aren’t saying anything about her, you know that-”
“No!” Ali interrupted. “She’s been hurt and whatever it was that we had that fixed us - they couldn’t bring it with them. The team brought hordes of medical things to share with the rest of us, right? But there was nothing that they claimed was the miracle drug - nothing that . . . nothing that could be reproduced. That’s what she said - when I was being treated after that fall I took; there was one thing that was injected, just one thing, just one time. They even found some old needles that were still sterile from when they’d colonised to inject it. The one that hurt so much afterwards, did any of you NOT get such an injection? Everything else was either swallowed or put on the skin, nothing was injected but that one shot, and Alexander was there, it was her who explained that it would help, that it would hurt, but that it would help.”
“I don’t remember, I was in and out of a coma for the first week,” Lovari said.
“My arm,” Bell said softly. “Yes, when we finally arrived at the city, a few days in, she injected that serum stuff - she didn’t say where it was from, but - she injected it herself, the doctors weren’t even willing to touch the thing - the pain afterwards was incredible, but the nerve was regrowing itself by the next day. I mean, look!” She held out her arm, the sleeve pushed back. “There’s not even a scar, it’s just like it was never hurt.”
“When I was shuttled over,” Mann said. “I got one the next day, and my recovery just jumped up from there - I figured it was being around Humans again. Would that have anything to do with it?”
“I overheard Richard talking with Alexander afterwards,” Ali said. “She couldn’t explain what the injection was, didn’t even want to, but you all know what Richard gets like - Alexander said that it could not be reproduced. Only stored - what if it’s like an organic-grown antibody? If we are carrying it, and they need to get samples to try to figure out how to make it work, because they can’t heal Alexander with the tech here?”
There was a long silence. Then, “That won’t work; if she’s that hurt, then the pain from the stuff working would kill her for sure.”
“Maybe she’s not hurt, maybe she wants to heal people who were injured, and if she knows how to get it out of a person - if she knows how it works, since she was there for our shots?”
“Maybe we should all shut up and wait to be briefed,” Chin said. “We’re about to land as the hospital - see? And the mass of security around it - we’re being let right down, that’s it not normal for a time like this.”
“There’s another shuttle already there, too. I wish I knew what was going on!” Bell looked worried.
~~~~
They were ushered into a medium sized room, one filled with chairs and tables, obviously meant for meeting rather than healing. A Ranger was already there; an older Human woman whose full-dress uniform was clean but whose face and hands had bits of dust and blood in the cracks and corners. She’d obviously been at the bombsite, and hadn’t had time to properly clean off in the hours since. She was standing oddly, like she’d been injured. Several others were also present, but not in Earthforce uniforms. It took only a glance for Ali to realise all the rest of them were former soldiers, also from the Sophocles - ones who’d retired or asked for a discharge once they had returned safely to Proxima. One fidgeting dischargee he recognised as having confessed to having been a latent telepath, she even wore the little insignia of the new corps on her sleeve.
Ali recognised the Ranger woman as well, after a few moments of looking. An Earthborn named Deveax; she’d been one of Alexander’s primary guards. She was waiting for the new ones to sit down; they did not dawdle. The sheer number of guards in the hallways, the evacuation of non-critical patients they’d witnessed, all pointed to a situation even more serious that the news was letting on.
“There are others coming,” Deveax started without preamble. Her voice was blunt, rough with dust and anger. “But I have been informed they will be some minutes in arriving, so I will not delay any more with those present. How many of you are aware of Alexander’s importance on the trade team’s mission?”
“She’s in charge, Ma’am. Keeping them behaving and organized.”
“She’s also a figurehead, ma’am - having fought the First Ones, having been known and respected before the Telepath War. She was one of those who ran the city where we gathered up, too.”
Deveax looked out at the rest of them, who were silent. “What do you know about the Interference Vortex, the one that surrounds the Sanctuary system?”
“It killed Kalderash - he tried to power up a gun and he was reduced to dust, along with part of his pod and Lampley’s arm. It destroys any charged weapon within its range, ma’am.”
“It destroyed the Drakh warships that were left at the end of the battle, and carried our ship into orbit of the Teep’s homeworld.”
“And it acts like a jumpgate, spitting ships back out into hyperspace. That’s how we were able to start back for home, ma’am.”
“Is that it?” The Ranger looked grim.
There was a bit of sideways glancing, then they nodded. “It’s red and white and likes White Star ships; that’s about it. The locals didn’t know much; it was there before they settled. They told us that.”
Deveax nodded, then looked at the latent woman, who had not made a single sound thus far. “Do you know anything else about it? Something about when your ship left the system?”
The woman looked a little uncertain. Then, softly, “It changed.”
“Louder, please, to let the rest hear.”
“It changed, Ms. Deveax. It was sealed off, until the trade team could return - to protect everyone inside once news of Sanctuary got loose. It changed - I could feel it. We all could, the - the other latents and I.”
“It changed. I assume that none of you know how.”
They shook their heads.
“Well, neither do I. But I was told this, within a day of beginning this position. The only one with the access codes, the only one with the needed key for them to get back in - for you and your unborn baby, for all the trade team to return - is currently laying a short distance away, cold on a surgery table. The only one,” she repeated, “who can open that Vortex up again, Lyta Alexander, is basically *dead*.”
The latent looked ready to cry.
“And we’ve damn near run out of magic wishes to help her, ladies and gentlemen. Her and the others who’ve actually lived this long - we’ve pulled more corpses out of the wreckage than I care to recall, and there are more left. We’re hunting for anything in the leftovers that might assist - organic tech, notes, a survivor who might have information. But unless she can be kicked back to life, none of it will matter much. There is only one clue as to what might get her going again, and I’m pretty sure that it won’t help anyway, but I’m bloody well going to try it. All of you were injured, injured very badly, and whatever they gave you - and a few others, but if it will be enough is another matter - basically rebuilt your bodies from the DNA up. We don’t know with what, or how, because Alexander and the other team members didn’t say. Any written notes they might have had are carbonised thanks to those missiles. You saw the damage on the way over, correct? Correct. We hadn’t gotten everything from their books onto data crystals yet, and of those things we did, most of the copies are destroyed or missing anyway. All we know is the summary - the one who carried the rebuilding ability was bled; then the samples were spun to separate the serum from the rest of the blood. This was injected into each of you - we don’t know who the carrier was, or even what species they might have been, but we’re gambling on the hope that at least some of you might still be carrying it. It won’t show up on scans - it might not survive being scanned, for all I know - either way, this is a pure blind luck run. And it’s volunteer only, because I won’t risk their lives on some bigot. But know this: if you refuse to volunteer, I will convince you otherwise with as much pain and suffering - on your part, not mine! - as it takes. Any questions?”
There was a very short pause. Then Bell asked, “Where do we go to be bled, and how soon can we start?”
Deveax almost smiled, but the expression did not quite reach her face. “Follow me.”
~~~~
It was a short distance away, though not exactly in the same location that Deveax had mentioned to an unhappy group of soldiers, that the next part was occurring. Again, a Ranger was involved, but this Ranger carried a live cargo instead of a message.
Two cargoes. Both alive, both scorched, and both much smaller than the Minbari who carried them. Both upset, both ill, both terrified, and both holding very still.
They could not move on their own, though their own injuries were more emotional than physical. They could not move because their feathers had been burned off. To say that the little alien birds looked pathetic would have been an understatement in the extreme. They were currently wrapped up in the softest, warmest fleece that could be found in such short notice, and they showed no interest in doing anything other than shivering. They were being carried to a place of safety, though it was not currently possible to explain this to them.
They had lost their translator jewels, and without an active that was familiar with their species’ mental patterns, they had no way to communicate. But they had been rescued, and were under the care of a familiar uniform, so they had withdrawn to begin to heal themselves. A few moments more, and their holder carefully pushed open a doorway to enter a darkened observation room, setting them down carefully on a soft seat. There were already three others there; two of which were telepaths who fit the requirements needed to communicate. These two, as well as the burned birds, were hiding in fear of further wounding. The third one had no thought other than his concern over what they could all see through the observation window.
What they could see was the exact location, and person, that had everyone in such a worry.
****
A warming pad had been brought in for the shivering, naked birds; plus a small sterile tray. They trembled slightly as they carefully picked the scorched feather stubble off each other, occasionally peeping in low tones as they dropped the remains of their beautiful coats into the dish. Every few minutes, one of them would hobble across the tabletop on bandaged pinions to glance out the viewing window, then shuffle back to the warming pad. Even without words, their concern was obvious.
Ecathe, his mind already battered by the day’s events, was too weary to do more than mentally corroborate the Ranger’s whispered story of a frantic call from a veterinary clinic, the staff there beyond astonished to find the animals that had been brought in a few hours before by well-meaning citizens of the city were not stray pets, but some of the missing members of the telepath trade team. Pets might take your pen, but only a sentient could have used it to write out even rough words across the floor of the cage he had been put in. Rather than alerting the media or any troublemakers, a staff member had quickly unlocked the two and cuddled them together - finally ending their upset screeching - while she had called the closest Ranger station.
Aaron Massey, the other telepath there, had sat down some minutes ago, and his exhaustion had given way to sleep. Ecathe longed to do the same, but his years of long days in medical work kept him upright still. He dabbed a fresh layer of antiseptic onto the Fidgie’s skin whenever they allowed it. He needed to do something, but was neither allowed nor still qualified to perform the microsurgery techniques used in the operating theatre below them. The distress and fatigue he could feel from the surgeons below him was piling up on his own emotions, even through his psychic blocks. Almost an hour before, there had been a slight flurry of hope from the surgeons; the first of the harvested serum had been ready. It was carefully injected while they continued to operate. But it only took a few minutes of observation for them to realise there was no effect; none of the tremors or nerve activity they knew to look for, not even any detectable cellular regeneration. The teams had continued working - her heart was almost intact again, and some minutes ago they had finished work on the lesser-destroyed leg and sealed those wounds over - as the next serum test was being prepared.
A third serum injection followed. The doctors completed all they could on her lower limbs, and closed the skin with grafts and force fields, moving off in fatigue as fresh members of those reassembling her spinal column and hips took up the spaces made, as the fourth then the fifth injections came. Ecathe had wrapped the clean, dozing birds up again in the fleece and sat down on the floor in front of the window by the time the sixth injection was tried. He tried not to listen to their emotions, and certainly he avoided looking into their thoughts. The sense of hope was not completely gone, as someone had come in and told the surgeons that some of the other injured were responding to their serum doses; that it would work, all they had to do was get her fixed enough for the alien antibodies to take effect.
The weary Brakiri healer was not the only one who worried that perhaps the reason the injections were not taking effect already was because the patient was not alive. Even with her heart patched together and pumping slightly under the direction of implanted controls, even with the recent lack of blood dripping off the table like a crimson waterfall, Ecathe knew she was dead. And he knew that without her being alive, it was days at most before he and all the others joined her in the next life. He could sense no presence below him, though he tried, hoping the little wild stories of her mindwalking could be stretched to somehow reach past the SoulEater’s grasp. It was not just the lack of mental activity in any part the scanners scanned, the lack of any nerve activity at all. It was not just the pale skin - grey where it was not blistered or grafted on fresh and pinkish - it was not just the unmoving form buried and hidden beneath sterile cloths and opaque force fields and the upright bodies of the surgeons. It was the *sense* that her soul was gone, like finding cold ashes instead of a roaring bonfire, though he and the others had called and shouted and screamed with their minds, begging and pleading with her to find a route back. He wanted her back; he wanted to hear her laugh; he wanted to have another argument with her; he wanted to be able to go home.
But he just could not admit it to himself. He could not truly admit that she might be gone. And if he was not convinced, then the Human who seemed too tired to stand - remaining upright through little more than adrenaline and willpower - beside him, face streaked with tears, was even less willing to surrender. Though Ecathe respected Zack Allan, he was not willing to let a hired man outlast him in the vigil over his beloved leader.
He could see, through eyes that were turning grey and blurry, that an eighth injection was being attempted now. He knew they would soon run out of donors. What happened then, he was not sure about, but he was growing too tired to care about the vague concept that was ‘later’. Ecathe closed his senses down, not wanting to feel these surroundings anymore. He wanted to hear Music again before he went insane and died, to hear something besides white noise and screaming, but even that simple joy was to be denied. Somewhere beside him, he could make out the shape of a Ranger in uniform, helping him to his feet, saying something about cryotubes and buying time. He mused to himself about the odd idea of purchasing something that was neither physical nor containable, even as a more clinical part of his mind hissed that he was in the first stages of insanity.
Somewhere in the grey haze, a sudden shrieking cut through the gloom. The Ranger shape near him stopped, but what Ecathe noticed was the sudden mental battering that was knocking about his head. With a single shake, he tried to clear the fog, focusing on the insistent demands that both birds were suddenly making on him. The pair was off the table now, trying to claw their way up a chair to where they could see into the theatre again, their bandage-wrapped talons unable to grip and their stubby, featherless wings unable to lift. Both avians were screaming, lungs and minds blasting loudly, their concept-thoughts begging him ‘look’, ‘look’.
Ecathe lifted the struggling, shrieking creatures onto the chair, rubbing his tired eyes. “What,” he rasped out, staring down to the table and surgeons. There was no change that he could see; though they were still operating. The scanner displays still showed Lyta’s body to be little more than a corpse; her heart and lungs only functioned under machine control and her brain did not function at all. Still the birds told him to look, and he reluctantly opened his mental shields a crack, though he did not have any reasons in his fogged mind as to why he might see something that his eyes could not.
Ecathe forgot how to breathe for a very long, disbelieving second. Then he fell to his knees and pressed closer to the glass, focusing all his energy to scan desperately towards the doors that led to and from the theatre itself, doors that were closed. What his eyes could not make out his blurry brain deciphered as a weak glow of energy, a white blaze tinted with only a slight bit of red, surrounded by dimmer glows that were winking out one after another. He could feel - it was *her*. Even through the whistling calls of the birds, he heard a voice asking him something. He knew what the answer was before the question was spoken, because he could sense that there was a barrier in front of the lost soul. “She can’t get in, she needs back - you have to let her in, she-” he stopped as the watched the blaze being hauled backwards by a swarm of lesser lights, fighting back but losing the vital closeness it needed. “Tell them,” he cried, staring in desperation, his words a bastard mix of his birth language and trade English, “they have to let her in, tell her they must let her in, it’s the only way!”
The Ranger was trying to move him, but he ignored the words and hands that pulled at him urgently. “Call them, tell them they have to let her in, otherwise they’re only cutting at a corpse, please Anla’shok, just let her in - just let her come back,” his voice suddenly lost its strength. “Please tell them,” he whispered as the world suddenly went dark and he passed out.
The birds, more agitated still, were not as easy to subdue; they had torn the bandages off the claws on their feet, and their beaks were as sharp as ever. The pair had stopped screeching, instead they hissed at the wary and now-wounded guards that tried to move them. They fought off the Rangers who tried clumsily to restrain them, yelling obscenities that were untranslated and untranslatable, just long enough for the Rangers in question to notice - then stare at in shock - the commotion in the theatre below them. The doors leading in were now open, held that way by the collapsed body that prevented them from closing. Several others, wearing both guard and medical uniforms, also littered the floor, and most of the surgery teams had backed away from a lone figure that obviously did not belong there. As the Rangers watched - then swore at and raced to stop, hands on their comm units barking orders - a surgeon who tried to stop the intruder was suddenly yanked by his arms, swung around to land with a slight thud against a wall. The intruder did not seem to notice the people around her as they now scrambled out the way, concerned with calling for more security or just with preserving their own skins, she just moved towards the operating table with the single-minded purpose of the possessed.
“It can’t be, that’s . . .”
One of the birds, silent now, cocked its head at the human speaker, the only other being still conscious in the observation room. The Fidgies sensed the recognition washing off Zack, and wondered if he could see what they could, or if all he recognised was the young Human who was carrying what had excited them so much. Turning back to watch with eyes and mind, they were able to observe the Human place her hands gently on the pale face of the patient, the brilliance of white suddenly rising up and out, bands and ribbons of light, of energy, of the soul-essence becoming almost visible as they expanded and roiled, then - less than half of a second later - the tendrils of energy suddenly reached downward, piling into and even right through the body on the table, leaving their previous host to collapse to the shiny, bloodstained floor.
Even as the two birds cackled in joy, over a dozen astonished doctors and one lovesick and weary guard watched as the lifesign monitors suddenly sputtered and changed.
As several upset and heavily armed Rangers burst in the door to the theatre; as a floor above them and a reality away a lone Human collapsed out of exhaustion; Lyta’s brainwaves returned. The scanners showed a ripple that shot across all her prone form, as all the nerves and connections suddenly sparked back into functioning, and, unaided by the pumps and machines, a long thin gasp of air was sucked into her lungs. It was the last thing Zack Allan saw as his injuries finally overtook him: that she had drawn a breath.
****
(Ch. 10 after I get back . . . See? I didn’t kill her!)