Curious Event ( Part Seven)

Tay awoke to the face of her Admiral, staring deeply into her eyes, holding her eyelids with his thumbs. She didn’t recommend it as an alarm. The Admiral muttered, ‘Are you sure? We’ve been here before. Is she awake?’ Tay squeaked. Even without the shock, the blurred mind, and a throat dry from weeks of silence and medication, she would have to admit that she squeaked like a child’s toy caught underfoot. ‘Sir?’

Noise filled the room, she could hear Roaden trying to get the Admiral to wait, she could hear a medic trying to intervene and, finally, she heard Doctor Reten throw them both out of his medbay. The voice of an immortal rock with a medical degree beats Admiral, she thought dreamily. Then she slipped into a normal, human sleep for the first time in longer than she knew.

Doctor Reten was waiting for her when she woke up properly. He knew Tay, so Bork had been waiting with tea and soft foods for her. Bork had been here every day with tea, every morning since the attack. He had refused to leave until it had gone cold, then he would remove it. The Admiral had tried soft words, then reason and finally outright orders, but until his Captain told him that she didn’t want her regular tea, he would be here and he would wait. Reten quietly wondered if his species was somehow related to Bork, since he was as immovable as a creature of stone. He had noticed four different complaints from their species that they were now being called ‘The Bork’ as a collective term. Humanity had struck again.

Tay awoke to the aroma of tea. This time it was a welcome face, no thumbs needed, ‘Hello Bork. Good to see you again. Please go and tell the crew that I’m fine and I will speak to them shortly. And thank you for the tea.’ Bork simply nodded and left. He was the perfect messenger since he would simply repeat her wishes and stop. She looked across the room. Doctor Reten was unlikely to be as simple. ‘Well Doctor, what did they do to me? Can it be fixed?’

Reten watched as Tay rebuilt her mind, ignoring trauma, looking for the blown fuse, the damaged wiring, or the corrupt drive. She hadn’t touched her emotions yet. He guessed that right now they were sealed in whatever was the human emotional equivalent of high-tensile steel-alloy. ‘ Welcome home Tay. Since I expected that to be your first question, and one that the Fleet has taken a great deal of interest in, I’ll start with the simple version. The Tec are a pseudo-telepathic species. They, as in the vast creature that spoke to you, use immensely powerful electrical-neural impulses and can speak to damn near anyone. It can, to a degree, bond you with itself. It’s the core of the In’Tec species symbiosis.’

Tay nodded, ‘Yes, we talked. It seemed nice. Old, very old. I think they retain the species memories. She paused, ‘Doctor, I don’t see how that affected me.’

Doctor Reten had been spending quite a lot of time on that since the attack, ‘Effectively, it hit you with a neural bat to the head. Instead of bonding, your brain rejected the signals and treated it as an infection. That caused your brain to swell and slam itself into your skull. You have been in a coma. We couldn’t risk waking you until we could get the swelling down. Since your brain thought it was under attack, it wasn’t willing to help. You came close when the Admiral spoke to you, but we couldn’t get through. I’ll be honest, don’t be surprised that most of your comrades think you are dying. Also, your mother is on the way, sorry,’

Tay stopped dead at that. ‘What? Why is she coming?’

The Doctor shook his head slowly, ‘Tay, we lost you for over a month. The Admiral had to make the call. We thought she might bring you back, it’s worked before.’ He sighed, ‘Tay, he waited as long as he could. You, humans, do not give up easily about such things. And now, as your doctor, I’m telling you to rest. I have left your tablet on read-only. Catch up with things slowly. There are going to be many questions asked.’ He smiled, ‘It’s good to have you back, Tay.’ Tay nodded, already falling back into the sedated sleep.

Roaden was tap-dancing across the thousand issues that had arisen without the Captain. He was currently up to his elbows in some scanning tech that the Intec had stolen from an unknown species. Since it seemed to be semi-organic, he had taken a personal interest. If someone was out there breeding spaceships, he wanted to know how and where. He watched as Bork arrived ‘ Chief, Captain Tay says she is fine and will speak to you later.’ The words, so simply delivered, were a bombshell. He grabbed his Comms, ‘ All decks, Chief Roaden speaking. The Captain is back, get your shit together. If I see a ten-mil socket out of place you are losing three days’ leave. Celebrations begin at the end of the shift, not before. Beers on me.’

Captain Sullivan couldn’t help but smile. He was quite sure that, if something terrible happened and he was eaten by a big nasty, they would hold a nice funeral and try and remember his name for a while. He was pretty sure that they would not start repainting the canteen and polishing the brass. The ghost of Tay was enough to send her crew into a frenzy. He guessed that the ship had lost several tons of weight when her crew heard the Chief. The ship felt lighter without the dense smog of grief filling every corner, anyway.

He went to join the Admiral.

Admiral Williams was standing in front of his maps. He wasn’t seeing a damn thing. The doctor had reported that his Captain was back and that filled his mind. He had built his entire Intel system around her and now he had to decide if he could trust her. Until he knew exactly what had been done to her, she couldn’t serve as its Captain. Yet, without her, it was just an old carrier with a bunch of engineers and a few spooks. He decided to wait until he had an operational reason to doubt her and then call it. In the meantime, he had another Captain to meet. One that might be taking Tays place, if things didn’t go well.

He was interrupted by Comms, ‘Sir, the Noctema is hailing us. Their Captain wishes to come aboard.’ The Admiral swore softly. He had stolen Tay from the Library ship and it’s Captain had never forgotten it. ‘Tell the Captain that he is welcome, and I will meet him in my quarters. Tell Captain Sullivan where I am. Send him our reports on the attack on Tay, all of them. Unabridged. Otherwise, he’ll just keep asking.’

Captain Zac’Hary was already unhappy that the galactic government had been lying for years. You don’t lie to a Librarian. Who would be able to track down the truth if they didn’t have the information? He suddenly had many questions. However, now he found that humans had broken his Engineer. Regardless of the titles and everything else she had accomplished, Tay was his Engineer first. Humans had plenty, surely they could find one somewhere. And then to find that the Tec had done it accidentally, well that just proved how careless humans were. Tay would be safer back on his ship.

Tay was awoken by a shouting match. Her Admiral was fighting with her old Captain, with Captain Sullivan trying to intervene. Then the Tec joined in on Comms, defending its children. It was a few minutes later that she realized that she had heard the entire row from her bed in the med bay, all alone except for Reten. He was sleeping like a rock. Then some conclusion was arrived at, as the Admiral and Captain Zac’Hary descended to see her. She called the doctor, ‘Reten, we are going to have company. I need you on my side for this one. You still do the patient-doctor thing right?’

Reten turned his mind back to the present. ‘ Yes Tay, unless you are a danger to the crew. Why?’

Tay lowered her voice and shielded her mouth, ‘ Because, doctor, I have just listened to a row between my former Captain and my current Admiral in his cabin. From here. If I was dreaming, then this is all the result of brain-damage but, if in about a minute they walk in here, you cannot let them ask me questions. Sedate me again, quickly.’

Reden applied the sedation just as the Admiral and the Librarian arrived. The doctor looked up at them, ‘Oh, my apologies. Tay needed to sleep. Perhaps in the morning?’