Chapter Text
“I navigate with that!” Tobias objected loudly.
“You navigate with it wrongly,” Alex－ Aximili countered.
“I have out-flown innumerable patrol boats! I’ve swung around stars and navigated my way through gas giants. With. This. System!” Tobias snarled.
“Wrongly,” Ax countered.
At that, the bridge airlock behind them rumbled open, revealing a thoroughly annoyed Jake. “Do I have to separate you two?” he demanded. “I can hear you with the airlock closed!”
Tobias quirked an eyebrow at him. “Are you kidding?” he demanded. “We’re making amazing progress on this piece of shit.” He tapped the control board to emphasize his point.
Jake wanted to argue. He really did. Unfortunately, he had no idea what he was arguing. “Just… less loud,” he floundered, shaking his head and heading back into the galley, where Marco was emerging from the shuttle bay.
“Oh, hey,” he greeted. “Got an ETA yet?”
“We’ll be in Misery Bay in about four days,” Jake said.
“Oh, Misery Bay?” Marco laughed. “Right, I’m sure I’ll be able to find plenty of clientele in Misery Bay.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jake said, rolling his eyes. “We’ll drop you off on the planet before heading to the moon. It’s a little extra fuel to do that, though, so…”
“Are you asking me for money?” Marco demanded. “Really? After how much I dumped into the whole Tom thing?”
“And I am so very… kind of grateful for that,” Jake said, grimacing. He rubbed at his nose nervously. “But uh… Thing is… If we don’t refill about… sixty more fuel cells on landing, then we’ll be on fumes before the job’s even over.”
“Won’t Cassie and Tobias let you be late on the paychecks?” Marco asked.
Jake rubbed his nose again and glanced aside. “I, uh… I already am,” he admitted.
Marco rolled his eyes and turned to head back to his shuttle. “I’ll see what I can do, but it means I pick the next location.”
“Sure,” Jake agreed. “So long as it doesn’t touch Core.”
Marco spun back toward him. “Jake, I am a business, not a charity!”
“And that business is currently flirting with some extreme illegality,” Jake said, gesturing in the general direction of the infirmary. “Look, it’s not forever. We’ll go back to our regular routes when the Alliance is off our back.”
Marco snorted bitterly. “When the Alliance is off our back,” he repeated. “So any day now, then?”
“You really wanna go to the core?” Jake challenged.
Marco deflated slightly, shaking his head. “I’m just frustrated, man,” he said, spreading his hands.
“We all are,” said Jake. “We’ll make it work. We always do.”
Marco nodded. “Yeah, sure.” He started back to his shuttle again. “I’ll see what I can dig out of my accounts. It may work better for either me or Fox to take an extra job,” he said.
Jake frowned. “Don’t bring Fox in if we don’t need ’em,” he warned. “The last thing we need is to give the Alliance more ammunition.”
Marco nodded again and waved a hand dismissively before disappearing through the shuttle bay airlock. Jake sighed and headed down toward the infirmary. He was surprised to see Rachel depositing her guns in the barrel at the other side of the door. “I didn’t know you ever checked on him,” Jake said, removing his gun belt and dropping it into the barrel on his side.
“I’m here for aspirin,” she grunted, crossing her arms defensively.
Jake rolled his eyes. “Okay, sure,” he said. Glaring at him, Rachel pushed her way into the infirmary, heading toward the far cabinets.
Entering after her, Jake stopped in his tracks, realizing immediately what was missing from the scene: Tom. “Rachel!” he hissed, and she turned, curiously. Then, her eyes widened, and she reached for a gun that wasn’t there. That was when he felt the all too familiar feeling of a pistol barrel pushing at the back of his head.
Slowly, Jake put up his hands and turned around to face his brother. Tom was breathing heavily and sweating, holding himself up against the wall. His gun hand was trembling slightly, but not enough to give Jake any confidence in an advantage. “Tom…” Jake whispered as Rachel eased toward the door, but Tom simply swung out his left hand, revealing a second gun, and Rachel decided to stay where she was. “Tom, please…”
Tom stared at him stonily and opened his mouth. He swallowed a couple deep breaths, then said “I…”
Jake and Rachel exchanged quick glances of panic and confusion. “Tom?” she asked.
“I… Ident…” he pushed out, wincing as though it hurt to dig the words out. “I… dent.”
Jake raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking for my ident card?” he asked.
“God, we’re being held at gunpoint by a broken brain,” Rachel whined, and Jake glared at her.
Tom’s head thudded back against the wall, and he blinked rapidly, appearing dizzy and confused. Ignoring that he was holding Jake at gunpoint, he started to press his right hand to his temple. Jake immediately moved forward to capture the gun, but Tom was faster. He aimed and shot.
A bottle behind Jake exploded in shards of glass, spilling liquid across the counter, and he jumped. At first, he thought that Tom had missed, but then Tom aimed again and shot the bottle next to it, immediately ducking out of the infirmary and pressing the exterior lock.
“Hey!” Rachel cried, running forward and slamming against the doors. It was no use. The exterior lock was a safety lock. They couldn’t leave until someone turned it off.
“Rachel,” Jake gasped, sinking to his knees. She turned to see that the two liquids had mixed and reacted, quickly filling the room with a cloudy gas. She ran to the exhaust fan but found that Tom had torn the controls out. “Well… shit.”
And then she, too, fell to the floor.
－ －
“I think that… is she usually glittery?”
“She inks her battle wounds.”
“... Ah.”
Sleepily, Rachel swatted at whoever the hell had the gall to be touching her. “Geddoffit,” she mumbled, trying to turn over in her bed, which resulted in a lot of shouting and many more hands on her, which was the opposite of what she'd wanted. “No no no!” she protested weakly.
“Rachel? Rachel, honey, I need you to wake up, okay?” Cassie’s voice. Someone was squeezing her hand, and immediately Rachel knew it was Tobias.
“Did somebody shoot me?” she slurred, trying to pry her eyes open.
“Not, quite,” said Tobias. “You’ve been drugged.”
“Booooo.”
“Urgngm,” someone mumbled to her far left. Jake, maybe? Rachel blinked up at the bright lights blearily, then turned to face the noise. Despite her vision still being fairly blurry, she could tell that Jake was trying to sit up on the other examination table, but Cassie and Marco had immediately rushed over to hold him down and talk to him. She was distracted from the view when Erek shone a penlight in her eyes. Groaning, she swatted at him until he left her again.
“I do think they’re recovering, but we can probably expect side effects for at least a day,” said Erek. “They should be returned to their rooms as soon as possible.”
“What side effects?” asked Marco.
“Uh… I have no idea,” Erek answered, wringing his hands.
“No one ever let me drink Rachel’s moonshine ever again,” Jake moaned, sitting up only enough to tuck his head between his legs.
Tobias rolled his eyes. “You were drugged,” he repeated.
“Is that not what I just said?”
“Hold on, what do you mean you don’t know?” Marco demanded.
Erek gestured to a screen on the wall. “Well, I know what the chemicals were. And I know what gas would be produced by mixing them. But… That shouldn’t have the effects I’m reading on Jake and Rachel. It should only be mild headaches, maybe some hallucinations if they’re given to that sort of thing.” He made a helpless motion. “It seems to be interacting with something else already in their system, but I’m having trouble isolating it.”
Cassie shook her head in disbelief. “Are you saying he poisoned them twice?” she demanded.
“No,” Jake murmured, shaking his head. “No no no.”
Erek was immediately at his side, one hand pinching his wrist and the other pressed against his chest. “Jake, do you remember what happened?” Erek asked.
“I… uh…” Jake floundered. “There was…” He raised his free hand to rub at his aching head.
“Do you remember being on the bridge with us?” Tobias asked.
Jake snapped his fingers and nodded. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “You and, uh, Acsimile… Askmil… Ax were arguing. I… I made you not be loud,” he slurred. “Then, I went to the infirmary… and… Rachel” He pointed at Rachel as though they wouldn’t immediately understand who that was, and Cassie clamped a hand over her mouth to keep from laughing. “Rachel was there. She, uh, she went in first. Then we saw Tom wasn’t there. Shoulda been. Behind me.” Jake gestured to the back of his head. “Had gun. One for her, too. Didn’t shoot us. Shot the…” Jake gestured to the counter where the chemicals had been. “The… things. Locked us in. They, uh, they made smoke.” He shook his head and rubbed his temples. “Don’t remember after that.”
“Where’s Tom?” Rachel asked, and Erek moved over to her to pinch her wrist. When he went to put a hand against her chest, however, she shoved him away.
“I need to measure your breaths,” he told her.
“I assure you that I’m breathing,” she growled. “Now, where is Tom?”
“I subdued him,” Marco said. “We drugged him, locked him in a room, and Aximili’s watching him now.”
“’Kay,” said Jake, laying back down on the exam table.
Cassie raised an eyebrow at that while Marco glowered. “Honey, you okay?” she asked.
“Shiny,” he mumbled.
“It’s not enough,” Rachel insisted. “This was premeditated. He’s obviously a lot more aware than we thought. He’s not only a set of triggers. He, himself, is against us.”
Marco rolled his eyes. “Rach, we put him in the room that you modified to hold him,” he said.
“Before this happened!” she insisted.
“Are we sure he’s not drunk?” Tobias asked, watching Jake skeptically. Jake had already gone back to sleep.
“They’re having opposing reactions to the drugs,” Erek said, removing his hand from Rachel’s wrist. “Where Rachel is hyper-alert, Jake is hyper-docile. Both have lowered inhibitions, but where Jake’s lowered inhibition means not caring, Rachel’s lowered inhibition means aggression.”
“I’ll show you aggression,” Rachel snapped.
“So basically she’s the mean drunk, and he’s the cuddly drunk,” Marco deciphered. “Anything we don’t know already?”
“Tom can talk,” Rachel said.
Everyone turned to her. Everyone but Jake, who was definitely asleep again. “What?” asked Tobias.
“He can talk,” she repeated. “He talked at us.”
“What did he say?” asked Erek.
“‘Ident’,” she told him.
Marco sighed in relief. “Yeah,” he said. “When I ran into him on that cruiser, during the war, he asked for my ident card. When I didn’t immediately comply, trying to talk to him instead, he threatened to kill me.”
“He must have been triggered after all,” said Cassie.
“Um, no,” Rachel said, hopping down off her exam table. “I told you, this was pre-meditated.”
“Right,” said Marco, “because he was programmed to pre-meditate it.”
“Listen here, slut-bucket!” Rachel started, advancing toward him, but Tobias grabbed her by the wrist to stop her. She immediately swung around to punch him, and he only barely dodged her fist.
Tobias grabbed the other wrist as well and glared at her. “Wow,” he snapped. “Just… wow. You are going to bed. Now.”
“You’re not the boss of me!” Rachel objected.
Cassie leaned in toward Erek. “Can you… um… give her something?” she asked. “Help her sleep this off?”
Erek shook his head. “Sorry, but I can’t risk an interaction until I know what they’ve been dosed with,” he said.
“Rachel, stop!” Tobias insisted as she thrashed in his arms.
Marco snapped his fingers. “Wait, I’ve got it,” he said, and he left Jake’s side and hurried out of the infirmary, to everyone’s confusion.
“Let me go!” Rachel insisted.
“Um, no,” Tobias growled. “Rachel stop it!”
“Um…” Cassie said uneasily. “Tobias, you need to…”
“Kinda busy,” Tobias grunted.
“But she’s－” Cassie was interrupted when Rachel elbowed Tobias hard in the gut. As he fell back, she turned and kicked him in the groin, the knee, and the chest in quick succession. “-- holding back,” Cassie finished.
Angrily, Rachel spun toward her. Luckily, that was the moment in which Marco chose to return with a wrench, which he used to hit her in the back of the head. She went down like a dropped brick.
For a moment, Cassie, Tobias, and Erek just stared down at her. Then, glaring, Erek demanded, “Really? Head trauma?”
Marco shrugged. “Well, it won’t have a drug interaction,” he said.