She had received her cabin assignment and was settling into quarters considerably larger than those she had enjoyed in the Elizabeth Blackwelclass="underline" she had space to stand in and a pull-down desk surface and stool as well as her own sanitary cabinet. She had just turned on the screen to familiarize herself with the ship's facilities when the buzzer went off and the screen cleared to a duty station.
"Major Surgeon Makem, please report to deck C, ward station G."
"What's the problem?" The corpsman glanced down to his right. "You're surgeon of record to a Lt. R. E. C. O'Hara?"
"That's right. What's wrong?" Maybe he'd been evacuated too soon.
"He won't wake up."
"What?"
"If you'd please come. Major?" Long-service corpsmen could develop a tone that was tantamount to an order.
Besides being worried about O'Hara, Bardie was curious. She had seen O'Hara leave the shuttle with his eyes closed, but for him to have slept? With the normal bucketing, creaking, and groaning on even the newest shuttle, much less the noise of its occupants, that was unlikely.
She keyed in the ship's deck plan and first located that antigrav shaft nearest her quarters on H deck, then ward G on C deck. When she got there, the officious corpsman was waiting for her with ill-concealed impatience. His expression said "you took your time," but he merely gave her a curt nod of his head and gestured for her to follow him.
"If you'll check him over, Major, since you're familiar with his case…" the corpsman said, stepping aside for her to enter the cabin. He shut the door immediately behind her and Bardie wondered if she should report his most unusual behavior to the deck physician.
But there was Roger Elliott Christopher O'Hara, neatly cocooned in his sensor sheet, and the printout over his bunk gave her no cause for immediate alarm. Except that he looked rather more pale than he ought. She approached the berth, noting the light sheen of sweat on his brow. The sensor did not indicate any unusual amount of pain reaction, and according to his chart, he'd been given medication two hours before.
Without realizing her intention, she laid her hand against his forehead, moist and cool. Her fingers, of their own accord, strayed to the crisp, but soft, curls. "Okay, mate, what's this all about? You were in good shape when Naffie wheeled you in." Did she detect the faintest wrinkle of a frown? She stroked his forehead again. "If you're not careful, you'll still end up in Brandeis's files, pulling this Sleeping Beauty act."
"There's only one way to wake a sleeping beauty, you know," he said, his eyes still closed. "I liked it the first time. But I wasn't sure if you were real or not until I saw you ahead of me on the gangplank. Brandeis had me believing you didn't exist at all except as a wish-fulfillment dream." Suddenly he opened his eyes, and they were a startling shade of clear green. He turned his head slowly to look at her. "But you did kiss me then,, didn't you? And I had to wake up because that's how the charm works, isn't it?"
She couldn't believe his ingenuousness: he couldn't have lived through three years' service and still believe in fairy tales, could he?
"You're no Sleeping Beauty, O'Hara. More Humpty Dumpty."
"That's why I had to see you, Bardie Makem," he said so earnestly that his rather rich baritone struck answering chords all down her spine. "I knew how bad I was hurt before I finally passed out and I was terrified that…" His voice broke and he swallowed convulsively. No, Roger O'Hara hadn't believed in any fairy tales, but he had feared to end up in a personal horror story. "I needed to know that you were real, Bardie Makem. And not a fairy tale."
"Alice in Wonderland…"
His smile had an almost breathtaking charisma to it. "Naffie told me it was wonders you did for me all right enough and no mistaking it, and not a king's horse in sight."
"So, you played Sleeping Beauty again to entice me into your clutches?"
"I sure as hell can't come to you for a while yet." He twisted his shoulders restlessly; then his smile became mischievous. "Would you take as a given that I'm sweeping you off your feet, to plonk you on my white charger and carry you off into the sunset to live happily ever after together…" His face was merry with his smile but the intense look in his vivid green eyes affected Bardie far more than she had the right to anticipate. "At least for the duration of this voyage… that'd give me a good reason to wake up again." He closed his eyes, schooled his handsome face into repose, but a hopeful smile pulled at the comers of his mouth.
Laughing at his whimsy and more than willing to enjoy some happily-ever-after as an anodyne to the past two years, Bardie bent to bestow on O'Hara the favor he had requested.
The kiss became considerably more magical than Bardie Makem could ever have expected!
The Mandalay Cure
Her intercom screen blinked and Amalfi Trotter looked up from the frustration of her life-support-system reports, grateful for an interruption.
"Captain requests a meeting of all officers in the ward-room at sixteen-thirty."
"Fardles, that's barely time enough to get there!" As a Life Support Systems officer, she was quartered on 9 deck, in the bowels of the troop carrier Mandalay.
With one hand, she toggled the acknowledgment switch as she began to strip off her coverall, stinking dirty from her latest wriggling tour of the air-conditioning systems. She'd been positive that she would find dead vermin to account for some of the pong that soured the Mandalay's air. She was a conscientious officer and had done her best with filters, purifiers, and deodorizers to neutralize the pervasive reek.
She lay awake in her bunk night after night, trying to figure out what could be generating or perpetuating the odors, which, she was certain, were one of the chief reasons why she - and most of the complement of the Mandalay - didn't sleep well. It was that kind of a nightmare combination of stenches. Perversely enough, the heads on all decks were reasonably free of unpleasant odors.
In fact, Cookie had told her that it was getting to be a joke: go to the head for a cleaner breath of air. Cramming her fouled coverall into the reconditioner, she stepped into the jetter, turning swiftly in the thin mist allowed her for such ablutions. Thirty seconds for soaping and then the mist returned to rinse her body. It did her morale no good to realize that she had just added her sweat and ventilator dust to the pervading odor but one didn't appear before the captain in visible dirt.
Could he have called an emergency meeting about the air quality? She had done her utmost to improve it. She knew how depressing it was to breathe bad air, and morale on the Mandalay was low enough. But she had tried.
After the Khalian surrender (the official one, although many enemy units refused to accept their defeat and the ignominy of yielding), while the Mandalay was on the surface, undergoing minor repairs, Amalfi Trotter had scrupulously replanted the entire 'ponics garden, coaxing broad shiny oxygen-supportive leaves from her vines with careful dollops of fas-gro. She had crawled through all the major ventilating shafts on an inspection tour and used remotes to sweep those which were too narrow for even her slight frame - was that why a pint-sized person was invariably made life-support officer? - and replaced every one of 743 vent filters.
Despite her best efforts, once they lifted from the planet even the "new" air had quickly taken on the taint of hot metals, acrid plastics, body odors too intense to neutralize, and the faint but throat-souring smell of Khalian weasel fur. Even after she had located and destroyed five badly preserved souvenir Khalian hides, she hadn't quite eradicated that taint. The residue was probably due to having to flush out the systems while they were still on a Khalian-occupied world, which had given the air its final touch of pollution.