“I’ll have my team escort you back,” Sandoval told Mack, when the captain stood, and swayed on his feet. “You’re still recovering from your injuries.”
Well, that was kind of him, but I caught the look on Treivani’s face, and wondered what kind of message they were sending by having us escorted back to our ship by an armed combat team.
“The kind that says you are under my protection,” Sandoval’s voice whispered in my head, and I wondered why it sounded like a threat.
Whatever it was, Mack, Tens, and I needed the escort, because not a single one of us could walk a straight line by the time we hit the concourse, and the distance between our ships stretched impossibly far in our addled brains. The security team’s closest members, each took a firm grip on our arms to keep us upright and moving, and got us into the ship before we were even close to falling down.
“Damn!” Doc said, when the team led us into the medical center. “You three are soaked.”
And we’d all looked down at ourselves to see where we’d gotten wet. Doc shook his head. He didn’t bother explaining, just grabbed Mack by the arm, and signaled for the security team to bring us through to a small med bay.
“What have they had?” he asked, and swore when the team leader told him.
“Do you know what to do?” the man asked, and Doc nodded.
“I know what to do,” he said. “Thank you for getting them here safely.”
The man cast a grim eye over the three of us, and then signaled his team out of the doc’s domain. Doc watched him go, his lips compressed into a tight line that said he wasn’t happy. He saved the real swears for when the security monitors showed that Sandoval’s team had cleared the ship, and were on their way back to the cruiser.
“Of all the stupid sons of well-furrowed, in-heat, man-eating bitches I’ve ever had the misfortune to keep on their feet,” he said, “you needle-dicked, mind-fucked, ass-ridden, puke-bucketed, shit piles are the stupidest there have ever been.”
“Hey,” Mack mumbled, and I agreed with the sentiment; there was no need for Doc to be so mean.
I didn’t see why he was so upset, not even when Tens walked up to the nearest bed and collapsed over it.
“Well, fuck me,” Doc said, and started bellowing. “Halloran I need your useless ass in here. We got ourselves a high-level drunk tank that needs detoxifying A.S.A. P.”
Detoxifying, huh? I decided I didn’t care for that, and turned myself about and headed for the door. No one was going to detoxify me... whatever that meant. I was just fine.
I ran into Halloran as he came into the room, and Doc caught me on the rebound, which would have been fine, if the jolt hadn’t made my stomach decide that ivanox was something better out than in.
“What in all the fucking stars is ivanox?” Halloran wanted to know as I turned the clean, light blue of his nursing scrubs into a multi-colored canvas of red, green and yellow blotches, with chunky bits in between.
“Local fortified,” Doc told him. “Get cleaned up, and send me a team.”
“You got an antidote?”
“You’re not going to like it.”
Doc was steering me to the nearest empty bunk as he was speaking, and I didn’t have the strength to resist. The fact I found Halloran’s scrubs fascinating in their new color scheme didn’t bother me a bit, but Doc laid me down, and I didn’t have the strength or coordination to get myself upright again.
For some reason, the ship was pitching like a rollercoaster, and I didn’t know how I was staying on the bed, let alone how Doc was keeping his feet. The side spins were particularly spectacular.
I lay very, very still, not daring to move. Doc just stood and looked at me.
“Bad storm, huh?” he asked, and I gripped the sides of the bed tight, and grunted an affirmative. Nodding seemed like a really bad idea, right now.
“Don’t worry,” he told me. “We’ll strap you in, and you’ll be fine.”
Okay, I thought. I wanted to say that out loud, but my voice had run away. I was still trying to work out how, when there came an almighty crash from behind him, and he spun away from me.
“Goddamnit, Mack! You were in the bed for a reason!”
It was an interesting ride from there on out, and the Shady Marie had detached from the station and was returning to Costral, by the time I made it back onto my feet. Mack was gone, having thrown off the effects far quicker than any of us, and I figured he had the body mass to cope. Tens had fared about as well as I had, being the most lightly built of us all.
I remembered downing the glass of ivanox at Sandoval’s insistence, the calculation I could see in Treivani’s eyes, the wariness in Mack’s, and the doubt that had drifted through the implant from Tens. That was funny given it was his fault we’d been expected to drink it.
He’d been the one to point out that ivanox was one of the Skymander traditions for closing a deal. So, of course, it was only natural that Skymander had expected us to partake. Goodwill being what it was, and all that.
And it had seemed like the right thing to do at the time, but now? Now I was pretty sure Tens had been set up—and had been used to set the rest of us up, right thing or not. Damn! Now, I knew why it was best to have experienced the local brew before trying it in a diplomatic situation. At least Skymander had known what to expect, and put contingencies in place.
And we’d
