“Brody.” Ford stepped into the central security room.
Jim turned away from the vid he’d been studying and faced the Commander. “Sir?” he replied, unsure what Ford wanted.
“You heard that Lucas was found?” The commander brushed an invisible dust speck from his own uniform.
“Yes,” he answered cautiously. What was this chit-chat about? Of course he knew that Lucas had been found! “I heard from O’Neill this morning on the way to bridge duty.”
Ford’s look softened a little. He abandoned the small-talk approach. “I know you had one hell of a manhunt organized, Jim,” he began awkwardly.
Brody’s eyebrows rose briefly in surprise. He’d been on the defensive, ready to withstand yet another verbal battle with Ford. But the Commander hadn’t come here to be hostile, it seemed. “Yeah, another half-hour, and squad eight would have found him,” Jim replied more openly. He made an attempt at a laugh, but his bitterness turned it into more of a bark. “We’d already searched the rest of the ship, but it took three days...”
Before Brody could begin doubting his team’s work, Ford interjected. “Lieutenant, he might have eluded you for three more days. Did Ortiz ever tell you about how Krieg stowed Lucas on board during the Scully anti-ecoterrorism mission?”
What?? Nobody had mentioned this to him before. “Negative, sir,” he replied reflexively.
Ford waved off Brody’s formality. This was a conversation between friends. “He crawled around those air ducts for days, staying out of sight from the security vids. And that was the first seaQuest. Half those crawlspaces in this one are for comms lines--which Lucas designed.” Ford realized he was rambling. “Anyway, I just came by to say that your teams did a good job under pressure.”
They hadn’t, really. But Jim understood the commander perfectly. It was as near as he could come to apologizing for his attitude during the past week without actually admitting that he’d caused a lot of the pressure. It was an old military saying: “The captain may be correct or incorrect, but the captain is never wrong.” In this instance, it seemed the cliché applied to the executive officer as well. Jim hadn’t expected this apology--he certainly didn’t feel that he deserved one. But it was nice to hear the words all the same.
“Thanks. Maybe when Lucas is done mending, he can help with a search-and-rescue plan for the comms ducts.” He made an expression somewhere between a grin and a grimace. “Since he seems to know them so well.”
Ford’s eyes unfocused a little as he pondered the idea. “Maybe. But I doubt he’ll want to go in there for a while after all this.”
After a pause, Brody nodded. “I think it’s best that Dagwood found him, anyway,” he said. “One of my guys would have scared him half to death.”
Ford clapped Jim on the shoulder. “Maybe you should bring up that search-and-rescue plan at the tactical meeting this afternoon.”
The Lieutenant considered the idea more carefully. With support from the XO, he might have a chance at getting the proposal through. “Hmm. Thanks.” But Ford had already exited the room.
Tim stood frozen with surprise at the scene on seadeck. Lucas sat on the edge of the moonpool, nearly asleep. He leaned heavily against Dagwood’s chest, which kept him from falling backward into the water. “Oh my--Dagwood, you found him!” Tim jabbered. This was just too weird. Nobody else on the boat had been able to find Lucas. Those encountering him by accident, like Tony, had reported that Lucas was in some state of paranoid panic. But there he was, calm as could be.
The GELF’s brow creased slightly. “Shh! Lucas needs it quiet. When it gets too loud or bright, his heart beats too fast.” He placed his hand gently on the teen’s chest, but Lucas didn’t react. Dagwood seemed satisfied, and waved at Tim to enter the room.
“He looks like Dagwood, doesn’t he.” Dag indicated the multicolored bruise on Lucas’ face, and then touched his own tortoise-mottled skin. Incongruous as the comment was, Tim was inclined to agree. “I have a question.”
“What is it, Dagwood?”
“What should we do with Lucas now? We can’t stay here. Lieutenant Henderson is fixing the boats,” he gestured broadly at the Stingers that lay in various stages of disarray around the room. “It will be too loud, and Lucas will run away again.”
The whole situation obviously had upset Dagwood. He unconsciously started to rock back and forth slightly, which made Lucas stir a little. Tim couldn’t believe it. Dagwood could do what nobody else had been able to do--retrieve the young scientist. But he couldn’t do what anybody else would have done. “Dagwood, we need to take him to medbay right this minute.”
“Mmm . . . but, but--”
“Right now, Dag!” Tim tried to sound urgent and soothing at the same time. “He’s very sick, and we can’t help him here.”
He wasn't convinced. “But he doesn’t want to go there. Dagwood thinks,” he leaned forward and brought his voice down to a stage whisper, “I think that Lucas is hiding.” Dagwood shifted his body a little, so that his broad torso separated Tim and Lucas.
“He talked to you?” That hardly seemed likely--the kid was semicatatonic.
“Sometimes he talks to Dagwood. Sometimes he talks to that bad man.”
“To Marshall?” Dagwood nodded. “Clay Marshall’s dead, Dag.”
Dagwood was getting tired of Tim’s patronizing attitude. “Dagwood knows. I know. Sometimes Lucas knows it, too. Sometimes he talks a little to himself. But mostly he is very quiet.”
This was going nowhere. Tim tried again. “We have to take him to medbay, Dagwood.” The GELF began to argue again, but Tim knew what to do this time. “Come on, pick him up. That’s right, nice and gentle. I’ll walk with you.” As usual, Dagwood responded unthinkingly to a direct order. Tim felt like a heel for taking advantage of that personality trait--it had probably been programmed straight into Dag’s DNA, or maybe trained into him as a child.
They made it all the way to the Maglev before Lucas woke up enough to comprehend what was happening. His blue eyes went wide, but didn’t appear to focus on anything in particular. “No. Tim, Dag, no . . . can’t go to medbay.” He attempted to rise and manipulate the manual controls of the elevator, but the lurching of the car prevented it.
Tim grabbed hold of Lucas’ wrist, and brought him back to the seats. The boy didn’t resist anymore, but under his breath kept up a continuous stream of dialogue, trying to convince the two men to let him go. Most of it was too quiet to hear, but Tim caught some of it. “I’ll be fine. I can’t go there; they can’t see me like this. I just need to go . . . ” Dagwood rubbed his shoulder, which seemed to comfort him a little. The words didn’t stop, though. The strange, disjointed monologue was even more eerie and frightening than his earlier silence.
“I can’t see her, I can’t go there. Don’t make me.” He was upset and unreasonable, and listening to his incoherent protestations made Tim’s skill crawl with goose bumps. He silently prayed that the car would arrive soon.
Suddenly they were there, and a bustling squad of nurses and med-techs took Lucas from Dagwood’s grasp. The medics fired a rapid burst of questions them, all at once. Tim fielded them as best he could. We found him on seadeck. No, I don’t think he’s eaten since he left. No, Bridger doesn’t know yet. No, I don’t know why he ran away.
Dr. Smith approached the group from behind. “We’ll take it from here, Tim.” Everyone immediately stopped talking, even Lucas, who stared intently at Wendy through narrowed eyes. Wendy shooed Tim and Dagwood out of medbay, and the hatch closed with a clang.
“They didn’t say, ‘Thank you, Tim. Thank you, Dagwood.’”
Tim sighed. That hadn’t gone at all like he’d expected. “No, they didn’t, Dag.”
“Welcome. Mmm.” Dagwood looked at the floor and shuffled back toward the Maglev.