Whisper Men and Chromis Angels

Posted on 06 Apr 2018 @ 7:43pm by Lieutenant Reginald Hawthorn & Commander Jayla Kij

3,136 words; about a 16 minute read

Mission: Crossing Over
Location: Sick Bay
Timeline: MD 35 :: 1623

It was all Jayla could do not to scream.

Sick Bay had ten neural stimulators. Ten! That was all! And now four of them were down and they still had half the crew’s memories to restore. This would slow them down to a snail’s pace.

So, Jayla has put in an urgent work order with Engineering. She only hoped that whoever showed up wouldn’t murder her for breaking more stuff.

"I have not slept in a day, I have not known the love of a good cup of coffee, and I'm an inch away from riddlin' someone with holes. Someone best be dying!" Reggie said by way of 'Greeting, how are ya?' as he walked into sickbay. He looked like walking talking wreckage. And as the shocked face of a sickbay patient looked upon his frightening visage he mellowed. "Sure you're doin' just fine, force of health that you are. Sure that'll...er...grow right back."

He mellowed a bit. His eyes locked on Jayla, noticed the pips, and began to steam against the tide towards her.

"So you make up this work order?" Reggie asked, looking at the rugged PADD in his hands. "You this Doc 'Kidg?'"

“Keej, actually,” Jayla corrected his pronunciation. “But yes. We’re trying to get you more engineers, but.. then this happened,” she added, indicating the four non-functioning neural stimulators. “It’s slowing us down.”

Reggie made a sound best left undescribed. But let us say on the colour wheel of life it was on the other side from contentment. He picked up one of the neural stimulators. The pair of devices, connected by a hypoallergenic band for easier brow draping, flopped about like a dead fish.

"Ya'all tried turning them on and off again?" he asked, turn ing them over and running a hand over the dermal contacts. "I mean these, not the folks stumbling through your door lookin' for a reading of their fates."

"Believe it or not, yes," replied Jayla with the barest hint of a grin. "But, there's no power, so there's nothing to turn back on. We tried a hard reset on this one," she said, showing him the one on which the lights were lit. "But, it just won't do anything. The others are dead. Our first thought was that they were out of charge, but if that's true, the light up as soon as we put them on their stations. These don't do anything."

“Throw’em in the matter reclamation hooper on deck 15 and have the replicators in sickbay spit out a few newbies for ya,” Reggie said after a moment, lowering the dead machine back to the tray. He then took his hand and rubbed it against his eyes for a moment. “Solid state equipment like that gets broke, it stays broke. Me and mine could fix it, but it would be like fixing out a blown lightbulb by replacing the filament. Doable, but time consuming.”

He then set the PADD down next to the tray of stimulators, and looked about.

“But given you need this right quick Doc, if you can supply me with a cup of coffee and a space to work I’ll give’em a look over,” he held up his hands. “I ain’t making a promise but I’ll try. Best I can do at half mast.”

“Deal!” declared Jayla. “I’ve even got some real coffee in my office. I’ll be right back.”

True to her word, she returned only moments later with a fat mug of coffee for him. “Here you are,” she announced triumphantly.

Reggie had colonised one of the small sickbay workbenches in the name of the proud Congressional Star Republic Of Montana. The inbox laden with PADD's and hard copy had been strategically bombed out of existence and had landed on another desk. A microcentrifuge had been co-opted for the fight to turn a little corner of sickbay into main engineering by being placed on a rack of vails. He had put down an anti-static sheet, so a little effort was being put into keeping sickbay cleanish. And in the clearing this little hard fought war had won, Reggie was dissecting a neural stimulator.

"That smells like liquid miracle," he said, turning his head to look at the cup with a smile. "And here I thought you Federation folk got all out of joint when your food didn't come out of a hole in the wall."

“Coffee is far too important to be replicated,” she informed him. “I stock up on beans whenever we’re at starbase. I see you’ve made yourself right at home.”

"You want these fixed then you gotta make all the signs and favours right. You don't treat tech with respect, tech is gonna be in the right to bite you," Reggie said, waving a hand over his workspace as he took a sip of the hot coffee. "My. Maker. That there is a cup of black deliciousness strong enough to bring back the dead. Mighty appreciative Doc, to find another such as myself that prefers their pleasures unfuddled by modern contrivances. You ever had BBQ?"

"Several times while at the academy," she replied, putting some of the stacked equipment away. "I dated a man who was totally into it, despite his Italian heritage. Messy stuff, but delicious."

"Huum," Reggie said, setting the cup onto the desk and picking up his tools to look over the stimulator. "Italian eh? I ain't never met an Italian before. Which planet they from?"

“Earth,” answered Jayla, now stowing the phials in an overhead cupboard. “Earth has so many distinct cultures. I’m not sure any other planet can match that.”

Reggie chuckled.

"My ma would have you up until the ripwing's crowed telling you how that ain't the littlest bit true," he said, squinting through the eyepiece as he popped the back off of the stimulator. Beneath the casing was a solid looking piece of tech, wrapped in coiled wires and solid-state chips. "Why back home on Montana we got a lot of distinctness in our folk. Ya got your Archepeligo folks, them called the Kipsi due to the fact of their hair. Then you got folks like me, Plainers. See Montana's this big old supercontinent, save for a string of islands that wrap the whole thing side to side. Plainer's tend to be a bit more long-term in their thinking. A Kipsi, why they might not know where they'll be 'fore the night comes."

He chuckled, as with his tools he began the slow dismantling process.

"Course Kipsi's tend to come up with some of the best ghost stories. You ever hear of The Patch Work Man?"

"No, but I love ghost stories," she replied. And why not listen? She couldn't really do much without these nueral stimulators working, could she? Plus, some engineers worked better with someone to talk to. In fact, so did some doctors; that's why they tended to chat to their patients while running scans. "Hold on!" she said, running back to her office and returning with another cup of coffee and the karraffe containing the rest. "Okay, I'm ready."

Reggie chuckled, hunched his shoulders as he got to work, and grinned as he told the tale of The Patch Work Man.

"A long time 'fore we's were born, there was this Kipsi widow who inherited a chromis weed mill from her dead husband. Thing was treacherous to use cause of all the small spinning blades used to slice up the weeds, and it was so old no one wanted to work for it save a ranchers ransom. Now the Widow had three children all of marrying age, but no one would marry them cause the Widow had no money for a dowery. So she got them to work the mill, being small and nimble and family. But they didn't want to work, being feckless and lazy and used to caosting on their fathers good name," Reggie said, poking the innards of the stimulator as a LED attached to a wire sparked to life. "Reckon we got a pulse in this one somewhere. Anywho, where was I?"

"Poor widow, lazy kids, etc," she reminded him.

"Lazy....yeah them three kids were lazy. They sought out the smoking dens, Pok Deng games, and other pursuits of ill repute, frittering away their widowed mother's coin. Then one night a Proctor arrives at the mill, carrying a writ demanding taxes. He gives the Widow a single week to make back the money she owes or he'll take everything. Distraught she tells her children, hoping the threat of poverty will spurn in them some action. Their apathy to her plight sends her into a rage, far beyond anything she ever experienced, and she threw them one by one as they slept into the chewing maw of the chromis mill."

Reggie set down one tool, and picked up another.

"Morning came, and the Widow was left with the remains of her actions. She had removed one problem, but still the Proctor would return for his coin or her livelihood. Now she's a married woman of the Kipsi, or at least was 'fore her husbands passing: so she knows Words. Now, these aren't words like you and I know them, these are Words. Powerful things used to conjure the spirits of the Down Under. Now the Widow knows a thing or three, and a loose demons from there is nothing but a plight. But a trapped demon, caught in a box or container of some sort will grant her power and a boon. So the Widow takes up her needle and thread, and with the bloodied remains of her children begins to stitch together a vessel for the demon to inhabit."

"That night she begins the summoning, speaking her Words. The tropical heat of the mill becomes cold, frost congealing around the blooded remains stitched together into a lopsided figure of a man with two heads. Then it jerks upright, its four eyes blazing blue. She commands it to stop moving, and it does. She commands it to stand, and it does. She giggles like a school girl because, deep in her thoughts, she knew this was all a bunch of baloney. But here it is, a bone golem of her own making being ridden by a demon. 'Make your price known' the demons asked. 'Work my mill and make me rich,' she demanded. The demon agreed, knowing it would be a simple task to break free of this golem. 'But know I have named with my Words every stitch around your stolen start demon. Only my hand can release you from it.' Well, as you can imagine that final straw was not to the demons liking. Can you hand me that EM flux reader, little needle-nosed thing with a doo-dad on the end."

She was so engrossed in the story that she didn’t realize at first that he’d asked for a tool. “Oh!” she said after half a beat, blinking and looking over the tools. “This one?” she asked, picking up the one that matched his description and offering it to him.

"Make an engineer out of you yet," he said taking the tool. "But back to the story. So the Demon worked for the Widow secretly at night. And when the Proctor returned at the end of his deadline, he had to use a dozen skiffs to haul off the chromis weed bales waiting for him. 'Now am I freed?' asked the Demon, to which the Widow cackled. For a year and a day the demon toiled in the bone golem, the heat and humidity slowly rotting it until one of its heads began to fall off. The Widow refused to fix it, knowing it was the three co-joined hearts of her butchered children that constrained the demon's soul. And they would never rot with the power of her Words. She would wait for the bone golem to rot, and then take the heart out into the deeps and throw it over the side into the sea."

The flux reader chiripped in his hands, and he put it aside to pick up a microscale welder.

"Over the coming month's as more and more of the demon's body rotted, the Demon's rage began to build. Until one day, close to its ending, it rose up against the Widow. As her Words began to burn it, the Demon sang a song of its kind not made of human words, but blue lightning danced across the sky. It held the Window in its rotting hands and threw her into the threshing machines of the mill. But now the Demon was stuck, as only the Widows will could free it from the three stolen hearts. And so it used her torn up body to replace its rotting parts, her head replacing the rotting one that had fallen off. But as it hid in the mill it still rotted, and so it had to wander out into the dockside towns in the dead of night. It would wait for the Dark Moon, when all three of Montana's moons were waning dark. It picked off the wandering luckless, and small children were its favourite as they lasted the longest. The Patch Work Man wanders the islands of the archipelago seeking out fresh parts every Dark Moon, moaning and pleading for help with its stolen voices."

Reggie paused in his work.

"Always reckoned those stories were fictions made to scare kids, like a shadow play or some such. But er...Doc you ever, ya know...you ever seen a Borg? Face to face like?" he asked quietly, looking at her. "As close as we are now?"

She shivered at the mere thought. “I can’t say I’ve had the displeasure,” she replied. “Save a couple of liberated ones who agreed to allow the students examine them back in medical school. Nice guys. But, no. I’ve never been face to face with a fully integrated Borg.”

"I was a fresh boot ensign, just got off a humanitarian junket helping to fix a wrecked planet when the call came out for all ships to assemble at Sector 001. Took me a minute to figure out where that was. Not that anyone tells a Boot whats going on, but you pick up things. The Tactical Officer just ran drills the whole way back to Earth, and the CMO was dishing out mood stabilizers like they were candy on festival day. The Borg they said. From the way folks were acting you'd think they'd misheard the word and thought Death was comin'," Reggie said with a nervous laugh. "We...we didn't get there for the fight. Got there for the clean up though. Ships cleaved in two, or flattened like dropped sweet cakes. Like the hand of the Maker reached down from on high and just pinched'em. I was part of a rescue party that boarded the USS Nanking. Most of it wasn't pressurised, and the sections that weren't were flooded with the sort of radiation exposure that cooks meat in seconds so..."

He slowly stilled himself, and settled the tools down on the desk.

"I found him. Well, think it was a him anywho. Looked it. I just looked across the compartment and saw what looked like a hand jutting out of the wreckage, fingers grasping. Didn't even think about what it could have been just saw someone in need of help. Shouted for the rest of the boarding party, reached out and grabbed the hand. Yelled to him it was all gonna be okay, help was here...then I noticed his hand wasn't at all right. All grey and dead lookin', and the fingers weren't all right. Like they were two hands stitched together with thumb on either side," he wrapped one hand around the other, wincing. "Grip like iron I can tell you. Broke every bone in my right hand. Distracted me a smidge as this cobbled together thing from my parent's nightmares began to drag itself out of a wall of wreckage. Like the ship was spitting out what was left of itself and its crew, this patchwork automaton of meat and gears. Just..."

Jayla shivered agin. Just the thought of coming face to face with an active borg scared the living day lights out of her. “That’s... that’s frightening,” she said finally. “What did you do? I mean how did you get out of it?”

“Didn’t. Thing had me dead to rights, no idea why it didn’t just jab me with the needle and get the work done. Maybe having half a starship folded around it confused it or some such, though in my mind I wasn’t so much afraid of being assimilated as being used for spare parts,” he chuckled. “Marine security detail came in on my screams. This brute in rattle rattle just walked up to where the drone had me, pushed his carbine against its wrist and fired point blank. Blew it clean off, but left the clawed fingers still trying to crush the life out of me. Gave the Olympia’s CMO something to do, knitting all those itty bitty bones back together. See?”

He held out his left hand like he was presenting it for a kiss, revealing in the sickbay lighting the nearly invisible seams of rapid surgical work. They crossed and cross the hand from the wrist back to the tips of each finger.

“This big old bear of a Russian kept trying to convince me to have it chopped off and replaced with a ‘good Martian fake’. Seemed right insistent on that point.”

"Probably owned the manufacturer," Jayla joked. "Can't have all those workers standing around bored, can he?"

"Most likely," Reggie grinned and placed in her hand the repaired neural stimulator. "One down, three to go. I can tell you more stories, but I reckon you got more important things to do than listen to a Montanan rancher's son jaw on and on about Whisper Men and Chromis Angels."

"More important, sure, but anywhere near as fun," she replied, looking half regretfully at the repaired neural stimulator. "I'd love to hear about those angels sometime, though. Thanks for your help," she added.

"We're out here in the Convergence for a spell, bound to need more equipment fixed around here. Hell, maybe we'll even see each other in our off hours, who knows," Reggie pulling over the second stimulator. He leaned closer, his right eye closed around the micro viewer. "Century class ship ain't all that big."

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