Raid Alerts

Jenga sprints onto the bridge, still coughing and dripping with cryo fluid, and slams into the copilot seat, grabbing for the auxiliary controls and thumbing up radar, thrust plot, and hull status. Sandy's own frantic hammering at her keyboard halts as she jumps half out of the pilot's seat with a startled shriek.

"Oh shit oh shit oh shit," Sandy says, which is entirely understandable for a ship with audible alarms screaming Proximity III, Hull Breach, Reactor Breach, and Gravity Overstress — and Jenga clutches at the controls, hyperventilating as she tries to make sense of that particular combo plus the sensor readings with her lungs still half full of an emergency dump of hypox solution.

And then Sandy's scrabbling switches off some kind of screen overlay, and everything stops.

The loudest thing in the cockpit is Jenga, gurgling and panting.

And there is no emergency.

"What are you doing awake!" Sandy says in a thin high panic voice, and Jenga jerkily folds over her own knees and twitches, holding her mouth open and trying not to heave as hypox trickles out of her.

"What. The fuck," she gravels, eyes squeezed shut. She knows, she thinks, but the knowledge is sitting in the front of her brain, unassimilable, because understanding it is going to make her so angry she just bursts like a blister, hypox and rage splattered everywhere, leaving just an empty balloon-skin.

Sandy takes a deep breath, then just squeaks when she tries to say something. Tries again, same result. Third breath, holds it for several seconds.

"I hooked up the audio test points to alert me for my ability cooldowns?" she says. "It bypasses the emergency warning system! It should have been fine—"

"You can't. Bypass. The emergency system," Jenga says, squeezing her eyes shut tighter. "Because what if there's. A. Fucking. Emer—" and she coughs and splutters over a fresh gush of fluid.

Sandy drops to her knees in front of her, heedless of the growing puddle of spit and hypox, and cradles her head. "Oh no no no," she mutters.

"The fucking— siren hardware — trips the e-wake. If it goes longer. Than test duration, in case something wrong—"

"Oh no."

"I thought. We were going. To fucking die."

Sandy makes a wordless, muffled wail of horrified contrition behind lips she has more sense than to part, right now.

"Murder you," Jenga threatens. "Space. Your corpse. Burn your. Fucking gamer collectibles. Piss on. Fucking cosplay—"

Sandy makes a choked noise. "Please don't break up with me," she says in a tiny shrill voice, and Jenga unballs one tight fist, reaches out, unsteady with the backwash of adrenaline, and re-curls it around a fistful of Sandy's shirt.

"Never," Jenga says, and coughs up another splash. "Never."

Sandy jerks sharply with a suppressed sob. "I'll delete my characters—" she starts.

"Sandy." Jenga forces herself to open her eyes and sit up a little. "Look at me."

Sandy shakes her head wildly.

"Now."

"I can't," Sandy wails. "I can't, I fucked up, I'm bad—"

"You're silly," Jenga growls, and drags her in, knees slipping in the puddle of cryo goop, grabs her chin and glares from close range. "You're silly and I'm. A fucking mess. Of stress hormones and — crash cryo dump shock, right now. Check course and radar. And help me down to sickbay."

She waits until Sandy stops avoiding her eyes and, cringing, looks up into hers. "Okay," Sandy says in a barely audible wobble, tears trickling down her face.

"Good." Jenga makes herself let go. "Do that," and ties to steady herself as Sandy scrambles miserably around in the slippery puddle. Now the panic's ebbing, she feels seasick and dizzy.

"Course locked, all clear," Sandy wavers.

"Good girl," Jenga says, and Sandy nearly breaks down crying. "Made a mistake. Scared me a lot. Not in — right mind to decide. What punishment you need, baby."

"I'll—"

"I decide," Jenga says darkly, and coughs round the uncomfortable feeling of wet lungs. "No punishing. Yourself."

(No return to the pre-Jenga days of furtively hoarded razor blades and ad-hoc punitive starvation, of Thou Never Deserved destruction of things Sandy loves.)

"Okay," Sandy says.

"Excuse. Me."

"Aye, Captain," Sandy corrects herself, and shudders out a huge sigh.

"Would never do any of those things," Jenga says, quieter. "Shouldn't have said them. You're my Cabin Girl. We do things shipshape."

"I love you," Sandy says.

"Love you too," Jenga says, and leans on her more than she strictly needs to, down to sickbay, keeps hold of her hand while the medbot pokes a cannula into the other and Sandy has to look the other way; makes sure she listens to the medbot's estimate of an eight-hour cryo chemical flush.

"Eight hours," she repeats, making sure it sinks in. "Gonna be here on a drip, hopefully nap. You take your scheduled breaks for food and sleep."

Sandy hesitates, and Jenga narrows her eyes. "Can I," Sandy mutters, eyes flitting to the spare sickbay bunk. "May I. Captain."

"You should sleep properly, in the cabin," Jenga says sternly. Her chest feels better already, but that's mostly because the bot's filled her with drugs; she needs to lie down. She wishes she could crawl into their shared bunk, tuck Sandy under her chin; there's a dark thing swollen under the surface of her feelings that hasn't calmed down from the throat-in-mouth terror that the ship was about to peel apart and she was going to watch Sandy die. "But okay, this once. Because I'm a pushover."

"You're the sternest Captain ever," Sandy says, the bald statement of the true believer, in something a lot like relief.