Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
BEA
Dr. Senna's office had become the most terrifying place on Mothership.
Not because of what happened there, no scalpels, no emergency codes, no life-or-death decisions that could haunt me for years. Just conversation. Questions. Silence that stretched until I filled it with truths I'd been avoiding since before Earth disappeared in my rearview mirror.
Six weeks of therapy. Twelve sessions. Seven hundred and twenty minutes of systematically dismantling every defense mechanism I'd spent decades perfecting.
I was exhausted in ways that had nothing to do with shift work.
"Tell me about the cave," Dr. Senna said.
We were in our usual positions, her in the comfortable chair designed for human proportions, me on the couch where I could see both the door and the viewport showing stars beyond. Escape routes and situational awareness. Some habits therapy couldn't break.
I didn't want to talk about the cave. We'd already discussed the Liberty disaster, the wormhole that tore our ship apart, the burning planet where we crashed. We'd excavated every traumatic moment like archaeologists sorting through ruins, cataloging damage with clinical precision.
But the cave was different. The cave was where I'd failed in ways that still made my hands shake.
"We had seventeen survivors initially," I heard myself say.
My voice sounded distant, like someone else was speaking through my mouth.
"Twenty-three people in the escape pod. Six died on impact or shortly after.
The heat was—" I stopped, forced breath into lungs that wanted to seize.
"During the day, the ground burned. We could only move at night when it rained and cooled enough to survive outside. "
Dr. Senna made a small notation on her datapad. "You mentioned this before. But you haven't talked about what happened inside the cave. About the decisions you had to make."
The decisions. Right. Because that was the core of it, wasn't it? The impossible choices that defined who lived and who became another statistic in my personal ledger of failure.
"Limited supplies," I said. The clinical language felt safer than emotional truth. "Inadequate medical equipment. Multiple serious injuries. I had to triage."
"Triage means choosing who gets treatment first. Who has the best chance of survival."
"I know what triage means."
"I'm sure you do. But knowing the definition intellectually is different from living with the consequences emotionally.
" Dr. Senna's voice stayed gentle, but her questions were scalpels cutting through protective tissue.
"You chose who to treat. Who to prioritize.
And some people died because of those choices. "
The words hung in the air like smoke from a fire I couldn't put out.
"Sarah Chen," I whispered. "Internal bleeding.
I could have tried surgery with the equipment we had, but the odds were terrible and we didn't have the supplies to waste on a procedure that would probably fail.
So I focused on the patients I could save.
Made her comfortable. Gave her pain medication from our limited stock.
Held her hand while she bled out over three hours. "
My vision blurred. I blinked hard.
"Marcus Rodriguez. Crushed pelvis, compound fractures, developing sepsis from wound contamination. He needed antibiotics we didn't have, surgery I couldn't perform without proper tools. I kept him sedated so he wouldn't suffer. He lasted four days."
"And you blame yourself for their deaths."
"I made the choice to let them die."
"You made the choice to save six other people who would have died without your care.
" Dr. Senna leaned forward slightly. "Bea, you were in an impossible situation with inadequate resources and no good options.
You did triage exactly as you were trained to do—prioritize those with the highest likelihood of survival. That's not murder. That's medicine."
"It felt like murder."
"I imagine it did. But feeling guilty doesn't make you guilty."
The logic was sound. I was a surgeon—I understood resource allocation, probability, the brutal mathematics of crisis medicine. But logic and emotion occupied different territories, and grief didn't care about reasonable arguments.
"I dream about them," I admitted. "Sarah and Marcus and the others who didn't make it off Earth, who died in the crash, who I couldn't save in the cave. They're there every time I close my eyes. Asking why I chose someone else. Why they weren't worth saving."
"What do you tell them?"
"Nothing. I just apologize and apologize and apologize until I wake up."
Dr. Senna was quiet for a moment, her expression thoughtful. "Have you considered that maybe they're not accusing you? That maybe your subconscious is trying to process trauma by creating these conversations?"
"Psychology isn't my area of expertise."
"Medicine isn't mine. But I know trauma when I see it, and you're carrying weight that would crush most people.
" She set down her datapad, gave me her full attention.
"You survived the Liberty disaster. You saved lives in impossible circumstances.
You were rescued and brought to an alien ship where you've continued healing people across species barriers. Those are remarkable accomplishments."
"They don't balance out the ones I lost."
"No. They don't. But Bea, and I need you to really hear this, you're not responsible for balancing the cosmic scales. You're not required to save enough people to make up for the ones you couldn't save. That's not how healing works."
The words hit somewhere deep in my chest, cracking something that had calcified around my heart.
"Then how does it work?" My voice came out smaller than intended, almost childlike in its confusion.
"You save the people you can save. You mourn the ones you couldn't. You forgive yourself for being human and finite and unable to fix everything.
" Dr. Senna's expression was kind but unflinching.
"And you allow yourself to live instead of just surviving.
You're allowed happiness, Bea. You're allowed rest. You're allowed to build connections without feeling guilty that you're alive when others aren't."
I wanted to argue. Wanted to defend the punishment I'd been inflicting through overwork and isolation and relentless forward motion. But the exhaustion was too heavy, the grief too raw, the truth too obvious.
I'd been punishing myself. Using medicine as penance. Destroying my health in some misguided attempt to atone for surviving when others didn't.
And it wasn't working.
"I don't know how to stop," I whispered.
"I know. That's why you're here. That's why we're going to keep meeting until you learn." Dr. Senna smiled, warm and genuine. "You're making progress. Six weeks ago, you couldn't even admit there was a problem. Now you're talking about the core trauma. That's a significant movement."
Progress felt like standing in rubble and calling it architecture. But maybe that's how healing worked—small reconstructions, one conversation at a time.
"There's a survivors' support group," Dr. Senna continued.
"Dana and Jalina attend. Several other Liberty crew members.
It meets weekly, informal discussions about processing displacement trauma and building new lives here.
I think it might help to talk with others who understand what you went through. "
My immediate instinct was to refuse. Support groups meant vulnerability, meant exposing my damage to people who might need me to be strong.
But Dr. Senna was right about one thing—I was tired of being strong alone.
"I'll think about it," I said.
"That's all I ask. Think about it. Consider that you don't have to carry this alone." She checked the time. "We're almost at the end of our session. How are you feeling?"
How was I feeling? Exhausted. Raw. Like someone had performed surgery on my psyche without anesthesia. But also, lighter. Like maybe the weight I'd been carrying wasn't quite as crushing as it had been when I walked in.
"Tired," I said honestly. "But okay."
"Good. That's good. Healing is exhausting work." Dr. Senna stood, signaling the end of the session with practiced grace. "Same time next week?"
"Yeah. Same time."
I left her office and stepped into Mothership's corridor, the transition from soft Earth-lighting to utilitarian alien efficiency jarring as always.
Crew members moved past Zandovians, humans, a few species I still couldn't properly identify.
A mobile city functioning around me while I tried to function within myself.
My comm unit chimed. Message from Jalina: Dinner tonight? All the bonded couples are getting together. You should come. Dana's making Er'dox try human food and the entertainment value alone is worth it.
I stared at the message, finger hovering over the decline button. Dinner with the happy couples, Dana and Er'dox, Jalina and Zor'go, all of them radiating contentment that made my isolation feel sharper by comparison.
But Dr. Senna's voice echoed: You're allowed happiness. You're allowed to build connections.
What time? I sent back before I could change my mind.
Jalina's response came immediately: 1900 hours. Deck 12 common area. Bring yourself and no excuses.
I pocketed my comm unit and headed toward the medical bay. Still had four hours until dinner, which meant time to check on current patients, review lab results, lose myself in work that made sense when nothing else did.
The medical bay was quiet when I arrived, just two occupants in the recovery area, both stable, both sleeping. The monitoring systems hummed with gentle efficiency, tracking vitals across species barriers with technology that still amazed me after three months.