Friendship Lost
Title: Friendship Lost
Author: Luzmaria
Rating: PG-13
No spoilers that I can see
Note: the first portion of the story is a fic orphan provided by doxymom. This is what I did with it at, oh, three in the morning…
Trance crooned to one of her favorite ferns. She caressed its downy blue leaves and smiled. Abruptly, the Rommie Ascendant lurched and she was tossed to the floor. A loud BONG sounded in the hallway beyond the door to Hydroponics. The ship steadied. Trance gained her feet and ran to investigate.
Harper lay face down on the floor of the corridor, his spiky hair still pressed against the metal wall. His eyes were closed. Three feet above him was a shallow dent. Trance gasped.
Harper didn't move.
Trance ran over to where Harper was lying on the ground and checked his pulse, careful not to move him unnecessarily. It was there, but it was very weak.
“Thank the Divine”, she whispered. “Rommie, prep Med Deck, Officer down…”
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Harper opened his eyes in Med Deck and felt pain at the top of his head. His hand reached up and touched a mother of a goose egg. “Ow, what happened?” he groaned. Rommie’s hologram materialized into view. “From my surveillance logs, it appears that you tripped and fell, bumping your head on my corridor when we were going through some turbulence. Luckily Trance found you and notified me to get Med Deck ready on time. You went into a coma on us for a while, my friend. There was nothing I could do for you.” Rommie frowned slightly and looked as if she were about to cry.
“That bad, huh?” Harper swallowed. “How long was I out?”
“Three days. Trance just turned in for a nap a couple of hours ago. I don’t know what she did, but she saved you.”
Harper nodded and tried to sit up, only to sway a bit. “Oh, man.”
“I think you should rest now. I’ll notify the others of your condition. In the meantime, I’ll have one of the droids bring you a flexi to read and something light if you are hungry.”
The hologram winked out, leaving Harper to lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. He was bored within minutes and tried, for a second time, to get up.
This time he did with no trouble. “I’m gonna go to my own bed.”
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Trance had settled into bed and was fast asleep when Rommie’s hologram materialized in her room. She stopped for a moment to watch Trance as she slept. She looked much tired, less perky than she once did. Her breathing was deep and slow, like a child’s. Rommie hesitated for a minute before waking her. “Trance?”
Trance barely opened her eyes. “Hmmmmm?”
“I have news. Harper is awake.”
Trance sat up like a bolt. “So soon?”
Rommie nodded. “As usual, he also isn’t listening to doctor’s orders. He’s already on his way to his room.”
Trance hissed in a language Rommie didn’t understand. She got out of bed, put on a robe and opened the door to find Harper standing there.
“Hi, babe.” He swayed slightly.
“Harper, you should be in bed, you know.” Trance gave him a look that was a mixture of worry and anger for her friend.
“I know. But I want to be in my bed, not in Med Deck. Unless of course you want to offer time in your bed… Besides, I wanted to say thank you for whatever you did. What did you do anyway?”
“UH… just, good old fashioned bedside manner.” Trance took his arm and led him across the way to his quarters. “You would have recovered anyway no matter what I did.” Rommie opened the door to his quarters and she led him inside to his bed. “Now get some rest, please. I’ll have Rommie monitor your vitals and she’ll call me, OK?”
Harper blinked at Trance. This wasn’t like her to not to argue with him about where he was recovering. “OK”, he said, and laid down on the bed. Trance smiled and touched his cheek. Again, this was not quite like Trance.
“Good night Harper, I’ll see you in the morning.”
And with that, Trance left. Harper found himself again staring at a ceiling, but at least this time it was his own and he could go to sleep if he wanted to. Only he didn’t. “Rommie?”
Rommie’s hologram appeared. “Yes, Harper?”
“Can you tell me what happened while I was unconscious? Trance isn’t acting right.”
Rommie’s hologram appeared to sigh. “I don’t know if I have the right –“
“I think I have the right to know.”
Rommie blinked. “Alright.”
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“Rommie, prep Med Deck, Officer down…” Trance began to check Harper’s other vital signs. His blood pressure was as week as his pulse, and it looked as if his breathing was shallow. A couple of droids arrived with a stretcher.
“Trance, Harper, report.” Trance heard Dylan say.
“Uh, I don’t know about damage Dylan, but we have one officer down. Head trauma.”
“Where’s Harper.”
“He’s the patient, Dylan. I gotta go.” Trance arrived at Med Deck with the droids and directed them to gently lay him on the bed. She checked him more thoroughly.
“What do you want me to do?” Rommie said through one of her droids. The emotions Harper programmed into her made her overly anxious, and she wished Harper gave her a failsafe to shut them off.
Trance was busy with the examination. “I think he has a severe concussion, but he’s also bleeding internally. We need to stabilize him.” She began to prepare a hypo of nanobots when Harper began to have a seizure. “Hold him down Rommie.”
One of the droids did as Trance asked and firmly, but gently, held down Harper. Trance injected Harper with the nanobots just as he stopped breathing and was beginning to fibrillate. The nanobots took a minute to work but the damage was done.
Seamus Harper was in a coma.
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“So, I was in a coma?” Harper said.
“After you fibrillated and then flatlined from the head trauma for 30 seconds. All of my tests confirmed that you had suffered permanent damage. No amount of nanos would have rebuilt your brain for you, Seamus. To Commonwealth records, you should have stayed in a semi conscious state permanently.”
Harper sucked in his breath. “So, why am I in bed, conscious and talking to you?”
“Because of Trance.”
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Trance stood, staring at the near lifeless body of her best friend. It has been almost two days since the accident. Still nothing was getting him out of his coma. The droids looked on as Trance watched him breathing. It was the only way she knew he was still alive and in there.
Dylan touched Trance on the shoulder. “Trance, there is nothing in Rommie’s files that can tell you how to correct the permanent damage done to his…”
“Dylan, I want to try anyway. Please, let me do the research. We… I owe him that much.” She said, not taking her eyes off her friend.
Dylan could only nod and leave the room. He heard him tell Rommie “Watch them both, and let me know of any changes.”
“Aye Captain.” Rommie’s voice echoed in the hallway. “So, what do you want me to do to help you, Trance?” One of the droids stepped forward.
“I need you to send a message for me. I need to call in a favor to one of my kind.”
“Aye.”
“Rommie? You can’t tell Dylan about this.”
“Why?”
“Because, my people are not only very private, but with few exceptions, very xenophobic. Dylan wouldn’t understand nor tolerate their attitude. In fact, it may be best if we take Harper off on the Maru to see my friend.”
The droid looked at Harper. This man was her engineer, the creator of her avatar, and her friend. But not telling Dylan was going against protocol. Rommie calculated the odds and did the math of the pros and cons before giving Trance her answer.
“You can trust me.”
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Rommie stepped off of the Maru onto a world she has never seen. Trance had taken them on a long trip to the slipstream with coordinates that should have led them nowhere. Trance has insisted that Rommie shut herself and her chronometer down for the journey so that she would not be aware of the passage of time.
The world was vastly colorful, rich with life. The sky was an unusual shade of violet, and the ground was a rosy hue. The trees and plant life was green and red, but everything sparkled land and shimmered in the sun. Only one house stood in the distance. Rommie stood and took in all that was around her as Trance wheeled out Harper in a wheelchair.
“My friend lives this way. Don’t worry, he’s like me.” She smiled as she pushed Harper in the direction of the house.
Rommie followed.
When they were not more than fifty feet away, a man emerged from inside the building. The man was wearing white shirt, black pants, and his head was clean-shaven. He looked like he could be of Trance’s species, except that his skin was red. Blood red. And he was big. Tyr kind of big.
He smiled at Trance and began to speak in a language unfamiliar to Rommie. As Trance responded, the man frowned slightly and slowly nodded to her. As the conversation wore on, the man grew more and more somber. Finally, he nodded and motioned for them all to come inside.
The house was sparsely furnished. There was a place for a dining room, a living room and even a bedroom, but everything was compacted into one room. Trance eased Harper out of his wheelchair and onto the bed. She looked on and turned to the man, speaking one last time, in a soft tone.
Again, the man responded. Trance walked over to the kitchen area and took a large knife and bowl out of the cabinet.
“Trance, what is going on?” Rommie said.
“My friend here… has a special gift. His blood seems to heal anyone of anything. Not all of my people are like this, but he is. I helped him and a few like him to find a new home when my people decided that those who were like him were too different and tried to kill them all out. I think it’s called genocide in Common. So in return, he has agreed to try to heal Harper.”
“I thought you said his blood can heal anyone.” Rommie looked slightly skeptical.
“That we’ve tried it out on so far, yes, but we’ve never done this for a human.” Trance handed the man the knife, who sliced open his upper arm enough to let a small amount of blood drip into the bowl. Trance drew the blood into an old fashioned Earth type syringe and injected it into Harper.
“How long until we know if it works?” Rommie asked.
“Not for several hours.” Trance whispered to the man in a soft tone. The man stood, and looked at Trance. He helped Trance place Harper back into his wheelchair. And then, he kissed her.
Rommie looked on as Trance turned and said, “It’s time to go back.”
As they exited the house and wheeled Harper back to the ship, she saw Trance begin to cry.
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“It wasn’t until we left planet side that I found out why. That man asked her for one favor before she left.”
“Which was what?”
“Apparently Trance gave up a lot when she chose to help this man. With very few exceptions, she had to give up all contact with her race. This man was one of the few of her kind she kept in touch with. He asked that she never see him after this, because he felt that, in the end, she used him too.”
“So Trance lost a friendship to save me.” Harper slumped back on the bed.
The hologram nodded. “She said I couldn’t tell Dylan what happened. When we got back on board the Andromeda, she told Dylan only that she found a research facility that was doing research on your condition. You woke up a day later.”
“Rommie, why are you telling me this if you promised not to tell anyone?”
Rommie smiled slightly. “I didn’t promise to tell anyone, only Dylan.”
Onward To Part 2!
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