Adventures in coma land

Posted on Tue Jul 11th, 2023 @ 5:53am by Lieutenant JG Miraj Derani & Commander Sthilg

Mission: Season 6: Episode 2: Survival
Location: Medical shuttle
Timeline: S06E02, MD 03 0400
3833 words - 7.7 OF Standard Post Measure

Sthilg paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. He'd been working hard for many hours to repair the damage to Miraj's broken body, yet the next bit was going to be the hardest of all.

Brain surgery was never an easy feat even in a state-of-the-art federation hospital. Here, in a makeshift hospital bay built from shipping containers, on an ice ball without a name, it would be even harder. Still he had to help his friend and he was the only doctor on the ship who could do it.

His artificial arm began morphing as he turned one of it's tendrils into a small drill to make an incision in her skull. He'd have to apply some electrode boosters to restart the brain's electoral current whilst applying small nanobot bursts to repair any dead tissue.

The frigid temperatures had arrested decomp, so the damage was not as an extensive as it could have been, but there was still more than enough for the little robots to do, rebuilding the synapses cell by cell, replicating and and replicating their way through the grey matter.

In counterpoint, the heart monitor bleeped away, keeping time, slow and steady. The biobed forced air in to the lungs and pulled it out again keeping her breathing measured. The EEG barely twitched, but a twitch was still a twitch, however small. Whilst the EEG picked up current, there was hope.

When he activated the first electrode, she spasmed, a single full-body shake that jerked her up before the arch stopped her and she fell back.

And then the EEG spiked, a bright heavy peak

--------------------------------------------------------

Miraj woke, but didn't bother opening her eyes. "Five more minutes", she mumbled, and turned over in the hope she'd actually get them. When no one actually told her no, or pulled the covers off, she sat up. She was in her bed in Queen Anne's Revenge.

That didn't feel right.

She kicked back the covers, the black satin slithering to the floor in a whisper of silk on silk. "Mal?" No answer. "Z? Ilon?" No answer. It was pitch black. not a light anywhere. She twisted and put her bare feet down on the floor, and frowned. She couldn't feel anything. Queen Anne's engines weren't working. "lights please, Anne."

A solitary light stuttered to life in the corner, right by the door, a sluggish orange. Miraj frowned again, as much as her flared orbital arches allowed. That shouldn't happen. She got out of bed, and realised she was wearing a hospital gown. That didn't feel right either.

The State room on Queen Anne wasn't large, only a few paces took her to the door, and she stepped out into the wave rider, and was horrified. Queen Anne's Revenge was trashed.

Opposite her, the door to the other cabin hang out of its frame, to her left, the engine room was wrecked. The slender warp core dead. The fusion generator for the impulse engine pulsing weakly. Everywhere wires and EPS conduits hung out of every panel. She looked around with alarm. What had happened? Had she been attacked?

That did feel right.

But by who? And why? Her waverider didn't even have all the advanced sensors and scientific packages that came as standard. They'd been ripped out to make room for the warp core. Queen Anne was a sleek little pleasure boat, only good for flying. No cargo space, no weapons, no shielding beyond the particle deflector.

She turned forward, through the lounge where everything was turned upside down, small holes in the hull filled with the glint of the SIF, and into the cockpit. Through the windscreen she could see the ship was drifting, but she didn't recognise where. it was too dark. Space was full of light, stars and galaxies all around. But here wasn't like any space she knew. There were maybe half a dozen stars a long long way away. This truly was an empty void.

She looked around the cockpit again. Some panels were dead, others were smashed. Comms was a mess of shattered glass and intermittent lights. Sensors were flickering in and out. The main computer didn't respond to her jabs on the LCARS. Ops struggled up, and then fell dark again. And her precious helm, that Ilon had converted to a pair of sticks and a foot board of pedals, was twitching idly, unresponsive.

Only one panel was untouched. It was blinking red. Life support. The battery indicator was down to barely a thin red line. Air scrubbers looked like they would fall over any second. Heating was running out of power. Gravity was deteriorating, and the SIF wouldn't be far behind.

Queen Anne was dying. If she wanted to survive, she had to get things moving.

Except she didn't know how she was going to fix anything. She was a pilot. Not an engineer, not a technician.

But that was a problem for later. First she needed a toolbox.

----------------------------------------------

Sthilg smiled slightly as his tendrils continued his work in her brain. "Miraj, my girl, I need you to help me." He said calmly as he worked keeping his eyes focused on the task at hand. At least her brain was coming back to life. The next section he had to work on was her frontal lobe which had taken quite a beating from her attacker. His silvery tendrils got to work applying electrode and regenerative patches.

----------------------------------

Miraj stared around the Queen Anne. Where would she find a toolbox? Her nose twitched and she sniffed. Something tickled at her, and she turned her head towards the cockpit. She got a clear whiff of something, the dead sterile whiff of distilled and ultrafiltered air. It wasn't any smell Queen Anne could make. Ilon had put in a complicated natural air system, since he had Views on making spacecraft feel like living in a tincan.

She stepped back into the wave riders control centre and was hit with blast of air heavy with metallic notes or iron. It seemed to be coming from the pilots seat. Scrambling over, she dropped to her knees, the bare deck plating there cold as ice. She could smell other things too now. The stale warm notes of over breathed air, that same tang of iron, only richer. Blood? And sitting on top of it all was the pungent whiff of antiseptic, invading everything.

It was coming from underneath the conn. She groped forward, and her fingers closed on something. She heaved, and dragged out a toolbox. With a little "ha!" of triumph she opened it up. The items inside were strange, unrecognizable. She knew they were tools, but they didn't look like anything she knew. Okay. So far so good. She was drifting in space, a gazillion miles from anywhere. What did she need? Life support, particle deflector, comms, propulsion, preferably in that order.

------------------------
The brain monitor chimed, indicating the olfactory bulbs and orbitofrontal area was complete, then again and again in quick succession to show Primary Audio Cortex, Cuneus and Paracentral lobule

Sthilg smiled at how well things were going. Thankfully it was standard procedure to save a transport copy so he had a good copy of Miraj's brain. Clicking his figures next to her ears get saw a slight twitch from her ear. " Hold on my friend. I'm going to get you fixed up." He said in his grandfatherly tone.

-----------------------

Queen Anne's comm system coughed awake. It was cracking, and thick with static. She could hear some sounds, a steady beeping, and she would swear there was something hissing in the background that wasn't just random signal fuzz.

"Anyone there?" she asked but there was only static on the comm. "Are you receiving, over?"

There was a long pause and then a voice said, "Mij?"

The flood of relief made her knees weak and she dropped into her seat. Her brothers voice was calm and clear. "Mal? Where are you?"

"Uh, somewhere between Orion space and the Klingons. Nowhere interesting. Where are you?"

"I don’t know. I'm drifting, and Queen Anne's damaged and the stars are so far away. Mal, there's no stars!"

There was a pause. "Okay. You know the drill: Life Support, shields, comms. Have you got life support?"

"Yes, but its running out."

"Okay, then you need power. Go look at the reactor, get it working. I told Ilon to make it you-proof. It won't be hard."

Miraj slid off her seat, aware of how cold the floor was getting against her bare feet, and scurried aft. The fusion generator was still working, but the hum was muted and dull, not its usual busy hum. Moving to its access panel, she unscrewed to plates and looked inside.

Her hat was inside. The black tricorn with the red feathers that she wore when she played Bloodbeard rather than Roger. She put it on her head. The fusion reactor was gummed up with all kinds of things, stuff she surrounded herself with. She pulled out her spyglass, the allegedly antique one Mal had bought for her as a graduation gift; her childhood cuddly parrot, Long John Silver, ; her illustrated General History of the Pyrates, that she knew off by heart; her Roger costume and her other dressing up clothes. It just kept coming.

Eventually she had a pile of stuff on the floor. She tugged out the last - her skull and crossbones flag and let it flutter down on top of the pile. The generator gave one last cough before speeding up into its usual galloping buzz. Power rolled back into the system. The lights came up, the air scrubbers started to purr, and the warp core started to roll up and down as it was supposed to.

And up in the cockpit, things started to explode.
--------------------------------------------------------------

" No no no no no...." Sthilg mumbled as he withdrew his tendrils at the sound of the emergency alert going off. It was, unfortunately, a common effect when fixing up one who had been brain-dead for as long as Miraj. Swinging the monitor round he cursed out loud again as he pulled out the drug draw. He needed to get her blood pressure under control or she could burst a vessel in her brain which would doom any chance of bringing her back.

"Come on my friend I need your help. I do not give you permisssssion to die. " He said a hint of panic in his voice as he injected her with a combination of drugs as he began to work the life support machine with his free hand.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Miraj ran forward, dodging sprays of plasma form broken and weakened conduits as the power filled the ship, reigniting dead station and putting current into previously dead devices. The comms unit was crackling. The beeping and the whooshing was still there, stronger, faster, but underneath she could pick out words… twenty mils Leptrazine…….15 mils synaptizine… hyrexanol… spironactalone."

She knew that voice. "Doctor?" but she got no response from the gorn. He was obviously busy with something. "Doctor!" Still nothing. She leant on the console and stared out. And blinked

There were more stars. Stars didn't just appear, except that was exactly what happened. There still weren't many, but now there were dozens, not just a dozen. Okay. Unexpected. Miraj looked around. Particle shields before comms. That was the rule, protect yourself before reaching out. Access to the deflector was under the lounge floor, so she turned back and looked for the panel.

It took her three goes to lift the right panel and find the deflector housing, but she ignored the smell of smoke and looked down. It was full of stars. She reached in, and gave them a bit of a stir, and they slid through her fingers, a million motes of light suspended in smooth oily night.

"Well well well we are in trouble aren't we....." A voice said from the co-pilots seat. One Miraj remembered all to well. The seat slowly turned to reveal it's occupant. He looked like death as if half his body had been kicked in and left to rot as the other half kept on pumping. "Hello, my pet." The mirror version of Sthilg hissed through his broken gums.

Miraj skittered back, her left arm still covered in the liquid essence of the milky way halfway to the elbow, and dripping down to leave starlight staining bits of her hospital gown. "How are you here? Half of you has fallen off." She felt her body starting to tighten with fear, as the memories of his dreadful machine nibbled at her mind.

The seemingly undead lizard shrugged as he started at her a look of annoyance and anger on his face. "How should I know?" As another piece of him fell off and flopped to the floor with a thump. "We're in your head now aren't we?"

Miraj looked at the lump of flesh on the floor, and the patch of deep muscles it had revealed on his face. She fancied she could see all the way through his cheek when he talked now. "My head is an empty void." She pointed to the barely starred blackness beyond the windscreens. And yes, that made sense. "Why do I get you? Why not the real doctor?"

"Who do you think is trying to keep you alive?" The rotting corpse replied before it seemed to snap into an upright position. "Don't you die on me little one you hear me...." came the doctors real voice that seemed to be echoing from a light year away. Snapping back into its slumped position the voice turned back into the doctors mirror nightmare. "Perhaps you should try the coms. It sounds like you can't hear him properly."

Miraj looked between the deflector, the comms panel, and the corpse, uncertain. She'd grown up on a salvage vessel. She'd learnt from seeing the results of disaster what your priorities should be. She had no idea how fast she was moving. There weren't enough stars to even try to guess. Even if she wasn't close to lightspeed, hitting even a speck of space dust at anything over quarter impulse would take a chunk out of Queen Anne. "Dad says always make sure things can't get worse before you think about reaching out." But it was more of a question than a statement.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sthilg smiled as her life signs started dropping back into safe levels. "Keep fighting Miraji." He said softly as he noticed the time. Four hours already and a lot more to go. Picking up an energy pill the lizard downed it dry. "You're going to be ssso annoyed at me for the head ssscar." He said to his friend before he returned to his work preparing his brain. "Wherever you are my friend I hope it'sss sssafe and warm." He said as he got back to work.


-----------------------------------------------
Miraj looked uncertainly between the two. The deflector dish was still a pool of stars. The comms were burbling softly words she couldn't catch. And Sthilg the Corpse was looking there, managing to seem entirely too smug for someone who looked like he'd been floating in the brine for the best part of a week.

And how did you fix a pool of stars anyway? She might have more luck with comms. "What's your game?" she asked Corpse-Sthilg

The corpse took up a pose of mocking curiosity. "Well if I was that weakling version you have I'd say I'm your brain putting out the memory of something you definitely wouldn't want to be stuck with. Trying to get you to hurry up."

It snapped upright again as the more gentler tone of an all to familiar voice filtered through "You're going to be ssso annoyed at me for the head ssscar."

Miraj touched her head. Her bunches were in place, the hair soft, no sign of a scar, but everything felt tender, sore, something she couldn't remember throbbed under her fingers. She pulled her hand away, embarrassed at being distracted. "Hurry Up? I'm going as fast as -" She stared down at the Deflector Dish. "What was I doing again?"

"Trying to avoid crashing this ship like you did with the Elysium." The mirror corpse said as it began to laugh.

"I didn't crash!" She snapped back, sitting down and starting to bail out the deflector dish with her bare hands. Stars splashed everywhere, turning the inside of Queen Anne's Revenge, cosy and bright with with the reflection of half the universe. "I tried artificially stretching space-time inside an oscillating and only partly stable quantum anomaly that there are only six people in the galaxy qualified to fly through." More stars flew out of the dish. She was covered in them, the floor of the lounge was covered in them. Even corpse-Sthilg's feet.

"We were wrapped up in a quantum filament, it was going to dice us at least three different ways, at which point the SIF would have failed in multiple points, and the vast majority of us would have died. Maybe it wasn't the smartest -" she realised it the moment she emptied the deflector. She looked up at corpse-Sthilg, surrounded by the septillion stars of the universe, "Actually, it was the smartest choice."

The certainty she felt was a surprise. It was the right decision. She knew it bone deep. She could screw up in a thousand ways, in a thousand places, but they were never ever, ever at the con. She looked into the deflector dish. It was finally empty, nothing left inside; no doubt and definitely no second guesses.

She looked up at Sthilg, "I don't make mistakes when I fly. I saved as many lives as I could. And people who don't like that can haul wind into a typhoon."

"
"Sure that's why someone tried caving your head in with his boot." The corpse replied as a light flashed on the flight controls.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


"No no no no no...." Sthilg bellowed out loud as the reading flashed before his eyes. It was at the most difficult part of the operation where he had to restart her heart and so it would beat normally. Only something had gone terribly wrong. " Miraj do not die on my now I've been putting you back together for fifteen hoursss ssstraihgt..." He yelled as he raced to get her vitals under control.


======================

Miraj stared at corpse-sthilg. "What? Someone did what?" Behind him, the conn kept flashing. It was instinct to go to it, but Corpse-Sthilg was blocking her.

"You don't remember?" It replied with a chilling laugh as it began to collapse in on itself into a pile of sludge. "Someone wants you dead little girl." its last cold words came from the sludge pile which began to fade into blackness as did the chair it had been sitting in.

For a moment Miraj just stared at the vanished corspe, the sludge had just... dissolved. Where he had been was now just... nothing. It wasn't liek the chair was empty, the chair was fading away too. and there was more Nothing in its place. Not empty air, that was just a lack of matter. This was a lack of existence.

But it wasn't the slowly spreading oblivion that had her rooted to the spot. Corpse-Sthilg's last words froze her. Someone wants you dead. It wasn't... that couldn't be... she wheezed for breath, her chest tight and weighted down, and she stumbled against the ops console, which faded away as she touched it. She glanced back down Queen Anne. And the aft of the waverunner was gone too, ontologically. Everything was fading.

And in the darkess beyond, a figure, shapeless. "This is all your fault." the voice was oily, and slithered over her and her flesh crawled at the sound. The figure moved again, black on black, "You had to show off."

No different from the void around it, the figure reached out a limb and sank its hand deep into her throat.

------------------------------------------------------


Sthilg let out a slight yell of panic as he heard the familiar sound of a flatline. "NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO" he yelled as he started pounding on her chest. "YOU ARE NOT DYING ON ME ENSSSIGN." he yelled as he worked to restart her heart.

---------------------------------

Miraj pushed against the thing, feeling the hate it had for her through her own skin. It was like grabbing an ice statue, the coldness of knowing someone hated her enough to try and kill her. THe limb in her throat stole her air, and made her pulse thump in her ears and she struggled against it, feeling a foot across her neck.

"We're centuries from home." It oozed, features becoming sharper, but she couldn't place them, still to blurred and gooey to be recognisable. "That's all on you."

The guilt she was expecting didn't come. Only the low hum of a sea shanty. 𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮"Bones in the ocean forever will be."𝅘𝅥𝅮𝅘𝅥𝅮

And the memory of her death was shoved back.

"Look at me!" it hissed, anger bubbling at every syllable.

"No!" Miraj knew if she looked, if she saw, she'd know everything, and she would be lost, it would finish what it started, what the radio-Sthilg was desperately trying to prevent. She craned her head away, keeping her eyes firmly on The parts of Queen Anne that still existed.

"No!" gurgled the thing. And its appendage slipped from her throat. "Look at me!" The wail was angry, but desperate, the cry was a whining pleading, rather than a command.

There were stars beyond the cockpit, not many, but a few. She had to reach them. There was safety there. Her fingers inched towards the helm, though the Death Memory try to haul her back.

"I belong out there!" She decided, and she shoved, still not looking. The semi-formed but itchingly familiar blob splattered backwards, and she dove for the con, her hands finding the sticks as surely as she could touch her own nose, shoving them down and the waverider lurched forward in a jolt.

The Death Memory was tipped right out of the non-existent back end of Queen Anne and was left in the void. Miraj refused to look back. If she did that, she'd never escape. And now, right now, she was where she should be, centered like she could be no other way. At conn.

It was a long way home. She knew that, even if she didn't know where home was. A long trip in darkness. But she would endure. She picked her course, and turned the sticks.

Second star to the right, straight on till morning.

END