Chapter 1 #2
I navigated through Mothership's corridors on autopilot.
Deck seven to the lift. Lift down to deck fourteen where the human crew quarters were located.
Past the common area where someone had attempted to recreate Earth-style furniture.
The results were well-intentioned but slightly wrong, like everything else about our new existence.
The quarters I shared with Elena were at the end of the corridor.
Small by Mothership standards but luxurious compared to the cave we'd survived in for three weeks on that burning nightmare planet.
Two sleeping alcoves, a shared living space, a hygiene unit that still confused me with its combination of water jets and some kind of sonic cleaning technology.
Elena wasn't there. Probably at the ceremony despite her protests. Or maybe hiding in the electrical systems she loved more than people.
I stood in the center of the empty quarters and felt the exhaustion hit like a physical weight.
Zorn was right. I was running on nothing.
But the alternative, actually stopping, actually resting, actually letting my guard down long enough to feel anything—that was worse. Because when I stopped working, when I let my mind go quiet, the memories came back.
The Liberty disaster. The wormhole that had shredded our ship apart. The burning planet where we'd crashed. The people I couldn't save.
Sixteen-hour shifts kept the nightmares away. Constant work meant constant focus. Patients who needed me gave me purpose.
Without the work, I was just a woman stranded billions of light-years from home with nothing but scar tissue where her heart used to be.
I moved to the small nutrition dispenser and requested something approximating Earth food.
The Mothership's systems had gotten better at synthesizing human-compatible meals over the past months, but the results were still off.
This allegedly was chicken and rice. It tasted like textured protein and sadness.
I ate it anyway. Fuel. Nothing more.
My hands had stopped shaking. Small victory.
I should sleep. Zorn's orders. Medical fitness for duty. All the rational reasons that made perfect sense when I wasn't the one being ordered around.
Instead, I pulled up my personal datapad and reviewed patient files.
The Krellian with the collapsed lung, prognosis was good but I wanted to cross-reference Zandovian regeneration protocols with the limited information I had about Krellian physiology.
The injured engineer, cranial trauma recovery times across different species showed significant variation.
I needed to study the data more carefully.
The work. Always the work.
Hours passed. The chronometer on the wall ticked over. 2300 hours. 0100. 0300.
My eyes burned. My head ached. But I kept reading, kept analyzing, kept my mind occupied with problems that had solutions instead of feelings that didn't.
When I finally collapsed into my sleeping alcove, still wearing my medical scrubs because changing seemed like too much effort, I had exactly forty-five minutes before my next scheduled shift.
The nightmares came immediately.
Fire. Always fire. The Liberty's corridors ablaze with plasma fires that ate through bulkheads like paper.
Emergency klaxons screaming their useless warnings.
I was running through the medical bay, trying to reach the patients strapped to their beds, but the floor kept tilting, gravity failing, and my feet couldn't find purchase.
"Doctor Santos!" A voice calling from behind burning doors. "Help us!"
I reached for the emergency release. The panel was too hot, skin sizzling against metal,but I yanked it anyway. The door opened onto empty space. Not the medical bay. Not the ship. Just the purple-orange sky of that nightmare planet rushing up to meet us, atmosphere screaming past the hull.
The impact threw me sideways. I was in the cave now, surrounded by injured women whose faces I couldn't save, whose names I'd cataloged like inventory.
Sierra with the crushed ribs. Melissa with the burns covering forty percent of her body.
The pilot whose name I never learned because she died before I could ask.
"You didn't save us," they whispered in unison, their eyes accusing. "You let us burn."
"I tried—" My voice wouldn't work right, coming out strangled and desperate. "I tried everything—"
"Not enough. Never enough."
The cave walls closed in, temperature spiking, heat pressing against my skin like a physical weight. I was burning now, feeling my skin blister, smelling my own flesh cooking, but I couldn't move, couldn't scream, could only watch as the flames consumed everything I'd failed to protect.
A hand touched my shoulder. I spun, and it was the Krellian patient, the one who'd died tonight under my compressions. His chest was caved in, ribs exposed, but he was standing, reaching for me with bloodied hands.
"Why did you stop?" he asked. "Why did you let me die?"
"You were already gone—"
"You gave up. Just like you gave up on them. Just like you'll give up on everyone eventually, because you're too broken to save anyone, least of all yourself—"
The alarm jerked me awake at 0545, heart hammering against my ribs like it was trying to escape my chest.
I was shaking. Couldn't stop shaking. My hands trembled as I pressed them against my face, feeling the cold sweat that had soaked through my scrubs, plastered my hair to my skull.
Forty-five minutes. I'd gotten forty-five minutes of that.
I felt like death.
The hygiene unit mirror confirmed it. I flinched away from my reflection, couldn't quite meet those bloodshot gray-blue eyes staring back. When had the dark circles become permanent? When had my cheekbones gotten so sharp?
I splashed cold water on my face, tried to shock my nervous system back to functional. The water was too cold. Everything was too much. Too bright, too loud, too real after the nightmare's visceral horror.
I twisted my pale blonde hair back into something approaching professional. The bun I'd attempted yesterday had mostly disintegrated, leaving wisps everywhere that made me look less charmingly disheveled and more recently resuscitated.
Close enough.
I pulled on a clean medical uniform with mechanical precision. Self-cleaning fabric, perfect fit, appropriate for any medical scenario. The Zandovian-designed scrubs were efficient in ways that should've been comforting but just felt alien.
Like everything else about my existence now.
The corridor was quiet this early. Night shift personnel heading to rest, day shift just beginning to stir. I made my way to the medical bay with the kind of focused determination that came from years of functioning on minimal sleep and maximum nightmare fuel.
The morning briefing was standard. Zorn reviewed overnight patient statuses, assigned duties, and discussed incoming rescue operations that might require medical support.
His golden-brown eyes tracked across my face when he thought I wasn't looking, noting the tremor in my hands I couldn't quite suppress, the way I had to blink hard to keep the overhead lights from stabbing into my skull.
He didn't comment. Didn't mention my forty-five minutes of sleep or the fact that I looked like I'd been run over by a cargo transport.
Professional courtesy, maybe. Or he was saving his lecture for later.
I took my assignments and dove into work. Three new patients from an overnight rescue. A family of Vex'ali refugees with radiation exposure from a deteriorating ship. Standard treatment protocols: decontamination, cellular regeneration therapy, radiation purge. I've done this dozens of times now.
My hands knew the movements even when my brain felt like sludge.
By midday, all three patients were stable and resting. I documented everything in their medical files, cross-referenced treatment efficacy with Zandovian medical databases, and made notes for follow-up care.
Efficient. Professional. Exactly what was expected.
"Bea."
I looked up from my datapad to find Dana standing in the medical bay entrance.
She'd changed. Not the superficial things, though her auburn hair was down instead of pulled back in its usual practical braid, and she wore civilian clothes instead of engineering coveralls.
The change was deeper. Something in the way she held herself, shoulders relaxed instead of braced for catastrophe.
The permanent worry line between her eyebrows had smoothed.
Her smile, when it came, looked effortless instead of forced.
Six months ago, Dana had been wound tighter than anyone I'd ever met, carrying the weight of sixteen lives on shoulders too young for that burden. Now she looked settled. Content.
Bonding had transformed her.
A sharp stab of something that might've been envy sliced through me. That is if I'd let myself examine it too closely.
"Dana." I set down the datapad, forced my professional mask into place. "Everything okay?"
"Yeah, actually. Just finished early. Er'dox kicked me out of Engineering, said I was optimizing systems that don't require optimization.
" She moved closer, her engineer's eye automatically scanning the medical equipment around us.
"Which apparently is code for 'you're being obsessive, go spend time with actual people. '"
"Sound advice."
"Coming from you, that's hilarious." Dana's expression shifted, concern replacing the lightness. "You look terrible."
"Thanks. That's exactly what every woman wants to hear."
"I'm serious. When did you last sleep more than four hours?"
The question hit too close to the nightmare still clinging to the edges of my consciousness. "I sleep fine."
"Bea." Dana's voice dropped, taking on that particular tone that meant she was about to say something I didn't want to hear. "Elena mentioned the nightmares. Said you’d wake up screaming twice a week at least."
Traitor.
"I'm handling it."