“Admiral, you really should be–”
“Lying down, I know.” Faith croaked, her voice a stumbling, grating tone full of brambles and a sound like the rustling of parched desert leaves. “Resting, whatever.” She waved one bandaged hand dismissively, coughed as her other tightened to white against the supporting rail of a hospital berth. “There are plenty of good people lying on the floor right now. I can at least stand– give me a drip, an injection, whatever, and let me be.” Faith coughed again, sucked in a deep, shaky breath as the wracking came and went, tortured her dry and burning lungs. “Give the bed... to someone else.”
“I must insist!”
“Only because you don’t have the authority to order.” Faith shot back, gestured loosely. “Now do what you have to do and let me get back to my office.”
“With all due respect, Admiral–”
“Save your respect for the infirm and the elderly.” Faith managed, groping blindly for the wall. “I should be in Operations, or at the very least my office. Not here, not...” She gestured, stumbled awkwardly over and past a cart of diagnostic equipment, caught herself at the last moment on the railing of another berth. “Not... taking up bed space in Medical.”
“Admiral?”
The sound of another voice, a voice that hung familiar in her mind froze her where she was, left her as a broken doll perched precariously on the loose bar of a bed railing. In her mind, a rattling cacophony of sound worked its way toward recognition, toward the gradual process of fixing a name to a voice she had only heard a handful of times before. All at once, she felt the hand reach toward her, nonthreatening but sudden, and as she stood uneasily, barely able to stand erect where she was, she reached out, let her hands met the stranger’s. The world was a vastly different place to the blind, a place still strange and frightening to Faith, but it wasn’t a bad place, a place any less detailed– it was a place simply different from the world she had left behind, a world so altogether alien that those who still had eyes could never truly imagine it. This new world of darkness, of smell and sound and touch and the acute study of vibration was a world that would take time to get used to. A long time.
“Panem?” She asked, and the hand that settled against hers was warm, familiar, as familiar as the voice her mind struggled to put some memory of a face to. She swallowed, eyes blindly working, as if they could perhaps push aside the veil between herself and the world of light and color if she just tried hard enough, if she just stared deep enough.
“Admiral.” He said again, and in the pause, she felt his other hand settle on the top of hers. To his eyes, she was a twisted vision of the woman she had once been, a shambling, bleeding wicker doll of oozing bandages and generously applied greypatches. Where skin showed, it was no longer smooth, no longer the dark and regal, cinnamon shade it had been, but paler, twisted and mottled red, warped as it bent at crooked joints and twisted with the edges of a broken smile. Mercifully, the blindness she had suffered had spared her the horror of seeing herself as she was now, as the almost lethal dose of radiation had left her– a ravaged and broken, wooden shade of her former self.
“I’ll make sure you get a commendation for this.” She managed, breathing feebly in the pause. “With skills and a sense of courage like yours, Panem, you should be the Chief of Reactor Operations on a starship somewhere further from the front line than this.”
Panem shook his head, let his eyes drop to the floor with a shy smile she couldn’t see.
“You’re really kind, Admiral,” He managed, “but it really was nothing.”
“Nonsense.” She shushed him, her face twisting into another broken smile. “I’ll put the paperwork together later today. I hate to lose any officer of your caliber, but your actions today were the actions of a hero, and after having had the experience of working in the deep reactor as a younger woman, after having seen first hand what a blistering hell it can be, it’s only fair that you be given a shot at something better.” She paused again, wheezed in the silence. “You deserve nothing less, Panem.”
“The deep reactor isn’t the best place in the world to work, but it isn’t all that bad, and as good as a promotion sounds to me, I would never want to transfer.” He shook his head, hands rising in a gesture that was almost pleading. “I love the Hok, Admiral. She’s my home, I know her corridors and ductwork practically like I’d grown up crawling through them.” He paused, looked away again, and in the silence, she could feel the tenseness of hesitation, the held breath. “But the truth is, there really is something more I’ve wanted, something else beyond the reactor that I’ve always wanted to get into, something I’ve studied extensively for, that I’m qualified for and even love to do, but there’s never been an opening, and...” He paused, made a weak, frustrated gesture. “It’s the whole reason I joined the Navy, and...”
“What is it?” Came Faith’s soft, wispy response.
“I love doing work on Semiatmospheric fighters.” He managed. “I don’t really care much about flying them, but their design, the intricacies of the quantum hotcoils that power them, the feel of knowing that I’m really doing something when I’m up to my elbows in one, that I’m one step away from being out there myself, from being the one showing the Blueskins just how strong human resolve really is.” He paused, swallowed. “I don’t ask anything for any part of the duties that I performed today, but if you feel that I should receive a promotion or a transfer, then I feel you should know that nothing else could possibly make me happier than to be able to work in the hangars with the maintenance team that services and repairs our Seindrives.”
Faith squeezed his hand, tried another smile. “Panem, after saving my life, after all you’ve done for your Admiral, for your ship and crew, consider it done.” Her smile stretched, became somehow softer despite the twisting of skin, the movement of tortured flesh. “It’s the least I can do in return.”
