“You should stay away from him,” Margrave had said, nudging Zachariah with his elbow. “I know it’s your instinct to befriend everyone, but not everyone feels likewise, little linebrother.

  “He looks so sad, sometimes,” Zachariah said, looking at the Line of Keon medic.

  “He’s probably contemplating how stupid the people around him are,” Margrave said, scowling. “He is not a gentle man. Competent enough, but not gentle. I think he is a medic because he could not bear to see others do something badly, and wished to correct them.”

  “I heard it was because he liked the blood,” muttered another man at their table.

  The Starless Void, Chapter Three

  ***

  Nicola felt… terrible.

  Every motion of her head sent a lance of pain ear to ear. She made herself eat, knew she had to eat, but nausea brought most of it back up.

  She drank as much as she could, water at least was plentiful, but it was… a chore. Nothing more, nothing less.

  Mostly, she slept on and off.

  When she heard knocking at her door again, she expected it was Zachariah, returned to egg her into eating again. It was weird that he wasn’t letting himself in, but… a lot of things seemed strange, now. After what seemed a long time, she struggled out of bed, leaning heavily on the wall, following it’s line to the door. Walking was a struggle, and moving her head still… hurt.

  If she was home, there were teas and medicines all over the place she could have taken, food that didn’t make her want to vomit as well as feeling compelled to. She could have been miserable in peace, at home.

  Head pounding she signaled the door to open, and her stomach dropped into her toes when she saw that the person beyond the door wasn’t Zachariah at all.

  She froze, staring up at Raphael, the medic. He froze, staring down at her.

  “Come on, sit back down,” he said after a moment, his face too still. “You look terrible.”

  She thought she should be panicking. She thought she should be angry. She felt nothing, except exhaustion, and vague shame at her own state, and the sense that whatever she did, the matter was out of her hands now. She didn’t move. Moving seemed suddenly exhausting.

  “Come on,” he said again, softer, and put a hand on her shoulders, steering her back towards the bed.

  ***

  The Aenocyan had warned him.

  “She may not be rational. She may be angry, or terrified.”

  “Why?”

  The Ideal shrugged. “Some mortals fear doctors. You are part of the… category. She may worry we’ll think she has the Prions— though that is near impossible, as you know. Probably Gravitational Inflammation.”

  “It’s been fourteen months since we were last called to a prospective prion bloom, and it turned out that was a previously unknown but treatable fungal infection. We’d have seen infection by now if it was on the ship. Where would she have gotten exposed? Unless… could she have been sent here to seed it on the ship?”

  His Ideal considered, cocking his head and observing the ceiling, lupine. “… As a tactic, possible, if clumsy. As an occurrence, not in this case. Humans when exposed fall fast. If she was exposed, we’d have noticed her acting a rabid dog on day two or three.”

  He felt his stomach falling at the very idea. “If… the men would…”

  “There are many reasons I kept a close eye in the first days. But. If that was the case, she would have assumed she came to be on the ship when we picked her up from an infected world. She did not. And… she said she hailed from Earth.”

  “I thought she was using it in it’s more… general meaning. Earthbound, landbound, not the planet.”

  “Maybe she did,” the Ideal sighed, looked to him too suddenly. “But I think not. And if she is from Earth…”

  “Then she could not be infected,” Raphael said, and felt a stir of pity. Because she would never be allowed to go back. To spare it the ravages of the prions, Earth was now a sacrosanct space, no traffic in, and none out. If Nicola was blessed enough to have seen humanity’s birthworld, she would never be allowed to go home. They didn’t even keep up communications much, anymore. It seemed to depress both sides. “But. Mortals fall prey to lesser sicknesses.”

  “Precisely. I doubt she thought we’d believe her to be uninfected.”

  “Why?”

  The Ideal smiled. “The fearful assume others treat the world with equal caution. She has lost all, whatever her worst impulses are, however great her worst fears, they will be greater now.”

  He pondered a moment, then frowned. “You said that would be a… clumsy tactic?”

  “Oh yes. The men are resistant to the prions, and while that hardly offers complete protection-- we do lose them, every time we fight a bloom… “ a shadow passed over his face, before he shook it off. “We have the infrastructure to isolate a victim of the prions. There are more effective ways to lay waste to a group of marines.”

  “… such as?”

  His Ideal turned to him then, observing his face, searching for something in his eyes. He smiled, slowly. “Cut the mortal open, plant a bomb on a short timer in her abdomen. None of the men would allow for such a victim to simply be ejected out an airlock, and, if they understood the situation fully, they could force me to oppose my men and perhaps be dragged down. Either the bomb goes off-- the ship crippled or exposed to Void-- or I fight my own men. Either I am forced to harm my own men to save them, or they drag me down. Regardless, either everyone is injured, or everyone is dead.”

  Raphael took a deep breath through his nose. He had asked. It was not the Ideal’s fault he thought so. He had been made so.

  He had asked.

  “There is another possibility, Lord Ideal. I could cut the bomb free, and launch it into space.”

  “Can you? Can you act fast enough to do so? Can you cut into a woman conscious and begging for your mercy?”

  He froze, picturing it. Dizziness rose in him. Nausea. But. “If… it saved her life. I think… I think… maybe?”

  As answers went, it was weak. His Ideal considered him though.

  “Good,” he said.

  He had looked away, uncomfortable and far too visible in his Ideal’s sight. “Enough hypotheticals. She will be afraid. Possibly unpredictable, definitely she won’t actively want help.”

  “Likely. She might be miserable enough to cave to you.” The Ideal leaned against the wall. “I’ll be nearby, but… my presence will not aid you. Unless she becomes violent, I suppose.”

  “You think that likely?”

  “No. But.. well. She is human. They are not so predictable as us,” the Ideal had said.

  It had been a fascinating conversation. And now, looking at the wasted, shivering creature, he had been glad of… most of it at least.

  “Tell me what happened, so I can help you,” he said.

  ***

  He wasn’t angry, that she could tell, but then, would his anger even matter? He wouldn’t need to be angry to decide she was a danger, or even just more trouble than she was worth.

  “Alright,” he said after a while. The calm scared her. She didn’t want to look at him, to see his expression, but he sighed and brushed his braid back over his shoulders. He was in what she assumed were his work clothes-- something like scrubs. Black. Everyone wore black and silver on this ship, because they were the Ideal’s colors. “How about I guess instead?”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  Why… what…

  “I’m guessing, that a few days after getting on board, you started developing an ear ache. Not a big deal, everyone has them occasionally. But it kept getting worse. At this point, you’re nauseous, constantly dizzy, and in a fair amount of pain. Am I correct?”

  She stared at his boots in mute confusion, sitting on the edge of her bed like a scolded child. The whole room was too.. sterile. She wanted, suddenly, to throw dirty clothes across the floor, to make it her room and not some...prison, or hospital room.

  “I wish you had told me sooner,” he said, softly. “I could have spared you some pain. It’s been so long since we had a guest that we didn’t think of it. Our gravitational system messes with the inner ear, until you grow accustomed to it-- your inner ear is registering constant motion, and it grows inflamed, becomes painful, destroys balance, sometimes makes loud or high pitched noises painful to hear.”

  He had been speaking softly and low, the whole time, she thought, and blinked, too tired and nauseated to take the thought any further.

  “We had the medicine on file, from… from when we last needed it, however long ago that was. So I was able to get it produced by the ship. Human grade painkillers, anti inflammatory medicines, a nausea soother and a medication to ease your dizziness. It’s all short term-- but it only needs to be short term. It’s just to ease your discomfort while you become accustomed to the gravity.”

  She frowned, looking up at him. He was tall of course-- he was a marine. They weren’t as beefy as she would have thought-- still beefy, but not a slab of muscle as wide as they were tall. Muscular, yes. Inhumanly so, but tall enough that some of them retained a certain elegance. He was more slender than most-- which… wasn’t saying much. He could still bench press a car.

  He looked back at her, calm, inhumanly still, and patient. After a moment, he looked away from her to dig through a pocket the size of her head, and pulled out an assortment of glass bottles with pills in them. They were hand labeled, with brown glass. The lids were not childproof. She supposed that there was no reason to make them childproof unless there were children consistently within a light year of their location.

  She blinked at them, dumbly, and he repeated the motion, bringing his hand slightly closer. She took them, fumbling a little.

  “If the nausea gets worse, send Zachariah to me, or come yourself, or send a ping through your datalink. If you stay ill, the whole pack of the marines is going to get incredibly morose very quickly, and I really cannot allow them to indulge in self flagellation again, even the metaphorical kind. Life is far too short. So really, you’d be doing me a favor. Do you struggle to swallow down your meals?”

  There no longer seemed to be a point in evading answering. She nodded, staring down at the floor again.

  “Alright. I can have your meals condensed to pill form for a while-- it’s not ideal, and it causes other problems if you do it long enough, but for a few days while you get back to where you should be, it can be helpful.”

  A few days where meals wouldn’t feel like swallowing warm snot. She could have cried out of sheer gratitude.

  “What else do you need?”

  A sudden curiosity gripped her, and she looked up. “Can I ask a question?”

  “Of course.”

  “… You… chose to become a medic, right?” Suddenly, she remembered that this was a bad idea, remembered where she was, What her position in the ship was, or rather wasn’t. But she had already spoken. No sense not finishing the question. No sense aggravating him and not learning. “Why?”

  He huffed. “You’ve been listening too much to the marines. Line of Keon is a series of attributes, what is done with them is mine. But… I suppose none of them would know. I’m one of the older marines now.” There was grief in his eyes, when, startled, she looked up at them, and she flinched back away. He started to lift a hand, and settled it back at his side. He didn’t look that much older than the other marines, whatever their lifespan naturally was… though there were some greybeards who worked in the armory, and a few other places. Zachariah had been keen that she not disturb them, so she hadn’t. “Very well. Let us make a bargain, you and I? I will tell you exactly why I became a medic, but… I would like a question answered in turn, if I may?”

  She bit her lip, considered, and nodded slowly.

  “Alright. Once, when I was a new marine, we had just finished a very nasty engagement, and I had just delivered a friend to the medics-- he’d gotten mauled pretty nicely and ended up losing an eye, but he survived. It had been a particularly bloody encounter, and the medics were swamped, and I had nothing to do but remember the fight, and pace back and forth by myself in the waiting area while they put him under to clean his injuries, since they were… pretty damn deep. I was a good fighter, and mostly untouched myself. After a bit, I noticed the smell of blood, no surprises there, given where we were, but it was wafting in from outside the waiting rooms, not from inside the private medical rooms. I debated, but went to investigate-- maybe someone had passed out on the way to the medic. Maybe there was just a large blood puddle-- cleaning it would have been something to do. Imagine my surprise when I found my Ideal there. He’d thrown himself into the fight, between a mutant and one of the really new marines who’d frozen and nearly gotten killed for it. It happens more than we’d like, there’s always a few who freeze. But as it turned out, the mutant had mauled his arm pretty badly. I could see bone, and as I watched, he fished out something that looked like gravel-- he’d landed funny before breaking the mutant’s neck and going back to the fight. Turned out, he was well aware of how swamped the medics were, and had decided he could wait a few more hours. He probably could have-- Ideals are… something else. But I vaguely recall yelling at him that he was an idiot and doing my level best to shove him into the infirmary, which just goes to show that adrenaline is an intoxicant too. But, he seemed to find me funny. I ended up helping him wash it out while he waited, which wasn’t what I wanted but was all I was getting, then helping him bandage it to keep it clean while he waited for someone who knew how to stitch it back into vaguely the right shape. I… don’t actually know if he ever went in to get it checked out. I assume so… but he’s an idiot sometimes.”

  She was staring, slack jawed, and he smirked, flipping his braid over one shoulder.

  “After that… well. We obviously needed more medics, and better medics, if he wasn’t fearing the lecture of a lifetime for ignoring his own injury. So I asked to take the training. No one thought I’d manage to do much more than maybe make field medic, what with me being Line of Keon… but I’m stubborn too, so… it worked out.”

  “Is the training just…. Free to all?”

  “Of course. No one ever fretted about having too many people who knew how to set bones and stop bleeding in our line of work, the Ideal tries to encourage us to all get beyond basic first aid but… most can’t.”

  “Can’t?” She asked, and his expression darkened. She shrank back.

  “Can’t,” he said, sinking back into the soft, quiet tones he had first approached with. “But the reasons why are… I can’t get into them right now. Besides, they’d take a year and a day to explain.”

  The turn of phrase was so whimsical it made her smile, slightly.

  “Now… my turn, if you’re satisfied. Why are you afraid of medics? I assume it is medics, and not that I am personally terrifying… but if I am wrong, do correct me.”

  She half curled up, drawing her knees to her chest and wrapping her arms around them. Refusing to answer now seemed… well, it seemed unfair. As did the question itself. How the hell was she supposed to answer?

  … Be general. Be honest. Leave out the weird shit. As a child, she had overexplained everything, terrified of being accused of lying. Her mother had, eventually sat her down and told her that not everything had to be explained fully. “People just want enough knowledge to judge if they’re doing the right thing,” she had said. As a child, Niki had found that explanation singularly unhelpful. As an adult…

  She couldn’t tell him he was in a story. Even if he’d believe her… she wasn’t that kind of cruel. And if this was an act, or a momentary, out of character mercy from someone who seemed so different then the world he knew, then the knowledge was the only weapon she held in reserve against him. People could lie, she knew that. He didn’t seem like he was lying… but then, she’d been puking her guts up too often to be sure of much besides in which direction lay the porcelain.. or in this case, stainless steel, throne. “Um… specifics would… be… it would take a while, and I don’t want to get into it. But… well for one, I’ve always been scared of doctors. You’re supposed to treat them like an authority, but you don’t know them. Most of the time… you’re just a day of work to them, and people have bad and good days. You can’t afford to trust strangers blindly. Even if they mean well, they don’t have to live with the consequences of what they do, you do. But… where I lived, there were a lot of medical scandals, papers being faked or badly researched, patients… and I hate that fucking word too. It makes you less. But… the people they treated often didn’t get enough information to actually properly consent to things, and it was just ‘oops, so sorry, ruined your life, anyway, come back in next week for a flu shot’ like they were supposed to be trusted blindly, not just in general, but after they majorly fucked up. People don’t like telling them to fuck themselves… and they got used to not having to explain themselves.” She sighed. Thought of the unnamed medic in the novel she didn’t dare tell him about, who was line of Keon. Who was probably not fully upholding the Hippocratic oath. Who might be a monster. Who might be running human experimentation, slowly, personally, on men he knew. She wasn’t sure this was at all about her world, and not entirely about his. “But then, I’m used to being told I’m paranoid.”

  He was considering her, frowning, and she let her eyes skate off him, over white walls and white floors-- seriously who had designed this place? A psychopath? “No. Someone who holds that much power should be held to a high standard. But… they remain people. I do not know how to fix that. Or if it should be fixed.”

  “Yeah. It’s kinda fucked.”

  He snorted, hand wrapping his braid around itself, and tugging very very lightly. A fidget, like drumming your fingers on a tabletop, but… she wondered how long he’d done it. She wondered when he’d started. “Could we make a bargain, you and I?”

  Wary again, she looked up to him, but his eyes were studying something past the wall behind her.

  “Treat me as a stranger, Nicola. Not a doctor-- I won’t claim authority over you unless you are actively dying and waiting to ask for your input would be a death sentence. A stranger, who can be called on to justify himself, or explain his reasoning. I expect we’ll see little enough of each other, but I would be happier knowing you at least felt safe enough to come and ask for the medicines that soothe everyday life. The stuff commonly available in the ship would be toxic for you-- it is meant for the marines, and they do not process much as a human might. Debate me, question me. But do not shun what you need to ease your life because I am part of accessing it.”

  She swallowed, slowly. “You might regret letting me debate or question you. I’m told I can be very difficult.”

  “I’m sure working with the Ideal has left me wholly unprepared for ‘difficult’”

  She snorted. “He’d have to talk to be this kind of difficult.”

  “Oh, allow me to assure you, he does. He was the one who realized you hadn’t been about. He just doesn’t do it much in public. His words carry too much weight to fling about carelessly, or at least, so he reasons.”

  “… Like throwing bowling balls around.”

  “What?”

  “Um… they’re… really heavy balls, about the size of what you’d use in dodgeball, which is… probably also not a sport you know. Ugh. Why would the gravity do this, anyway?”

  “Because the ship, while massive, does not have the mass needed to imitate a planet. You said you were worldside, yes? We perceive it as a similar amount of force, consciously, but your inner ear can feel the amount of movement needed to make the imitation to your muscles and bones. It just needs time to adapt. There… is a room, not far but out of the way, where you can see some of the way the ship generates that force in action. But you are not currently up to the walk.”

  She felt her eyes narrowing, and cursed herself for a fool again. But if he wanted her to consider talking to him like… like she could maybe trust him… then if he was going to go off on her, he may as well do it now, while she was still miserable anyway. “I expect directions as soon as I can make the trek.”

  “When you are up to it, I will show you the way, myself,” he said, apparently amused, and stood. “For now, I think I’ve taken enough of your time. You should take a dose of each of those, and sleep. I’ll be by, or send Zachariah by, later with the pill form of the meals. But, most of recovery is sleep, in most cases.”

  Sleep sounded… really, really good. So did letting whatever this was kick in in peace. “Sure. I guess. Later.”

  “… Indeed, later.”

  Until we meet again, may you see past the surface, to the hearts of the men and women around you. You are cherished of the Most High, and he sees you-- see others likewise.