Chapter Text
vital signs of life
Watching the blast-darkened wreck of the Enterprise drift out of the wormhole, Michael thinks about breathing.
The facts she’d learned as a child: breathing, one of the basic functions of the human autonomic nervous system. A process, reassuringly efficient; a link between her and her Vulcan classmates the teacher took care to point out, and it was only much later that she wondered if Amanda had dropped an anvil-subtle hint.
At the time, all she’d known was that the teacher was wrong. As she’d listened to (she thought) the murder of both her parents she learned that breathing was in fact a tether, fraying and any process forgotten in the panic but impossible to repress. All that kept her from being washed away by grief until the search team found her, catatonic behind the closet door with air hissing bitterly through her teeth.
(The average human can live for approximately three minutes without oxygen.)
Only since joining Starfleet has she come to accept that the truth lies somewhere between. Starfleet runs on regulations stating breathing is the function to be protected at the expense of all other systems, a process, reduced to life support and science, but an undefinable tether too. The marvel of life persisting against the odds as humans and oxygen-dependent lifeforms walked through the airless void of space on the wings of starships and breathed, spoke, laughed, lived.
All of them know that even marvels fail. Her dreams hold shadows of the Section 31 crew frozen in the dark, echo with the pain of her own wheezing on Essof IV — knowing she’d made her choice, that she’d breathed safely on a hostile world and chosen on her own word to give that up. She remembers the dissonance of her body panicking even as her mind ran the logic of her safety under the watchful eyes of the crew, lungs seizing as the toxic particles tore into them, as the basic function of breathing killed her. As her last breath rattled out, she’d had time to wonder if she’d ever take air for granted again.
Easy as breathing humans say sometimes, and Michael has to fight to maintain a polite expression with all her Vulcan upbringing. It’s a nonsense cliche for those who’ve never walked the stars; no one in Starfleet who’s seen explosive decompression of a starship or witnessed an EVA gone wrong, lived through a life support malfunction, ever thinks of breathing as easy ever again. Sometimes, simply continuing to breathe in itself could become a final defiant act.
(Travelling nine centuries through a wormhole apparently takes eighty-four seconds. That leaves ninety seconds and change. One, two…)
Breathing, Michael was taught once and has come to understand, bone-deep and haunted, is a basic function — until it’s not. It’s a tether but one that can snap, or be cut, or be handed away.
(...ten, eleven...)
Drifting in unknown space and staring at the torpedo lodged in torn hull plating like jagged teeth near (too near) the bridge of the Enterprise, half the ship opened up to the vacuum – Michael, now, runs through everything she knows about breathing, how fast she suffocated on Essof IV. How much it hurt. She calculates the merciless math of how long it might take to suffocate in a ship torn open to space and it takes every fragment of willpower she has to force herself not to be that little girl catatonic in a closet again, sucking air through teeth clenched against her sobs.
He got out. The crew all got out and he made it to an escape pod before we were pulled through the wormhole. That’s nothing more than a broken, empty ship.
Twenty-one. Twenty-tw-
‘Incoming!’ Detmer’s voice crackles over the comm built into the suit. The temporal anomaly is closing behind them as the wreck of the Enterprise clears the red cloud that marks the rip in spacetime. Discovery’s already through safely to Michael’s right as she tries to juggle the suit’s boosters without spinning herself like a top (‘Equal and opposite reactions, Michael!’ says the memory of Tilly cheerfully in her head), to pay attention to the overload of readings flashing across the HUD as the suit winds down from the time jump, and simultaneously convince her body that she has oxygen, that the suit’s life support was put together by the best minds in Starfleet even if it was on a ludicrous multitasking wave of panic, she’s fine-
But Detmer sounds anything but fine and there’s a silver blur tumbling through the maw of the wormhole on the Enterprise’s tail. Much smaller as it would have to be to fit the contracting anomaly, not a starship but a shuttle and for a moment her heartbeat thuds too hard over a flare of hope.
‘Shuttle identified as Section 31.’ Owo’s voice cuts short Michael’s urge to do something truly stupid like fly toward the shuttle – the enemy shuttle, did she abandon her common sense nine centuries ago? – ‘No response to hail.’
‘If that’s harbouring Control, we have to destroy it before it can escape or everything we’ve done will be for nothing.’
Even after everything she’s survived in the last few weeks (months, years, her entire life) Michael’s strangely proud to hear her voice come out so calm. Solid Vulcan repression might leave her wanting to kick Spock in the kneecaps occasionally just to elicit a reaction but it’s a bedrock now, holding her steady even as she’s howling inside the private confines of her mind every time she glances at the wreck.
There is savage satisfaction in adding, ‘Recommend a photon torpedo.’ Revenge for her grief might be petty, but not even a Vulcan would read the bitterness beneath her tone and the false memory of Leland’s hand around her throat lingers. Even Sarek might allow that she’s owed a little petty.
‘If we miss and hit the Enterprise -’ Saru doesn’t need to finish, not when they’re short on time and he knows they understand his quiet warning just the same. The shuttle is righting itself now and almost past the drag of the wormhole, a bright spark against the Enterprise’s blast-darkened hull. If it clears it, it’ll go to warp and Discovery would have to choose between retrieving Michael and giving chase.
She’d tell them to go in a heartbeat. But she has the suit, and she won’t risk them losing each other in unfamiliar space, so far from home.
‘Do it,’ Michael says and barely hears the confirmation from Owo, closes her eyes against the flare of the torpedo launch. She has no capacity for anything in that moment beyond drawing in a breath, two, that tastes slightly metallic from the suit’s life support filters and her own fear. Waits for the concussive shock of a ship bigger than the shuttle breaking apart, for her last hope to go up in a pyre in the vast expanse of unknown future space.
‘Shuttle destroyed,’ Owo says over the comm and Michael exhales a double-lungful of relief.
‘Are-’ Finally her calm cracks; furious with herself, she swallows the hitch. ‘Are there any life signs aboard the Enterprise?’
‘We’re having some trouble with the sensors until the temporal distortion fades.’ Tilly’s voice at least holds all the heartbreak Michael’s ruthlessly compressing into practicality. ‘We had confirmation from Ca- Captain Pike-’ Her voice wobbles as she steadies herself. ‘- that the crew was over ninety-nine percent evacuated before we entered the wormhole and they were drawn in after us. He should have had time to make it to an escape pod.’
Should have, and Michael closes her eyes against the bleakness of uncertainty, all her bitterness drained away to leave only emptiness in the wake. Her entire life is a succession of breaking and rebuilding herself from the ground up, over and over and ripping off pieces of her soul every step along the way. She’s so fucking tired of the universe asking her to have faith.
Maybe that’s why you almost didn’t.
It’d been a close call. Earlier — twenty minutes left behind nine centuries ago — after she got into the suit and watched a white-faced Reno seat the time crystal with hands that shook despite her breezy try not to run over anyone’s grandmother Burnham, a succession of failed calculations meant the wormhole finally opened too close to the battlefield. By accident alone it took out five Section 31 ships, blaze of fireworks lighting up one after another as the ripples spread, luckier than they deserved; it’d been a last-ditch effort coordinating between Michael and Spock in Engineering on Discovery, Po shouting scanner readings from a nearby shuttle, to make the final calculations to get it to open at all. Nothing had gone to plan — not that, Michael realised as she’d fought the suit’s calculations, anything they did deserved being designated a plan. Intelligent panic and dumb luck might be the unofficial Starfleet playbook but the last few days had felt like bad decision cascading on bad decision until they were backed into a corner between disaster and- well, the end of all sentient life in the galaxy.
As weeks go, she’s had better. And the moment the Section 31 ships had surrounded them, outnumbered and cornered, in the space between one breath to another, Michael found she couldn’t bring herself to believe they would win.
She’d thought walking out to that chair on Essof IV was the most terrifying thing she’d ever do but it was a vacation stroll compared to stepping out of Discovery ’s launch bay, knowing her insistence on piloting the suit to the future had killed them all. Only a last minute Hail Mary they couldn’t have anticipated – the Sphere data saving Discovery and her crew as an unintended side effect, upgrading the shields beyond all known Starfleet capability without their intervention until Section 31 torpedos went dark, inert before they could get close – saved her from crippling guilt, and saved everyone else from her.
As soon as they’d realised what was happening to Discovery’s shields, Michael heard Saru give the order to cover the Enterprise with their impenetrable blanket of safety and the Klingon flagship arriving in a blaze of glory and war chants over the comms tipped the balance of the fight but for all the luck and time travel in the universe, it’d been too little, too late. The Enterprise’s abandon ship was sounded, the hull rent apart by the barrage of torpedos and Michael had cried, silent, inside her helmet even she plotted the final coordinates for the jump.
In the midst of chaos, her desperate hands skimming through the math that would drag her out of reach, her own sadness caught her off-guard. She hadn’t even heard his final command, not tapped into the ship-to-ship comms and somehow it felt like fresh grief, that she’d never know if his voice wavered when he announced the end of his ship. The secondhand updates on the progress of the evacuation from Discovery broke into static as she leaped forwards into the wormhole, not daring to glance back in case she got lost between the cracks in the universe.
If he’d stayed on Discovery, he’d be safe whispers the voice at the back of Michael’s mind, the one that these days sounds uncomfortably like the Terran Philippa.
She squashes it; it’s a baseless what-if. He was only ever on loan, never hers – theirs – to keep. She should be grateful that he’d been there at all. Lorca would have handed them over to Control in return for safe passage and fled to his own universe still full of sentient murderous life without a second thought.
When Starfleet assigned them their temporary captain, she’d wondered over the last few months — had they been demonstrating rare insight to understand he was what they all needed? Known that they were lending their best and brightest to be her own personal stepping stone back to solid footing after Lorca and Ash, after- everything? Even if Starfleet’s intent had been simple expediency faced with the Red Angel signals it didn't change that he’d rebuilt their fractured resilience, drawn them together after they’d been lost.
But it was a gift lent, not given. They wouldn’t have made it here without him and she’s been telling herself for weeks that it’s enough.
The possibility of a different choice still haunts her. She needs to spend less time listening to former Terran Emperors; it’s making her illogically selfish.
Sixty-two. Sixty-three.
The comm’s been quiet for too long, she realises. It’s been forty breaths since Tilly spoke, forty inhales and exhales of clean, recycled oxygen wrapped around her by the seamless shell of her suit as she drifts in space, safe. A sniff over the open channel is most likely Tilly, holding back misery as she works on the sensors, the silence speaking of the conclusions they’re all coming to.
Adrift in the abrupt calm after a battle that Michael’s suit informs her ended over nine hundred years ago – something off about the numbers but she’s too distracted to process exactly what – they’re quiet because they’re coming to terms with a more final goodbye than the one they’d said an hour ago.
It’s been the longest of days in every possible sense and Michael has said final goodbyes to almost everyone she’s ever loved. Some of them more than once.
To hell with the entire universe if it’s forcing her to say it this time. She's done with having faith.
‘Commander Burnham, what are you doing?’ Saru sounds sharp in the new, pushy way he’s grown into since his vahar’ai but she’s the one with the fancy flying suit and they can’t stop her. At least – she’s pretty sure transporters will still be offline or this is going to be an embarrassingly short rescue attempt. ‘We’re still reading no life signs and if that torpedo happens to blow, it will take out anything at close range.’
‘I know that, Saru.’ Michael maintains her new course, avoiding the drifting shuttle wreckage and watching unfamiliar constellations blurring into streaks as the bulk of the ruined Enterprise looms before her. Flying the suit is nothing like flying an ordinary EVA with boosters, not when the suit controls are so responsive it almost feels like an extension of her own being, as if she’d grown an exoskeleton and branched wings from her own bones.
The comparison to how it might feel to be invaded by Control’s nanobots is...unnerving, but she’s learning to fly true and on course, and she’ll take the discomfort if it means she can reach the Enterprise in time.
‘He’ll have made it out, Michael.’ (Of course it’s Tilly who’s worked it out, Tilly who’d probably be forming a cheering squad if she wasn’t on duty. Saying goodbye isn’t something any of them can do here, either, it would seem.) ‘He had at least five minutes to make it. Well, close to five. Minimum four. That’s plenty; I’ve seen him jogging on deck three before beta shift and he’s no slouch.’
‘He’d want me to be sure.’
‘He’d want you to be safe. Don’t do anything rash, Michael.’
That’s Spock over the comm, finally making it back to the bridge from Engineering, unharmed by the battle and that particular worry unclenches in Michael’s chest. He’ll be wearing that eyebrow tilt Michael taught herself to copy in the mirror as a child, his concern boxed neatly away unless you knew him well – but she knew him once, and the past few weeks have been a brutal learning curve for them both. He came with her here to this unknown space and time, left himself as orphaned as Michael had been on nothing more than a wish not to abandon her to leap into the void alone.
He’s telling her now, in his Spock way, not to leave him to the same fate. This is a fool’s errand his tone says, even as he adds, ‘He will be exceedingly aggravating if I am to report back one day that we lost you because you believed him incapable of surviving without your assistance.’
‘He is the most capable person that I know,’ Michael replies. The gaping wound in the Enterprise is right there in front of her now, half-shadowed from the ship’s flickering emergency lights, the torpedo lodged incongruously out like an old-time sailing mast. ‘But I also know it’s not in him to leave anyone behind, which is why I know he would not have left until one hundred percent of the crew was safe regardless of the danger to himself.’
The comm falls silent but Michael knows it’s acknowledgment, not rebuke. All of them want – no, need, to be sure and the arguments weren’t dissent, only filling the silence with white noise while they ran the possibilities to arrive at a solution. Familiar now, their worn-in ritual of how they work together; what they’d lived through was worth a hundred lifetimes as a crew before they ever travelled nine centuries together. Perhaps Pike became their touchstone but they went through the fire before, hand in hand, and came out tempered like fine steel.
Pride, and not a small amount of amazement, shivers warm down Michael’s spine. They’re so good together,the best of Starfleet and they came with her. In a less kind universe, she could be doing this alone. If she’s looking for faith in anything, she knows with certainty down to her depths: she has faith in them.
None of us would leave a Starfleet brother or sister behind… sir.
Drifting to a halt beside the jagged wound in the Enterprise , her suit registers the faintest wisps of alteration in atmospheric readings; there’s barely any air escaping. Not because the hull is more secure than it looks, she knows, but because there’s no air left to escape. Panic starting to hammer like a trapped bird in her chest — eighty-eight, eighty-nine — she grabs for the nearest spar of metal in her way.
‘We- we’re getting a life sign. Michael there’s- no it’s gone, damn it. I’ll keep trying.’ There’s a thump over the comm that’s probably Tilly hitting the console in frustration, judging by the wet, desperate edge to her audible breathing.
Michael can hardly blame her; her own cheeks are still wet inside her helmet, nine centuries of grief still fresh. None of them have had any time to process the abrupt shift from chaotic battle to empty space, their own isolation from every backup and everything familiar. Anyone they save here, they’ll be doing it without Starfleet and that’s fine, she reminds herself, they’re good at winging the kind of dramatic rescues which had Starfleet counselors sending increasingly-frantic daily reminders about getting enough sleep and downtime ( each one universally ignored because honestly, saving all sentient life in the galaxy rates higher up the priority list than getting a solid eight hours).
Their biggest flaw as a crew at this point is probably that none of them deal well with inaction. Saving their captain right after arriving in the future could be the rallying cry they need.
Ninety...six. Ninety-seven.
Or he could be dead already and their welcome to the future will be a funeral. Michael wonders, with scientific detachment, how many times she can have her heart ripped out before it gives up entirely.
‘Tilly, any luck with the signal? ’ she asks to distract herself. She wrenches harder than necessary at the metal and stifles a yelp when a muscle in her back protests, drifts back slightly to weigh what she needs to do to create a Michael-sized gap with healthy wariness for the torpedo wedged precariously to her left. ‘Can you beam him out?’
‘There’s too much interference still, either from the wormhole or maybe the shifted hull plating – I can’t get a lock. If you can reach him, I can use the suit’s readouts as a beacon, it’s strong – but you’ll need to be right next to him.’
‘Noted.’ The suit’s gyros whine a protest as Michael tries, unsuccessfully, to shift another piece of hull plate. ‘Is he still on the bridge?’
‘It is hard to tell precisely with the damage but from your current position he is one deck above and to your left.’ That’s Saru’s voice and Michael spares a flicker of concern for Tilly before Spock clearly reads her silence with his damned insight, adds:
‘Ensign Tilly is on her way to the transporter room to see if she can refine the signal. You must hurry, Michael.’
Instead of starting a needless fight with do you want me to be safe or do you want me to hurry, Michael pauses to give the torpedo an assessing glance. The lights are dark, the display blank – it passed through Discovery’s Sphere-enhanced defensive shields which, she assumes, is why it hadn’t detonated on impact but rather slammed through the hull like a deadweight projectile.
It might reactivate, it might not. Regardless, she doesn’t have time to run a diagnostic and if it does detonate it’s unlikely she’ll have the time to regret her haste. Taking a firm grip on the torn hull plating, Michael braces herself and ignites her boosters.
The reinforced gloves of the suit bite half an inch deep into the metal and her shoulders threaten to dislocate but with a shudder she feels in her palms, the plate bends back on itself. Disengaging the power before she goes faceplate-first into the side of the ship and need rescuing herself – Spock’s I told you so face would be insufferable for the next nine centuries – Michael flips and wriggles into the gap she’s created, occasionally using the smooth side of the torpedo for balance as she slides into the dark.
Briefly she’s worried that she’ll rip the wings from the suit but almost before the thought has time to cross her mind, a proximity warning flashes up on the HUD and the curves of metal retract, folding into neat sweeps along her back like a bird going to ground.
It would be so easy to get addicted to programming this intuitive and she wonders, suddenly, how her mother coped – will cope? Damn time travel – with the loss of it.
Maybe when all this over she’ll get the chance to ask. She refuses to let her thoughts linger on the readout from when she’d first tumbled out the wormhole, the numbers that meant she won’t be getting an answer any time soon.
‘Life sign still intermittent.’ Spock’s voice, quiet and steady in her ear. They have a direct feed of the suit’s readouts; they must be watching her heart rate climb. ‘Twenty metres to your left and take the lift shaft up.’
‘Acknowledged.’ Michael frees her hand from a tangle of severed wiring and drags herself the last few inches through the torn hull. It’s pitch black without even the leftover running lights and starlight outside, internal gravity failed and she floats disoriented in the darkness, thudding gently against the side of the corridor before the suit’s exterior lights flick automatically on, a lifeline in the dark.
I love this suit.
The lights pan over buckled walls and empty corridor, broken access panels hanging down like a bizarre art installation but no bodies, no watching eyes in the shadows. She’s almost shaking with leftover adrenaline and the creeping, unfounded (most likely unfounded but don’t calculate probabilities, just don’t ) fear that she’ll turn to find Leland or unknown puppets of Control watching her from the dark. No one from Discovery would get to her in time to help. Best case scenario, she’d have time to shout for them to destroy the ship – including her – before Control escaped.
The only sound is the whir of the suit and her own breathing. Enterprise is entirely dead.
‘In another moment down went Alice after it,’ she murmurs as she orients herself, pushes left and making a point not to glance at anything that might be behind her. The words are half-rote as her skin prickles cold with terror, her own comfort pattern. ‘Never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.’
‘Can you repeat that?’ Detmer asks, confused, but Spock’s voice cuts over her.
‘Well, thought Alice to herself, after such a fall as this I shall think nothing of tumbling down-stairs. How brave they’ll all think me at home.’
In spite of the situation, Michael smiles. ‘I suspect even Alice might have thought something of it if she fell for as long as we have.’
‘While she lacked the requisite technological experience to predict falling almost a thousand years into the future, I believe she would have viewed the situation with the same logical application of action as you, Michael.’ Spock sounds supremely unconcerned by all the baffled stares he must be getting from the rest of the bridge crew by now, but her heart rate is slowing until she feels slightly less on the brink of a meltdown. ‘Lift shaft is ten metres in front of you. Please watch out for any disembodied cats.’
(‘Have they gone future space crazy?’ Detmer whispers.
‘If they have, I call dibs on tackling tall and pointy,’ Owo whispers back. ‘Michael’s more terrifying when she’s mad.’
‘I would be happy to provide practical evidence to support my own menace,’ Spock says dryly and stifled giggling over the comm makes Michael smile in spite of herself, the panic tamped down.)
The turbolift doors are ajar, bent askew by the buckle of the ship. It’s much easier to wrench them open than the external hull plating and Michael squeezes through as soon as the gap is wide enough, boosting herself upward probably too fast but no one’s mentioned the life sign for over a minute now and she’s trying not to imagine being a minute too late. When the doors marked Bridge flash up in the brightness from her helmet light she overcompensates on her flip this time and hits them hard enough to make her grunt as they dent outward.
‘Michael?’
‘I’m fine Spock, just oversteered. I’m on the bridge. Directions?’
‘Three metres to your left.’
Unexpected and out of breath, Tilly laughs over the comm. ‘Did you honestly just crash your one-of-a-kind time-suit? I guess you’re still in training wheels – ooo, when we have time we should set up some suit-driving practice for you, I can build you an obstacle course! Do you think racing stripes would improve or hinder the speed of time travel? Maybe if I synthesise a paint of LHC particles... and if there’s a way we could combine that with the spores to enhance your navigation in harmony with the network, you’d glow, do you want to glow Michael, just FYI the correct answer is yes.’
Michael’s riding the end of a nine-hundred-year-long stress high, forcing her way through the wreckage of Starfleet’s pride and joy flagship; the fact that she laughs at all, she decides, makes up for the fact that it trips out faintly hysterical.
‘Tilly, if you get the transporters working then you can paint me in all the glowing rainbow stripes you want.’
‘I’m holding you to that.’
She magnetises the suit’s boots to the deck for ease and seeks left, pushing aside a support beam with a groan of stressed metal. Everything is dark and cold and airless, the bright orange accents that reminded her of the graceful pillars of their house on Vulcan when she first stepped onto this bridge all charred to grey now and her panic starts to trip up again.
No one could survive this whispers that Philippa voice and this time Michael can’t quite silence it. There’s nothing here – nothing but a twisted mess of shattered consoles and bent hull in the tiny beams from the suit lights, everything silent.
‘You should be standing right in front of him, Michael.’
‘There’s nothing here.’ Michael’s voice pitches uncomfortably high. It’s been fifteen minutes since the air ran out; there’s nothing to suggest anyone has somehow survived on the bridge. If the sensors are wrong after all - ‘Are you sure I’m in the right place?’
‘Sure as sure.’ Tilly sounds firm in the way that means she’s forcing herself calm with data. ‘You should be able to reach out and touch him.’
All that’s in front of her is the side of the bridge, the smooth curve of alloy scratched by shattered screens. What used to be the ceiling is now a jagged latticework of support beams and wiring hanging around her, cold and still. The suit lights shine through it, unobstructed by anything larger than her handwidth; there’s nowhere he could be out of sight and still alive. Unless he’s somehow inside the wall-
Wait, the wall is curved – but outwards, interrupting the usual concave bridge circle with what could be a structural support or a quirk of the design, or-
‘Spock, does the Enterprise have a captain’s escape pod?’
‘No. The design meant that not all bridge crew pods could be accommodated and Captain Pike reassigned his pod to make up the shortfall. He insisted that he would make it to the nearest emergency bank, same as the rest of the crew.’ Spock’s pause is thoughtful, even over the comm. ‘Number One was... distressingly loud regarding her opinion of his self-preservation instincts at the time, so it is not implausible that she could have had one installed during the refit.’
Michael stares at the wall and yes, the curve is the right dimensions for a pod tube. When she pushes aside the hanging tangle of wiring that used to be the Engineering station, she finds the printed letters Cpt Emergency Pod.
If she ever makes it back to a time when Number One is still around, Michael is sending her on an all-expenses paid vacation to anywhere in the galaxy that she wants to go.
‘Spock, there is a pod but the outer hatch is closed.’ Michael misses any reply because she’s pushing aside more wiring, searching for the display panel and finding a red warning light, the only light left on the bridge other than from her suit. It’s blinking next to Deploy Failure.
‘The life sign is someone in the captain’s pod,’ she says, and catches herself before she can hope, ruthlessly forcing herself to be realistic. The sensors might be malfunctioning and the pod will be empty. Worst case scenario, it could be Leland.
Or- the captain would give his pod up in an instant to someone else if he thought it was necessary, and in the destruction of the ship he might not have noticed it failing to deploy before he escaped another way. He might be twenty minutes and almost a thousand years ago, taking a head count of the Enterprise crew and starting to worry when the bridge numbers came up short. It would be illogical to get ahead of herself.
She finds herself hoping illogically anyway.
‘It looks like it’s failed to launch with the others,’ she says. ‘I can’t see through the outer hatch.’
‘Can you open it? The system’s completely dead so I can’t hack it from here but the manual release should be to your right.’
Michael runs her gloved hands down the hatch, tracing the hairline crack where the hatch should open and trying to feel with her fingertips through the alloy of her suit. Where the manual release depression should be there’s only a dent, buckled against debris.
‘Tilly, I can’t reach the release handle. Could I hotwire it?’
‘No, escape pods are on isolated systems which sounded like a sensible safety precaution when I first learned it but now seems kind of dumb when the entire ship has no power and you can’t get inside the hatch to the secondary manual release inside the pod. Who puts a manual release inside anything anyway, honestly, if we ever get back I’m going to write a sternly worded evisceration to R&D.’ Tilly’s on a roll now, latching onto the problem in a way Michael knows is a distraction from what they’re all thinking; who’s inside. ‘You might be able to prise it open if there’s a gap, or if someone can get into a suit I can beam them to your location with a laser cutter.’
Michael tries and fails to get her fingertips into the hairline crack. ‘That would take too long – give me a second.’
Closing her glove into a fist, she draws it back and makes a few adjustments to strengthen the suit’s elbow joint for an impact, warnings flickering past on the display for her to ignore. She can’t risk using the boosters to hit too hard in case she drives pieces of the hatch into the pod itself but she only needs to get a hand inside for contact and Tilly can beam them – whoever’s inside – out.
Please don’t let me kill whoever is in there she silently asks because the damn universe owes her a favour and drives her fist into the hatch.
She breaks at least one finger on impact. Her suit’s readings blank red from the adrenaline spike and an involuntary cry escapes her gritted teeth, Spock’s measured alarm sharp over the comm but if she hesitates to listen then she risks being debilitated from the pain. Before she has time to register consciously how much it hurts, she hits the hatch again.
‘Michael.’ From the panicked volume, it’s not the first time Tilly’s said her name. ‘I thought Spock was making some incomprehensible Vulcan family in-joke about the cats but is something attacking you?! What-’
‘I’m fine, Tilly,’ Michael reassures, blinking dancing lights from her vision. There’ll be time to inconveniently pass out later; rescue first. ‘ Prying open the hatch now.’
Where she hit, the metal is bent inward enough around the join to leave a gap two fingers wide, just enough. With her non-pulverised hand, Michael gets a grip and yanks.
Protocols designed to assist search and research teams engage and the hatch locks release. Light spills out from the clear pod cover as the outer hatch slides back, light from a still-powered escape pod, one occupant. Michael’s thrown by an expanse of bare skin for a moment when she’s looking for a uniform, has to blink again to focus and catch her breath.
Captain Pike looks back at her from inside the pod and she didn’t know her heart could backflip in her chest but that’s how it feels, all her insides gone more weightless than can be accounted for by the lack of gravity. He’s here and he’s-
He’s suffocating.
She catalogues with the rapid detachment of necessity. Too pale, eyes half-lidded, hazy, his mouth wide as he gasps for oxygen that isn’t there. He’s also shirtless, bare chest so incongruous that Michael flounders for a moment – is this a trick of Control’s and not the captain at all? – before she sees the crack running the length of the pod’s clear shell, gaping to a jagged, fist-sized hole stuffed with a bundle of gold fabric. Pike has one hand pressed to hold it in place but it’s hardly airtight and her suit’s external sensors are delivering specs and damage reports almost as fast as her own assessment.
During the failed launch, the pod shell cracked and trapped him in a pocket of fast-depleting air. He’d been slowly suffocating without any reasonable hope of rescue and he’d still plugged the hole, tried desperately to stay alive as long as he could.
Breathing as a final defiant act. Of course.
‘Captain?’ she tries before his eyes slide past her and she realises he can’t hear her, can’t see through the mirrored faceplate of her helmet. She can see him all too well, the grey tinge to his lips and short, rapid heave of his chest as he struggles to breathe.
Hypoxia, the suit’s wrist readout suggests – unhelpfully because she knows, mentally running over potential outcomes for ten minutes already. The pod kept him alive as the rest of the Enterprise’s systems died but now it’s in her way.
‘Tilly can you get a lock yet?’
‘No, he’s not wearing a comm’ - probably because he’s not wearing a shirt to attach it to but she’s really not up to announcing that to the entire bridge - ‘and the signal’s still flickering, we might only end up with bits of him which, ew. If you can touch him, the sensors in the suit gloves will get us a life sign reading and I can use that to enhance the pattern. Is it-’ Tilly rushes the last without pausing for breath and stumbles. ‘Never mind, we have to save them anyway, it shouldn’t matter.’
‘It’s Captain Pike,’ Michael confirms and tunes out Tilly having emotions at her over the comm as a concern for later as she assesses the problem.
Escape pods were made of the strongest single-layered fabrics known to Starfleet, in the expectation that they might be launched into debris or combat situations; it’s unlucky for the transparent aluminum of this one to have cracked. It also means Michael isn’t going to be punching her way through it no matter how many fingers she sacrifices.
It’s fortunate then that she doesn’t need to. With her good hand Michael raps gently on the pod to catch the captain’s attention, waits for the flash of blue her way and points at the hole he’s holding shut. Aware he can’t see her exaggerated mouthing of the words through the suit faceplate, instead she points to him, then herself, and closes her hand in his eyeline to mime touch.
Those blue eyes blink, unfocused and slide shut, dammit. Michael knocks on the pod shell again, harder.
‘Captain, I need to touch you,’ she says out loud and Tilly makes a startled choking sound over the comm. ‘Tilly, are you okay? Was that you getting a lock?’
‘No- no, that was just many, many weeks of stifling the urge to comment on certain people having intense eye-contact make-out sessions across the bridge and in the turbolift and over lunch every single day all coming back at once to smack me upside the head with my own restraint, nevermind I just – oh my god I think I’m high on panic please never tell him I said any of this after you save his life, please save his life so I can be embarrassed about this instead of emotionally destroyed, I’m going to- shut up now and let you do your Michael-the-hero thing. Sorry.’
Michael’s pretty sure the half-stifled snort she hears over the comm is laughter, and she’s also pretty sure it’s Detmer but only because Spock doesn’t laugh.
At least none of them can see her blushing.
‘Tilly,’ she says evenly as she waves to catch Pike’s attention, pointing more insistently at the bunched shirt to no effect. ‘When this is over, I’m going to recommend a new module for the Command Training Programme covering the penalties for starting unfounded rumours about superior officers. Up to and including my rights as the injured party to hide Lycosian tarantulas in your bed.’
‘Eh, I haven’t handed in my assignments for almost a thousand years so I’m pretty sure I’ve flunked out anyway and I’ll just skip that one. Also aren’t you like, scared of spiders?’
Michael gives up trying to attract the captain’s attention and starts pushing at the bunched fabric blocking the hole instead, trying to force his hand to move away. ‘Fear of non-poisonous arachnids that are much smaller and more fragile than I am would be illogical.’
‘That’s not a no.’
‘That is because she is indeed scared of spiders.’ Spock’s tone has the lilt that means he’s exasperated; he’s not had enough exposure to Tilly to appreciate how often her stream-of-consciousness talk can lead to a solution or, Michael’s observed, calm everyone down enough to make reasonable decisions. It’s going to make one hell of a captain’s style.
If they ever make it back to a time that needs Starfleet captains that is.
‘Thanks Spock,’ she says, letting her tone run dry. ‘Expose all my weaknesses.’
‘I must make the most of the few you have or you will never let me win an argument.’ It’s about as close as Spock ever gets to to a compliment and something warm blooms beneath Michael’s ribs, slowing her racing heart rate as surely as Tilly’s teasing. ‘Have you managed to break into the pod yet?’
‘He’s fighting me.’ Aware that all their nonsense talk is centred on keeping her calm while she saves the captain’s life, Michael presses harder against the shirt. Pike presses back to hold it in place, rolling his head side to side in what could be a silent no. He’s breathing shallower now, chest hitching and Michael mutters the Vulcan insults she saves for her worst moments under her breath, slams her palm flat to the pod in frustration. ‘Do you think he knows it’s me? Maybe he thinks I’m Control.’
‘It is possible he cannot recognise the suit, but he must realise you are attempting to provide assistance.’ Spock hesitates. ‘What else is he doing?’
‘Suffocating,’ Michael whispers. She lets her faceplate rest against the pod, pressing herself to the clear shell with her good hand flattened beside her to show that she’s unarmed. Pike’s eyes rove dizzily and then catch, something sharp there and gone in the depths as he stares at her directly for the first time. ‘It’s me,’ Michael whispers, knowing he can’t hear her; she’s never wished so hard to be from a telepathic species. ‘Captain, please.’
He blinks at her, leaning body-length and defenceless up against the pod. Sharpness flickers in blue again, something of her – their – captain surfacing through the haze and he swallows, mouth moving soundlessly around his gasps for air, but the shape of it is clear.
‘Michael?’
Michael nods too enthusiastically and winces when her helmet bounces off the pod. ‘Yes ,’ she answers, futile, and offers him a thumbs up instead. Can’t resist flicking her hand out after, fingers spread in an irritated gesture to imply obviously and even running out of air, lips blue, the corners of Pike’s mouth twitch up.
But when Michael reaches back toward the jagged hole in the pod, he shakes his head.
‘What?!’ Michael’s own rage, born of stress and exhaustion and the grinding agony of her broken hand, snaps. She hears Spock say ‘Michael?’ softly over the comm and doesn’t allow herself to care, slams her good palm hard against the pod again instead and watches Pike flinch at the impact. ‘I’m trying to help, why won’t you let me?'
He mouths something again. Michael swears to the higher power he believes in, if he’s saying goodbye then she’s going to claw her way through the aluminium regardless and drag him back to Discovery by her teeth if they’re the only things left unbroken when she’s done and she will never let him hear the end of it.
Barely aware of the fresh tears leaving wet tracks inside her helmet, she holds still to watch him – focusing on the smart, subtle mouth she’s spent months telling herself should be no more an object of fascination than anyone else’s, telling herself she only has reverence for the words he says because of the kind of captain he embodies, the best of Starfleet. Pretending the warmth that flares inside her when he smiles is nothing more than pride in her captain’s approval.
She gets so distracted by the curve of his mouth now, she misses what he says the first time. It’s… an S and… his lips meeting, a B? Sickbay?
Michael hits the pod again. ‘I’m trying to get you to Sickbay you muffle-headed son of a Tribble!’
Over the comm there’s a stunned pause before Tilly whispers:
‘Okay, do we try to intervene now or do we let her get some of that anger out by shouting first? Because I have to say I think I’m all tapped out on suicide missions for today.’
Michael wants to apologise, reassure them that she’s fine but Tilly’s told her countless times that she’s a terrible liar, and also she’s afraid that if she takes her attention from the captain he’ll pass out before she can understand his message. He’s waving his free hand weakly, apparently trying to indicate – her? The lower decks? She makes a helpless gesture in response but his eyes are flickering shut, the last spark of life fading as his hands-
As his hands drop to his sides, shirt falling away from the hole in the pod with a hiss as the last air escapes. Michael hears her own breath choke on a sob as she jams her fist through, ignoring the jagged aluminum scratching on the suit alloy as finally, she presses her gloved hand to Pike’s chest.
‘Oh my god I’ve- I’ve got a lock, Michael don’t move!’
‘Hurry,’ Michael says numbly. Resting her gaze on the captain’s still face, she searches in vain for the elusive, gleaming spark that she catches herself thinking of sometimes, in quiet moments going over briefings, or when he’s tired at the end of a shift with his shoulders slumped slightly, still making the effort to listen to every word her reports, as Chris.
There’s nothing, his chest still beneath her gloved palm. She can’t even feel his heart beating through the thick alloy of the suit. Panic bunches in her throat like a scream working to come out, voiceless denial; they can’t be too late, she refuses.
‘Tilly-’
Even as Tilly’s tumble of reassurance crackles over the comm, Michael feels the stir of the transporter. She’s lost count of how many times they’ve done this now, relied on the other to save them as the universe threatened to come apart; for every time she’s caught him in an asteroid field, he’s come back for her in a rain of falling debris and Red Angel light. She just has time to wonder if they’d have achieved the same mutual trust if he’d been her captain without the constant terror of imminent death – it would’ve been nice to have less of that – and then she’s rematerialising to Tilly’s pale, determined face over at the transporter console, Discovery’s familiar lines coming into focus around her.
Home, she thinks, just time to acknowledge her own wash of relief before her body’s moving for her, lunging on instinct to catch Pike as he crumples without the pod to hold him up.
Forgetting, Michael reaches with both hands and can’t bite back a scream when his weight hits her broken fingers. She drops to her knees with him still, heavy against her chest; without the suit’s reinforced joints they’d both be flat on the deck and she locks her shoulders, dizzy from the jolt of pain every time the bones in her hand grind together wrong. Detecting a breathable atmosphere the suit’s helmet retracts at least and suddenly she’s gone from Pike trapped at untouchable arms-length to indecorously close, her face buried in hair that smells of ozone and smoke and faintly beneath it all, the standard issue Starfleet shampoo.
That last makes her wonder, wild with panic, when in the last few days of fear and desperation and terrible goodbyes he found time for a shower. If he’d taken deep breaths in his like she had in hers, the last time before Control caught up with them, leaning into the slick side of the stall and trying to stop feeling like she was falling against her will, hands grasping uselessly on nothing.
They’re full now – although she would never have pictured this even if she’d dared to believe they’d survive Control. He’s slumped, unconscious (at least she hopes it’s only unconscious) and the weight and the brush of his hair is a flashback back to Terralysium, body memory a confusion that has her shifting to accommodate a phaser blast to the chest that isn’t there.
(The phantom pain of being so sure she’d failed, again, still is. He’d just survived a five year mission and then almost died twice in the first few days of knowing her; she’d tried hard not to think the word cursed because it’s superstitious impracticality, but if two is a coincidence then three is a pattern. It only takes so many Starfleet captains dying in unusual circumstances before everyone, including her, starts looking askance at the common denominator.
Please don’t let me be cursed.)
‘Michael.’ There’s hands tugging at her, jolting her back to the transporter pad. All her muscles tense automatically but it’s only Stamets, familiar blur of pale hair and soft pleading at the peripheral of her awareness. ‘You can untense from all that fight or flight now, we’ve got you. It’s okay.’
Michael tries to relax and discovers that she can’t remember how. It’s been hours since the battle against Control started and she’s feeling every one of those centuries travelled; her whole body feels knotted with the urge to keep fighting. If she lets go of the captain, she’ll have to face their new reality.
She’ll have to face what it means if unconscious is actually something worse and she can’t.
And then Philippa is there, sporting a truly impressive black eye and split lip, but still a calm anchor in Michael’s line of sight. Her grip is firm on Michael’s shoulder, bracing without pulling, drawing her focus.
‘As much as I would like to take over command of Discovery,’ she says, ‘I fear there may be many tiresome objections raised and it has been a long day so, this once, I would prefer for you to let go so we may help him breathe. Michael. Let go.’
Michael’s refused orders given in that steady voice once and almost brought down Starfleet; the necessity of obeying now is ingrained to her core. Her arms loosen and other hands draw Pike away, his hair brushing soft across her cheek before he’s gone; all she’s left with are glimpses through the flurry of activity as they set him gently down on the deck; Dr Pollard with an oxygen mask, Stamets hovering and Rhys snapping at him to be less of a mother hen and help, Saru’s voice over the comm requesting an update that she’s too dizzy to hear if anyone answers. The efficient motions of Michael’s found family all concentrated on the captain, lying motionless and silent on the deck.
She tries to take comfort in their competence, all focused on making sure he lives. Tries to remember that she has faith in them.
But he’s so still. His eyes are closed and the lips that she knows in smiles and pensive curls, tight around fair reprimands when she’s done something more reckless than usual, are colourless behind the oxygen mask. She can’t take her eyes off his mouth, the mouth that she’d watched form her own name through the pod and try to tell her-
‘Michael!’
Tilly’s hug is half-tackle, half-yelp as she bruises an elbow on the suit. Michael spares a flicker of amusement for the startled flinch back from Philippa as if the overspill of feelings might be contagious.
‘You did it you know,’ Tilly says into her shoulder, ‘we’re in the future! Almost exactly where we wanted to be although maybe we misplaced a digit somewhere in the math – oh!’ She pulls back, suddenly all gleaming eyes and professional curiosity as she snaps a tricorder from her belt. ‘Are you okay, did you have any problems in the wormhole? Any disorientation or dizziness, shortness of-’
The tricorder beeps and – breaking about six Starfleet care of equipment protocols – she shakes it as if that might correct the readout she’s staring at.
‘Michael,’ she breathes, wide-eyed. ‘Your hand.’
Over her shoulder Michael hears Dr Pollard say quietly, dropped like a stone into a calm, clear lake, ‘If we can’t get him out of respiratory arrest now it won’t matter if he’s in Sickbay or not, so get out of my way Mr Stamets,’ and all the pieces Michael’s been puzzling over come together.
‘Tilly you need to beam me back to the Enterprise right now.’
‘No!’ Tilly and Philippa snap in chorus and any other time, the mutually appalled look they exchange at being in agreement on anything would be funny. Surprisingly it’s Tilly who wins the battle of glares to say,
‘That’s nonsense talk Michael, you’ve fractured half the bones in your left hand and there’s no one there, okay? We’re not picking up any more life signs.’
Michael’s already leaning back, fumbling to reactivate her helmet. ‘You wouldn’t pick them up if they were in Sickbay.’
‘Of course we would, we couldn’t lock onto the captain in that damn pod but we could see you both clear as fireflies on the sensors, there’s no reason for Sickbay to be-’
Mid-sentence, Tilly pauses with her mouth open on an oh of realisation, staring at Michael. ‘No reason...unless they activated that super fancy new emergency shielding to protect Sickbay in case of being boarded, we got a memo about it last month so they’ll have had it installed during the refit but I read it, I remember – it’s on a separate circuit like the pods so it might still be active oh my god, we won’t know if they even have life support, we need-’
She’s already up, working the problem as she sprints back to the console and pushes Rhys out of the way. ‘ Sorry, not sorry – Michael, I can beam you right outside Sickbay doors but we’ll need a captain’s code to open them if they’re on the emergency routine, is Captain Pike-’
‘Working on it,’ Dr Pollard snaps, voice tight.
‘We don’t need a code,’ Philippa says. Her hand is tucked at the small of Michael’s back, holding her up out of sight of the others, as if needing support even now might be taken as a weakness. Circling the adrenaline crash and exhaustion, Michael can’t find it in herself to resent the subterfuge.
Still, trust is a different question. ‘If you’re planning to use a Section 31 code to get in, that’s probably a bad idea. They might think we’re Control.’
Around the puffiness of the bruising, Philippa favours her with the look of uniquely Terran disappointment that says she expects better of Michael’s intelligence.
‘We don’t need a code when we have this.’ She lifts the laser cutter in her hand – a hand already gloved in an ordinary spacesuit Michael realises and startled, hears the clear echo of Tilly saying If someone can get in a suit, I can beam them over with a laser cutter.
‘...You were coming to help me,’ she says, slow with amazement. The memory of the argument they’d had nine centuries ago is still a bitterness beneath it – but they won the fight and they made it here, and the bruising on Philippa’s face indicates that she almost hadn’t. If Michael’s last words to her had been those, offered in an anger born of fear...there’s been so many chances she’s missed up until now. She needs to be better at not throwing them away. ‘After everything you said about letting yourself be exploited by others? After everything I said to you.’
Philippa drops whiplash-fast into the expression of superiority that’s her default fallback whenever Michael catches her tripping accidentally into caring.
‘We had an unfinished conversation to revisit,’ she says, tone almost bored. ‘I could hardly allow you to throw your life away on tragic heroics erroneously believing that you had had the last word. I have standards to uphold.’
(‘Pulse stablilising,’ Dr Pollard murmurs. ‘We might be safe to move him to Sickbay.’)
Michael smiles. ‘Apology accepted.’
‘I have nothing to apologise for-’
‘Tilly,’ Michael calls and struggles to her feet, ignoring Philippa’s irritated huff as she stands beside her. ‘Put us as close to Sickbay as you can and prep for incoming injured, we don’t know how many there could be. Energize.’
Occupied with Tilly's shouted order to use the laser cutter this time not your damn hand, Michael and already thinking ahead, focused on the rescue mission, it's only at last second as Discovery fades into the blur of the transporter that Michael gives in to the whispering insistence of her heart and looks down.
And briefly, half-lidded and beautifully looking back, she sees a flicker of blue.