! written by Jakkar on 2014-05-08

Two human males sit on trolleys in the sickbay of the Kestrel design cruiser Seething Rage. The Seething Rage is occupied by anything but, today... More a sense of numbed shell-shock, with a hint of giggling whimsy typical of mild-to-moderate oxygen deprivation in the long term.

We're not in the mood to move, or indeed to do very much at all but sit and stare and think.

There were four of us, until relatively recently. Time hasn't had much meaning for a while though. Without air, when every breath you can take that doesn't burn your lungs is a luxury you didn't expect and do not anticipate tasting again, the passage of time becomes more of a series of isolated moments. Infinite Now followed by infinite Now, aware only of the burn intensifying in the throat and the increased awareness of the shape and volume of the lungs as a three dimensional form inside you, something you can never ordinarily sense. The deep ache.

Of course, I can't speculate on what that poor green bastard used to breathe with. Presumably lungs. Something like lungs. He must have had them - else he wouldn't have looked so frantic on the monitors as he tried to reassemble the shredded remains of the primary O2 processor, with his bare hands... but as quietly as he volunteered to join us during a Fed evacuation, he faded away. A ripple of green energy fluttering up into the ventilation ducts, endlessly cycling dead air - and now our old friend with it. If I were to breathe, I suppose I'd be breathing him, now.

There were three humans, though, among the four crew-members aboard. Three, of four, before the Mantis ruined the air processor. I'm repeating myself, aren't I? I think it's shock. Do you think it's shock? I've never been in shock before.

The third is still in the corridor outside O2 processing. We'll deal with him later. Maybe. Pretty sure he's dead. Living people usually have less holes in them. I mean, we all have a certain number, but those don't look like they're in the right place. And there's all that blood. Besides, there wasn't any air out there for a long time.

There is now. Air. I think. I can't see it so I don't know but the monitors say so. Air. I don't know. Maybe.

I think we'll stay in here for a bit longer. In medical.

We were the first responders, you see. When the pirates came aboard. The scanners registered two boarders - the fuckers teleported directly into O2 processing from the enemy vessel off Starboard. The alarms sounded but we already knew - as we neared the blast doors we could hear the chittering sounds of Mantis, buzzed on destruction, and the metallic shriek and clatter of components being torn apart by those long, serrated chitin blades. Fucking insects.

Of course, in the cramped processing station we were face-to-mandible with the bastards before we could get a shot off. Hand to hand with a pair of micro-gone-macro nightmares. What do you think happened? We were ripped to shreds - we barely made it out alive, crawled and staggered our way to sickbay carried only by the promise of life courtesy of the surgical suite, and collapsed onto the autogurneys, haemhorraging messily all over the pristine white plasteel floor.

The others ran for the O2, abandoning their stations - we had no autopilot but the enemy guns were being held at bay by level two shields and we felt we had more important, more primal threats to worry about - and I don't even mean the boarders, I just mean the air. Personally I don't know if the bitter metal taste was in the air, or was the blood from my lungs surging up my throat each time I coughed.

I don't remember much. I don't want to. I felt the judder run through the bulkhead at my back as the enemy vessel imploded in on itself under the barrage of laser bursts our ship was spewing on automatic - I'd programmed it to hit the gunnery deck and not stop firing until we could see out the other side of the enemy ship, just before I ran for the O2. I know that feeling, the pulse of an engine coming apart at full power in the void, the energy released washing across the hull and sending a single vibration through every wall and floor - the feeling of a ship silently crunching in the emptiness outside. I managed to turn my head to the monitors in time to see the Mantis finally collapse in a tangle of hard green limbs across one-another and the corpse of our comrade. I reached out to a remote terminal, keyed myself in with one bloody hand and closed the airlock to the engine-room. I'm not entirely sure why, given that there was no Oxy left in that half of the ship - that was the first thing we did - tried to suffocate them - but Mantis don't breathe like we do. Take longer to die. Not much longer, really.

The lack of oxy didn't stop our naive alien ally from sprinting straight in there, of course. I guess he had the right idea, with limited information - he merely overestimated his ability to hold his breath while reassembling heavy machinery.

I'm rambling again. So. Yes. Two of us left. In medical. Doors sealed, breathing the last dregs of oxygen, wheezing and gasping, too concentrated upon our own personal agonies to note the other's similar state. We were alive, or something like it. Far from intact, but the med systems were patching us up slow but sure. What's a few more scars, a few new fingers lacking that solar tan? But we weren't really breathing, now. Support systems were feeding oxygen directly into our bloodstream even as they strove to replace what we'd lost, then kept on pumping, cycling our entire blood supply which was by this point receiving close to zero oxygen from our bodies' desperate attempts to breath dead air. I knew the theory and simply tried to fight the instinct, to hold my lungs still, knowing the agony I'd feel if I let them spasm and force nothingness down. Something like itching inside my core quickly rose to a maddening intensity, but there was nothing to be done.

He and I stared at each other across the room as the silence settled, as we mastered our gasping, convulsing frames, each wordlessly aware of the other's wordless awareness that we were alone aboard a ship with no air and no means to produce it.

After a while, we noticed the numbness in our new fingers, our new flesh. Of a paleness, an itching. A wetness, blood leaking from half-sutured wounds. A humming sound as the medical systems ramped up their internal fans to compensate for the rising heat as they ran beyond their standard capacity, struggling to maintain a process that was never meant to be constant. We were alive, but we weren't healing. Our repairs were dying on our bodies. We were bonded with dead flesh as the medical systems struggled to multi-process too much damage while maintaining our total oxygen supply.

We were in limbo. Half dead, half alive, in an unmanned ship with no autopilot or preprogrammed destination, securely defended by an expensive shielding system and totally unable to leave the sickbay lest our ruined bodies simply fall apart. Besides which, we'd be dead of oxygen deprivation within seconds.

I reached out, eyes blurred, and wiped the blood from the remote console beside me, and examined the ship systems in full. I couldn't think of anything we could do, and I wasn't sure either of us were strong enough to even kill ourselves. How long might we float here, sustained by an ignorant machine, burning inside, rotting outside and unable to die? Is it possible to envy the dead outside the room? I may have, for a time.

Time. Time passed. That I know. How much, I don't. I woke up, at some point, after many wakings and forgotten dreams, gasping, hissing panic each time I woke to a body that would not, could not breathe, but kept trying - and my crewmate had his own terminal active, his attention focused on it, a dusty coating of dried blood, orange upon his face under the harsh flourescent lights, giving him an obscure look of a holiday-maker too long on the beach of some tour-world, some artificial terraformed paradise. How long had it been?

Stubble had become straggly beard on both our wasted faces. I think looking back I'm making light of this, but I have no idea how long we lay there, deathless, breathless and quietly terrified. Perhaps the limited oxygen supply and the unhealthy, shuddering gasps we still sometimes took were keeping us high, drugged - killing braincells but saving us from the true horror of our situation.

I digress again. He was working on something... Wordless, ceaseless, focused. I think my broken fingernails and matted hair were longer by the time he no longer tapped at that console. I never saw him sleep.