Sickbay after Dark

Posted on Thu Jan 31st, 2019 @ 12:08pm by Lieutenant JG Siobahn Fallon & Lieutenant Renee Salchin

Mission: https://wellington.pegasusfleet.site/index.php/sim/missions/id/5
Location: Sickbay

It was late, alpha shift was long over and sickbay was near empty, aside from a handful of patients that remained. Most of the medical staff had left, except for Siobahn who had volunteered to stay back and cover the late shift. With Hailey off the ship there was nothing for her to go home to, and sickbay at least provided a basic distraction.

Retrieving her textbook from Janice's office where she had stored it earlier in her shift, she carried it back into the main sickbay, casting a quick smile at Renee as she passed the other woman. "Do you need anything?" she asked quietly, not wanting to disturb her too much. "Another PADD? Some water? Something to eat? A blanket?"

"A free pass to leave sickbay?" Renee asked jovially, then laughed brightly, "Don't worry, doc, I know you aren't going to allow me to leave yet.." She shuffled the second PADD she'd been given to the front, "I do have something I'm going to need you to give to your Renee... Not yet, not until I'm out and away from where she can comm me with questions. And you can tell her that it's her normal password, she really needs to change it, to be honest... It's really obvious if you know what she knows, like I know."

"Sure," Siobahn replied with an easy smile. "I can do that." Replicating herself a mug of hot chocolate, She climbed up onto a biobed and opened up the text book in front of her. She stared at the page for a moment before looking back at Renee again. "What's it really like over there?" she asked softly.

“Bad, really bad.” Renee said sadly, “We have less than a dozen planets under our control, none of them overly major and several that the Shalti shouldn’t know about. Honestly, of all of the alliance, the Dalacari and Ts’usugi are the best off. But things will be getting better very soon.” She checked the time and date stamp at the top of her PADD, “The first step to our final victory should be in place almost any time, if the message Sabrina left for me was accurate.”

Siobahn nodded slowly. "I guess that's the big top secret that the Marines are off on now..." she mused quietly. "I can't even begin to imagine..." she shook her head slightly. "The injuries that we've seen come in, I've never seen anything like it at all in my life. I'm the first to admit I've not had a lot of experience but still... the shell fragments we've pulled out of bodies... actually.. hang on..." she jumped off the bio bed and walked across to one of the small cupboards in the corner of the room. Reaching in, she shuffled some stuff around and retrieved a small vial, carrying it back and handing it to Renee with a smile. "A souvenir for you if you want it."

Renee looked over it and shook it slightly, "I would love to say it gets easier, but it doesn't. Right now, my biggest priority is to make sure my kids get to grow up in a galaxy where they're not going to be hunted by the bugs until they die trapped and scared." She tapped on the first PADD a couple seconds, then turned it to show Siobahn a couple children, one about a year old, the other around four years old. "They're my world, my whole world and they're why I'm here doing what I do."

Siobahn smiled at the picture. "It's so hard to look at you and hear you say things like that... Renee, I mean, the Renee here is a friend... and I can't even begin to imagine her cooing over babies. But they are gorgeous and I can see why you would want to fight with everything you have to give them a chance at a better future."

"You'll understand when you have one or two of your own." Renee promised, "There's no feeling like it, believe me." She sighed, "I miss them, badly, and I know I'll get a few weeks with them when we get the mission over with, because while the nanites are doing a good job on the armor, there's a lot of damage that needs to be taken care of and anyways, the Admiral has her own mission to perform if we succeed."

Siobahn laughed softly. "I'll take your word for it. As much as I wish it to be different, this is the closest I'll ever get to children," she said with a smile as she held up her pediatric text book.

Renee shook her head slightly, "There's always adopting, you know. But seriously, is there any way I can escape for a while? You're wonderful, but I really am getting bored here in sickbay, I don't think I've ever been this still for a long time. You could go with me?" She tried to sweeten the deal.

Siobahn raised one eyebrow slightly. "Where exactly is it that you would be wanting to go?" she asked curiously. "Because, you know, with how serious your injuries were, you shouldn't even be out here, you should still be sedated and in isolation."

"Anywhere? Engineering? I know for fact you won't let me go back to the Icarus." Renee chuckled, "I've got medical nanites that do help the healing process, at least the passive healing process. But I don't remember... Did you tell me what happened to me?"

Motioning to the small vial, Siobahn drew in a deep breath. "That little piece of Shalti bug shell nearly killed you. I don't know what happened before you came here, but you presented with severe arterial bleeding and a major aortal puncture. As we got you into surgery your body went into shock from the sheer damage you had sustained and your blood pressure crashed. You flatlined twice during surgery... and then you had a major bleed caused by that little piece of shrapnel that embedded itself in your abdomen and resulted in a massive secondary bleed." Siobahn's voice became matter of fact as she spoke. She couldn't, she wouldn't, allow herself to get emotional. This wasn't *her* Renee. This was just another patient asking questions and she just needed to keep reminding herself that.

Renee's face went somber as she was told just how bad it was, "Thank you..." She said very, very softly, "Seriously, thank you for saving my life. I'd love to meet the rest of your team to thank them as well and if there's anything I can do, ANYthing at all, tell me. I know I'm not going to be here for long, but anything I can do, I'll do."

Siobahn shook her head slightly. "I only assisted, it was mostly on Major Weston. She realized incredibly quickly how severe it was and had you in surgery within a few minutes. She's off the ship now with the marines, with your marines I assume." She smiled quickly. "You just need to remember to take it easy for a while, avoid strenuous activities and avoid caffeine. Give it a couple of weeks for the healing to really take and you should be fine, so as much as I know you probably don't like it, you're going to have to delegate to the rest of your team and have them do the grunt work and heavy lifting for you."

With a nod, Renee tapped the PADD she still had, "I might need another PADD then... I can work on one of my other projects, a starship design, really revolutionary. A long-range colony ship, actually, fully self-sufficient, really, really large."

Grabbing another PADD from the CMO's office, Siobahn handed it to Renee and smiled. "Sounds like it's a unique project," she said quietly. "Will certainly make colonizing new areas easier, especially if you can just land the ship and use it for accommodations while they start build outs."

"Modular triple ring design." Renee deftly unlocked the PADD and spliced it into her secure feed to Icarus, "Rings are detachable as orbital stations, with each ring having detachable landing modules that can act as temporary shelters while the ground surrounding the landing sites are investigated and cleared or determined to be unsuitable. If the latter, the modules move onto another location and the station remains in orbit with full shuttle capacity as well. It means that after a shortish stay, the ship itself can move on to another location and start up to four colonies if the ship itself is considered to be a 'station' of it's own." She brought up the display and showed it to Siobahn, "Total 'crew' of about a hundred-fifty thousand, far more than enough to guarantee survival of a viable planetary population, with enough people to be able to construct and maintain infrastructure while more people arrive. Great for people wanting a new start, don't you think?"

“It seems.... impressive.” Siobhan said with a shake of her head. “I won’t even pretend I understood most of it, but it sounds good. It seems like you and the Renee from this reality are two peas in a pod, you both have the same knack for all that stuff.”

"You'd be surprised..." Renee trailed off, "She's a lot like me, but just carefree. From her research, her record, oh she's good, but she just doesn't focus. I'm glad she's able to be that way, there's nothing like a galaxy-wide crisis to focus one's mind. I'm just hoping I can finally stop looking at more efficient ways of causing devastation to a way to actually help us return to living life. Like this." She tapped the PADD, "Yours? I want her to live her life, even if it means being a complete airhead." Renee laughed.

Siobhan felt herself bristle at the unflattering comment. “Renee is lots of things.” She said quietly, her voice taking on an almost cautionary tone, “but she is not an airhead. She is one of the smartest, kindest, brilliant and amazing people I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. Calling her an airhead couldn’t be further from the truth.”

"She has, I had, what I called 'Ooo-Shiny Syndrome', gets distracted easily." Alternate Renee chuckled, "There isn't anything wrong with it! She just doesn't finish out her thoughts is all. Here, take a look at this." She paged through one of the PADDs and handed it over, "She's got the basic idea of this armor down, knows the alloy she needs to work with, even knows how to transform it, but not how to adhere it to the hull or how to mass-produce it. The answer is to design a series of nanites to take the individual molecules onto the hull and collapse them in contact with the hull itself. All she needs to do is basically to repurpose the nanites she'd designed for another project of hers. Smart? Ohh yeah. Kind? I can believe it. Amazing? I do believe I am indeed! But nonetheless, she's still the airhead that I was."

"You know, it's becoming more and more apparent just how different the two of you are, I mean, you look the same, you sound the same, and surprisingly your base behaviors are the same, yet you are so very very different. When you first came into surgery we didn't know about this whole alternate reality thing, I thought you were our Renee. It was a shock." Siobahn said with a smile as she returned to the bio bed she had claimed.

"I can believe it." Renee shook her head, "What are the odds of two ships in a small temporal meeting actually having the same person from each timeline on it? The odds are astronomical! I mean literally one in probably trillions! Really amazing how long odds like that really happen to happen, right?"

"It's actually quite startling how intertwined our crews are, I mean in our own realities, but how much overlap there is between us... and how similar things are, yet at the same time so different." She laughed suddenly. "Oh goodness, will you listen to me? I wouldn't have a clue what I'm talking about at all."

"It's all right, Siobahn, you seem to be hitting the nail on it's head." Renee smiled, "It's so different, yet so alike. Heck, if I didn't have the kids back on the other side, I could swap myself with your Renee and stay here!" She winked at the doctor to let her know she was kidding.

Siobahn laughed and shook her head. "I think there's probably quite a few of your crew that would do the same," she said, opening the text book again but not bothering to look at it. "It still doesn't feel right sending you all back, especially knowing how bad it is over there."

Renee shrugged, "Your house is burning down and you're across the world from it. But you still go back, because it's home. Yeah, it could be so much better, intact rather than ashes with all of your possessions destroyed, but it's still home. Some people don't have anyone or anywhere to call 'home', but the rest of us?"

Siobahn smiled sadly. "Believe me, I get it. You don't need to explain it to me at all." She drew in a short, sharp breath. "Right now in my life everyone I know and love is on this ship. A few days ago I was all but asked to go back to your reality, to fill my own shoes over there... but I couldn't do it. This is my home, here, with the woman I love. And as tempting as it may seem at moments, I don't want to be anywhere else except here." she finally said softly, staring intently at the text book in front of her with eyes that were incapable of focus. "Home is what we make of it."

=/\=

Lieutenant Renee Setine
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Icarus

Ensign Siobahn Fallon
Medical Officer
USS Wellington