Blood Impulse

Part 42.3 - RUDE AWAKENING

Meloira Sector, Battleship Singularity

Sergeant Alise Cortana startled awake with a hacking cough, her nose absolutely burning. She jerked her face away, but the chemical burn followed, riding straight up her nostrils and down her throat like fire. Desperately, she swatted at her face, trying to rid herself of the source. Her fingertips came away covered in a cool gel that had a gritty texture. Eventually, she scratched enough of it off that she could properly breathe, and braved opening her eyes.

The lights were bright, so bright that it took her a moment to adjust, and then she could see the bedsheets covering her legs. They were white, scratchy and cheap, just as all military-issue sheets were. The mattress below her weight was a little lumpy, and the bedframe had been adjusted to put her in a halfway sitting position. The low rumble in the background – engine noise she still hadn't grown used to – told her where she was even before she had enough wits about her to recognize who was standing over her.

The Singularity's chief medical officer had the look of most veteran medical officers. He was perpetually disgruntled, and felt no real need to be polite or iron his white coat. Wrinkled, it hung over his uniform, weighed down by whatever was in his pockets, and stained by whatever he'd last cut open. "Smelling stimulants aren't the nicest way to wake up, are they?" he asked.

Cortana wiped that vile substance from her fingertips onto the bedsheets. "No," she said sourly, "they aren't."

"Well," the doctor shrugged, "you were drugged to the gills when they brought you in. Probably would have slept for two days without it."

Then let me sleep, Cortana nearly snapped. Why wake her with something so crude? But she held her tongue as the doctor bent over to check the machine monitoring her vitals, because she saw he wasn't her only guest. The second man stood unnervingly still, so still she'd initially disregarded his very presence. Poised like that – arms folded behind his back in some version of parade rest – he may as well have been a mannequin. His expression was every bit as blank.

"We checked you for injuries, Sergeant," the doctor continued, offering out a damp cloth. "Didn't find anything beyond bruises. Does anything hurt?"

"No," Cortana said, wiping the rest of the smelling stimulants from her upper lip. They'd served their purpose and unpleasantly woken her up, which, no doubt, had been the objective.

"Right," Doctor Macintosh said, "then I'll take my leave."

He wasted no time ducking out past the curtain drawn around her bed, which Cortana didn't find particularly comforting, but she could hardly blame him. If she thought it would help her, she probably would have done the same. Instead, she was left face to face with the emotionless expression of Admiral Gives.

For a long minute, he stood there, not speaking, not moving. She felt like an ant under a magnifying glass, utterly uncertain if it would be angled toward the sun to cook her, or simply observe her path. Anxiety tightened her jaw, and she wondered, not for the first time, if he simply enjoyed making her uncomfortable.

It was easy for him. Sergeant Cortana had met high-ranking officers of all varieties. She'd been the Secretary of Defense's personal guard, so it wasn't his rank that unnerved her. It was the complexities of who he was: the deadliest officer to ever serve the UCSC fleet, and the brother of the man she'd failed to protect. Perhaps it was the latter that unnerved her so much, because his face, though wiped of emotion, was still similar. Colder and darker in color and personality, she could still see those similarities.

In the end, when he spoke, even the range of his voice wasn't so different, just a little deeper and perpetually disinterested. "Do you have anything you would like to say for yourself, Sergeant?"