Ad Noctum: Bridgade! (Part 1)

“I think the captain may be mistaken about the identity of his cosmic lover,” Ginn offered.

Chapter warnings: Stressors of all kinds. Violence. Injuries. Torture. Abduction. Anxiety. Panic. Purposefully insensitive discussion of mental health issues. Loss of agency. Thought control. Boundary problems. Manipulation. Gaslighting. References to suicide. Drug use. Death wishes. Indirect references to sexual assault. Blood. Grief. Self harm.

Text iteration: Witching hour.

Additional notes: None.

Brigade! (Part 1)

Volker hit a metal wall with a head-to-shins smack. It took a few seconds of lying on it to understand the wall was a floor: smooth, cool, and the dark bronze of oxidized naquadah. Okay then. The gravity, a touch heavier than their tel’tak but lighter than Brigadoon, weighed in at about 1g.

Crates of crystal littered the open floorspace, as though the gate had delivered a swift, energetic kick in transit.

Volker clambered to his knees. Beside him, Ginn pressed from the floor with more grace. Long red hair curtained over her shoulder and shone with the rippling glaze of the open event horizon.

Rush, Mendelssohn in his arms and cat food at his feet, faced down a line of armed soldiers.

“Hello,” Rush said politely.

The event horizon shredded.

The lights died.

A bass drop in Doppler shift shuddered through the metal beneath Volker’s knees. The floor fell away without moving and phased back. He gasped at the press of the void on his open eyes.

Safeties came off four, maybe five rifles, followed by the metallic clack of racked rounds.

“Don’t shoot!” Volker raised his hands in the pitch black.

Faint emergency lights thrummed to life at the bases of the walls and radiated from paired consoles at the back of the room. Mirrored sets of silver stairs led to a shadowy level above. A balcony, Volker realized with an appreciative pang. The curves of the stairs evoked streaming water, high ground to low. Beneath the balcony, a set of grand doors soaked up the dark. The room was huge, big enough to hold over a hundred people. If Rush was right, and this was a ship—it had to be a massive vessel. Beyond anything Volker had imagined.

The central soldier in a line of five clicked on a flashlight and spotlighted Rush.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Everett growled.

“Hands where we can see ‘em.” The soldier’s midwestern accent echoed off metal walls.

Ginn and Volker were already kneeling with their hands up, so…that worked out.

Mendelssohn in his arms, Rush swept a foot back and sketched the ghost of a formal bow. 

Another soldier in the line asked, “Is that a cat?”

Everett’s light slid from Rush and landed in Volker’s eyes. He squinted. The beam moved to Ginn, who flinched and shaded her face. Finally, Everett angled the beam toward the floor where it bounced off the deck and added diffuse light to the dim vault of the room.

The four soldiers flanking Everett wore combat gear: helmets, vests, and rifles as big as their torsos. Three men, one woman. A sixth man with dark hair, a pale blue dress shirt, and a hangdog expression hunched over a console at the back of the room.

“We dropped from FTL,” the coal-eyed pessimist said. “Everything but life support is offline.”

“Mr. Brody.” Everett sounded like he’d run out of patience three days back. “Let’s keep operational disclosures to a minimum?”

“Sorry,” Brody replied.

“Power’s out?” Rush tutted with false sympathy. “Seems we’ve arrived just in time.”

A pit of apprehension yawned in Volker’s stomach at the idea of the Department Chair of the Pirate Alliance tangling with the USAF’s finest.

“You,” Everett turned to Rush, “were not on my bingo card.”

“Wasn’t I?” Pleased, Rush shook his hair away from his face. “Hello, my love.”

The four soldiers flanking Everett traded a flurry of side-eyes.

Everett spent a beat staring at Rush in what might have been disguised rage or mild amusement but was probably not the eros of romantic love? Then he turned to Volker. “Where’s David?”

Dread gripped Volker by the throat. Unforgivable, not to have anticipated a question like that. A mass of guilt and sorrow accreted from memories he’d suppressed for days, strong enough to power a dark star.

“You guys kill him?” Everett asked, counterfeit casual.

“No,” Volker said. “He’s with Kiva.” The words crushed one another, ready to fuse. “On her flagship. He—he was heavily guarded. He asked us, he told us to—”

Rush kicked into motion like a planet in a decaying orbit and spiraled toward Volker with an armful of cat.

“David Telford was a pedestrian zealot.” Rush lifted Mendelssohn from his shoulder and deposited him in Volker’s waiting arms. “We left him behind.”

Everett tucked his chin and nailed Rush with a hot gaze from beneath lowered brows.

Mendelssohn coiled into the secure interior of Volker’s coat.

Rush paced a curved path over the open, bronzed floor toward Everett and his line of soldiers. As he drew near, the soldiers tensed, guns up and glinting in the emergency light. With cool deliberation, Rush shoulder-checked a rifle. The soldier holding it flashed a delighted, wild-edged grin. He hauled his gun back, reversed it—

“Sergeant.” Everett held out a hand.

Sergeant Wildcard pulled the blow.

“Nobody kills this idiot,” Everett announced. “Unless he knifes me.”

Rush stepped up to Everett, and the rose gold streak that lay over his shoulders stole hues from the tarnished walls. He lifted a finger to the patch on the man’s uniform where his name was sewn. “You’re ‘Colonel Young’?”

In Volker’s opinion, this brick-stacked, no-nonsense truck of an officer definitely seemed more like a “Colonel Young” than an “Everett.” As Rush traced a delicate, dead-boy fingertip along a dark stitchline of Young’s military coat, Volker decided their rock-and-river chemistry did have a certain timeless quality that—

Young clamped a hand around Rush’s forearm. Capture.

One knee still on the floor, Ginn planted a foot.

“Uh uh.” Sergeant Wildcard shook his head at her.

Rush considered the colonel’s punishing grip with chilling poise, given how much it probably hurt to have all the knives and crystal in his trick sleeves crushed into the skin and bone of his forearm.

Rush and Young smiled at each other.

“I wouldn’t,” Volker advised the colonel. “Let him go, man.”

Not capable of watching her captain get manhandled, Ginn stood. 

“Back on the ground.” Midwest gestured with the barrel of his rifle.

Ginn hesitated, hands open, bent in a crouch.

A soldier with ice-chip eyes and a shaved head stepped out of the line, heading for Ginn.

“Ginn!” Volker hissed.

Ginn fell to her knees at Volker’s side, eyes on the floor.

Volker wasn’t quite brave enough to risk a glare at Ice Chip.

“I don’t like this at all, I’m afraid,” Rush said, low and dangerous. “Keep them in line or I will do it. For you.” He paused to give Young a vituperative sparkler of a glare. “My love.”

“Why do you look like someone left you in a freezer for a week?” Young ran his flashlight over Rush in a head-to-toe appraisal, then added a, “Babe?” that was so nakedly ironic it seemed to Volker like it actually flipped the bar a little bit.

Rush braced his injured shoulder and leaned back in the colonel’s grip, using his body weight to make his argument.

Volker tucked Mendelssohn further into his coat. “I highly recommend letting him go,” he said.

Ice Chip glared at Volker. “You don’t give orders around here.”

“This ship just lost power, right?” Volker directed his words at Young. “We can help.”

Young grinned, equal parts friendly and terrifying. “Who said this was a ship?”

A flicker of anxiety passed across Rush’s face. “Unanswerable.”

Young hauled Rush closer. “Unanswerable? You drained the last of our power with your grand entrance back there, asshole. If you think I’m letting any of you near a critical system you’re dreaming. I suggest you start talking.” Young painted Ginn with his light. “Who’s the girl?”

“And I suggest,” Rush hissed, “we begin with your surrender. To me. The rightful head of the Lucian Alliance.”

“No!” Volker hugged Mendelssohn tighter. “No. We’re academics. He teaches math at UC Berkeley; I teach astrophysics at Caltech. Go Beavers!” He adjusted his grip on his cat so he could mime the waving of a tiny flag. “This is our graduate student, Ginn. Everyone’s on the same team here. We can help you, if you’ll let us.”

Young glowered at Ginn. “Grad student?”

“Ginn,” Volker said, “say something from Earth.”

“Hot sauce,” Ginn replied promptly.

The female soldier snorted a laugh. 

“See?” Volker hoped Sense of Humor might back him up, but at a glance from Young she wiped her smile and fell in line.

“We are the Lost House of the Lucian Alliance.” Rush braced a foot against the colonel’s boot and tried to pry his arm free. “Surrender.”

“Never. Gonna. Happen.” Young punctuated each word with a shake.

And then—

Like it was drawn by an invisible lodestone, Rush’s focus slid from the colonel. The tension bled out of his arm. He stopped fighting Young. He stopped attending to Young at all. His free hand drifted to the rims of his glasses.

The small hairs on the back of Volker’s neck prickled.

“What the hell?” Young breathed.

Rush stood transfixed, eyes wide. The frames of his glasses trembled faintly beneath his fingertips.

He was looking at something Volker couldn’t see.

The line of soldiers shifted. Ice Chip gripped his gun, knuckles white. Wildcard and Midwest shared an uneasy glance. Sense of Humor’s eyes flicked between the haunted spot on the floor and her commanding officer.

When Volker looked to Young, the colonel shook Rush’s slack forearm in wordless question.

“I don’t know, man!”

Young let Rush go. As soon as the mathematician was free, he stepped away from the colonel. Moving like a sleepwalker, he paced back toward the dark arch of the gate, but his path curved before he got there, as though he were slingshotting around an invisible speaker.

Mendelssohn turned in Volker’s arms so he could peer from the open coat.

“Captain?” Ginn asked.

Rush pulled his glasses off, scanned the room, then slid them back into position.

“Hey,” Volker said. “Nick.”

But Rush ignored them. His circle shrank to a spiral that tightened in on empty air. “What are you?” he asked the void.

And then he paused. As though listening to a response.

Volker felt a wave of cold crest from his own bones. Rush had talked to people or things or ideas or whatever, but this was different. He was totally gone to the room. Everything had fallen away except for whatever he thought he saw.

“Liar,” Rush hissed.

The soldiers looked to Young for direction.

Ginn rocked her weight back and forth, knee to knee, like her body could barely bottle the urge to stand.

“Stop,” Rush demanded, and the word was packed with the energy of position.  As upset as he’d been on the tel’tak when he’d attacked Telford with a question about his dead wife—he was more upset now. Volker could feel it; the idea played along his nerves and resonated through a sense-gate he had no name for. 

This was about to get so bad.

Dale Volker wished for David Telford like a melon baller carving a scoop full of heart. 

Volker turned to Ginn. “Take Mendelssohn.” He passed her the cat. “Keep him safe.”

Face pale, Ginn nodded.

Volker pushed to his feet.

“Back on the floor!” Ice Chip shouted.

Young gave Ice Chip a bring-it-down-a-notch hand gesture.

“Colonel,” Volker said, respectful, sotto voce, and trying to neither catch nor break Rush’s attention. “He’s important.”

Rush breathed like his lungs were filling up with fluid. 

“Sure,” Young said.

“He’s a mathematician. A good one. An academic rockstar. You shouldn’t—” Volker reframed as Young’s expression hardened. “He can help you. He got you here.”

Young turned a dead-eyed smile on Volker. “Oh, I know he got us here. In fact, he hand-delivered us a one-way ticket to a derelict wreck at the edge of the known universe.”

“I thought you guys wanted to be here?” Volker began.

“And I thought you three were Lucian Alliance,” Young said.

Taunts are a good sign, the memory of David Telford encouraged him. They’re deployed against positions of advantage.

Rush ducked away from nothing like it had tried to lay a hand on him. He staggered a lateral step and swayed. The heel of one hand pressed to his temple and he angled his head down and away, like he was trying to block an image.

“You,” Volker said, fierce and low, his eyes on Young, “are supposed to help him. He is one of yours. He picked you for this.”

“Leave me alone,” Rush breathed.

Young glowered at Volker. “I didn’t ask to be picked.”

“LEAVE ME ALONE,” Rush screamed at the empty air.

“I’ve had about enough of this.” Young sideswiped Volker and barreled into Rush. He bear-hugged the mathematician from behind, hauled him bodily away from whatever he was screaming at, and flung the scientist in the direction of the doors.

Volker expected Rush to get his feet under him and come back at Young with a blade or five; the colonel, from his stance—guard up, center of gravity low—expected the same.

But the counterattack never came.

Rush face-planted into the metal deck with the boneless grace of someone already insensible. 

Young rocked back on his heels and dropped his guard. Ginn gasped. Midwest started forward, then stopped.

And…yeah. Volker got it, because, like a snap-bleed through a scrim, Rush suddenly seemed extremely dead. 

Even though he knew where it came from, Volker himself wasn’t immune to Rush’s strings-cut sepulchral sprawl. He realized with a sinking feeling that it must have taken energy to transform a DHD, to induce current, to direct a massive flow of charge from veins of liberated naquadria. Crap. It probably took a lot of energy. More than humans generally had on tap.

Volker dived into a crouch next to Rush. Young, half a measure off the beat, followed him down. Working together, they rolled Rush onto his back. His glasses were askew, and the corner of a frame had split the skin beneath Rush’s left eye. Lavender liquid leaked from the broken skin.

“What the hell?” Pale and shaken, Young swiped the pad of his thumb through the LA’s synthetic blood substitute.

Rush’s eyelids fluttered when Young spoke, as though part of him was still trying to spin up his fight vortex. His eyes didn’t open.

“He swapped his blood for a synthetic substitute,” Volker said. “He was trying to stop the Faith from taking hold.”

Young cut a grave profile in the shadowy light of the gate room.

“You know the Faith?” Volker asked.

“I know the Faith.” Young pulled Rush’s glasses off and handed them to Volker. “Back up.”

“What?” Volker asked.

“Back up, Dr. Volker.” Young bent Rush’s nearest knee and placed the worn sole of a pirate boot flat on the floor.

“What are you doing?” Volker demanded.

“Does he look like he’s walking out of here?” Young bent Rush’s other knee, pinned them together, then stood. He eased his weight onto Rush’s toes, closed a hand around the mathematician’s wrist, and yanked him off the floor. As Rush came up, Young dived under his arm, drove his shoulder into the hinge of Rush’s hips, and straightened into a fireman’s carry. 

A slender knife slid from Rush’s sleeve.

Young sighed, pulled the holstered zat off Rush’s thigh, and tossed it to Sergeant Wildcard. “Strip these two of their weapons.” He thrust his chin at Volker and Ginn. “We’re going to the brig.”

“The brig?” Volker protested. “But we’re from California!”

~~~

Unfortunately, Volker was pretty sure the “brig” was a biocontainment unit. The space was long and narrow, with a monitoring station at its far end. Emergency track lights gleamed along the central corridor, which was lined by rooms with glass partitions. Each cell had a shadowy drain in the center of the floor. Tarnished nozzles projected from the ceiling. A basin-y thing mounted on the back wall was, maybe, a toilet? Maybe. A faucet with no sink jutted from the wall. 

Volker balked at the open glass door.

“It’s temporary.” Colonel Unreasonable walked into the cell and deposited Rush on the floor like a sack of grain.

Ice Chip shoved Volker into the room after Young with the butt of his rifle, and a bolt of pain shot up Volker’s spine and down his legs. He rebalanced and spun to face Ice Chip, but—

Don’t fight angry, the memory of David Telford warned.

“You wanna go, Alliance?” Ice Chip asked.

“No.” Volker stepped into the cell. “And I’m from Pasadena, by the way.”

Ginn, still carrying Mendelssohn, scanned the beveled floors sloping to the drain and the plumbing coming from the ceiling with a worried frown.

Sense of Humor ducked behind Ice Chip to deposit Mendelssohn’s water bowl and bag of cat food in a corner. Volker decided she was his favorite soldier by the length of, oh, about one Astronomical Unit.

He caught her eye and nodded. She gave him a hint of a smile in return, then retreated to the hall where Midwest and Wildcard waited, their guns at the ready.

Young squatted beside Rush, two fingers at his neck, presumably checking to see if the five-minute shoulder-carry through night-dark halls had killed humanity’s greatest living mathematician.

After weeks of being cooped up with a half-mad light-artist who’d turned a quantum computer into a canvas for all the crystal of the universe to paint his cosmically-assigned soulmate’s nine-chevron dial…Volker had expected a little more from “Colonel Young.”

If he was honest with himself, he’d been assuming competence. Compassion. Courage. Practicality. Logistical excellence. Physical prowess. A respect for science, for math, for the unknown itself.

With a crushing dismay that drove the air from his lungs and the blood from his hands, he realized he’d expected David Telford.

Instead, he’d gotten a tower of brick with control issues, very little patience, and maybe an appreciation for dark irony.

It wasn’t feeling like a great trade?

Young opened Rush’s jacket and started stripping the mathematician of his knives. He ended up with a small pile of blades with handles of varying length. A few pieces of dried cat food and crystal ended up mixed in as well, but Young left those where they were.

“He needs a doctor,” Volker said pointedly.

“We’re fresh out.” Young stood. “You can thank your friends in the Sixth House for that.”

“They are not our friends,” Ginn stated, solemn and powerful and holding a cat.

Young glanced at her. “I’ll send our medic by when we can spare her.”

“You can’t leave us in an alien biocontainment unit!” Volker protested. “That’s—that’s a violation of the Geneva Convention.”

Young angled his head at the ceiling. “Biocontainment? Sure. I could see it.” With that, he exited their transparent cell. “C’mon people,” he said, and the soldiers followed him.

All of them.

“What if we need something?” Volker shouted at their retreating backs.

No one even turned.

He pressed his hands to the glass plate. The long central hall was empty and dark. This was fine. This wasn’t so much a small room as a large room, a good, long space, partitioned by alien glass. He tapped it with a knuckle and it emitted a low tone, faint and pleasing. Glass was great. Glass was fine. Glass wasn’t confining, glass was technically breakable, glass—

Something rubbed Volker’s calf and he jerked, hands reaching for the weapons the Air Force had stripped.

“Mrao.” Mendelssohn looked up at him.

“Sorry,” Volker breathed. “You scared me.”

Ginn crouched beside Rush, one hand on his shoulder, as though he hadn’t almost killed her three days ago under similar circumstances. Then again, Young had taken his knives. Probably not all of them, though.

“Captain?” Ginn called softly.

Rush didn’t so much as twitch.

Together, Ginn and Volker figured out how to get water from the faucet on the wall, then set up a corner for Mendelssohn. That done, they settled shoulder to shoulder against the back wall of their cell. Volker dragged America’s Most Tragic Math Professor in, so his head was pillowed on Volker’s thigh. 

Mendelssohn approached the pane of the cell door, just a backlit silhouette of cute cat against the tracklights. 

“Mieu?” He enquired.

“Sorry buddy,” Volker said. “I don’t think that’ll work here.”

“Miu!” Mendelssohn tried again.

When the door didn’t move, Mendelssohn sauntered over, turned a circle, then curled up in the flipped-open liner of Rush’s coat.

The ship was quiet. No buzzes, no thrums of engines, no vibrations.

“I think the captain may be mistaken about the identity of his cosmic lover,” Ginn offered.

“Yep.” Volker blew out a breath. “That guy straight-up sucks.”

Ginn inched closer.

Volker couldn’t imagine what all this looked like from her perspective. She’d given up her whole life to help two mid-career Tau’ri academics and they’d led her to a dead ship infested with rifle-toting Americans.

“It’ll be okay,” Volker said, not at all sure of anything of the kind.

“This doesn’t seem like a ship the Ancestors built.” There was a raw, whispery note in Ginn’s voice. “It’s dark.” She curled her boot away from the black maw of the drain in the floor. “The captain was talking to a spirit.”

Trying to be respectful of her culture while introducing a little skepticism at the same time, Volker said, “Maybe. But I’ve seen him do some incredible things. Like this morning, for example. Pretty sure he used electromagnetism to crack open that DHD and route the power draws from the most stable naquadria veins. Where I come from, we call that ‘technomagery’.”

“Technomagery,” Ginn repeated contemplatively.

“Doesn’t mean the people he shouts at are real,” Volker finished.

Ginn said nothing.

“The brain is full of electrical signals,” Volker said. “No disrespect to him, but his signaling pathways are less locked down than yours or mine, I think.”

“Because of what the Alliance did,” Ginn said.

“Yeah,” Volker said.

“You tried to warn me,” Ginn said. “You’re trying to warn me again now. You think the captain isn’t reliable.”

Yeah. Exactly. Rush wasn’t reliable. At all. And Ginn was a wonderful, earnest, smart person who’d torpedoed her whole life for a chance at something better. Volker was planning to make sure she got something better than a bullet from a trigger-happy 22-year-old’s gun. 

“‘Warn’ is a strong word,” Volker began. “I know you—” he stopped before he put his foot in his mouth. “I know all of this looks very different from your perspective than it does from mine.”

“But Dale,” Ginn said softly, “Ancestral tech is haunted.”

Down the hall, a door opened.

Ginn was immediately in a crouch, her hand ghosting over the holster where her energy weapon had been. Fingertips braced against the floor, she cocked her head, listening.

Volker put a hand on her shoulder. “Sit back.” He gave her shoulder a tug. “Stay calm.”

A flashlight beam reflected and refracted through the line of glass cells. “Where are they?” It was a new voice. A contralto—husky and musical, concerned but not afraid.

“Down here,” Wildcard said.

She appeared in the dim light, dressed in black, carrying a bag. Her hair was swept into a crown of gold and glint, made of curls pinned to curls pinned to curls. Her face was luminous in the emergency light, her eyes wide, the color of Ancient crystal.

She smiled, warm and sad. “I’m Lieutenant Tamara Johansen. I’m a medic.”

Volker swallowed. Tamara. God, what a name.

Ginn got to her feet. “I’m Ginn of the Lost House. Our captain is hurt.”

At the word “captain” the medic looked at Wildcard.

Wildcard shrugged, unimpressed. “They’re all crazy, far as I’m concerned.”

Tamara reached for the door.

“There’s a cat in there,” Wildcard dropped the words casually. “Don’t let it out.”

“A cat?” Disapproval and interest turned her breathy voice sharp.

“He’s sleeping,” Volker said. “You can come in.”

Wildcard swept his light over Ginn, balanced on the balls of her feet and fingertips, over Volker, leaning against the back wall with Rush’s head in his lap, and finally over Rush, who looked particularly corpse-like in the harsh glare.

Tamara gasped and hit the door controls. In a handful of steps she crossed the space, startling Mendelssohn, who would have darted into the hall if Sergeant Wildcard hadn’t shooed him back.

“What happened?” Tamara breathed, her fingertips at Rush’s throat.

Volker gave Tamara a run-down of all that he knew that had happened to Rush, including genetic modification courtesy of an Anubis-designed bioweapon, torture, a gunshot wound, blood-replacement, Lucian Alliance brainwashing and dialing the nine-chevron address with the combined power of a Theseus-class planet and his mind. Probably.

At the end of the list, Sergeant Wildcard snorted and said, “Let’s not forget talking to people who aren’t there.”

Tamara clicked on a small light of her own and touched one of Rush’s hands, uncurling his fingers to look at his nail beds. “His oxygen levels have to be dangerously low.”

“LA synthetic blood has no red cells,” Volker said. “It’s got a collection of proteins that bind and liberate oxygen like hemoglobin. It’s also got some clotting factors. Other blood stuff. It’s lavender-colored. He’s looked like a three-day old corpse ever since he did the full swap. Gets winded easily too.”

Tamara placed Rush’s hand back on the floor of the decon suite. “That sounds incredibly dangerous.”

“I mean, it was nobody’s first choice?” Volker said.

The medic turned worried, sea-colored eyes on him. “I don’t have the tools for this. I don’t even know how to interpret vital signs when blood gets replaced with something else, I—”

“I had a device that I came in with,” Volker said. “About the size of a phone? It’s called an A-corder. It displays medical information. It’s all in Ancient. I can barely read it, but it might help you, if any of your people know Ancient—”

Tamara’s gaze, quiet and evaluative, pierced Volker’s heart. He met it best he could, with all his hope in her and his personal 1d1 charisma on his face.

Tamara nodded. “I’ll look for it.” She turned to Sergeant Wildcard. “This man needs to be monitored in the infirmary. You can guard him there.”

“Take it up with the colonel,” Wildcard said.

Tamara looked at Volker. “I’ll be back,” she promised.

“We’ll be here,” Volker replied.

~~~

Hours passed. The ship cooled.

Ginn curled against his side, trying to conserve heat but also, he thought, crying a little bit in the dark. He could feel an occasional hitch in her breathing. Mendelssohn loafed on Volker’s lap. Rush still hadn’t moved. Volker was getting worried. If the ship got much cooler, he should probably strip off his own jacket and put it under the man.

If Telford were here—

Volker shook his head. 

“You always fall asleep on watch.” Ginn sniffed.

“Sorry,” Volker said softly. “I wasn’t sleeping. Just—had a thought I didn’t like.”

Ginn breathed a teary laugh and wiped her face.

“I’m gonna have to get up in a minute,” Volker informed Mendelssohn. “My legs are asleep.”

The cat yawned.

“No one’s stopping you,” Rush said dully.

Ginn’s head jerked up. “Captain!” She scrambled over Volker’s outstretched legs to crouch beside Rush.

“Hey, buddy.” Volker pulled Rush’s glasses from his jacket and tapped the scientist on the shoulder with them. “Welcome back.”

Rush slid the frames into place.

“What happened?” Ginn hovered over him.

“There’s been a complication.” Rush curled his knees into his chest.

“We got that much,” Volker said. “What kind of complication?”

“This ship has no manners.” Rush turned his face into Volker’s thigh like he was trying not to look into the dark. “Whatsoever.”

Manners. Okay. What the heck did that mean? Guessing with a statement and pivoting based on non-verbal cues was his best method for ferreting out answers from Rush, but that took weeks, and all he could see of Rush’s face was the light reflecting from his hair and glasses.

The whir and clank of an opening door cut short Volker’s strategizing.

Ginn darted to the glass for a quick look, then returned, positioning herself in a crouch in front of Rush. “It’s the colonel.”

Volker put a hand on Rush’s shoulder. “How about I do the talking this time?” he whispered.

Rush shrugged into Volker’s thigh and balled himself up a little tighter.

The colonel stopped in front of their clear glass door. Midwest, hands on gun, took up a position behind his commanding officer. Young shone his light into Volker’s eyes. 

“You’re really an astrophysicist?”

“Yes.” Volker squinted, lifted a hand, and packed as much acidity into his tone as it would take; admittedly, with Rush’s head in his lap and a feral grad student crouched beside him, it wasn’t as much as he’d like.

“And you know, somehow, that this is a ship,” Young growled.

“I mean, I’d heard that, yeah.”

“From who?” Young demanded. “From Kiva? From David?”

Volker summoned faculty-meeting unconcern and papered it over the lie that itself papered over a chasm of guilt. “That’s right. From David.”

Young rubbed his jaw. “This ship is dead in the water coasting for a star. Seems like an astrophysicist might have something to add.”

Oh. Great. Caught in the gravity well of a fireball. That was just what his day had been missing. But at least Volker might be able to leverage something out of the situation.

“Ginn is a scientist,” Volker said, “and Rush is better with Ancient tech than anyone here. We’ll all help you. In exchange, you let us out of here. Then we can sit down and share what we know. I’m hoping that at the end of it, we won’t be living in a quarantine lab.”

Young leaned a shoulder into the open frame of their glass cage. “It’s a nice idea.”

“I mean, I thought so, yeah,” Volker said.

“Unfortunately, Dr. Volker, this ship is a cooling rock with emergency lights and air circulators. There’s nothing for an LA scientist or Ancient tech expert to do. Everyone on this ship is dead. That’s you, that’s me, that’s your duo of crazy,” he gestured at Rush and Ginn, “and your cat. Sorry.”

“What?” Volker breathed.

“We’re about five hours out from burning up in the heart of a star. I’ve got a shuttle with enough power to save seventeen people. I’d like someone to double check our orbital calculations because the kid who did them is a high school dropout. You want to help me save seventeen lives?”

Volker floundered, trying to catch up. “But—where will the shuttle…go?”

“There’s a planet in range,” Young said. “Should be habitable. Theoretically.”

“Don’t waste a shuttle,” Rush rasped. “Or sacrifice personnel.” Then, like he couldn’t help himself, he added, “Idiot.”

Young huffed a laugh. “Oh. The rockstar’s awake. Lucky us.”

Ginn moved, opening up a sightline between Young and Rush.

“Don’t send anyone anywhere,” Rush said.

“You wanna make sense for once in your life?” Young asked.

“No,” Rush replied, venom flambé. “This is my ship. You follow my orders. Do not launch a shuttle.”

Volker grimaced in the dark. “Okay, well, we brought a naquadah drive core,” he said, “kinda seems like that should change the calculus a little—”

“You brought a drive core?” Young asked, shocked.

At the same time, Rush said, “Do NOT waste naquadah on this.”

Volker took a beat to reorient, then said, “You realize flying into a star is bad, right?”

“We’ll be fine,” Rush replied. “The ship uses them to refuel.”

Everyone stared at him.

“You got something to base that on?” Young asked.

“Yes,” Rush breathed, one hand over his face. “The ship’s AI told me.”

Huh.

Volker and Young looked at one another.

“When?” Young asked.

“Right fuckin’ now,” Rush said, one hand still over his eyes. “Won’t shut up about it, if y’want to know.”

“Okay,” Young said. “Dr. Volker, you coming? I’ll introduce you to the team.”

Like he was granting permission, Rush shifted off his thigh and hunched into a miserable curl against the wall, one hand digging into his injured shoulder. “Don’t burn out that drive. Or you’re fuckin’ fired.”

“You save this ship and I’ll hire you,” Young said.

Volker bent his knee, riding out the pins and needles before he put weight on it. “I need Ginn’s help.”

“No.” Ginn crouched beside Rush. “I don’t agree with using the drive core. The AI said we don’t need to.”

“Ginn,” Volker began, “it would be better if—”

“No,” Young said. “I don’t trust her.”

“I do,” Volker said. “She risked her life to save us. She deserves a chance to prove herself.”

“Seems like she doesn’t want it.” Young offered Volker his hand. “Let’s go.”

Volker took it, and got hauled to his feet. “They need food and water.” He eased his weight onto a leg still tingling with pins and needles, then looked back at Rush and Ginn, huddled in the dark like forlorn spirits.

“Done,” Young replied. “I’ll send HR by with our finest.”

“Don’t fuckin’ bother,” Rush muttered.

“I would like food,” Ginn clarified, “and so would the captain.”

Young nodded at her, then pointed a casual thumb at Rush. “You may want to rethink whatever chain you’ve decided this guy is the top of.” He gave Volker a meaningful look. “That goes for both of you.”

“You’re no better.” Rush was a baleful ball against the wall.

“Thought I was your ‘love’?” There was no mistaking the mockery in Young’s question.

“That in no way exempts you from fucking off,” Rush snarled.

“Fucking off was my plan; how’d you guess?” Young clapped Volker on the shoulder. “Let’s go.”

“Do not,” Rush said, as Volker passed through the door to the cell, “burn out that drive.”

“Right, but, um, I don’t really want to fly into a star?” Volker said.

“Bloody typical,” Rush muttered.

With a last, uneasy look at Rush and Ginn, and not at all sure this was a good idea, Volker followed Young out of the brig and into the darkness of the ship.