The corridor outside the medical bay was busier than usual. Crew members heading to or from the celebration, dressed in their formal uniforms or cultural garments. Zandovians in their geometric-patterned dress tunics. A group of Litheans with their bioluminescent skin patterns lit up in celebration colors. Even a few Krellians, apparently not all of them, collapsed with lung injuries.
They moved around me like I was a stone in a stream. Present but not really seen.
I navigated through Mothership's corridors on autopilot. Deck seven to the lift. Lift down to deck fourteen where the human crew quarters were located. Past the common area where someone had attempted to recreate Earth-style furniture.The results were well-intentioned but slightly wrong, like everything else about our new existence.
The quarters I shared with Elena were at the end of the corridor. Small by Mothership standards but luxurious compared to the cave we'd survived in for three weeks on that burning nightmare planet. Two sleeping alcoves, a shared living space, a hygiene unit that still confused me with its combination of water jets and some kind of sonic cleaning technology.
Elena wasn't there. Probably at the ceremony despite her protests. Or maybe hiding in the electrical systems she loved more than people.
I stood in the center of the empty quarters and felt the exhaustion hit like a physical weight.
Zorn was right. I was running on nothing.
But the alternative, actually stopping, actually resting, actually letting my guard down long enough to feel anything—that was worse. Because when I stopped working, when I let my mind go quiet, the memories came back.
The Liberty disaster. The wormhole that had shredded our ship apart. The burning planet where we'd crashed. The people I couldn't save.
Sixteen-hour shifts kept the nightmares away. Constant work meant constant focus. Patients who needed me gave me purpose.
Without the work, I was just a woman stranded billions of light-years from home with nothing but scar tissue where her heart used to be.
I moved to the small nutrition dispenser and requested something approximating Earth food. The Mothership's systems had gotten better at synthesizing human-compatible meals over the past months, but the results were still off. This allegedly was chicken and rice. It tasted like textured protein and sadness.
I ate it anyway. Fuel. Nothing more.
My hands had stopped shaking. Small victory.
I should sleep. Zorn's orders. Medical fitness for duty. All the rational reasons that made perfect sense when I wasn't the one being ordered around.
Instead, I pulled up my personal datapad and reviewed patient files. The Krellian with the collapsed lung, prognosis was good but I wanted to cross-reference Zandovian regeneration protocols with the limited information I had about Krellian physiology. The injured engineer, cranial trauma recovery times across different species showed significant variation. I needed to study the data more carefully.
The work. Always the work.
Hours passed. The chronometer on the wall ticked over. 2300 hours. 0100. 0300.
My eyes burned. My head ached. But I kept reading, kept analyzing, kept my mind occupied with problems that had solutions instead of feelings that didn't.
When I finally collapsed into my sleeping alcove, still wearing my medical scrubs because changing seemed like too much effort, I had exactly forty-five minutes before my next scheduled shift.
The nightmares came immediately.
Fire. Always fire. The Liberty's corridors ablaze with plasma fires that ate through bulkheads like paper. Emergency klaxons screaming their useless warnings. I was running through the medical bay, trying to reach the patients strapped to their beds, but the floor kept tilting, gravity failing, and my feet couldn't find purchase.
"Doctor Santos!" A voice calling from behind burning doors. "Help us!"
I reached for the emergency release. The panel was too hot, skin sizzling against metal,but I yanked it anyway. The door opened onto empty space. Not the medical bay. Not the ship. Just the purple-orange sky of that nightmare planet rushing up to meet us, atmosphere screaming past the hull.
The impact threw me sideways. I was in the cave now, surrounded by injured women whose faces I couldn't save, whose names I'd cataloged like inventory. Sierra with the crushed ribs. Melissa with the burns covering forty percent of her body. The pilot whose name I never learned because she died before I could ask.
"You didn't save us," they whispered in unison, their eyes accusing. "You let us burn."
"I tried—" My voice wouldn't work right, coming out strangled and desperate. "I tried everything?—"
"Not enough. Never enough."
The cave walls closed in, temperature spiking, heat pressing against my skin like a physical weight. I was burning now, feeling my skin blister, smelling my own flesh cooking, but I couldn't move, couldn't scream, could only watch as the flames consumed everything I'd failed to protect.
A hand touched my shoulder. I spun, and it was the Krellian patient, the one who'd died tonight under my compressions. His chest was caved in, ribs exposed, but he was standing, reaching for me with bloodied hands.
