ten_fwd | [Medbay]

Trance looked down at the floor, hearing a thud and a very familiar groan. And then...

"Harper!" A very golden Trance cried out. She ran over, and knelt by the engineer. She studied him for a minute, multiple realities, possibilities coming into focus and then she realized.

"You're still infested. And the medication's almost stopped working. I need some help over here!" Trance called out to whoever was in the ~~medbay~~ sickbay.

Dr. Crusher is already dropping to the floor on Harper's free side to get a tricorder reading.

"Prep a stasis unit and bring it on-line," she calls out to the staff on hand. "Somebody come help me get him to a bed."

As the doctors and nurses move to follow orders, she focuses on the tricorder readings and the woman opposite her. "You should move out of the way so the doctors can work."

That tricorder would have certainly picked up an interesting set of readings for Harper. During the course of his life so far he's suffered malnutrition while growing up, which means his immune system pretty badly compromised. Recently he had Triangulum measles which would have killed him. Harper also has a number of healed fractures to various bones due to various fights he's been party to over the years. Though that is nothing to what are currently very happily wrapped around his internal organs.

The Magog larvae were not going to be easily removed. It was the cure he was working on but running out of time. Though down to the last remaining six they were still causing considerable pain for him.

He recognised Trance's voice and reached out to her. She was after all one of his closest friends. "Trance..." Harper tried to focus on her. She was the wrong color. It was the pain playing a trick. Had to be. "I tried." He was convinced he'd run out of time.

"Don't worry. I'm going to fix this." Trance found his hand and held it. "But you have to fight for me okay?"

Trance wasn't moving. This was Harper. This was her patient. If Dr. Crusher wanted her out that badly, she'd have to be removed by security. And security would probably fail.

"You need me Dr. Crusher. I know Harper, I've dealt with this case before. " Literally, about a year ago. "Harper is infested with magog eggs. He only has a few days to live at most. I had given him medication to keep the eggs dormant but it's losing its effectiveness. The eggs wrap themselves around his vital organs and will squeeze if tried to remove. Magog eggs mature by eating their way through the host, finally hatching out of the abdomen. "

Trance paused for a brief second, allowing Beverly to take this all in. " Another crewmember was infested around the same time as Harper was. I was able to surgically remove the eggs, but he only just survived. And Harper...Harper wont survive the surgery. I've been working for months trying to find an answer, Doctor." Trance was desperate to save her friend. She had sacrificed Harper so many times in her mind, trying to revive him, watching helplessly as he went into respiratory, cardiovascular and neural failure. She wasn't doing that again. It was too painful. Not to Harper.

"They were removed via a tesseract machine, allowing us to bend space and time and remove the eggs. I was unable to find another way. I worked for months trying to find it."

"Damn." The tricorder readings are every bit as horrific as what Trance is telling her. This man is going to die if he doesn't get immediate help, and she's dealing with things she's never heard of before.

"We need that stasis unit now," she shouts. "We've got to stabilize him before these damn eggs hatch!"

Beverly looks at Trance. She may not trust her completely, but it's obvious the patient knows her, so Beverly is left with little choice but to rely on what Trance knows. "Explain to me how this tesseract machine works, how bending space and time can help him."

"Harper's the engineer, he should really be explaining it." But Harper doesn't seem in any state to do so. "What we need is a way to move within Harper's body without Harper's body being affected. The Tesseract machine bends the space around it, allowing you to move through solid matter--like walking through a wall. It folds space and dimensions.It separated Harper into dimensions, like a three dimensional being interact with a two dimensional object. He once found a way for someone with tesseract ability to reach in and scoop out some eggs. Both were physical beings made up of matter, but for a brief moment they existed on different planes."

Trance gripped Harper's hand. If he was still infested, she must look really odd to him. Luckily at the moment he was too freaked out about the magog eggs to worry why his best friend wasn't purple.

Two nurses rush from an adjoining room, pushing what can only be the unit Beverly asked for. She waves them over, instructing the rest of the staff to help her carefully lift Harper into the unit.

"I'm not sure we have anything so sophisticated as..." she begins to say, but her mind is working much faster than her mouth is. "The transporters!"

Her eyes light up, and she immediately starts doling out orders. "I need 40 CCs ambizine, and ready the cortical stimulators. Get him in the stasis unit now."

The stasis unit should suspend all cellular activity, including the growth of the eggs, while Dr. Crusher works out what to do. The ambizine is just a sedative, and should give Harper some relief.

Trance had no idea what these medications were, being from a completely different universe, nor was she familiar with a transporter, but she knew what she could do. Grabbing a tool from Harper's belt(if poor Harper had been conscious he surely would have made a joke about not coping a feel), Trance readied some medical nanos.

"I need to program these to help repair the damage after the magog eggs are out. I assume we can use your injector?" Trance indicated the hypo what had housed the ambizine.

Dr. Crusher is busily keying in the proper settings as her medical staff get Harper situated comfortably inside the unit. She picks up her tricorder and turns to Trance.

"Are those nanites?" she says, shaking her head. "Assuming they are as sophisticated as the Enterprise's medical equipment, yes. Right now I'm more interested in slowing the progress of the Magog eggs down. This should about do it."

Harper is effectually in suspended animation. Dr. Crusher pores over his readings until she's satisfied that he is resting as comfortably as possible, and in no immediate danger. Nodding, she turns back to Trance.

"Now, I need you to tell me everything you know about these 'Magog eggs', and this time you must be absolutely honest with me," she says, leaving no room for argument. "I may have an idea."

"I'm always honest, unless it's something you don't need to know. This however, you do need to know, and I hope you never have to face them in person. The Magog breed by rape. You can see the result. They infect living beings with their eggs. The eggs themselves absorb a tiny part of the hosts DNA, burrowing themselves in and around internal organs. The larvae grow, and as they mature, they feast on the host. When it's time to hatch, they eat their way out of the host's abdomen and the corpse becomes their first meal. All Magog need to kill their food first before the digestion process can begin."

Trance paused and looked at Harper. They would save him. She'd do almost anything.

"Harper would rather die than let those Magog hatch inside of him. Like I said previously, another crewmember was also infested, but he was genetically engineered and much stronger than Harper. But even he barely survived surgery. And that was at the beginning of the infestation. Now that the larvae are immune to the medication, they're growing again. What is your idea?"

It's a horrible way to die. Dr. Crusher has seen some unsightly things in her tenure as chief medical officer, but this may be the worst.

"We have something called a transporter aboard. They're used to beam officers on and off the ship, but the way they do so is by dematerializing, transmitting, and reassembling the person or object by way of a molecular imaging scanner. It may not be as powerful as your tesseract machine, but isolating certain particles and transporting them separately has been done in the past. We could possibly remove the eggs just by discarding their imprint during the transporting process. It may be the only way of saving him."

She hesitates.

"However, it will depend on the skills of our transporter chief to be sure he only removes the eggs, and it will depend on how much of Harper's DNA the Magog eggs have assimilated. If it's so much that the sensors can't discern one from the other, it could potentially kill him."

"Let's do it. The DNA the magog assimilated should be minimal. 1 or 2% at most. I'd like to make sure I have the nanobots ready for him before we begin though---just in case your 'transporter' chief takes a little too much tissue out than necessary."

Trance didn't know what a transporter was, but it kind of sounded like Harper's machine. The one with the melons. One thing was for sure, when Harper got better, he was going to love this ship. Even if it was only the 24th century.

"I don't need a lot of time. I should be finished by the time you get Harper ready."

Beverly purses her lips. What Trance is asking is for her to trust her in her sickbay, with her equipment, and she still just doesn't. But they're talking about a man's life here, and the captain, for whatever reason, has given Trance the benefit of the doubt and asked she try to do the same.

"All right," she sighs. "The stasis unit should buy us all the time we need. I'll contact the transporter room and prep Harper to travel, while you work with the nanites."

She picks up her equipment and shoots Trance one last look. "This is your chance to prove you're really on our side."

"I promise you, I'm not going to use these controls to do anything other than help my friend. If you would prefer, you may have a staff member watch me but I would rather not be constantly interrupted for explanations. As you know, Harper does not have a lot of time. I wont let him die."

Trance looked down at Harper's machine, programming it to begin spitting out medical nanos so she could encode them to help Harper.

Beverly's eyes shift between Trance and the nearest nurse. She nods, and the nurse moves closer to Trance, both to watch and to assist her if needed.

"That's good enough for me," Beverly says. She hesitates, and reaches out a brief but comforting hand, touching Trance's shoulder. "I will do everything in my power to prevent your friend from dying. You have my word."

And her word is as good as gold.

With a nod, she moves back to the unit and taps her comm badge to hail the closest transporter room. She knows exactly who's on duty, and she'd trust him with any patient.

Trances nods to Beverly. "Let's get to work then. " Neither of them would let Harper die. Trance just hoped she didn't have to work against Q to make reality fit her own version of it. Just in case they didn't succeed. There was always the chance this wasn't real. But she had to play it out like it was.

The avatar sat down at a console, busy replicating nanos from Harper's device, programming them via the console and injecting them into the hypospray. She just hoped Dr. Crusher's plan worked. Trance hated to think what the nanos would do if the Magog larvae weren't completely extracted when they started to repair the damage.

With everything functioning at optimum, it gives Beverly the time to do her work and check it twice before moving them. As soon as Harper is removed from the stasis unit, they'll have to move fast.

"All right, let's get him to Transporter Room 8," she says, letting a team of nurses push the unit to the hall. "Trance, are you ready?"

"Ready here." Trance nodded, getting up, and grabbing the now full hypo. Watching Dr. Crusher she ran toward the door and followed the team of nurses(and Harper) to the destination.

It isn't far down the hall. The transporter room is clear of any equipment besides the control terminal and the transporter pad. The nurses wheel Harper to the center of the room, and get to work.

Chief O'Brien steps forward when Beverly and Trance enter.

"I've sent you all the information I've logged on him so far," Beverly says, looking worried. "He's not a species we've ever dealt with before."

O'Brien nods. "It should be enough." He glances at Trance briefly, but his following words are as much directed at her as they are Dr. Crusher. "You are aware of the dangers?"

Actually Harper was very human. But the eggs nesting inside him weren't so Trance didn't argue. In response to Dr. Crusher's question, however, she turned her head and put a hand on the force lance at her thigh.

"Harper's going to die if we do nothing. If he does die as a result of this, then I wont have to shoot him." She really, really didn't want to shoot her best friend.

O'Brien looks grim.

"Right, then," he nods, turning back to his console. "These 'Magog' eggs are everywhere, as you know. Parasitic, and while it is possible to successfully separate them from the boy's body by targeting their unique DNA, they are so deeply embedded in some areas that I've had to pull from a healthy human's internal readings to make up for what I couldn't discern from his."

He pulls everything up on the display in front of him, fingers moving fast at the controls. "If everything goes well, the transporters will carry him from one pad on the platform to another, taking no more than a few seconds. The biofilters, with luck, will remove all traces of the Magog eggs before he re-materializes."

Trance waited, watching, hypospray in hand. "Do we have to worry about the eggs in the biofilters? Is there any possibility they'll be able to survive?"

She nodded to both Dr.Crusher and the new officer at the console. "Let's get started."

"None," Chief O'Brien assures her. "If we are successful, any remnants of the eggs will be completely dispersed."

Beverly nods, and moves to the center of the room. The nurses have removed Harper from stasis, and are carefully moving his body to the transporter pad. She wishes this could have been done in sickbay, but the fact of the matter is they needed Chief O'Brien's skillful hand.

"All right, set him down gently. Careful now," she says, hovering her tricorder over his body jut to be sure nothing has changed since the last scan. Meanwhile, Chief O'Brien readies the overhead molecular imaging scanner, immediately getting underway for the big moment.

Beverly nods to Trance, gesturing for her to come closer. As soon as the transport is over, they'll need to check his vitals.

Harper was still mostly out of it from what he'd been given but he was showing signs of starting to come around from it. None the worse for the time in stasis.

Trance went as close as she could, giving Harper's closest hand a brief squeeze, before retreating, hand on her force lance. Just in case.

"Let's bring it."

Beverly nods. "Now, Chief O'Brien."

With grim determination, O'Brien proceeds. It's delicate work, even more so than taking a scalpel to living flesh. If he gets one molecule wrong, Harper could be lost.

The transport begins with a deceptively musical hum. Harper's body slowly disappears into the matter stream, and Beverly holds her breath. It's a long few seconds before he slowly re-materializes on a different pad. As soon as the transfer is totally complete, Dr. Crusher rushes to him.

"I am getting vitals," she breathes. "Pulse is normal, though he has sustained some internal damage from where the eggs tried to take over. Trance, are the nanites ready?"

Trance is right behind Dr. Crusher, and stabs Harper in the abdomen with the medical nanos. She was definitely going to have to ask Harper to make her one of the Andromeda's hypos. At the very least they were actually supposed to be used with the type of nanobots that Trance was using.

She grasped his hand, and gave a smile to the Enterprises CMO.
"Thank you for helping him." And then, she got an odd look on her face. "Would either of you be able to help me get something for Harper?"

Beverly only hopes that whatever nanites Trance and Harper have brought onto the ship don't cause the kind of trouble Wesley's nanites caused for everyone a few years ago. She sweeps her tricorder over Harper immediately, taking readings while the nanites get to work.

After a few moments, she relaxes and smiles. "He's going to be just fine. It looks like all traces of the Magog eggs have been eradicated, and the nanites are already getting to work repairing what tissue was damaged. Thank you, Chief O'Brien."

He smiles, and looks relieved as well.

"What sort of something?" Beverly asks, now that they're out of the woods.

Trance kept a hand on Harper's, watching her friend and the readouts on Beverly's tricorder.

"Sparky cola. It's absolutely terrible for you, but he's completely addicted to it and drinks over a gallon of it a day. I thought a can or two might be a nice thought after what he's been through." Trance had a thought. "Actually it's probably still in his stomach."

Beverly honestly does not know what to say to that. She glances at O'Brien, who cocks his head at Trance.

"If you have a list of ingredients," he says, "it could likely be programmed into the replicators."

He hesitates, and rightly so. The good doctor takes her cue.

"But I would like to know exactly what goes into it first," she says. "After what he's been through, he should be careful what he ingests for a few days at least."

Did Trance look a little uncomfortable there?

"It's a kind of soda. Sugar, artificial flavoring, water, some kind of acidic compound, caffeine and a bit of a narcotic compound. It's completely legal and mostly safe." Unless, of course, you imbibe as much as Harper does on a daily basis.

What, it's not like Trance was trying to get flash for Beka. That was strictly a no no. But Sparky cola was totally legal.

Dr. Crusher arches an eyebrow.

"A Narcotic compound?" she repeats, shaking her head. "I'm sorry, there's no way I could allow that. The caffeine alone would put it on my list of 'don'ts' until his system is completely repaired."

She can't even believe Trance is asking about it, or that they even have such drinks.

"I know, it is terrible for him. It has no nutritional value, rots the teeth, has destroys the digestive tract and is completely addictive. But at least it comes with its own warning label?"

Trance shrugged, and snuck another look at Harper. He was going to be okay. Although, perhaps, not for long without his Sparky cola fix. She wrinkled her nose.

"Harper might be back sooner than later then.He's got quite a Sparky cola addiction."

Trance suspected there were a lot of things about the Andromeda that Dr. Crusher would be horrified about--not in the least the state of Machine Shop 17.

Beverly casts what can only be described as a warning look. Label or no, that stuff isn't coming anywhere near her patient!

As Trance goes on to speak of addiction, she sighs. "I'm not surprised. There are some treatments I can give him, but for now I'd like to get him back to sickbay and resting comfortably while he sleeps off what's left of the sedative."

From relief to disappointment in such a short time! Oh well, at least he's going to live. They will just have to take things one step at a time.

"I'd like to monitor him for a while if I could? Make sure he doesn't need another dose of nanos and that his immune system is up to the task." Which, she was sure it wasn't. But what else is new. Harper's immune system sucked.

Trance leaned over and gave Harper a kiss on his forehead. It wasn't flash. Flash withdrawal was the worst. And often deadly.

"Thank you."

Despite herself, her expression softens. She places a hand on Trance's shoulder.

"Of course," she nods. "And Trance? Good work today. I may have judged you a little too harshly."

She's a big enough woman to admit her mistakes. She nods for her nurses to help Harper get resituated, and moves off so Trance has a little more privacy.

Trance smiled at Dr. Crusher, and turned her gaze back to Harper, watching the nanos undoubtably repaired milimeter by milimeter, keeping an eye on his vitals.

"Thank you."

[Medbay] - Entrance

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Trigger warning! Sexual assault, cannibalism, murder

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject