As if it wasn’t ghastly enough to blast a fifty-year-old starship across the galaxy at emergency speeds, this one sounded like it was haunted, too.

There was a whimper and a sharp intake of breath.  It was the sound of something clutching at a cliff’s edge, clawing through the barrier between life and death.

She almost didn’t hear it at first through all the commotion.

Sickay roiled with the bewildering disarray of a mass casualty event.  Medical officers in blue and teal uniforms scurried across the intensive care ward with all the tenacity of ants protecting their colony.  The staccato call of orders was drowned out by the desperate groans of patients gasping for their next breaths.  Or their last.

Ensign Tress Trojet could only turn her back on sickbay because she was a medical student.  Legally, her wrists should have been manacled for all the medicine she was allowed to practice independently.  That was how she rationalised it, at least, when she searched a darkened corridor for the source of the muffled sound.

Trojet lied to herself: It wasn’t curiosity overriding all other reason, all other sense.  No, she had made this choice because she was a patient advocate.  If the whimpering was a patient rather than a ghost, they might have become lost and need a helping hand.  More rationalisation, of course.  Quarantine fields restrained all the patients to protect the medical staff as much as the patients.

The overhead lights flickered on as Trojet passed the windows outside the medical chief’s office.  The indigo carpet swallowed the sound of each bootfall.  She understood that to maintain the ship’s emergency speed of warp 9.6, non-essential systems had been shut down.  As an ambulance ship attached to the hospital, the USS Edmund Hillary didn’t even have a chief medical officer.  The Challenger-class cruiser was hardly crewed by a skeleton staff at the best of times.  No one had any reason to be in there.

A voice drifted out of the office.  The tone was vaguely masculine, but the cadence sounded more like an ancient robot trapped in a logic spiral.

“I don’t– I don’t– I don’t–” it gasped.  

Trojet followed the noise.  She took one tentative step into the office and then caught herself.  Impassive at the aperture, she grasped the doorframe and scanned the room.  Her gaze landed on the gangly limbs of Ensign Elyas Sark, huddled beneath the wooden desk.  He had made himself small, clutching his knees to his chest.

Sark looked paler than usual, like he was sick.  His wide cheekbones and angular chin emphasized his silent snarl.  His dark eyes, which seemed big enough to take up half his face, glared toward her.  The brown pools of his irises were overfilled with disdain.  Now, that was a look she had seen before.

“How can you stand it?  How are you still standing?” Sark asked her.  Even at a whisper, the words roiled out of him with disgust.  

“Standing what?  You didn’t mention any compromised seals in your environmental suit on the planet,” Trojet said, shaking her head.  Her first instinct was to search for clues and solve the problem.  Her very, very first instinct.  Even as she said it, she crossed her left arm over her chest, gripping her right elbow.  Her chest tightened.

She asked him, “Are you feeling ill?”

His eyes widened at that question, and he rocked back slightly.  His nostrils flared.

“I hurt inside,” he scoffed at her.  “Why don’t you?”

Without thinking, Trojet took half a step back from Sark.  Chest pain wasn’t a typical symptom of Cartalian fever, but the symptoms among the Edmund Hillary’s patients didn’t entirely fit the expected profile either.

“Where does it hurt, Sark?” she asked.

The more she studied his eyes, the more she could recognise that Sark wasn’t looking at her.  Not really looking at her.  He looked like he was remembering.  As a Trill, Trojet knew what that looked like.  Memory was currency; memory was mythology where she grew up.

Sark asked, “Was that even real?  We live in the Federation, don’t we?”

In an effort to close the distance between them, Trojet kneeled on the carpet with him.  She left space between them but met his eyes on the same plane.  With that haunted look in his eyes, Sark looked so much like her brother when he’d been in the hospital.

“…Sark?” she asked, strategically using his name again, hoping to rouse him.

The tautness of his face went slack.  He dropped his chin to his knees.

Sark sighed like he was releasing a demon.  “I’ve never seen anything like that.  The medical clinic on Sora Major.  Patients sleeping in the hallways, corpses filling their shuttle bay.  We’re not supposed to treat people like that.  We don’t treat animals like that.”

Sora Major.  Patients.  Corpses.  Trojet replayed their conversation in her head, reshuffling the new context into place.  Sark was talking about the moon colony where they had rescued their patients, which meant she could devise a treatment plan.  She had an anecdotal analgesic at the ready.

“It happened too fast, Sark,” Trojet offered, lowering her voice into a soothing timbre.  “By the time they understood the spread of the Cartalian fever, half of their medical staff was already infected.”  –Her voice went harder, and she sat back on her heels– “The Jem’Hadar destroyed the colony’s hospital.  Those clinics were never designed to support the entire population.  So that’s what we’re here for.  That’s why we’re Starfleet.”

Sark glared down at his hands, balled into fists.

“Why is this happening?  This shouldn’t be happening,” Sark said insistently.  “I scraped my knee on the academy track that time.  The blood didn’t faze me.  Not even my own blood.  I should have been able to– Does this– Does this mean I can’t be a doctor?”

Instantly, Trojet held still.  She took care not to change her expression; she didn’t want a single microexpression to suggest she was taking humour from his question, nor that she was dismissing his fear.  But its weight was too much.  The pressure of creating a safe space for Sark was too much to carry.

She blinked.

“Sark, I want you to close your eyes,” she said.  “Take a breath, take a deep breath, and think back to your perfect day.  One of those days where the temperature feels just right and the dappled sunlight feels like–“

Trojet heard Lieutenant Commander Elegy Weld call for her from the intensive care ward, and she softly gasped.  He didn’t say her name exactly, but she quickly understood what he meant.

“Medical students!” Weld shouted. “Where are my medical students? I’m certain I brought a couple members from Cygni Squadron to observe…?”  He sounded genuinely befuddled as if they were spare tricorders left behind in a drawer somewhere.

Keeping her gaze on Sark, Trojet asked, “Are you ready to face them again?”

Sark opened one eye.

“Not ever,” he said, but he found the strength to get to his feet anyway.  

Rising to his full height –almost a whole foot taller than her– Sark only slowed him down a little when he bumped his head on the edge of the desk.  He grunted and rubbed his head.  When he lowered that hand, Trojet clasped the back of his hand and squeezed it.  She didn’t know what else to say.  She just nodded at him and tugged him into the corridor.

Feeling the sweat in her palm, Trojet dreaded the thought of artificially expanding this moment between them.  They weren’t really friends.  They were classmates with a scant few weeks of shared history.  Trojet let Sark’s hand slip from her own, and she trusted he would be right behind her.  She hurried into the intensive care ward.  Within the first dozen steps she took, Trojet mentally prepared two potential excuses for why she hadn’t been observing Doctor Weld’s ministration.  One was more flattering, and the other relied on self-deprecating humour.  Being so new to Cygni Squadron, she hadn’t yet learned which one would resonate most strongly with Weld.

It proved moot in either case.

“We’ve stabilised those patients,” Weld said to her.  Stabbing through the air, he pointed out two anti-grav gurneys hovering beyond the rows of biobeds.  “Get them down to the docking port.  As soon as we dock with Caleum Station, you run them to the hospital as fast as your legs can carry you.  Understood?”

“Aye, doctor,” Trojet chirped.

At the same time, she heard Sark say, “Uh, yeah,” but she had projected her voice far louder.

After jogging across Sickbay and getting a grip on the handlebar across the foot of the gurney, Trojet gently pushed it toward the exit.  The way she jostled the gurney, a flash of blue hexagons lit up over the patient, confirming the quarantine field still protected her from the patient’s infection.

Another flash of light snatched her attention.  Through a wide viewport, the streaking light of warp travel flared out, as the Edmund Hillary dropped to impulse speed.  The silhouette of Caelum Station hung in space.  As the newest annex for Starfleet Medical, the space station was newly home to a teaching hospital and medical school.  Like most Jupiter-class stations, Caelum was an assembly of saucer-shaped modules in two stacks of three atop reactor spires.  Bridges and solar panel arrays strung the modules together.  There was something distinctive about the lustre of the hull panels on Caelum Station: it looked an even duller shade of grey than most Starfleet starships.

Dragging an anti-grav gurney behind him with one hand, Sark nodded at Caelum Station, as it appeared larger and larger through the viewport.

“Y’know, when I applied to medical school,” he said dryly, “I assumed I’d finally make it to Earth.  Study at Starfleet Medical headquarters.  Try the local cuisine.  Get a tan.  No one told me I could end up in a refurbished space station in the ass-end of Deneb.”

Trojet squinted at Sark.  “I didn’t much care about getting to Earth.  All I wanted was to get out of Deneb Sector.”

“What does that mean?” he asked.

Smirking at Sark, Trojet shook her head at him.

“We better hurry,” she said, pushing her patient’s gurney into the corridor.  “You don’t think we’ll get demerits for missing pharmacology class, do you?”

“Nah,” Sark replied, chasing after her.  “We can forge a note from Doctor Weld.”