Starship Castaways

For God's sake, let the rest of us take it from here!"

Mitch Dufrain was a huge man, tall and solid and broad of torso without carrying a gram of flabbiness in the process. Lifting Irina up and carrying her off her bridge would be the easiest thing in the universe for him, and he would do it gently, too.

Nevertheless the idea of being moved was about the only thing left in the universe that could horrify her now. Pappaniku locked gazes with him, and she grimaced because shaking her head was an almost equally bad idea. "No!" she grated, as the powerful analgesics already in her bloodstream began giving way to pain again. Mitch was right; if she took enough to push the agony back one more time, it would also be enough to send her over the edge into unconsciousness.

She was going there soon enough anyway, and for that relief she wouldn't need pharmaceuticals. Nor would she return from it...so wasting these final moments of awareness was unthinkable. They were difficult, but they were also incalculably precious.

"Mitch, in 30 minutes I'll be gone. You know that as well as I know it," she said, gathering herself physically while her mind grew preternaturally clear. "I don't want everyone walking into the ready room to find me, or what's left of me, lying on that couch. I want them to find you waiting for them, in command and ready to take their reports and put together a plan. I'm dead already-I knew I was about two minutes after I got hit. I'm counting on you to pull the people together now and keep them together, and get them to someplace where they can survive. Understood?"

He opened his mouth to argue. She stared at him without flinching, now truly using the last of her strength and thinking it well invested when he closed his lips again, set his jaw, and nodded.

He did understand. He was accepting the charge she'd given him.

It was enough. She could rest now.

Irina Pappaniku closed her eyes for the last time, and let the darkness take her.

* * *

"Where's the captain?" It was Rilla Lansing who wanted to know that first, of course. Rilla had been one of Irina Pappaniku's closest friends.

Mitchell Dufrain looked at each of the half-dozen other people who were occupying the casual seating (several comfortable chairs and a sofa) in the Archangel's ready room. He knew he ought to be sitting behind the captain's desk, but he couldn't manage that yet. So he was in the guest chair in front of that desk instead, with the chair swiveled on its base so that he could face his department heads and deck bosses.

They'd lost sickbay and they'd lost the hangar deck, both completely, so there were two fewer people here than there ought to be. One of those attending this meeting was a substitute, because the ship's chief tactical officer had arrived wounded in sickbay just before a shot that Dufrain devoutly hoped even a clan ship hadn't aimed for the medical facility struck there anyway.

Still, he had a better representation of the ship's leaders than he'd any right to hope for considering their desperate situation. The ones who were still alive were even whole (so far) in the physical sense, relatively speaking.