Technicality
kreska ido & karek
terran allied forces academy
kreska ido & karek
terran allied forces academy
Kreska woke with very little fanfare. She yawned, and she blinked at the chrome of the ceiling, and for a moment it did not occur to her that she was awake.
"You're awake," someone said, which was what brought it to her attention that she was. She grunted an affirmation, and with a significant amount of effort, turned her head in his direction. Then she smiled.
"Doctor Li," she said, and her mouth felt like it was full of cobwebs. He dragged a chair to her bedside, eyes glowing briefly blue as he ran some kind of diagnostic.
"Kreska," he said in return, and she was always so grateful that he never called her Ms. Ido. "How do you feel?"
She considered the question. "Sore," she said finally, because her entire body was a dull ache wrapped in cotton wool. She grasped through her mind for the more important question that had thus far eluded her. "Did I win?" she asked.
Li looked chagrined. "You almost died," he said, and she frowned.
"Yeah," she agreed, "but did I win?"
"You've been asleep for four weeks," he emphasized. Kreska said nothing, pressing her mouth into a thin line and jutting out her chin as she waited for him to tell her what she wanted. He made a sound like a sigh, disregarding his lack of lungs. "The record for the Crenik Run is then-cadet Robinson's time of one-hundred and thirty-four Standard minutes." Kreska sucked anxiously at her lower lip, because it hurt too much to bite it. She thought she'd done better than that. But it was hard to tell, when everything had gone all... wibbly. "You delivered the package in... sixteen minutes."
Her face immediately split into a wide grin. She tried to throw up her hands, but immediately realized the error of her ways as pain stabbed through her. She settled for wiggling pleased fists in the bed, as Li seemed ready to hold her down if he had to. "I knew it," she declared. "No one's ever going to beat that record, not ever."
Li clasped his hands under his chin, and she didn't know how to interpret the face he was making. "It's not a record," he said.
"... what?" She blinked. "You just said... I beat the old record."
"And you were disqualified," he explained, "for cheating."
Slowly, her face fell. "What?" she asked again. For reasons she could not explain, everything seemed to hurt more. "That's... not possible. Crenik has no rules. It's a no-limits race. That's the whole point."
"You disabled your limiter. You broke warp."
"There's no rule against that!"
"Kit shuttles aren't designed to break warp," he said, as if she did not already know that. "You could have blown up. You rammed quite a few of the other shuttles."
"People always ram other shuttles," she protested, because it was true, even if it theoretically went against the purpose of the Crenik Run.
"Not at warp, they don't. You destroyed three ships, not including your own, and you nearly died. Those are unacceptable losses."
"That's–" Kreska swallowed the expletives sitting on her tongue. "Stupid," she settled on instead, disconsolate.
Li had a curve to his mouth that was not quite a smile, because to smile now would be unkind. "You know," he said, "the whole time I've been here, people have been saying how strange it was, seeing you so quiet and still. You've got a reputation for a real filthy mouth." He smoothed out the edge of her sheet, unwilling to touch her when she was still in such a delicate state. "You must have picked it up on the station," he said, "but I've still never heard it."
Her face turned a slightly darker shade of green, and she looked down at her hands. "So I'm being completely disqualified?" she asked, changing the subject. "I don't get a grade, even?"
Li made that sighing sound again, and ventured to reach forward and take her hand. It felt indistinguishable from a human, aside from the fact that she knew better. Humans didn't hold her hand. "You're being court-marshaled," he explained gently, and she winced. "You're... probably going to be expelled."
She scowled, and risked raising her other hand high enough to rub at her eyes. "Tired," she said as an explanation, and she knew it was a poor one. "Don't even care," she lied. "Their loss. If they want to kick me out for not even breaking any rules, that's whatever. I don't even want to be in their stupid thing. They're the ones that invited me."
Kreska was so angry she wanted to vomit. But she wasn't going to do it in front of him.
"How did you do it?" he asked.
"What?"
"Your shuttle was wrecked," he said, "and you almost died. But it should have exploded. And you should be significantly more dead. I'm a good doctor, but I'm not that good. I want to know how you did it."
She swallowed down her rage so that her throat would function properly, dropping her shaking hand to her side. "I wasn't in warp for more than a minute at a time," she said finally. "I just... inertia. I didn't brake when I came out of it. So I warped and coasted and warped and coasted. Landing was... that was the hard part. But I think I did okay. It didn't hurt as bad as I thought it would."
"You were probably in shock," he said.
"Probably," she agreed.
"That is the cleverest stupid thing I've ever heard of," he said, and she smiled.
"You've heard a lot of those?" she asked.
"I could tell you some stories. I won't, but I could." He patted her hand, then let her go. "Now that I know you're... okay... I'm going to get your intar. You're going to be sleeping here a while still."
Kreska huffed. "I don't need it."
"Yes," he said as he stood, "you do. Don't argue with your biology."
"Easy for you to say," she muttered at his back as he left.
She really hated hospitals.
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