Fic: Scavenger
Title: Scavenger
Fandom: SGU
Pairing: gen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: anxiety, people manure, panic attacks, robots, sentient starships in need of medical advice, and lots and lots of dead animals.
Notes: Written for the longfic-bingo prompt “military”. Follows tBomND. Not sure about my James pov; be gentle.I am actually so nervous about this I could puke
Summary: Making the best of it is the only way to survive.
In which there is food, freezing, and a robot with a flower on its head.
“Holy shit,” James says, staring into the valley below them. “Holy shit.”
It’s a town - or something that used to be a town. It looks abandoned, several buildings caved in and grass reclaiming what used to be cleared roads.
It’s those toad aliens. It has to be.
James and Scott share startled faces, before Scott pulls out his radio and James pulls out her binoculars.
“Salvage mission?” she whispers.
Scott shrugs.
The rest of their team is on the other side of the hill, trying to gather what supplies they can. Eli, manning the kino, scrambles up the hill in response to Scott’s call. “You found a city? Like a descendants-from-the-past city or a bad-guy city?”
“Like an abandoned city,” James says flatly. As they watch, something that looks like the bastard son of a fox and a squirrel climbs up a wall and in through a window.
“If you’re up here, who’s dialing the gate?” Scott asks.
Eli shrugs. “It’s already open. The guys had a full load.”
James rolls her eyes while Scott trots down the hill. She shoos Eli down after him.
She waits quietly, eyes and ears open. It’s a relatively peaceful planet so far - droning insects but nothing that bites, sunny but not too hot, lots of edible looking plants and animals. The city though: that’s an unpleasant surprise.
Scott and Eli come back with Rush, Dunning, Brody, and a lot of backpacks.
“Salvage mission,” Scott says when they reach her. She nods.
“No activity that I can see. Small animals, a few birds. Nothing big.”
“How many buildings?”
“Twenty. Possibly more on the other side of those trees.”
Rush is already setting off down the hill; after a moment of hesitation, Eli follows him, half an eye on whatever he was getting from the kino.
“This was a either a research outpost or a manufacturing plant,” Rush says, rifling through someone’s desk drawer. “They prefer to live closer to the water.”
He got captured twice by the things; his guess is better than anyone else’s.
Their backpacks fill up quick - the plan is to take anything that looks useful, and whatever this place was, there’s a lot of stuff that ‘looks useful’ lying around. Rope, wires, something that looks vaguely like a hatchet. James and Dunning dismantle an entire pulley system and divide it between them.
James doesn’t pick up anything that looks electrical. There’s a fine line between looking useful and being dangerous, after all.
“Nails?” Eli says, riffling through a box one-handed. “That’s kind of disappointing.”
“What did the colonel think about this salvage mission?”
Scott scratches the back of his neck. “He...uh…”
“Colonel Young,” Rush interrupts, sorting through a stack of old electronics for something useful, “is still recovering from a long illness. There was no need for him to be involved.”
There is an awkward silence.
“You mean this mission isn’t authorized?”
“It was authorized by Wray and myself. That’s all the permission we need.”
James shoots Scott an incredulous look. He makes a face. “He was asleep. TJ said not to wake him on pain of death.”
“That’s an exaggeration, but not by much,” Brody puts in from the next room.
There is a pregnant pause.
“So. Uhhh….” Eli grabs something. “This looks like a flashlight. Could we use this?”
“Nothing electrical, unless it’s clearly broken with no visible power source,” Scott is quick to say. “We’ll take the broken stuff closer to the gate and then dismantle it for parts. Working electronics could be used to track us.”
Eli drops the potential flashlight quickly, putting the nails into his backpack instead.
“Has anyone considered that this might not belong to the toad things?”
Brody shrugs, putting the box he’d grabbed on an empty patch of table. “It’s still abandoned. I don’t think our hypothetical non-toad non-blue potentially friendly aliens will care.”
James helps Scott break into a metal case. “Unauthorized,” she hisses.
“I’m technically in command, again, while the colonel’s on medical leave” Scott whispers. “And I’ve spent months listening to Wray talk about her government thing. And I wasn’t going to waste my veto on it, because I’m not entirely sure but I think I get one veto a week, and we still have most of the week left, and we can really use these supplies.”
“We’re still dead when the colonel finds out.”
Scott does a strange jerky shrug and takes a swig from his canteen.
James sighs, letting it go for now.
They empty their backpacks twice at the gate, except for Brody who leaves full boxes. They steal the sled from the foraging teams to haul several large slabs of a metal alloy. After that, James says fuck it and ties her jacket around her waist.
They eat mystery-mammal kabobs on their way back to the abandoned town.
When they get there, Brody is alone at their meeting place, wrapping glass jars in stretchy translucent fabric.
“Eli found these,” Brody says, meaning the fabric. “There’s a lot more, if you’re interested. Eli’s getting some now; last I saw him he was muttering something about clothes. Dunning’s with him.”
“And Rush?”
James interprets Brody’s gesture as “Who the fuck knows?”
Scott radios Rush.
“When was the last time you saw him?” James asks.
“In the one story warehouse with no roof, about twenty minutes ago. I’m going to get more of these in a minute; I could show you.”
The warehouse has a roof. Half of it is caved in.
Brody heads toward the dark end of the warehouse, where the roof is still in place. Back there are several crates of empty glass jars. There is a bunch of machinery beneath the ruins of the roof, and James assumes that it was some sort of packaging plant.
“I know we can’t take all of these, but. I’d like to take all of these.”
James checks her watch. They have three hours before the ship goes into FTL. “If you steal someone from the foraging team you might have a shot.”
The warehouse has no other visible exist. James goes back to their meet-point. Eli and Dunning are both armed with piles of fabric, arguing about who has to carry it to the gate. Scott is staring at his radio like’s it’s personally offended him. James bites back a curse.
“How do you want to split this up?”
They walk to the far end of town and split up to make their way back. It’s an imperfect system.
It’s thirty minutes before James hears Scott’s call on someone else’s radio. The building she enters is two stories. Cement floors - or as close to cement as you got in space. Rush was on the second floor, engrossed in a machine. A machine that was active.
“What happened to not turning anything on?”
Rush barely glances at her. “It’s not transmitting.”
Rush looks…strained. He’s practically hip deep in whirring glowing potentially-deadly alien artifact, eyes flicking back and forth as if he were reading, though - when James circled behind him - there wasn’t any sort of visible display.
“Are you alright?”
For a moment she isn’t sure he’d heard. Eventually he shifts. “I’m fine. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you. You weren’t answering your radio; the last time that happened off planet you and Col Young spent a month in the infirmary.”
It might as well have been a month, anyway. When you counted the amount of time they’d be technically off duty, and the number of times the colonel had gone back in afterwards, a month was putting it lightly.
“If it’s not transmitting anything, what is it doing?”
“It’s a database,” Rush whispers. “Containing information about this town, about this planet. I’m trying to find out why they left.”
James looks at the machine again. There are no screens that she can see - no controls, no scary penetrative wires, not even a holographic projection. She raises her eyebrows. “And you’re getting information from this thing?”
Rush makes a gesture that James is pretty sure means “shut the fuck up”. It might have been a yes. Either way.
She steps closer.
There aren’t any flashing lights, or beams, or obvious connections at all. There’s just Rush, surrounded by the hum of working technology, one hand pressed against the nearest piece.
“I’ll be right back,” she says. She isn’t sure Rush even hears.
“I found him,” she says from the staircase, the hand not holding the radio resting on the butt of her gun.
“He’s communing with an alien artifact.”
“As in turned something on?”
“Yep.”
She can picture Scott’s face perfectly.
“Can you get him to turn it off?”
“I’ll try, but he isn’t exactly responding. He says it’s not transmitting but that’s no guarantee.”
There’s a pause where James assumes he takes a swig from his canteen. He’s been drinking like a fish lately. She wonders if he was denied water wherever he and Rush ended up, when they went missing for a day but said it was a year. It might be something else, some disease he picked up, or a brand new chronic condition like Colonel Young.
There’s no way for her to know. It’s not like they talk, these days.
“I’m coming to you,” Scott says. “Try and…just. Try.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Rush is only half paying attention to her, responding with gestures and signs if he responds at all. It’s only when Scott jogs in that he blinks, sways, and turns to look at her as if seeing her for the first time.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
“Are we seriously going to have that conversation again? You weren’t answering your radio, I found you, I’ve spent fifteen minutes trying to get you to either turn that thing off or give me some reason not to send you to the infirmary as soon as I can haul your ass to the gate. What was that thing? Why did you turn it on in the first place?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rush says, because he’s insane. Of course it matters, when everything and its three-eyed dog was dead set on killing them.
Scott takes a swig from his canteen. James is starting to think he does that to cover his reactions.
“We need to get out of here.”
“There’s no need to be frantic,” Rush says. “It wasn’t transmitting anything; that’s not its purpose.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know.”
The look Rush and Scott share speaks entire encyclopedias. There’s something going on that James doesn’t know the details of. Something huge.
This whole “worst kept secrets of the Destiny” deal is getting old fast.
They don’t leave right away, because Rush’s insanity was catching. Instead, after filling their backpacks with scraps and the sled with scrap metal, they help carry crates of glass jars and piles of stretchy fabric.
Then they stay even longer because one of the weeds the foraging team had found was something TJ wanted more of.
James waits for ships and weapons and running, but the expected disaster never comes. Some of the partially intact machines they’d brought closer to the gate need to be dismantled.
The low keening of distant animals is anticlimactic.
“They were abruptly recalled to more densely populated areas because they were at war.” Rush is talking, but James isn’t entirely sure who he’s talking to. “Isolated outposts like this were especially vulnerable. Rather than spread into less noticeable targets they drew together. They thought it’d be safer, with their goods produced nearby rather than transported from several planets away. The goods that remained were too expensive to ship relative to their value. The enemy could have them.”
The metal devices fall apart easily beneath their tools. Perhaps they’d been manufactured this way - easy to assemble, easy to dismantle.
“The enemy arrived mere days after the last of them had left. They studied the history of the town, but found nothing of use to them.”
“Lucky for us,” Dunning mumbles. James shoots him a sharp look and he shrugs. He blows dust from the side of a glass jar before scrubbing it with the sleeve of his jacket.
Rush is still staring at nothing. James wonders if she should have pulled him out of the machine the moment she saw him standing in it. She’ll “suggest” they swing by the infirmary as soon as they get back on the ship.
“I’m going to make myself a stretchy sleep shirt,” Eli says. “And underwear that doesn’t scratch in unfortunate places.”
“I care more about the things we can do with these jars.”
Scott tosses a circuit board into a pile of them. He separates his heap of metal and glass into careful piles on the sled: the kino sled, thankfully, so none of them will have to drag it through the gate.
The other sled - the ground sled with the vines and the animal hides and the branches - is piled high with crates of glass and a ridiculous amount of fabric. The straps of her backpack are digging into James’ shoulders, and the insects are starting to swarm.
They need to get this show on the road.
James dumps her backpack and jogs to the cluster of foragers closer to the hill.
“Pack it up!” She whistles sharply. “This is your ten minute warning. Everybody start heading for the gate.”
Scott nods at her when she reaches him. “Everybody accounted for?”
“Everyone was in sight, no one was screaming. They remembered to stay in groups of three.” She smirks. “Dreams do come true.”
“Eli!”
“Kind of busy here.”
James takes over for him, prying the top off of a square metal something with a quick snap. “Dial the gate.”
Being back inside the dark dreary walls of Destiny shouldn’t be as much of a relief as it is. She’s gotten used to it.
The repair robots look like insects. They make her skin crawl.
One rounded a corner and James comes this close to firing on it.
“Those fuckers remind me of replicators.”
Greer nods, at her shoulder. “I’ve been informed by five different people that they’re harmless.”
They share a look.
James has to admit that no matter how creepy the bots were, they were doing what they were meant to do. In the day they’d been on board the habitable area had become more habitable than before. It was still heinously cold, but the worrisome holes in the hull were gone, and the science team had spent a lot of time being excited about long-twisty-things and the-square-things getting replaced.
They need to come up with better names for these things.
There were also a lot of structural repairs happening in the non-habitable area, and as James hadn’t had any more strange dreams in languages she didn’t speak, she assumed the ship was getting what it wanted.
As long as what the ship wanted didn’t involve venting them into space, James could deal with that. She didn’t have much of a choice.
It was strange that the seedship had so many robots. According to Scott, who’d heard it from Chloe, Rush said the seedship had been making them instead of making stargates, for…a while. Ten years.
James can’t imagine what must’ve happened ten years ago to make a seedship need several thousand repair robots.
Shit. Maybe it was lonely.
Volker’s on the bridge; he gives her a half hearted wave when she gets there, in the middle of giving a report to Scott. She waits for them to finish.
“We set?” she asks, when Scott gives her a questioning look.
“Set. I need you to take over for Volker while he goes to the core room.”
So James spends the last thirty minutes of her shift sitting in the command chair on the bridge. They jump in tandem with the seedship; it was shakier than usual, but nothing to write home about.
The skittering steps of repair robots echo in from the hallway.
There are repair robots in her quarters. Repair bots and Eli in her quarters.
“Don’t freak out!” Eli says, the moment the doors open.
Too late.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Eli squirms. “Climate control and ventilation. I swear, the bots came in themselves; I just followed them to see how they work. Don’t shoot me!”
“I’m not gonna shoot you,” she snaps, glaring at him, at her uncomfortable bed with its slippery sheets, at the robots digging into the walls. “The ship cares about climate control?”
“Well, it’s connected to a larger problem with Destiny’s ability to maintain…well, everything. Some parts are too hot, some are too cold, and it can’t make the adjustments because the wiring is damaged. It takes like, twice as much power as it should to keep our living space above freezing. So the bots have been going room to room replacing everything, and I really should have told you beforehand. Should I make an announcement?”
“If Greer finds these in his room he’s going to shoot them.”
Eli makes a face. “I’m going to make an announcement.”
“You do that.” She grabs him by the hood of his jacket before he could dart away. “How long is this going to take?”
“About fifteen seconds if I use shipwide.”
James gives him a sour look.
“Oh! Oh maybe…an hour?” He flinches like he expects her to lash out.
She just swears.
Fifteen minutes later, she’s sitting in the mess with a cup of very alcoholic tea.
Brody’s there to join her in decimating her liver. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a week.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Wray asks, sitting down with a cup of what is probably just tea.
“I woke up to a repair robot standing on my face,” Brody says.
Wray blinks rapidly. “That must have been unpleasant.”
She has a gift for understatement; James has to give her that.
The mess is mostly deserted. It’s past midnight. Counting the three of them there are maybe ten people in it all together. Most of them are drinking.
“I’m surprised they haven’t gotten to this place yet,” Wray muses, eyeing the room with sleepy interest.
“Don’t jinx it,” James says, the same time that Brody says “Give it a day or two.”
They stare at each other.
“My alcohol has too much tea in it,” James says to cut the silence. Brody passes the jar over.
“I, on the other hand, think my tea doesn’t have enough…tea.” Wray takes a sip and grimaces. “It’s liquefied sugar with a hint of tea for flavor.”
“You can pour some of this in and it’d be all sugar?”
Wray smiles. “No thanks.”
She leaves the table and comes back with a piece of flatbread. “To cut the sweetness.”
More power to her.
James yawns. She wonders how much longer it will be before her room is clear.
“I’ve never been this exhausted,” Wray says.
“It’s the ship,” says Brody. “We think that after it recharges it’ll stop projecting exhaustion at us.”
James shrugs. “It’s a step up from nightmares anyway.”
In the end, you take what you can get.
The locked out planet has breathable air and a decent-ish atmosphere. If they fly a shuttle there they won’t crash.
The gate is buried in a glacier. Very deep in the glacier at that. James wonders what it’d be like if they’d arrived years earlier or later, before ice sealed the gate away.
It’s nice in its own way. Lots of birds and small animals.
The snow crunches behind her, and James spins around.
It’s Chloe, wearing a cape that James has never seen before. There’s a medium-sized bone serving as a button and the collar is clasped tight around her neck.
Chloe holds out a bundle. “I brought you one too.”
This one has fucking flowers embroidered around the edge. James tries not to stare while she puts it on. Who has time to embroider flowers on a cape?
It is nice to have an extra layer.
“We found an animal carcass buried in a snow drift.”
Chloe makes a face. “We’re not that desperate for food, are we?”
“The bones will come in handy.” After all, a bone knife is better than no knife at all.
The wind is the worst. Her boots are holding up pretty well and her het kept her head from freezing, but the wind cuts viciously through the rest of her. She was really grateful for the cape.
“At least it’s frozen.” Chloe sighs, adjusting the strap of her backpack. “It won’t bleed everywhere.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Greer and Sanchez are already there, shivering while they keep an eye out for predators. The animal is a decent size; it would’ve been great if they’d found it under different circumstances. It’s a loss, but not a huge one. The planet with the working gate had plenty of edible creatures, and they had a nice bit stored up.
Becker - with permission from someone - had upped their rations. According to TJ they were almost all underweight and deficient in a long list of vitamins and minerals, so it was seed paste in everything and lots of hope that hydroponics would put out.
“Nice coat,” Greer said. “Are they standard issue?”
“Lisa insisted I make you one; I told her, once I start giving them out, everybody’s going to want one.”
Chloe pulled her arms in close to her chest. “It isn’t finished yet.”
“There’s time.”
James squats in front of the carcass. “How are we gonna do this?”
Greer shrugs a shoulder. “Teams of two?”
Greer and Sanchez go first. When they trade off, Greer lends her his gloves. Her fingers are out, but it’s nice to have something between the bulk of her hand and the ice. Greer knit these himself during Wray’s class; James appreciates the look of them as well as the gesture.
It takes them maybe an hour to finish. When they get back to the shuttle there are small mammals hanging on the hatch. They look like furry iguanas. There’s also the biggest damn hedgehog James has ever seen bleeding in the shuttle’s shadow. Varro - standing there with no jacket whatsoever - is tying its feet together. Hunting down unsuspecting woodland creatures must be hot work.
“There’s a whole troop of these a few clicks southeast. I figure I can take at least two more without doing much damage.”
Sounds like a plan. They’ve certainly got the time.
James stands with her hands in her pockets. Her ass is going to be one giant icicle by the time this is over.
She sighs when a snowball goes sailing over her head. “Will you guys knock it off?”
“We’re working on our target practice,” Sanchez says. Another snowball sails by.
“If one hits me I’m shoving snow down your pants.”
“Understood.”
There’s a thump and a few cheers when a snowball collides with a nearby tree. Varro’s hedgehog hunting party is taking its time.
“What’s the score?” Wade asks.
“Six-nothing,” Chloe says. When James turns, she sees that Chloe’s been scratching tally marks into the ice near the shuttle. “Team Glacier is winning.”
There are several high fives and a few groans.
James rolls her eyes and turns her back to them.
She had a dream like this once, where she was frozen alive and then slowly eaten by a bear. She hopes it was a ship induced nightmare, but it’s always hard to tell with these things. She keeps an eye out anyway, pacing to keep warm.
Twenty minutes and she’ll radio Greer. Hopefully she won’t have to.
“Get ready for a come from behind w-look out!”
James hits the ground, but it’s the hunting party that gets hit. The giant space moose they’re carrying gets hit right in the stab wound.
“You guys are late,” she snaps, trying to brush the snow off of her face.
“We followed this thing west,” Varro says while Greer gives the snowball teams the hairy eyeball. “I know it was out of the way, but we figured it was worth it.”
Dunning and Evans are both red in the face. “Help!” Evans squeaks out.
James jogs over. The moose is heavy, and it’s enormous. They could probably fit five of her inside it.
“How on earth did you bring this back?”
“Carefully,” Greer says. He’s got a hedgehog of unusual size hanging from his other shoulder. Varro has the other.
It takes all of them to get it inside. There’s barely room enough left for them.
“Maybe if someone sits on top…”
“Not it,” Chloe says.
“We’ll draw straws.”
Someone breaks twigs off a tree and comes back.
James ends up with her feet on the seat, a large hedgehog between the moose’s antlers.
She hopes this thing is worth the extra weight.
“Oh God.” James covers her nose with her shirt, taking a step back.
“We need the material for hydroponics,” Rush says. He’s clearly no fan of the smell either, but he’s wearing a look of grim determination.
Shit.
Destiny has apparently sectioned off some of the waste best suited to their fertilizer needs. It’s also been turning their food waste into soil.
James drew the short straw with this assignment. There’s handling food that turned into soil, and there’s handling their own semi-sanitized shit, and one is more terrible by far.
She’s going to avoid hydroponics like the plague when this is done.
Destiny apparently makes use of what it can and dumps the rest into space. It started making fertilizer when they found the hydroponics room.
Shoveling shit into a bucket and carting it through the halls until she reaches hydroponics is not how James wanted to spend her day. At all.
She meets Colonel Young on her second trip.
“Need any help with that?”
She shakes her head.”Aren’t you supposed to be on medical leave, sir?”
“Carrying a bucket can’t be any more strenuous than all the running I’ve been doing.” He keeps pace with her. “Breathe through your mouth.”
She heard on TV that baring your teeth in a crazed smile can help fight nausea. She tries it.
Col Young carries the empty bucket back to the waste management room. She doesn’t complain.
Their fourth trip, Col Young has his own bucket.
She grins. “Very sneaky, sir.”
“I’m certain I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
They jump with the seedship again. Two planets, two accessible gates.
They’re going to be stuck with the seedship for a while.
“It’s a pummelo.”
“A what?”
Chloe turns the fruit in her hands. “A large citrus fruit.”
“You mean a grapefruit.”
“Pummelos are bigger than grapefruits.”
Brody shrugs at the one he’s eating. “There are some obvious differences, but overall I’d say this was very much a pummelo.”
Unless pummelos on earth have blue insides, this must be one of the obvious differences he’s talking about.
They taste okay.
Chloe looks around. “You know? What if we take one of these trees with us? A little one.”
There’s a moment of silence while they look around at the grove of fruit trees.
James blinks. “Where would we plant it?”
“The dome will be repaired in a few days. In the meantime, we could plant it in a bucket.”
They look around.
“What the hell? It’s not like it’d hurt anything.”
Even with the dome in place, there’s no floor, and very little atmosphere. Eli shows her the progress through a kino.
“Most of the systems were fried, but they’ve replaced all that. They’re also reinforcing…well…everything.”
“So I see.” She does like the look of it. A repaired dome means more room for food. Who could fault that?
She’s on her way to the laundry room when she comes across a hallway the repair robots have taken over. The walls are open to display a mess of wires and parts against a skeleton frame. The science team regularly crawled inside the walls, but the bots found it more efficient to take the ship apart piece by piece.
As she watches, a bot leaves, comes back, and circles her. She turns to keep it in front of her. They make three circles this way before the bot wanders off again.
When the bot comes back, it drops three components that look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle at her feet.
That can’t have been an accident.
She looks around. One of the robots puts a jigsaw piece into a slot inside the wall.
Huh.
James picks up a jigsaw and - after a moment of hesitation - puts it in place.
A repair robot examines her work, takes the piece out, and turns it in the opposite direction. It moves a little down the wall and waits.
She can take a hint. She repeats the process with the next two pieces. The bot is apparently satisfied with her work. It leaves and returns with a large pile of jigsaw pieces.
She huffs a laugh. Apparently they and the bots have been paying each other an equal amount of attention.
She uses her jacket to carry the jigsaw pieces. No harm in going to work.
A call for Rush goes out over shipwide. Optimistic of them, to think he’d respond.
Ruins here, but nothing worth scavenging. The tallest buildings come up to her knee.
It’s pretty dry. There’s some iron ore in the rocks and lots of cacti. Also bird. Lots and lots of birds.
She heads toward the sand a short distance behind the gate and stops short.
There’s something large tunneling in the desert. It looks an awful lot like a giant worm.
James steps closer to get a better look, because this is Dune level shit.
Greer, beside her, looks at the cloudless sky. “Never one drop of rain on Arakiss.”
She sighs. “It’s bullshit that nobody has that movie.”
“I do.”
She stares at him. “Seriously?”
“It’s a bootleg copy with Chinese subtitles and a terrible aspect ratio.”
“You bastard. Share.”
“I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”
“Share.”
“Share what?” Eli asks, coming up behind them. He stops. “The hell?”
“Greer’s been holding out on us,” James says, still staring into the desert. “Maybe we should make him ride the worm.”
“Maybe I should punch you in the neck.”
“Maybe I should complain to your girlfriend that you aren’t contributing to ship morale.”
Eli looks at them both like they’ve lost their minds. “I’m going to rejoin the group because I am experiencing a hallucination due to heatstroke.”
“Stay off the sand,” James tosses over her shoulder.
Greer chuckles. They’re getting better at this friend thing.
There’s a small crowd in the door of the mess.
“What’s going on?” she asks the person nearest her, who just happens to be Rush. She almost regrets the question.
“There’s a pipe behind that wall that needs to be replaced,” he said without looking at her. “They’re trying to find away to access it without taking down the wall.”
The repair robots are resting on every surface but the wall with the mural. One of them has a flower painted on its dome.
“When didthat happen?”
Becker points to a far corner, where Wray is drawing on the dome of another bot.
“They imbedded one of her pictures in the wall of her room,” Chloe says, standing just behind Becker.
“She was eating lunch when they got here, and I think it asked her to decorate it.”
James raises an eyebrow. “It asked her?”
“It brought her supplies and stood in front of her until she complied.” That was Rush. He looked very far away. “This is their first encounter with the idea of decoration. They find it fascinating.”
So fascinating they demand to have flowers painted on their heads? She doesn’t buy it.
She watches anyway, while the robots are careful not to damage the mural during their work.
Leaving half its robotic army on the Destiny, the seedship jumps ahead of them. The science team says there are supplies that it can’t gather when the ships are attached and that they’ll meet up with it when they next drop out.
The nightmares are brutal.
“The seedship has been a stabilizing force,” the explanation goes. “Without it, the ship lapses into its old habits.”
James cries her way through her shower, huddled on the floor. Colonel Young falls asleep on his table in the mess, and half the crew spends their nights on the observation deck trying to stay awake.
It’s a relief to get off the ship, to walk on the planet with the citrus trees and feel like a human being instead of an emotional wreck.
“Name a citrus fruit,” Eli says, tossing a gourd at her.
“Lemons.”
She tosses it back, trying not to look bewildered. Eli has dark rings around his eyes and he’s reaching Rush-like levels of unhinged.
“It’s a game,” Chloe explains, and catches the gourd when Eli tosses it to her. “Tangelos.”
Volker says “clementines” and Wade says “tangerines.”
When they run out of citrus fruits they start on the periodic table. James can practically see the tension falling away.
She gets lost in a hallway. She can’t even remember where she’s going. She stops in the middle of the floor and frowns, trying to remember anything about what she was doing or why.
She can feel panic building in her chest.
This isn’t her. This isn’t her.
She has a radio. She can call for help. But how does it work, this strange box? And she knows, she knows how it works but she doesn’t, what is this thing in her hand this thing -
Next thing she knows she’s huddled against the bulkhead. She was….she was on her way to the laundry….she was…she was lost, and she was alone, and she could scream forever and never be heard.
There is the click of metal against metal.
Flower-bot is standing there. It has applied a clear lacquer to its dome that makes the painted flower shine. It paces back and forth in front of her.
James takes a shaky breath, wiping at the tears on her face.
“I’m not sure what you want. I’m sorry.”
God, this was dying. This was dying.
Flower-bot scurries away.
She feels like she is drowning. How could a corridor be so big and so suffocatingly small all at once? She cannot breathe.
“Lieutenant James?”
That was TJ and flower-bot and the end of the hall. The infirmary was ages away. She was being sucked through time and there was nothing to anchor her, nothing and no one and she was alone, but she was not, but she was alone….
“Lieutenant James. Vanessa! You’re having a panic attack. I need you to take a deep breath.”
Flower-bot skitters back and forth, replicator legs echoing in her ears.
“Travel in groups,” the colonel says. “Try to stick to common areas.”
“We’re going in to FTL tomorrow.”
James will miss the citrus planet, but she’ll be happy to see the seedship again. She’ll even be happy to see the creepy robots.
They watch Greer’s shitty copy of Dune.
“What happened to a special occasion?” James asks, trying not to huddle inside her cape.
He holds up his heavily bandaged left hand.”I tried to punch through a wall last night. Knowing that this bullshit will be over soon is occasion enough.”
Nobody’s complaining that they can’t see or making fun of the voice-overs - “He knows”, indeed.
The dome is nearly finished and there’s a robot with a banana painted on it. They’ll be joining the seedship soon.
You take what you can get.
This entry was crossposted to My DW Account. Please feel free to read or comment on either site.
Fandom: SGU
Pairing: gen
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: anxiety, people manure, panic attacks, robots, sentient starships in need of medical advice, and lots and lots of dead animals.
Notes: Written for the longfic-bingo prompt “military”. Follows tBomND. Not sure about my James pov; be gentle.I am actually so nervous about this I could puke
Summary: Making the best of it is the only way to survive.
In which there is food, freezing, and a robot with a flower on its head.
“Holy shit,” James says, staring into the valley below them. “Holy shit.”
It’s a town - or something that used to be a town. It looks abandoned, several buildings caved in and grass reclaiming what used to be cleared roads.
It’s those toad aliens. It has to be.
James and Scott share startled faces, before Scott pulls out his radio and James pulls out her binoculars.
“Salvage mission?” she whispers.
Scott shrugs.
The rest of their team is on the other side of the hill, trying to gather what supplies they can. Eli, manning the kino, scrambles up the hill in response to Scott’s call. “You found a city? Like a descendants-from-the-past city or a bad-guy city?”
“Like an abandoned city,” James says flatly. As they watch, something that looks like the bastard son of a fox and a squirrel climbs up a wall and in through a window.
“If you’re up here, who’s dialing the gate?” Scott asks.
Eli shrugs. “It’s already open. The guys had a full load.”
James rolls her eyes while Scott trots down the hill. She shoos Eli down after him.
She waits quietly, eyes and ears open. It’s a relatively peaceful planet so far - droning insects but nothing that bites, sunny but not too hot, lots of edible looking plants and animals. The city though: that’s an unpleasant surprise.
Scott and Eli come back with Rush, Dunning, Brody, and a lot of backpacks.
“Salvage mission,” Scott says when they reach her. She nods.
“No activity that I can see. Small animals, a few birds. Nothing big.”
“How many buildings?”
“Twenty. Possibly more on the other side of those trees.”
Rush is already setting off down the hill; after a moment of hesitation, Eli follows him, half an eye on whatever he was getting from the kino.
“This was a either a research outpost or a manufacturing plant,” Rush says, rifling through someone’s desk drawer. “They prefer to live closer to the water.”
He got captured twice by the things; his guess is better than anyone else’s.
Their backpacks fill up quick - the plan is to take anything that looks useful, and whatever this place was, there’s a lot of stuff that ‘looks useful’ lying around. Rope, wires, something that looks vaguely like a hatchet. James and Dunning dismantle an entire pulley system and divide it between them.
James doesn’t pick up anything that looks electrical. There’s a fine line between looking useful and being dangerous, after all.
“Nails?” Eli says, riffling through a box one-handed. “That’s kind of disappointing.”
“What did the colonel think about this salvage mission?”
Scott scratches the back of his neck. “He...uh…”
“Colonel Young,” Rush interrupts, sorting through a stack of old electronics for something useful, “is still recovering from a long illness. There was no need for him to be involved.”
There is an awkward silence.
“You mean this mission isn’t authorized?”
“It was authorized by Wray and myself. That’s all the permission we need.”
James shoots Scott an incredulous look. He makes a face. “He was asleep. TJ said not to wake him on pain of death.”
“That’s an exaggeration, but not by much,” Brody puts in from the next room.
There is a pregnant pause.
“So. Uhhh….” Eli grabs something. “This looks like a flashlight. Could we use this?”
“Nothing electrical, unless it’s clearly broken with no visible power source,” Scott is quick to say. “We’ll take the broken stuff closer to the gate and then dismantle it for parts. Working electronics could be used to track us.”
Eli drops the potential flashlight quickly, putting the nails into his backpack instead.
“Has anyone considered that this might not belong to the toad things?”
Brody shrugs, putting the box he’d grabbed on an empty patch of table. “It’s still abandoned. I don’t think our hypothetical non-toad non-blue potentially friendly aliens will care.”
James helps Scott break into a metal case. “Unauthorized,” she hisses.
“I’m technically in command, again, while the colonel’s on medical leave” Scott whispers. “And I’ve spent months listening to Wray talk about her government thing. And I wasn’t going to waste my veto on it, because I’m not entirely sure but I think I get one veto a week, and we still have most of the week left, and we can really use these supplies.”
“We’re still dead when the colonel finds out.”
Scott does a strange jerky shrug and takes a swig from his canteen.
James sighs, letting it go for now.
They empty their backpacks twice at the gate, except for Brody who leaves full boxes. They steal the sled from the foraging teams to haul several large slabs of a metal alloy. After that, James says fuck it and ties her jacket around her waist.
They eat mystery-mammal kabobs on their way back to the abandoned town.
When they get there, Brody is alone at their meeting place, wrapping glass jars in stretchy translucent fabric.
“Eli found these,” Brody says, meaning the fabric. “There’s a lot more, if you’re interested. Eli’s getting some now; last I saw him he was muttering something about clothes. Dunning’s with him.”
“And Rush?”
James interprets Brody’s gesture as “Who the fuck knows?”
Scott radios Rush.
“When was the last time you saw him?” James asks.
“In the one story warehouse with no roof, about twenty minutes ago. I’m going to get more of these in a minute; I could show you.”
The warehouse has a roof. Half of it is caved in.
Brody heads toward the dark end of the warehouse, where the roof is still in place. Back there are several crates of empty glass jars. There is a bunch of machinery beneath the ruins of the roof, and James assumes that it was some sort of packaging plant.
“I know we can’t take all of these, but. I’d like to take all of these.”
James checks her watch. They have three hours before the ship goes into FTL. “If you steal someone from the foraging team you might have a shot.”
The warehouse has no other visible exist. James goes back to their meet-point. Eli and Dunning are both armed with piles of fabric, arguing about who has to carry it to the gate. Scott is staring at his radio like’s it’s personally offended him. James bites back a curse.
“How do you want to split this up?”
They walk to the far end of town and split up to make their way back. It’s an imperfect system.
It’s thirty minutes before James hears Scott’s call on someone else’s radio. The building she enters is two stories. Cement floors - or as close to cement as you got in space. Rush was on the second floor, engrossed in a machine. A machine that was active.
“What happened to not turning anything on?”
Rush barely glances at her. “It’s not transmitting.”
Rush looks…strained. He’s practically hip deep in whirring glowing potentially-deadly alien artifact, eyes flicking back and forth as if he were reading, though - when James circled behind him - there wasn’t any sort of visible display.
“Are you alright?”
For a moment she isn’t sure he’d heard. Eventually he shifts. “I’m fine. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for you. You weren’t answering your radio; the last time that happened off planet you and Col Young spent a month in the infirmary.”
It might as well have been a month, anyway. When you counted the amount of time they’d be technically off duty, and the number of times the colonel had gone back in afterwards, a month was putting it lightly.
“If it’s not transmitting anything, what is it doing?”
“It’s a database,” Rush whispers. “Containing information about this town, about this planet. I’m trying to find out why they left.”
James looks at the machine again. There are no screens that she can see - no controls, no scary penetrative wires, not even a holographic projection. She raises her eyebrows. “And you’re getting information from this thing?”
Rush makes a gesture that James is pretty sure means “shut the fuck up”. It might have been a yes. Either way.
She steps closer.
There aren’t any flashing lights, or beams, or obvious connections at all. There’s just Rush, surrounded by the hum of working technology, one hand pressed against the nearest piece.
“I’ll be right back,” she says. She isn’t sure Rush even hears.
“I found him,” she says from the staircase, the hand not holding the radio resting on the butt of her gun.
“He’s communing with an alien artifact.”
“As in turned something on?”
“Yep.”
She can picture Scott’s face perfectly.
“Can you get him to turn it off?”
“I’ll try, but he isn’t exactly responding. He says it’s not transmitting but that’s no guarantee.”
There’s a pause where James assumes he takes a swig from his canteen. He’s been drinking like a fish lately. She wonders if he was denied water wherever he and Rush ended up, when they went missing for a day but said it was a year. It might be something else, some disease he picked up, or a brand new chronic condition like Colonel Young.
There’s no way for her to know. It’s not like they talk, these days.
“I’m coming to you,” Scott says. “Try and…just. Try.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
Rush is only half paying attention to her, responding with gestures and signs if he responds at all. It’s only when Scott jogs in that he blinks, sways, and turns to look at her as if seeing her for the first time.
“What on earth are you doing here?”
“Are we seriously going to have that conversation again? You weren’t answering your radio, I found you, I’ve spent fifteen minutes trying to get you to either turn that thing off or give me some reason not to send you to the infirmary as soon as I can haul your ass to the gate. What was that thing? Why did you turn it on in the first place?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Rush says, because he’s insane. Of course it matters, when everything and its three-eyed dog was dead set on killing them.
Scott takes a swig from his canteen. James is starting to think he does that to cover his reactions.
“We need to get out of here.”
“There’s no need to be frantic,” Rush says. “It wasn’t transmitting anything; that’s not its purpose.”
“You can’t know that.”
“I know.”
The look Rush and Scott share speaks entire encyclopedias. There’s something going on that James doesn’t know the details of. Something huge.
This whole “worst kept secrets of the Destiny” deal is getting old fast.
They don’t leave right away, because Rush’s insanity was catching. Instead, after filling their backpacks with scraps and the sled with scrap metal, they help carry crates of glass jars and piles of stretchy fabric.
Then they stay even longer because one of the weeds the foraging team had found was something TJ wanted more of.
James waits for ships and weapons and running, but the expected disaster never comes. Some of the partially intact machines they’d brought closer to the gate need to be dismantled.
The low keening of distant animals is anticlimactic.
“They were abruptly recalled to more densely populated areas because they were at war.” Rush is talking, but James isn’t entirely sure who he’s talking to. “Isolated outposts like this were especially vulnerable. Rather than spread into less noticeable targets they drew together. They thought it’d be safer, with their goods produced nearby rather than transported from several planets away. The goods that remained were too expensive to ship relative to their value. The enemy could have them.”
The metal devices fall apart easily beneath their tools. Perhaps they’d been manufactured this way - easy to assemble, easy to dismantle.
“The enemy arrived mere days after the last of them had left. They studied the history of the town, but found nothing of use to them.”
“Lucky for us,” Dunning mumbles. James shoots him a sharp look and he shrugs. He blows dust from the side of a glass jar before scrubbing it with the sleeve of his jacket.
Rush is still staring at nothing. James wonders if she should have pulled him out of the machine the moment she saw him standing in it. She’ll “suggest” they swing by the infirmary as soon as they get back on the ship.
“I’m going to make myself a stretchy sleep shirt,” Eli says. “And underwear that doesn’t scratch in unfortunate places.”
“I care more about the things we can do with these jars.”
Scott tosses a circuit board into a pile of them. He separates his heap of metal and glass into careful piles on the sled: the kino sled, thankfully, so none of them will have to drag it through the gate.
The other sled - the ground sled with the vines and the animal hides and the branches - is piled high with crates of glass and a ridiculous amount of fabric. The straps of her backpack are digging into James’ shoulders, and the insects are starting to swarm.
They need to get this show on the road.
James dumps her backpack and jogs to the cluster of foragers closer to the hill.
“Pack it up!” She whistles sharply. “This is your ten minute warning. Everybody start heading for the gate.”
Scott nods at her when she reaches him. “Everybody accounted for?”
“Everyone was in sight, no one was screaming. They remembered to stay in groups of three.” She smirks. “Dreams do come true.”
“Eli!”
“Kind of busy here.”
James takes over for him, prying the top off of a square metal something with a quick snap. “Dial the gate.”
Being back inside the dark dreary walls of Destiny shouldn’t be as much of a relief as it is. She’s gotten used to it.
The repair robots look like insects. They make her skin crawl.
One rounded a corner and James comes this close to firing on it.
“Those fuckers remind me of replicators.”
Greer nods, at her shoulder. “I’ve been informed by five different people that they’re harmless.”
They share a look.
James has to admit that no matter how creepy the bots were, they were doing what they were meant to do. In the day they’d been on board the habitable area had become more habitable than before. It was still heinously cold, but the worrisome holes in the hull were gone, and the science team had spent a lot of time being excited about long-twisty-things and the-square-things getting replaced.
They need to come up with better names for these things.
There were also a lot of structural repairs happening in the non-habitable area, and as James hadn’t had any more strange dreams in languages she didn’t speak, she assumed the ship was getting what it wanted.
As long as what the ship wanted didn’t involve venting them into space, James could deal with that. She didn’t have much of a choice.
It was strange that the seedship had so many robots. According to Scott, who’d heard it from Chloe, Rush said the seedship had been making them instead of making stargates, for…a while. Ten years.
James can’t imagine what must’ve happened ten years ago to make a seedship need several thousand repair robots.
Shit. Maybe it was lonely.
Volker’s on the bridge; he gives her a half hearted wave when she gets there, in the middle of giving a report to Scott. She waits for them to finish.
“We set?” she asks, when Scott gives her a questioning look.
“Set. I need you to take over for Volker while he goes to the core room.”
So James spends the last thirty minutes of her shift sitting in the command chair on the bridge. They jump in tandem with the seedship; it was shakier than usual, but nothing to write home about.
The skittering steps of repair robots echo in from the hallway.
There are repair robots in her quarters. Repair bots and Eli in her quarters.
“Don’t freak out!” Eli says, the moment the doors open.
Too late.
“What the hell are you doing?”
Eli squirms. “Climate control and ventilation. I swear, the bots came in themselves; I just followed them to see how they work. Don’t shoot me!”
“I’m not gonna shoot you,” she snaps, glaring at him, at her uncomfortable bed with its slippery sheets, at the robots digging into the walls. “The ship cares about climate control?”
“Well, it’s connected to a larger problem with Destiny’s ability to maintain…well, everything. Some parts are too hot, some are too cold, and it can’t make the adjustments because the wiring is damaged. It takes like, twice as much power as it should to keep our living space above freezing. So the bots have been going room to room replacing everything, and I really should have told you beforehand. Should I make an announcement?”
“If Greer finds these in his room he’s going to shoot them.”
Eli makes a face. “I’m going to make an announcement.”
“You do that.” She grabs him by the hood of his jacket before he could dart away. “How long is this going to take?”
“About fifteen seconds if I use shipwide.”
James gives him a sour look.
“Oh! Oh maybe…an hour?” He flinches like he expects her to lash out.
She just swears.
Fifteen minutes later, she’s sitting in the mess with a cup of very alcoholic tea.
Brody’s there to join her in decimating her liver. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a week.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Wray asks, sitting down with a cup of what is probably just tea.
“I woke up to a repair robot standing on my face,” Brody says.
Wray blinks rapidly. “That must have been unpleasant.”
She has a gift for understatement; James has to give her that.
The mess is mostly deserted. It’s past midnight. Counting the three of them there are maybe ten people in it all together. Most of them are drinking.
“I’m surprised they haven’t gotten to this place yet,” Wray muses, eyeing the room with sleepy interest.
“Don’t jinx it,” James says, the same time that Brody says “Give it a day or two.”
They stare at each other.
“My alcohol has too much tea in it,” James says to cut the silence. Brody passes the jar over.
“I, on the other hand, think my tea doesn’t have enough…tea.” Wray takes a sip and grimaces. “It’s liquefied sugar with a hint of tea for flavor.”
“You can pour some of this in and it’d be all sugar?”
Wray smiles. “No thanks.”
She leaves the table and comes back with a piece of flatbread. “To cut the sweetness.”
More power to her.
James yawns. She wonders how much longer it will be before her room is clear.
“I’ve never been this exhausted,” Wray says.
“It’s the ship,” says Brody. “We think that after it recharges it’ll stop projecting exhaustion at us.”
James shrugs. “It’s a step up from nightmares anyway.”
In the end, you take what you can get.
The locked out planet has breathable air and a decent-ish atmosphere. If they fly a shuttle there they won’t crash.
The gate is buried in a glacier. Very deep in the glacier at that. James wonders what it’d be like if they’d arrived years earlier or later, before ice sealed the gate away.
It’s nice in its own way. Lots of birds and small animals.
The snow crunches behind her, and James spins around.
It’s Chloe, wearing a cape that James has never seen before. There’s a medium-sized bone serving as a button and the collar is clasped tight around her neck.
Chloe holds out a bundle. “I brought you one too.”
This one has fucking flowers embroidered around the edge. James tries not to stare while she puts it on. Who has time to embroider flowers on a cape?
It is nice to have an extra layer.
“We found an animal carcass buried in a snow drift.”
Chloe makes a face. “We’re not that desperate for food, are we?”
“The bones will come in handy.” After all, a bone knife is better than no knife at all.
The wind is the worst. Her boots are holding up pretty well and her het kept her head from freezing, but the wind cuts viciously through the rest of her. She was really grateful for the cape.
“At least it’s frozen.” Chloe sighs, adjusting the strap of her backpack. “It won’t bleed everywhere.”
“That’s the spirit.”
Greer and Sanchez are already there, shivering while they keep an eye out for predators. The animal is a decent size; it would’ve been great if they’d found it under different circumstances. It’s a loss, but not a huge one. The planet with the working gate had plenty of edible creatures, and they had a nice bit stored up.
Becker - with permission from someone - had upped their rations. According to TJ they were almost all underweight and deficient in a long list of vitamins and minerals, so it was seed paste in everything and lots of hope that hydroponics would put out.
“Nice coat,” Greer said. “Are they standard issue?”
“Lisa insisted I make you one; I told her, once I start giving them out, everybody’s going to want one.”
Chloe pulled her arms in close to her chest. “It isn’t finished yet.”
“There’s time.”
James squats in front of the carcass. “How are we gonna do this?”
Greer shrugs a shoulder. “Teams of two?”
Greer and Sanchez go first. When they trade off, Greer lends her his gloves. Her fingers are out, but it’s nice to have something between the bulk of her hand and the ice. Greer knit these himself during Wray’s class; James appreciates the look of them as well as the gesture.
It takes them maybe an hour to finish. When they get back to the shuttle there are small mammals hanging on the hatch. They look like furry iguanas. There’s also the biggest damn hedgehog James has ever seen bleeding in the shuttle’s shadow. Varro - standing there with no jacket whatsoever - is tying its feet together. Hunting down unsuspecting woodland creatures must be hot work.
“There’s a whole troop of these a few clicks southeast. I figure I can take at least two more without doing much damage.”
Sounds like a plan. They’ve certainly got the time.
James stands with her hands in her pockets. Her ass is going to be one giant icicle by the time this is over.
She sighs when a snowball goes sailing over her head. “Will you guys knock it off?”
“We’re working on our target practice,” Sanchez says. Another snowball sails by.
“If one hits me I’m shoving snow down your pants.”
“Understood.”
There’s a thump and a few cheers when a snowball collides with a nearby tree. Varro’s hedgehog hunting party is taking its time.
“What’s the score?” Wade asks.
“Six-nothing,” Chloe says. When James turns, she sees that Chloe’s been scratching tally marks into the ice near the shuttle. “Team Glacier is winning.”
There are several high fives and a few groans.
James rolls her eyes and turns her back to them.
She had a dream like this once, where she was frozen alive and then slowly eaten by a bear. She hopes it was a ship induced nightmare, but it’s always hard to tell with these things. She keeps an eye out anyway, pacing to keep warm.
Twenty minutes and she’ll radio Greer. Hopefully she won’t have to.
“Get ready for a come from behind w-look out!”
James hits the ground, but it’s the hunting party that gets hit. The giant space moose they’re carrying gets hit right in the stab wound.
“You guys are late,” she snaps, trying to brush the snow off of her face.
“We followed this thing west,” Varro says while Greer gives the snowball teams the hairy eyeball. “I know it was out of the way, but we figured it was worth it.”
Dunning and Evans are both red in the face. “Help!” Evans squeaks out.
James jogs over. The moose is heavy, and it’s enormous. They could probably fit five of her inside it.
“How on earth did you bring this back?”
“Carefully,” Greer says. He’s got a hedgehog of unusual size hanging from his other shoulder. Varro has the other.
It takes all of them to get it inside. There’s barely room enough left for them.
“Maybe if someone sits on top…”
“Not it,” Chloe says.
“We’ll draw straws.”
Someone breaks twigs off a tree and comes back.
James ends up with her feet on the seat, a large hedgehog between the moose’s antlers.
She hopes this thing is worth the extra weight.
“Oh God.” James covers her nose with her shirt, taking a step back.
“We need the material for hydroponics,” Rush says. He’s clearly no fan of the smell either, but he’s wearing a look of grim determination.
Shit.
Destiny has apparently sectioned off some of the waste best suited to their fertilizer needs. It’s also been turning their food waste into soil.
James drew the short straw with this assignment. There’s handling food that turned into soil, and there’s handling their own semi-sanitized shit, and one is more terrible by far.
She’s going to avoid hydroponics like the plague when this is done.
Destiny apparently makes use of what it can and dumps the rest into space. It started making fertilizer when they found the hydroponics room.
Shoveling shit into a bucket and carting it through the halls until she reaches hydroponics is not how James wanted to spend her day. At all.
She meets Colonel Young on her second trip.
“Need any help with that?”
She shakes her head.”Aren’t you supposed to be on medical leave, sir?”
“Carrying a bucket can’t be any more strenuous than all the running I’ve been doing.” He keeps pace with her. “Breathe through your mouth.”
She heard on TV that baring your teeth in a crazed smile can help fight nausea. She tries it.
Col Young carries the empty bucket back to the waste management room. She doesn’t complain.
Their fourth trip, Col Young has his own bucket.
She grins. “Very sneaky, sir.”
“I’m certain I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
They jump with the seedship again. Two planets, two accessible gates.
They’re going to be stuck with the seedship for a while.
“It’s a pummelo.”
“A what?”
Chloe turns the fruit in her hands. “A large citrus fruit.”
“You mean a grapefruit.”
“Pummelos are bigger than grapefruits.”
Brody shrugs at the one he’s eating. “There are some obvious differences, but overall I’d say this was very much a pummelo.”
Unless pummelos on earth have blue insides, this must be one of the obvious differences he’s talking about.
They taste okay.
Chloe looks around. “You know? What if we take one of these trees with us? A little one.”
There’s a moment of silence while they look around at the grove of fruit trees.
James blinks. “Where would we plant it?”
“The dome will be repaired in a few days. In the meantime, we could plant it in a bucket.”
They look around.
“What the hell? It’s not like it’d hurt anything.”
Even with the dome in place, there’s no floor, and very little atmosphere. Eli shows her the progress through a kino.
“Most of the systems were fried, but they’ve replaced all that. They’re also reinforcing…well…everything.”
“So I see.” She does like the look of it. A repaired dome means more room for food. Who could fault that?
She’s on her way to the laundry room when she comes across a hallway the repair robots have taken over. The walls are open to display a mess of wires and parts against a skeleton frame. The science team regularly crawled inside the walls, but the bots found it more efficient to take the ship apart piece by piece.
As she watches, a bot leaves, comes back, and circles her. She turns to keep it in front of her. They make three circles this way before the bot wanders off again.
When the bot comes back, it drops three components that look like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle at her feet.
That can’t have been an accident.
She looks around. One of the robots puts a jigsaw piece into a slot inside the wall.
Huh.
James picks up a jigsaw and - after a moment of hesitation - puts it in place.
A repair robot examines her work, takes the piece out, and turns it in the opposite direction. It moves a little down the wall and waits.
She can take a hint. She repeats the process with the next two pieces. The bot is apparently satisfied with her work. It leaves and returns with a large pile of jigsaw pieces.
She huffs a laugh. Apparently they and the bots have been paying each other an equal amount of attention.
She uses her jacket to carry the jigsaw pieces. No harm in going to work.
A call for Rush goes out over shipwide. Optimistic of them, to think he’d respond.
Ruins here, but nothing worth scavenging. The tallest buildings come up to her knee.
It’s pretty dry. There’s some iron ore in the rocks and lots of cacti. Also bird. Lots and lots of birds.
She heads toward the sand a short distance behind the gate and stops short.
There’s something large tunneling in the desert. It looks an awful lot like a giant worm.
James steps closer to get a better look, because this is Dune level shit.
Greer, beside her, looks at the cloudless sky. “Never one drop of rain on Arakiss.”
She sighs. “It’s bullshit that nobody has that movie.”
“I do.”
She stares at him. “Seriously?”
“It’s a bootleg copy with Chinese subtitles and a terrible aspect ratio.”
“You bastard. Share.”
“I’ve been saving it for a special occasion.”
“Share.”
“Share what?” Eli asks, coming up behind them. He stops. “The hell?”
“Greer’s been holding out on us,” James says, still staring into the desert. “Maybe we should make him ride the worm.”
“Maybe I should punch you in the neck.”
“Maybe I should complain to your girlfriend that you aren’t contributing to ship morale.”
Eli looks at them both like they’ve lost their minds. “I’m going to rejoin the group because I am experiencing a hallucination due to heatstroke.”
“Stay off the sand,” James tosses over her shoulder.
Greer chuckles. They’re getting better at this friend thing.
There’s a small crowd in the door of the mess.
“What’s going on?” she asks the person nearest her, who just happens to be Rush. She almost regrets the question.
“There’s a pipe behind that wall that needs to be replaced,” he said without looking at her. “They’re trying to find away to access it without taking down the wall.”
The repair robots are resting on every surface but the wall with the mural. One of them has a flower painted on its dome.
“When didthat happen?”
Becker points to a far corner, where Wray is drawing on the dome of another bot.
“They imbedded one of her pictures in the wall of her room,” Chloe says, standing just behind Becker.
“She was eating lunch when they got here, and I think it asked her to decorate it.”
James raises an eyebrow. “It asked her?”
“It brought her supplies and stood in front of her until she complied.” That was Rush. He looked very far away. “This is their first encounter with the idea of decoration. They find it fascinating.”
So fascinating they demand to have flowers painted on their heads? She doesn’t buy it.
She watches anyway, while the robots are careful not to damage the mural during their work.
Leaving half its robotic army on the Destiny, the seedship jumps ahead of them. The science team says there are supplies that it can’t gather when the ships are attached and that they’ll meet up with it when they next drop out.
The nightmares are brutal.
“The seedship has been a stabilizing force,” the explanation goes. “Without it, the ship lapses into its old habits.”
James cries her way through her shower, huddled on the floor. Colonel Young falls asleep on his table in the mess, and half the crew spends their nights on the observation deck trying to stay awake.
It’s a relief to get off the ship, to walk on the planet with the citrus trees and feel like a human being instead of an emotional wreck.
“Name a citrus fruit,” Eli says, tossing a gourd at her.
“Lemons.”
She tosses it back, trying not to look bewildered. Eli has dark rings around his eyes and he’s reaching Rush-like levels of unhinged.
“It’s a game,” Chloe explains, and catches the gourd when Eli tosses it to her. “Tangelos.”
Volker says “clementines” and Wade says “tangerines.”
When they run out of citrus fruits they start on the periodic table. James can practically see the tension falling away.
She gets lost in a hallway. She can’t even remember where she’s going. She stops in the middle of the floor and frowns, trying to remember anything about what she was doing or why.
She can feel panic building in her chest.
This isn’t her. This isn’t her.
She has a radio. She can call for help. But how does it work, this strange box? And she knows, she knows how it works but she doesn’t, what is this thing in her hand this thing -
Next thing she knows she’s huddled against the bulkhead. She was….she was on her way to the laundry….she was…she was lost, and she was alone, and she could scream forever and never be heard.
There is the click of metal against metal.
Flower-bot is standing there. It has applied a clear lacquer to its dome that makes the painted flower shine. It paces back and forth in front of her.
James takes a shaky breath, wiping at the tears on her face.
“I’m not sure what you want. I’m sorry.”
God, this was dying. This was dying.
Flower-bot scurries away.
She feels like she is drowning. How could a corridor be so big and so suffocatingly small all at once? She cannot breathe.
“Lieutenant James?”
That was TJ and flower-bot and the end of the hall. The infirmary was ages away. She was being sucked through time and there was nothing to anchor her, nothing and no one and she was alone, but she was not, but she was alone….
“Lieutenant James. Vanessa! You’re having a panic attack. I need you to take a deep breath.”
Flower-bot skitters back and forth, replicator legs echoing in her ears.
“Travel in groups,” the colonel says. “Try to stick to common areas.”
“We’re going in to FTL tomorrow.”
James will miss the citrus planet, but she’ll be happy to see the seedship again. She’ll even be happy to see the creepy robots.
They watch Greer’s shitty copy of Dune.
“What happened to a special occasion?” James asks, trying not to huddle inside her cape.
He holds up his heavily bandaged left hand.”I tried to punch through a wall last night. Knowing that this bullshit will be over soon is occasion enough.”
Nobody’s complaining that they can’t see or making fun of the voice-overs - “He knows”, indeed.
The dome is nearly finished and there’s a robot with a banana painted on it. They’ll be joining the seedship soon.
You take what you can get.
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