Frost steadied himself a little and stepped away from the doorway. “Those shots're nothin' but instant hangover! Ye'll hafta take me down th' hard way afore I let ye hit me wi' that! Come on then you chancers.”
The first two guards stepped towards him, one with an injector in his hand, the other with hands open, ready to subdue the drunken Chief. As soon as the first was in striking distance, Frost grabbed the arm with the injector in it and pulled the man off balance before pushing him into the other guard. Shamus couldn't steady himself as the pair collided, and was pulled into the mess which ended with all three of them in an awkward pile on the floor.
Frost was facing upward by the time the other two approached, ready to pick him up and drag him off. “You too eh?” he exclaimed before punching the nearest in the nose so hard he was flung back into a man behind him.
Both Price and Finn cringed as they watched the guard's nose start bleeding in a gush. The rest of the guards took a few seconds to seal their face plates. It only took that long for Frost to roll to his feet and stand squarely, fists at the ready. “Ye march off yer own way lads an' I'll forget this ever 'appened,” Frost slurred.
“You're coming with us to the brig, Chief,” replied one of the guards getting to his feet. He took two steps towards Frost before he was punched fully in the face. The stout Gunnery Chief put so much weight behind his blow that he was nearly thrown completely off balance. The guard's head bobbed backwards, if he wasn't wearing his faceplate something would have been broken, but the transparent metal stopped any damage from being done.
Price and Finn couldn't help cringing. They knew that the guard would be fine, but Frost's hand was another question entirely. “Go with them Frost, you should sleep it off,” Finn half heartedly tried to convince him as he squared up again, getting ready to slug the next guard.
The Gunnery Chief turned towards Finn and Price to wave them off and in that moment the nearest guard stepped forward and injected Frost right below the ear with a tranquillizer.
The look of surprise on the drunken fellow's face was priceless as he fell back to the deck. “Ye shitehawk bastard! If it weren't fer yer faceplate I'd find out who ye were and come after ye sober!” he managed before passing out.
The guards rolled him onto a stretcher from a nearby emergency medical station once they were sure he was fully unconscious. “Thanks for watching him,” one of the guards said over his shoulder as they walked off.
“Where are you taking him?” Finn asked.
“The brig.”
Finn and Price shrugged and decided to follow.
Ashley and Stephanie had watched the whole thing and when the security personnel were down the hallway and in the lift Ashley turned to her best friend. “You're taking him back, aren't you?”
Stephanie sighed and smiled. “He's a big thug, but he's my big thug. I understand if you don't get it.”
“Oh, after seeing you two together when you're not fighting, I get it. Well, I sort of get it. You two seem to fit.”
“I wouldn't have imagined back on the Samson. ”
“Me neither,” Ashley said as she put her hand on her friend's arm. She looked tired, and after the couple of days they had had after Frost had captured and tortured Burke to within a second of his life, she understood. “Don't feel like going out?”
Stephanie looked so apologetic; “I'm sorry, I'm just tired. If he wasn't all liquored up and just came to apologize we'd probably be going to the club night as a double date.” She recognized uncertainty in her friend right away; “things aren't going well with Finn?”
Ashley tried to lighten up her expression, feigning optimism; “we're good. There's just no…”
“Sparks?” Stephanie finished.
“Yeah, there's just a piece missing. He's nice, and he listens, but I just don't know what to say, what to do. I don't know.”
“Well maybe the away time you two are going on will change that. It might be that you just need time away from the ship with him, you know, no distractions, no one watching you. After you visited him every day in medical, people are watching to see how things turn out.”
“That's probably it, too much pressure,” Ashley agreed. “Now let's find a couple movies and have a night in.”
“You don't mind? We could still make an appearance.”
“It's all right, you and Frost tired me out.”
Resolution
There were two objects that distracted Ayan. The first was the bag with all the data collected from her personal files, the ones that the Judiciary Council had claimed she had no rights to but was left instead to her mother, who passed it on to her. The second was a metal case containing a drug cocktail given to her by Doctor Anderson.
When she woke up that morning, she decided to take care of one of the two objects, and after several moments of thought over coffee she opened the black bag and poured out the three dense data chips into her palm. The only thing left inside the bag were her old favourite chokers. One white, one black and both made from genuine silk. The blue gem cut in the shape of a circle and sword, the symbol of Freeground was back in storage with the rest of her old things. At least it's safe there. She thought as she took the black choker out of the bag and put it on with one hand.
Ayan opened her other hand to look at the three dense silver surfaced data chips there once more. She was looking at a kind of inheritance, even though its passing was in a backwards fashion, from her predecessor to her mother then back to her.
She pressed the first chip to her command and control bracelet and it transferred the contents in seconds. It was her personal journals and progress logs. That was what she was really looking for. She always kept her more private journal entries behind a password and if she was lucky her former self hadn't changed it.
She put the chips back in the bag and drew her knees up, so she was entirely in the cradle of the copilot's seat. Using a holographic menu she navigated to her private journal directory and entered in the password. It opened.
All the entries she'd made over the course of her life were there, most of which she remembered, and the five she didn't recognize stood out right away. Four were unlabelled, the first of them was marked; Second Chance.
She rested the wrist with her command and control unit on one knee while she wrapped her other arm around her shins, holding her knees close. “Playback quietly please,” Ayan requested of the unit politely. It was one of the old habits she carried with her, being polite to machines.
The face that appeared looked tired, thin with sunken eyes and cheeks. Thus far Ayan hadn't seen images of her previous self when she was very ill, and the sight was at the same time saddening and frightening. “Hello, if you're watching this that means that someone, probably Doctor Anderson, used the scan results to try and recreate me. It's good to meet you, it really is,” that simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar face smiled warmly before going on. “I'll start with what I hope you already know. The scan can only be used to full effect once. After a digital system has accessed it the the memories contained inside begin to fragment because they reorganize themselves to conform to a digital environment, that means you're probably the only attempt they had using my mental template. At the time of this recording it has been almost four years since Doctor Anderson disappeared in a ship with a dynamic wormhole compression drive, so I'm assuming he's using some kind of quantum compression wormhole to make time pass faster inside and create you using less or no growth acceleration therapy. I hope his experiment works, because if it does that means you probably have more than seventy percent of my memories, maybe all of them.”
“I have all of them,” Ayan whispered to herself.
“You do? Fantastic!” said the recording in response. “Do you want me to go on or would you like to ask questions instead?”