Fiction Fragment Friday
This story really took on a life of it’s own. I started with an idea for a scene that I wanted to describe and went from there. It has been a few weeks because of life stresses so I needed to get back into the habit. I also needed to kick off a little bit of writing rust to get ideas out there. There is some real potential in future rewrites of this one. Maybe on the edits I will come up with a better name.
“Warning Power Levels critically low. Life support failing” The automated warning broadcast through the halls of the tiny vessel. It was rated for a crew of up to three, but it had been years since anyone other than Dax Vallen had been on board. The ship had too many secrets on it for him to allow anyone else onboard. With the ship lit by only dim red warning lights he realized the shortsightedness of not allowing maintenance workers onboard.
Five minutes earlier the Vagrant had jumped into the system with a fluctuating integrity field and experienced a cascading system failure. Power surged into the capacitors causing them to explode. Dax had been tossed around the bridge smashing into the bulkheads as gravity fluctuated in both direction and intensity. It ranged from 0 to 6Gs focused on different directions over a thirty second period. He was unconscious with three broken ribs before gravity normalized.
“Computer system status report.” Just those few words hurt to say. Even breathing was difficult. The silence from the computer concerned him even more than his own injuries. Holding his ribs with his left hand he tried to pull up the console with his right hand. The screen remained completely blank. “Damn it.”
On shaky legs Dax started down the corridor towards the engine room. He used his right hand to brace himself against the wall for stability after his knee gave out on his first step Every movement sent pain throughout his body, making the trek slow. With life support offline the smoke coming from multiple fires was not being filtered out of the air. This caused Dax to fall into coughing fits that sent blood onto the deck. “That can’t be healthy.”
Any hope of repairing the ship in time was quashed when he saw the closed bulkhead to the engine room. The bulkhead was designed with pneumatic pistons to slam shut in the case of a hull breach. Even if he could repair the ship while in space every system, he needed to do it was exposed to the vacuum of space. Dax slid down the wall collapsing to the deck in despair. He ran his hand along the corridor wall. “You deserved so much better.” After one final coughing spell he passed out from lack of oxygen.
Dax awoke to a rhythmic beeping sound. The sterile smell that hit his nose could only be from an infirmary. This only added to his confusion because his ship didn’t have an infirmary. He had an out-of-date med chamber that wasn’t good for much more than injecting pain killers and antibiotics. He thought about how nice the pian killers would be as his body felt like one big ball of pain. Especially his head. His eyes were assaulted by a bright light overhead as he managed to open them. He could hear people talking in the room with him, but it was difficult to make out what they are saying. One of the voices thought he would know anywhere.
“Three cracked ribs, a broken leg, and his body is basically one big bruise. My biggest concern though is the potential for brain damage. We don’t know how long he went without oxygen before we got to him.”
“Trust me doc if he’s got brain damage no one’ll be able to tell the difference.”
“Is that any way to talk about your father?” Dax’s words came out rough through a throat raw with pain. He was going for flippant, but pain makes that extremely difficult to accomplish.
Captain Jonathan Sinclair spun to look at the patient with an unmistakable look of disgust on his face. The doctor reached out in an effort to calm him, but he pushed the man away rougher than he had intended. “Father? No that’s a title you earn. The only thing you ever did for me was get my mother pregnant.”
“I know I wasn’t there.”
“No, you weren’t, and I probably turned out better because of it. If I had my way, we would have turned that scrap heap you call a ship into dust, and you’d be sitting in the brig not my infirmary. I just wish we would have done the universe a favor and gotten here an hour later.”
His words hurt Dax far more than he would ever be willing to show. With his pain it wasn’t difficult to play off the impact on his injuries. “Why did you bother to save me then?”
“Because it’s my job. I was ordered to find you and recruit you for a mission.”
Dax laughed and instantly regretted it as pain shot through his body. The doctor hit a few buttons on his tablet, and he felt the warm comforting sensation of pain killers running through his body.
Captain Sinclair rounded on his chief medical officer. “I told you no pain meds until after the conversation.”
“Yes, you did sir, but I’m the doctor here and that man is my patient. I’m not going to stand here and force him to suffer while you insult him.”
“I didn’t order you to hold off because I want him to suffer. I ordered you to withhold the medication because now he’s under the influence of them and can’t agree to any binding deals. You’ve set us back by days.”
“I’ve done no such thing. I’ve made a medical call about MY patient. You saw his ship. It’s going to take at least a week with our entire engineering team doing extra shifts just to get it capable of flight. Now if you don’t mind sir you are in my infirmary and while you are my captain you have no authority over how I treat my patients.”
The captain let out a frustrated grunt while clenching and unclenching his fists. “You are of course correct Doctor Crate. I apologize for my outburst. Now what I have to discuss with your patient is above your clearance level so may I please speak to him in private.”
“Of course, captain, but I will be remotely monitoring his vitals and if anything impacts them, I will be back in here to address it.”
“Understood doctor.” The two men locked eyes staring each other down for a moment before the doctor moved into his office. Captain Sinclair turned back to the patient. “Now as I was saying. I was ordered to find you and recruit you for a mission. My superiors seemed to think you would be more likely to listen to the offer if it came from me. They obviously don’t know you like I do.”
“Why in the world would they want me for anything?”
“For your reputation of course. Every smuggler, mercenary, and general scum den in the galaxy knows your ship by sight and won’t blow it out of space on sight. No one would ever expect you to be working for the Alliance Vanguard.”
“Damn right they wouldn’t. I’ve spent most of my life just trying to avoid the Vanguard. I’m not a big fan of brigs.”
“As much as I’m loath to admit it as vile as you are the one thing you have never been accused of is hurting innocents. One of your old traveling companions managed to infiltrate one of our most secure research facilities and walk out with experimental weapons and a bioengineered virus capable of wiping out all human life from a planet.”
“Hey, you know I’m no hero kid. That sounds like something I want to stay as far away from as possible.”
“Kind of hard to do without a working ship.”
“How is the Vagrant?”
“A hunk of junk worth more melted for scrap than being used as a ship. It however can be repaired back to the barely flyable state you usually keep it in.”
Dax let out a sigh of relief. He had not even realized how concerned he had been about his ship. “Ok, so is that the deal? You fix up my ship, let me go, and I go find your thief for you?”
“Not quite that simple, but yeah you go the basics. There’s no way we’re trusting you to go off on your own though. You get an undercover agent watching over you and making sure you don’t betray us.”
“What idiot got stuck with babysitting me?”
“I did.”
Dax laughed again and while the pain was intense the pain meds were doing their job. “This just keeps getting better and better. Ok, let’s say I agree and as of right now that’s a damn longshot. Just who stole your treaty violating weapons?”
At this Captain Sinclair smiled. “None other than the Ironclaw herself. Seraphina Sinclair.”
“Wait. No. Oh, this is rich. They send you… to recruit me… so we can do some father son bonding hunting down your mother.”
“I am aware of the irony, but my superiors believe that my connection to both of you makes me the only person who might be able to get close enough to complete the mission. I respectfully disagree with them, but I have my orders, and I do agree that you are the most likely person to find her.”
“I want all the details of this in writing before I agree to anything.”
“Wait you’re actually going to help?”
“You kidding me? Seeing you reunited with the one person in this galaxy you hate more than me. No way am I missing that.” Dax chuckled to himself and rolled over to get some rest. “If you try putting any trackers on my ship while you fix it the deal’s off. Don’t think I won’t know either.”
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