Page 11 of Dax: Gratefully Bonded
“No,” I stopped him, holding up a hand. “There’s… we need…” Fuck, could my brain just work for one bleeding moment? Words should not be this difficult to find. “There are medical supplies there,” I said, gesturing in the general direction of the crate. “My crewmates are in the cabin. We need to go back there. They need help.”
The man glanced around, then dashed back over to the large crate, climbing inside. He returned a moment later with a small backpack. He dumped out the contents onto the floor – a couple of items of clothing, a water flask and a few packets of food – and proceeded to fill the bag with the medication. Job done, he stood up and looked at me hesitantly.
“Do you need help?”
I shook my head. “No, I’m… Oh fuck.” The room tilted sideways, and I found myself plastered to the floor again. “Okay, shit, yeah, I probably do.”
He was at my side in an instant, gently lifting me, supporting my weight by getting his shoulder under my arm. “Which way?” he asked, once I was more or less upright. My vision was jumping, the room seeming to do a slow spin northwards.
“That way,” I said, pointing towards what I hoped was the right door. The only other door out of this room was through the airlock, and I hoped the man would have enough sense not to dump us both into space.
We stumbled up the hallway and I managed to pick the right door into the pilot’s cabin. Ru startled when she looked up and saw the man with me. “He was in the crate,” I said dumbly. “He’s got medicine.”
I honestly couldn’t have said much about what happened over the next few minutes. The man set me on the floor, propped up against one wall, and went about helping Ru treat the others’ wounds. Matchi came to at one point and muttered something about a Vangravian slave. But that was about all the details I could process. The stinging pain in my right thigh was migrating north, and the burning in my left side was dripping south, and a headache was blossoming in the back of my head. I heard a muttered conversation, but nothing in it made much sense to me, until I felt a hand on my arm, and managed to prise my eyes open. The blue man was crouched in front of me, with a syringe in his hand.
“It’s a broad spectrum anti-venom,” he said. “Ru said she thinks you got stung by something.”
“Fucking alien shit,” I muttered, my words slurring badly. “This stuff won’t work.”
I felt the man moving my arm about, then a strong pressure near my elbow, followed by a sharp prick. But I was too out of it to protest. I was going to die soon, and someone would have to figure out how to dock the ship at the space station.
In the next moment, my heart rate suddenly doubled, my eyes snapped open, and a wave of mental clarity hit me like a freight train. “Jesus Christ,” I yelped, snatching my arm away from the man, who was currently injecting a second vial of something into my vein. “What the fuck are you doing?”
“Injecting you with anti-venom and adrenaline,” he said calmly. “Ru was concerned you were going to die.”
A thin trail of blood trickled from the injection site, where I’d so rudely caused him to rip the needle out of me. “Where are we?” I asked urgently.
“On the AEV Defender, en route to Delaville,” Ru informed me, no doubt attempting to be helpful.
“No, you dimwit,” I muttered, lurching to my feet. “I mean how close to Delaville are we?” I headed for the console, needing to figure out how much time had passed while I’d been off with the fairies. The blue man shadowed me, catching my elbow when I stumbled. Either the adrenaline or the anti-venom – or more likely, both – had had a fine effect at getting my brain to function, but my right leg was still out of action.
“Shit, we’re… two hours out,” I said, after checking a few of the screens. “Could be worse, I suppose.”
“Master, you’re bleeding,” the blue man said, eyeing me with concern.
“It’s just a scratch,” I dismissed him, brushing at the blood on my arm irritably. “Ru, did you get some of that anaesthetic into you? How’s the arm?”
“No, Master, you’re bleeding,” the blue man insisted. I would have ignored him, except that at that point, Ru let out a string of curses.
“Holy fuck, he’s right.” She grabbed up a handful of bandages and gauze from the pile on the floor, cradling them in her injured arm, and dashed over to us. I followed her gaze down to my mid torso, and realised that the trickling sensation I’d been feeling from the wound on my abdomen was not, in fact, just the pain spreading. It was blood. A wide, dark stain had spread from my waist to mid-thigh.
Ru grabbed my shirt and yanked it upwards. “Mother-fucking son of a bitch, not you as well.”
No, Matchi hadn’t been the only one to have been opened up to have his organs harvested. The aliens had closed the wound with a few clumsy stitches – enough to stop the rest of my organs from spilling out, but in a way that would presumably provide easy access again later, when they wanted to go back in.
“We need to stop the bleeding or you’ll never make it to the station.”
“I’m fine,” I said, pushing her away. I didn’t want to think about it. And admitting that there was a wound there would mean admitting that they’d…
“Dressing the wound is the wiser course of action, Master,” the blue man said, taking a step forward and reaching out a hand. He had a thick dressing in his hand, but as he closed in, I shoved him back.
“Don’t you fucking touch me,” I snarled at him. I could already feel waves of panic climbing me, as I desperately tried to block out the sensation of hands – or tentacles, maybe? – reaching into my body and removing the parts they wanted. Yeah, maybe I would bleed all over the floor if I didn’t wrap the wound, but if that meant I didn’t have to think about what they’d done, then I was fine with that.
“You need the wound dressed,” Ru insisted, stepping forward again, though I evaded her hands. “Don’t be a fucking idiot.”
“I’m fine.”
“None of us are fine. And we’re going to be a whole lot worse if we don’t have you to dock the fucking ship for us!”