|
“Coitus Conceptus”
By ekayak
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: Star Trek and all characters owned by Paramount. Story written for entertainment purposes only.
Description: It’s Year Seven, people! Timeframe: Somewhere between Terra Prime and The F***nalé.
This story is a sequel to Coitus Experimentus.
(((((((((((((((((((((((
Part 5
)))))))))))))))))))))))
“Get them in here!” Archer shouted at the poor ensign manning the transporter pad.
“Yes, sir!” the ensign bawled back, high on adrenaline, sweat prickling excruciatingly from every pore, as he forced himself to acquire the fastest, most accurate transporter lock of his life. He hunched over the panel and grabbed the stream controls in his huge fists. And then, delicately—like a deadlifter gently setting a ladybug down—he expertly disassembled the science officer and chief engineer from outside the ship and lightly and smoothly recreated them on the futuristic canvas of his transport pad…always remembering to watch his neutrinos. Not for nothing had Ensign Yarrow been the top of his class in transport technologies.
Trip felt the sick, garbling pull of the transporter grip him as soon as the storm abated. For the first time in his career he was so vastly grateful to suffer it he forgot to be indignant at the philosophical, biological, selfological conundrum it always thrust him into.
Seconds later, he fell to his knees in the suddenly heavy gravity, his arms finally giving way, and both he and T’Pol clattered loudly to the transporter pad. Trip forced himself to remain conscious and ripped off his helmet, throwing it aside. He vaguely heard the tech inform the captain that they‘d made it, as his bond informed him quite accurately that T’Pol was floating deeply in a silent, painless, frightening ether.
And also that, whatever else was going to happen in the near future, he was most definitely still a father. He knew this solely from the mental beating the tiny thing was doling out, in its sheer, shrill, discordant demand that help be given to its host parent.
Trip gasped for air in the slightly less-oxygenated environment of the ship, and used his last strength to pull T’Pol over onto her side in her heavy, cumbersome EV suit, as Ensign Yarrow ran over to help. Trip’s heart flopped at the sight of her pale, unconscious face behind the isolating glass of her helmet, and he moved to unlatch the helmet housing from the rigid circle of machined metal that married it to the stiff front of the suit below.
Ensign’s Yarrow’s bellow of terror was what tore his eyes away from her face and down to the rest of her body. T’Pol was vastly distorted beneath the suit’s thick covering.
“Shit! Shit!” Yarrow shouted, bolting immediately back to the console, certain that he had just grievously misassembled the Vulcan woman. He frantically scanned the many logs generated by the transport to find out what had happened.
Though the sight of T’Pol’s obviously swollen belly splashed through his eyes and down into his stomach like ice water, Trip knew immediately exactly what had somehow freakishly happened.
He stood, again forcing himself not to pass out through sheer effort of will. Bending, leaving T’Pol’s helmet in place for now, in the hope that she would benefit from the higher oxygen content the suits delivered, Trip attempted to drag her into the centre of the pad so they could send her straight to Sickbay. But this doubled-over effort was the final insult to his completely overwrought body.
Even the imperious, screaming self-preservation of their unutterably noisy progeny, and his own instinctive urge to obey, was no longer enough to hold his body upright; and Trip fell to his knees, and then his front, cursing silently at himself for his frailty, even as he joined T’Pol in unconsciousness: each floating aimlessly: isolated, handicapped and blinded by their brains’ current walkout.
Yarrow looked up in horror from his console as the other commander fell, too, into syncope. He abandoned his search for the transporter error and flung himself back over to the pad. As he shoved and heaved the two cumbersome, sprawled forms of his superior officers into a more-or-less transportable position on the small surface, he caused one of T’Pol’s highly adhesive boots to flip upward, the heel *whummping* firmly onto the transporter pad surface.
Her calf and knee were held up artificially by the boot’s support, and her toe extended completely off the transport pad and out over the floor below. Into the Nissen zone. Instead of wasting time trying to fight with the boot’s strong magnet, Yarrow simply undid the complicated latch where the boot met the pantleg, quickly separating the two components with a faint hiss of atmosphere.
He gently, but swiftly, lifted her limp leg out of the boot, moaning with panic as he saw the bright green fluid that thickly soaked her ankle-height sports sock. He shoved her freed left leg underneath the right one, bending her knee awkwardly, mentally apologizing for the indignity, before tearing back to his console.
He again performed what he fervently hoped was a perfect wide-beam transport to the floor of Sickbay. He stood shakily afterward, intending to contact the doctor to fill him in, but the sight of the toe-half of T’Pol’s abandoned EV boot lying twisted and horribly intermelted with green blood on the floor sunk home the awfulness of what he thought had just happened under his careful hand. And the young, good-hearted ensign fainted clean away— as his brain, too, demanded a moment’s respite.
* * *
The second transport kick-started Trip back into life. He hated that feeling more than anything else in the world. He rolled painfully onto his back, pulling finally and impatiently at his stiff, clammy gloves, wise enough now not to try and sit or stand until he could convince the doc to inject him with a stimulant to keep him from passing out again.
Phlox ran over, tutting professionally: immediately and automatically trying, as he always did, to begin to calm a situation with his voice. His words died in his throat though, with a faint strangling sound, as he took in the scientifically-impossible sight of T’Pol’s mutated, slightly green-smeared form. But even this small slip into understandable incredulity couldn’t halt the fundamentally-programmed physician within. Squatting at her head and swiftly disassembling the EV suit from T’Pol’s unmoving form, he reset his vocal cords and called out, “Give me a hand here, crewman!”
Trip, grappling faintly now with the closure of his own EV suit, wondered in some part of his reeling brain if the physician could possibly be asking him for assistance. He didn’t waste words trying to respond, simply fuming silently that the next person who called him ‘crewman’ was going to get their ass kicked. Assuming the radiation from the ion storm hadn’t fatally fried his insides. He couldn’t tell yet.
Phlox certainly was not recruiting the chief engineer’s help. He assumed that the human man was unconscious, as he had not yet taken his eyes off the patient that blood and ethics clearly demanded he treat first. The needs of the many…
Crewman Cole ran over from where she stood, gawking in shock. She tried not to blanch at the oddly unnerving spectacle of Commander T’Pol’s emerald-soaked sock. She herself had the exact same pair, and the somewhat foamy saturation of the familiar garment with the shocking-coloured lifeblood of her Vulcan colleague was testing Cole’s slight, combined phobias: of foot cuts and blood in general.
The only ‘adequate’ speck on a psych profile that glowed across the board. Made it somewhat hard for her to get into Sickbay as a medic, but Enterprise’s few openings and her sheer determination to transfer out of the MACO unit and into Starfleet had combined in a fateful way to make Amanda Cole Phlox’s newest non-commissioned trainee.
Most days she loved it. As she fell to her knees and freed T’Pol’s second boot, however, releasing a second viscous, dripping flow of green fluid onto the floor, she reflected on the piquant pleasures of boot camp compared to medicine and seriously considered, for the first time since her transfer to the fleet, the possibility of pulling a Tucker and transferring back out.
Phlox looked up at his young assistant’s muddy complexion. He realised his help would become an additional patient in a moment if he didn’t distract her and so he nodded in the direction of Trip, as he finally removed the suit completely from T’Pol’s body. She had been wearing only closefitting, cotton stretch-pants and a similar T-shirt under the environmentally-controlled spacesuit. Both were of the regulation dark blue fabric that most things of the quartermaster’s store consisted of. The bottom half of the outfit, however, was stained black with blood, the green socks showing up violently at the ends of her slim legs.
Amanda was distracted from dwelling long upon any of this, however, as she stared for the first time in utter shock at the pregnant-looking stomach that protruded about six months outward from her commanding officer’s slight, muscular frame. Until now, the green socks had prevented her from looking at the woman’s middle.
She had spent a half-hour next to Commander T’Pol in the gym just two days ago and she had definitely not had this shape. In fact, Amanda specifically remembered eyeing the smaller woman’s ridiculously taut abdomen as it peeked from between her T-shirt and shorts and silently envying it in a good-humoured sort of way.
The same abdomen thrust hugely now from under the small T-shirt, and the greenish skin, which would have found itself taxed enough during normal gestation, looked as though it had torn and haemorrhaged beneath the epidermal surface, forming a severe herringbone pattern of hunter-green, reticulated stretch-mark shapes as ancient and universal as the oceans whose waves they resembled.
Somehow this sight, being one that called to mind her own pregnant sister at home, broke Amanda’s heart rather than turning her stomach. She glanced over at Trip, who seemed to be coming around on his own, fighting to remove his boots, and she renewed her resolve to help Phlox with the injured.
Steadfastly ignoring the spongy carnage of T’Pol’s socks beneath her fingers, she firmly gripped the inert woman’s ankles and communicated to Phlox with her eyes that she was ready to help him lift the patient to the waiting biobed. Phlox nodded in approval, quickly assessed Cole’s pupils to make sure she wasn’t likely to keel over and drop T’Pol, and then, giving themselves a second to synchronize their intent, they gently and smoothly heaved their unconscious colleague to the padded surface of the biobed.
Phlox looked at his newest medic with a quick beam of approval. He hadn’t entertained the highest hopes for her prospects, but today she had just caused him to reassess her proficiency. He nodded again towards Tucker who had managed to push himself to a sitting position against the nearby wall, his suit half-removed now, the heavy plastic components shoved to one side and the rest puddled around him in a coppery crinkle of stiff, synthetic, papery fabric.
“Why don’t you go help him while I assess Commander T’Pol, hmm?” Phlox suggested.
Amanda nodded, glancing at Trip. But before she went, she couldn’t help placing a compassionate hand on the top half of their unconscious patient’s belly, well away from the crusting, dark green smears that coated the lower half. “What happened to her?” she asked in a hushed, almost-frightened voice. The damp skin beneath her fingers was hot and tight as a drum.
“I intend to find that out,” Phlox replied in a kindly voice. Space-faring exobiological medicine was always a slap in the face, for the first couple of years at least. He understood the young woman’s faintly fascinated yet horrified urge to help, all too well. It was most unsettling until one gained a good sense of professional distance. He watched Cole take a first-aid kit and a second scanner down to Commander Tucker who, though he looked half dead, was propping himself stalwartly against the wall, refusing to succumb. Phlox mentally planned a cocktail of sedatives and anti-radiation drugs with which he would inject the engineer directly, but first he had to attend to the needs of the severely-ill woman in front of him.
The professional distance he had just been ascribing to himself was severely tested as he assessed his friend’s grim and completely unheard-of condition.
Her heart rate and blood pressure were abominable, and he suspected some unknown hormonal force in her suddenly pregnant body’s arsenal was the only thing that continued to jumpstart her heart into beating every few seconds. The cells of her body had taken a heavy dose of radiation, though not irreversible, he hoped.
His fingers flew over the keys of his scanner as he analysed the most shocking part of her physiological condition: that of her abdominal area, which had increased in sheer displacement volume by 13.8 litres since his last scan, just minutes before they had gone outside. Her abdominal papillary and reticular dermes were severely torn and were causing 23% of the blood-loss she was currently undergoing. The rest of it was in the form of a massive haemorrhage within her womb, which now housed a clear set of triplets, each of which was suffering from its mother’s near-fatal condition. He didn’t dare inject her pre-emptively with any sedative or vasoconstrictive anaesthetic in her severely shocked state, but he placed a loaded injector closely at hand should it become absolutely necessary.
Phlox stabbed a few swift words into the computer and sent them up to the bridge to the effect that he had received the injured, was working on them, and that Ensign Yarrow was not responding to hails. He made sure to swiftly add an admonition that only if someone was dying should they be brought to Sickbay at this time and all others should kindly stay out until further notice. There was nothing worse than the captain coming down for answers when he was halfway-done saving someone’s life.
“Cole,” Phlox shouted as he grabbed his sterilising beams and his microsutures from their places within the surgical cart. “If Trip’s stable, leave him for now. Get the tank out and start filling it! Hurry!”
Putting down her medkit, Amanda abandoned her walking-wounded (sitting-wounded, anyway) and rushed to pull the large tank Phlox had shown her only last week over to the sink. She set it filling with water and stabbed at the control panel to set the parameters for sterility, temperature, and additives. “What temp do you want?” she called out.
Phlox had donned gloves and a mask and was already performing surgery with his laserscalpel and cauterising microsuture. But he called back steadily and clearly, “39.8 degrees, and please make sure that the intermix is set to the program ‘phlox ä’.” He deftly dropped his microsuture onto the tray, picking up a fluid vaporiser with expert blind touch. He preferred to work without an assistant in surgical procedures, no matter what the schools taught. Nothing was more off-putting than people handing you the wrong things.
He glanced up microscopically from his work as Commander Tucker somehow approached the table.
“Stand back please,” Phlox intoned as he steadily worked, his fingers and tools as nimble and quick as if they were working dry, on a mannequin, instead of glistening surgically with blood.
Trip halted a meter from the table, staring in fixed fascination as Phlox manipulated his tools as expertly as any engineer, swiftly halting the leaks and injuries that were fighting to claim T’Pol’s life.
“Commander Tucker,” the doctor said sternly, not looking up again, “I order you to sit down immediately. You are in no condition to stand and observe this surgery.”
He traded his vaporiser for the suture again, beginning to work on some of the lesser bleeding in the papillary dermis, where the most severe stretching trauma had taken place. Her exposed womb he had left untouched for now, and he strained his ears to catch the rising pitch of the filling tank, wondering how long to was going to take to get to temperature.
Meanwhile, Cole left the tank preparing for she-was-starting-to-guess-what, though she couldn’t believe it her own line of logic. No way could a baby grow that fast. She hustled back over to the scene of action, noting Trip’s refusal to budge from his suddenly-standing position near the operating field.
Amanda cringed inwardly at the man’s seeming ability to watch something so graphic with such a passive face, but then she realised that he was not watching the green-smeared battlefield where Phlox currently fought for what was quickly seeming like more than one life. Trip was staring intently and fixedly at Commander T’Pol’s ashen, unconscious face.
Amanda paused for a moment in her step, bushing a stray wisp of hair behind her sweaty ear. Instantly she knew that the two before her shared more than simply neuropressure sessions. She wasn’t sure how she could tell these things, but once she made up her mind, she was never wrong.
Her one moment of distraction gone, she hurried toward her abandoned first-aid kit. Cramming the instruments back inside, she noted that the dermal injector now contained the stimulant tranzaline. The only reason she even noticed was because the carpules were colour-coded. Sedatives were white. Stimulants were red. She clearly recalled that she had left the injector loaded with a sedative for Phlox to use. She popped the red carpule out into her hand: empty.
Amanda approached Trip quietly and took his upper arm. He shook her off, tense and trembling. “Leave me alone, Cole,” he said loudly, watching T’Pol’s face, mentally holding her hand and willing her to live through this bizarre situation.
Phlox finally looked up, breaking his precious surgical concentration. The sound of his other patient’s voice was not what he would have expected. Cole held up a red tranzaline cartridge behind Trip. “He injected himself with this while I was filling the tank,” Cole said bluntly.
Phlox met Trip’s eyes for just long enough to discern that she was correct. Trip didn’t affirm or deny the accusation, he simply looked again at T’Pol’s face without moving one step from his spot. His jumpy pulse was visible in a vein running down his perspiring neck. Phlox looked back down and resumed his delicate task. “Congratulations, Mr. Tucker,” he said dryly and with irritated disappointment. “You may well have given yourself a heart attack. Go lie down on one of the beds immediately.”
When Trip didn’t respond, Phlox lost his patience: yet without sacrificing an iota of concentration. “Exactly what good will you be to T’Pol or your children if you are dead?” he demanded. “In matters of medicine, I outrank everyone on this ship. Now get up on one of those biobeds or I will have security escort you to the brig!” Phlox’s steady hand didn’t tremble once during his diatribe, nor did he deign to look up from the torn veins and arteries he was swiftly reconnecting.
Trip’s face went ashen at the physician’s words (especially the one ‘children’) and he climbed immediately and obediently onto the adjacent bed, lying down and staring across the distance as before at the blue-lidded, closed eyes of his lover, his heart pounding as if it would burst.
Cole had never seen the good doctor angry before and she almost jumped when he addressed her, though his voice was friendly enough again.
“Crewman Cole,” he chimed, “I believe your tank is nearly full.”
Amanda’s head whipped around and she saw that the tank was, indeed, full nearly to overflowing. She tore across the room and shut off the water supply, allowing some of the warming liquid to drain before gently pushing the tank around on its antigrav base. Careful not to attain too much momentum, (she estimated it weighed almost 400 kg), Cole pushed it slowly toward the labouring surgeon, halting when she was next to him and turning the massive thing so that Phlox could see the readout.
He glanced once at the tank’s console, decided that it was close enough, and finally applied his laser scalpel to the dark, vascular green of T’Pol’s exposed and tightly-stretched womb. The tissue split easily before his beam as if it was relieved to finally give way under the extreme tension it had been under. Greenish water welled out of the opening and over the sides of the distended organ into her abdominal cavity.
Phlox kept the incision small and reached with two gloved fingers into the opening he had made. The first of the miniscule children came to his hand and he gently tugged, slipping the wee, wet thing past its tangled siblings and out into the cruel, dry world of Sickbay. With a quick pass of the laser, he severed the umbilicus, leaving a significant length of cord dangling from the neonate’s navel.
Phlox held his hands high as he turned on the spot and swiftly lowered the dripping creature into the warm, sterile bath of amniotic substitute filling the tall, cylindrical tank. He inserted the cut end of its umbilical cord into the placental intermix unit, clamping it once everything was in place. The tiny boy drifted slowly in the large confines of his new home, already almost forgetting that anything untoward had happened to him. Phlox turned to scoop out the next baby.
Amanda stood transfixed, watching the extremely early removal of babies that couldn’t have been big enough to squash an ant two days ago. In totally confused but momentarily overawed wonder, she turned to see what Trip thought of this: the birth of what were apparently his children.
Her heart caught as she realised that Trip was in the process of jerkily passing out. She ran over to the side of his bed, instinctively reaching under the sides for the straps that hid there. She latched a belt over his seizing form to prevent him from shaking sideways off the bed.
Phlox glanced up once from his delicate changeover and then focused back down on his task and called out terse instructions. “Get the scanner. Check his heart rate and breathing.”
Amanda grabbed the scanner and bolted back to Trip’s side, bashing the flesh of her hip on a corner as she did so and trying to ignore its punchy, stinging hurt. She activated the scan and passed it around Trip‘s torso.
“It’s zero!” she yelled back. “They’re both zero!”
“Calm down, Amanda,” Phlox intoned firmly and nasally, as he lifted the third dripping Tucker child from its ravaged mother and transferred it, gold-fish-like, to its tank. “We went over this days ago. You are excellent at it. Get the cardiac cart.” Phlox hoped internally that she wouldn’t freeze in the moment. He did not allow himself to entertain for even second the grisly entry he would make in tonight’s log if things did not go well for these five people.
“We went over this days ago. I am excellent at it,” Amanda whispered to herself as she ran for the crash cart and prayed to god she would find it first try. She did, grabbing it from its prominent spot under the counter and hauling it back toward Trip.
She plucked the micro-defibrillators out of their nested places in the top of the cart and, shoving Trip’s sweat-soaked tank top up, she stuck one on the right side of his damp chest, below his clavicle. She smacked the other on onto his left side, just below his limp pectoral muscle.
Activating the defib console and waiting impatiently for it to do its short start-up routine, she turned. “What setting?” she shouted back at Phlox.
He had three babies hovering eerily in the tank now, gently bumping into one another as the nurturing fluid circulated around them. However, his back was turned on the miniscule children, and he was trying to tuck all of T’Pol’s organs back into their proper places within her traumatised abdominal cavity, before closing up the straight, long wound he had made in her flesh. “180 joules,” he replied clearly to her call.
Amanda’s hands trembled as she entered the setting. She took a deep breath and bit her lower lip. Her thumb pressed the activation. Trip’s body clenched sickly, falsely, and then lay still.
“It didn’t work!” she shouted back, tears pricking in her eyes as she watched the unresponsive, slack face of the man she never got to know as well as she wanted to.
“Increase the charge to 200 joules,” Phlox said loudly, over her last word. He was working as swiftly as he could to finish suturing the layers of muscle and skin still laid open within T’Pol’s belly.
Amanda did as she was told, punching the setting in with numbing fingers. She looked at Trip, squeezed her eyes shut with a prayer, and pressed the button again. A nanosecond of following silence caused her stomach to drop out of her body in despair, and then her eyes flew open as the defib devices picked up a sudden, steady heart rate.
“HA!” Amanda shouted, hugging herself and jumping on the spot, while resisting the urge to slap Trip for trying to kill himself on her shift. “He’s back!” she redundantly informed the doctor after a moment, who was smiling slightly to himself as he finished the last of his sutures.
Phlox finally left T’Pol’s side for a brief second, after glancing incredulously at her steadily-chugging, though weak, vitals. He couldn’t believe that she had survived the storm, let alone the trauma of the sudden fetal growth and the subsequent massive blood loss and surgery. Shaking his head, he sidled past Crewman Cole, who was holding Trip’s cold, live hand in both of hers in a platonic, awe-struck, yet possessive kind of way.
Phlox checked Trip’s readouts, and satisfied that he was going to live, looked over at his helper. She was as white as a sheet, but she had reacted with flying colours. At least one, if not more, of the people in this room owed their lives to her clearheaded assistance. “It’s quite the thing, the first time you pull someone back from the dead, hm?” Phlox asked gently of his youthful assistant.
Cole turned large, wet eyes upon him, simply nodding at his perfect echo of her sentiment. She didn’t trust her voice. She felt silly enough getting so mushy over a man whose partner had just delivered triplets three feet away, but she couldn’t help herself. He had been lying there, dead, and now he was alive. Still unconscious, but alive. Thanks to her. She abandoned her earlier, squeamish thoughts of transfer back to the MACO unit and wondered about the rigors of medical school instead.
Phlox prepared his originally intended hypospray for Trip. He included a neutralizing compound for the stimulant the rash engineer had nearly ended his life with, in trying to be a superman. Phlox pressed the cocktail into Trip’s yielding neck with a hiss, musing that human explorers were the worst patients he’d ever had for sheer, stubborn cussedness.
The healthy young man’s vital signs stabilized before Phlox’s eyes after he finished dosing him with everything he could think of to help. The rest was up to Trip.
Leaving him under Cole’s vigilant care, Phlox went back to the brood he had extracted form T’Pol and ran his scanner around them to discover what he could about the mysterious, thriving infants. He had fully expected the single blastocyst to have expired by now, and here he had three hybrid babies, all responding well to the amniotic recipe he had concocted on a funny whim only the week before. He thought about recommending to Starfleet the practice of keeping all relevant species’ amniotic requirements on-file aboard ship.
Phlox looked at the unusual set-up, with the first, faint beginnings of hope for a positive outcome. He smiled in a moment of self-satisfied approval. That would certainly show that pesky Lieutenant Commander Witsell at Utopia Planitia, with her list of “essentials” and a budget plan a mile long. She had said that the tank was an “unnecessary luxury” and predicted that the only use he would find for it would be as a fish habitat in the event he extended his menagerie to include aquatics.
However, the device had saved the captain’s dog, successfully gestated Sim, and now, Phlox hoped, it would carry Sim’s two nieces and nephew to near-full term size, though how soon that would be, he could not be certain. His scanner still showed an extraordinary rate of cellular growth. The babies had not yet been treated for the radiation they received, and Phlox started to wonder if he should treat them. It seemed that was possibly what had caused the sharp increase in their cellular life-cycle. The only thing that would have allowed them to survive the critically exponential difference in their two parents’ different genetic embryonic developmental rates. The babies had grown so quickly, it seemed the unconquerable tanylase deficiency wasn’t prolonged enough to be fatal.
He didn’t even bother to try wondering why there were three fertilized eggs rather than the singleton he had admittedly had no particular reason to expect. Though Vulcans were clearly not a species that typically favoured multiple births, there were many, many species of all types of creatures that routinely ovulated more than one egg, all but the strongest withering away rapidly, usually before the existence of multiples was even detected. It would make sense in a species that tended only to mate every seven years, to have the best possible chance for a successful conception.
Phlox’s naturally inquiring mind started formulating a list of questions for T’Pol once she gained her strength enough to answer them. As he mulled over the multitudinous possibilities and the gallingly scanty Vulcan database, he prepared a hypospray of various medications from painkillers to anti-radiation serum to oxytocin and vitamins. He injected these into T’Pol’s system, noting that her already strengthening vital signs responded quickly to the helpful chemicals. Phlox shook his head, as always amazed at the body’s capability to heal.
He looked up. Cole was standing at the foot of Trip’s biobed, watching his vital readout, interestedly comparing it to the scanner she held in her one hand, while eating an apple with the other. Phlox called her over and she set the scanner down and approached, chewing somewhat guiltily.
“Sorry,” she said through a cheekful of granny smith, holding the nearly-whittled core of the apple aloft. “I was starving. I had it in my bag for a snack.”
“By all means, by all means,” Phlox allowed. “We can’t have you joining in the festivities.“ He gestured to indicate their inert colleagues. “I’m actually glad you’ve gotten some fructose into your system. I’d like to request a little donation, if you wouldn’t mind?” Phlox held up what looked to be a handful of thin tubing.
“What?” Amanda asked warily.
“Just some plasma. You won’t miss it.”
Amanda tried to think of a way out, then did, and wished she hadn’t. “Um, I don’t know if I can,” she said uncomfortably.
“You’re certainly under no obligation to,” Phlox allowed, “though it would be the simplest source for Commander T’Pol’s needs. Your cells are quite different, but the plasma that they…ah, ‘swim within’, is interchangeable enough. I have on hand a quantity of synthesized cyanoglobin concentrate, and that, with the extra plasma, should shore the commander up nicely.” As he spoke, Phlox detected a strange look on Crewman Cole’s face…not fear, so much as guilt.
“No, I, uh…” she paused, reminded herself that Phlox was her doctor, and forced the words out. “A few years back, I caught—I got sick,” she looked away, her cheeks red. “I mean, I’m better now, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea for me to…”
Phlox’s curious face relaxed into understanding. “Ah, yes. I recall your medical file. It is conscientious of you to consider that factor, but there is no danger now that you have been treated.”
“Oh.” Amanda scowled inwardly as she considered her ever-pursuant medical file. You couldn’t get away from it really.
Phlox misread her demeanour, and remembering her particular psych profile, began to demur. “I can certainly warm up a little of my plasma stores. I just prefer the fresh stuff when I can get it.” He started to move away, but Amanda stopped him with a hand on his arm.
“No,” she said, looking over at the banged-up little family they were trying to fix. “I don’t mind, really.”
“Ah, excellent!” Phlox said approvingly. “Come along then!”
“What...now?” Amanda asked, somewhat nonplussed.
Phlox stopped and looked at her. “Yes, is that a problem?”
“Noo,” Amanda answered, trying to walk normally as she followed the doctor to a chair he had set near the head of T’Pol’s bed. She took the seat and tried not to think of needles pricking tender veins. Phlox had already set up the IV on T’Pol’s end and now he connected the thin tubing to the machine that would separate Amanda’s plasma from her haemoglobin and other cells before returning the cells back to her body via a second tube and delivering only the plasma to T’Pol.
After a quick scan to ensure Cole was in appropriate shape to donate, Phlox inserted the microscopically machined flexible needle without ceremony into her left arm, and taped it down securely. Cole bit her lip and couldn’t help watching her dark red blood snaking slowly down the clear tubing and disappearing into the smooth, blinking medical device that would render it palatable for Vulcan veins. She flinched when Phlox swabbed her right arm in preparation to insert a second needle.
“How come two?” Amanda asked, trying to sound casual.
“Ah,” Phlox answered as he thoroughly scoured her skin with the pungent spongeful of disinfectant. “This one will return your cells to your body once they have been extracted from the liquid protein plasma that makes up the bulk of your blood…and Commander T’Pol’s.”
“It’s all right really, you can keep them, I don’t need them back,” Amanda generously offered, but too late, Phlox had already deftly slipped the miniscule, sharp tubule into her right arm. She barely noticed the actual instant when it pierced her skin. It didn’t hurt really; it was more the idea that made her cringe.
“Nonsense,” he said brusquely, flicking the tube gently with an odd-looking fingernail. “Why throw away perfectly good blood cells? You should be happy to have them back.”
Something in the ship’s environment shifted ever-so-slightly and Amanda looked up at the doctor as he moved away to bustle about his various patients, checking and rechecking things, nearly unable to let himself believe that they had all seemingly pulled through.
“They did it,” Amanda said into the quiet of the room. “The ship. It’s moving,” she clarified, in response to Phlox’s quizzical _expression. “They must have gotten some sensors back.” She sat back in her chair, noticing the tip of her nose starting to tingle, and tried to relax her poor, bothered arms as they were variously sucked and pumped full of her own fluids. At least they wouldn’t be thrown around by the waves anymore.
To distract herself, Cole humbly looked over at her two fascinating colleagues. She still realised that she had played an enormous role in tonight’s successful rescue operation, but she comprehended also the massive risk that the five! of them had taken outdoors, in order that the entire ship might survive.
Phlox cocked his head slightly for an instant, trying to detect for himself the rumblings of the beast they travelled within. He never could manage to do so, and always marvelled at the aural capacities of people who could. “You should have been an engineer,” he suggested with a wry smile as he resumed studying the three preemies suddenly under his care.
Amanda smiled at that. “I don’t know,” she said lightly. “This isn’t so bad.”
Phlox didn’t answer, merely glanced approvingly at the young woman who was now forcing herself to calmly watch the progress of the plasmapheresis she was sharing with Commander T’Pol.
Randomly, Cole hoped that this would help ease the friction that always seemed to be between her and the Vulcan woman. She understood its source a little better now, but her romantic interest no longer lay in the friendly engineer. She had had her eye on Crewman Kenter for a while now, a fellow MACO who had transferred with her into Enterprise’s crew. He made no secret of his plans to attend Starfleet Academy next year, and Cole abruptly wondered if she might not join him at the last minute. As he had joined her suddenly when the MACO detachment was pulled off Enterprise. She smiled to herself, quietly pursuing daydreams until she noticed her lips were cold.
“Uh, is my mouth supposed to feel numb?” she spoke up somewhat nervously.
“Oh, yes indeed,” Phlox sang out from across the room, where he was microscopically analysing the cellular damage of the five who had been caught out in the ions.
“Great,” Amanda mumbled back. But she slouched back in her chair, somewhat reassured, pushing her lips in and out and hoping that she’d be able to stay awake for tonight’s planned ‘accidental’ running-into of Kenter in the gym. She thought of something else and sat up again.
“Hey, can I still go to the gym tonight?”
“No, no, absolutely not. Commander Tucker was kind enough to give us all a good demonstration of what can happen to those who treat their body too harshly.” Phlox looked up at her briefly, as he changed slides. Reapplying his eyes to the lenses of his scope, he finished: “It’s a warm shower, some hot soup and juice, and off to bed with you my dear!”
“Dammit,” Cole muttered. She slouched down again, wiggling her fingers to stave off the creeping cold of her somewhat blood-starved extremities. Plain enough. She’d simply have to accidentally run into him after his workout. Stop in to drop something off, wait while he had a quick shower…very interesting possibilities, she mused…especially when one was under doctor’s orders to take things easy….
Her slightly dizzy mental ramblings were suddenly cut short as she noticed Commander T’Pol’s eyes flickering open. Cole sat up straight in her chair again, still careful not to disturb the warm, thin tubes that dangled down her forearms. “Phlox,” she called out, but he had already started over, alerted to T’Pol’s awakening by the alarm on his nearby console.
He placed a gently restraining hand on the prone woman’s upper chest as she switched her head from side to side in momentary confusion. “Commander T’Pol,” Phlox spoke clearly, “you are in Sickbay. You’re going to be fine. Everyone is all right.”
This got T’Pol’s fogged attention. She turned her head to her right and looked up into Phlox’s eyes. “Everyone…? Even….” she asked in a barely-there voice.
“Yes,” Phlox confirmed, crinkling his eyes at her a little. He saved the news of the other two babies for a moment when she wasn’t quite so frail. “It appears you are a mother, T’Pol. Congratulations.”
T’Pol was unable to answer him immediately, so overcome was she with the conviction that this was some heady dream. She suddenly caught sight of Amanda Cole sitting in a chair near her bed, just behind the doctor. Twin tubules of dark red fluid trailed down her arms and away somewhere she couldn’t see.
Phlox noticed the unasked questions in T’Pol’s eyes. “Crewman Cole is generously donating a portion of her plasma for your use. You left quite a bit of your own behind, I’m afraid.”
Amanda smiled nervously at T’Pol as she slowly flicked her eyes over to meet her donor’s.
“Thank you,” T’Pol managed, in a scratchy voice. Her eyes were deeply sincere, and Amanda was quite startled at the depth of emotion she saw clearly swimming there before the tired woman again closed her eyelids. She took a breath. “Trip?” she asked next, stoically.
“He’ll be all right,” Phlox assured her. “He’s sleeping now.”
The plasmapheresis unit emitted a gentle chime and Phlox tapped a few of its controls. He gently tugged the tube out of Amanda’s left arm, pressing a cotton down with his left thumb and holding it there. He waited a moment for another small chime before one-handedly slipping the second needle out of her right arm and deftly pushing another cotton ball against the prickmark. After a minute, he checked the blood flow. Hardly any.
“Excellent,” Phlox pronounced. “Your platelets are clotting famously. Lots of fluids tonight, and as I said,” he looked at her significantly, “take it easy, hm?”
Amanda sighed, sticking small, round adhesive bandages into the crooks of her two elbows and rolling her sleeves down. She was tired. Maybe she would just go to bed.
She went and gathered her PADD and bag from where she’d stashed them when she had shown up at Phlox’s request, to help with any potential emergencies that the storm caused. She slung her bag over her shoulder, reflecting that she’d had no idea when she walked through those doors that she would be bringing Trip Tucker back from the dead and donating a pint and a half of her plasma to a recently-delivered Vulcan mother.
She stopped before exiting the doors. “’Night Phlox,” she said somewhat affectionately. “And thanks.” She meant it. She never would have made it through the last hour and a half if not for his strong, unwavering support and belief in her abilities.
Phlox looked up from his work and assessed the exhausted young woman, ready to leave the bay. “Thank you,” he replied adamantly. “There is no way all of them would have survived without your help. It was extremely well-done.” He paused to let his praise sink in. “I look forward to your next shift. We’ll be going over splints.”
“Oh, good,” Amanda laughed as she turned and walked out the doors. She realised that, after tonight, nothing was going to seem difficult again.
Back to Part 4
Continue to Part 6
|
