Disclaimer: The characters, concepts and places of Deepwater Black used in this story are the property of the Sci-Fi Channel, YTV and Empire Entertainment. It is a non-profit piece of fun and no copyright infringement is intended.
He awoke to the sound of the Cryo chamber opening. Confused, he looked around, remembering another awakening, far more traumatic and confusing. This time he knew who he was - Reb Anderson - and what he was - Mission Commander for Deepwater Black - but there was still confusion. Running his hands down the length of his slender body to get rid of some of the protein gel, he took his first shaky steps out of the chamber.
"Gen?"
With a swirl of light, Gen materialized and gave him a warm smile. Reb relaxed and let out the breath he hadn't realised he'd been holding.
"I am glad to see that you have decanted successfully, Reb. Your physiological signs are normal and the memory implants should have taken this time."
"Gen, why was I in the Cryo chamber?" Reb broke in impatiently. "Where are the others?"
She gave him what he could only describe as a compassionate look. "You can only access memories up until your last neurone scan. I regret that I have unfortunate news for you."
Neurone scans? Oh yes, he remembered insisting that everyone have those done at regular intervals, with Bren agreeing over Yuna and Gret's distaste at the idea. If something happened to any of them, the next generation of clones would have all the information they had so painfully gained and not blunder around like dangerously ignorant children.
If something happened....
"Gen, what is going on?" he demanded urgently. "Where are the others?"
"The others will remain in cryogenic stasis until you stabilise Deepwater's systems, Reb."
"Why... why are they all in stasis?" Reb whispered, gazing at the remaining five pods, filled with opaque emerald gel.
"It was necessary to regrow the entire crew when the previous one had to be terminated after the accident."
"Accident?"
Something huge, dark and terrifying was looming over Reb. He flinched away from it, from what it contained, but it was reaching for him in greedy hunger. It wanted to absorb him, to become part of him, and it wasn't going to let him escape. There was nowhere to escape because it was already inside him. The word 'accident' had triggered it and it wasn't going to stop just because he was afraid of it and what it represented.
"Accident. There was an.... accident and we all... died. I'm not me anymore."
Then the dark whirlwind had him.
Agony! Pure as the lick of a sun it poured over and through him. He could hear the others. Yuna was screaming his name while Lise was calling out to Gen. Zak and Gret were garbled but he was certain he could hear Bren yelling at him to hold on, to not let go.
Hold on to what?
He came to on the floor of the Medbay, feeling cold and alone, despite the presence of Gen standing beside him patiently. Lost and confused, Reb rolled over on to his hands and knees before pushing himself up on his feet. His balance was shot and he automatically reached out to Gen for support, remembering just a few seconds too late that she was a hologram. Crashing back to the deck hurt enough to jar him back to some semblance of alertness and the next time he used the side of the examination bed to support himself.
"I prexed the accident," he began, then stopped in confusion. "No, I couldn't have. I can't have the memories of my death, can I?"
He had been thinking out loud but Gen considered the question dispassionately. "It is possible. Lise worked on you for a while before your previous body failed. Since I had not initiated a neurone scan, I assumed one had not been done. I shall check."
"It's not important," Reb mumbled. His body was still trembling from the aftershock of the pain he remembered suffering. He didn't want to experience that again in a hurry. "I'd better get cleaned up."
He lingered as long as possible in the shower, letting the hot water rain down on him and wash away the tension as well as the dried protein gel. It was a losing battle. As fast as he managed to relax, his emotions would ambush him and his body was thrumming with tension again. The loss of the others was a sharp anguish; the knowledge that Yuna was dead an unbearable ache deep inside him.
The fact that they would soon follow him in his scientific resurrection did little to make the hurt ease. Memories of a friendship or relationship did not automatically guarantee that such a bonding would continue through to the next life. Aurora had taught him that. A clone was only identical to its donor up until the moment it stepped out of the Cryo chamber. From that second on it became an individual in its own right, evolving a personality shaped by its own experiences. His previous self had not been the Reb Anderson who had been so in love with Aurora her loss had nearly crippled him emotionally. If there was too great a time lag between his emergence and Yuna's, he would not be the Reb Anderson who had loved her in their last life.
A small inner voice tried to remind him that the Reb of Deepwater Gold had also fallen in love with Yuna, but Reb wasn't ready to listen to reason. If repairing Deepwater Black was the key to having Yuna back in his life, then that is what he was going to do. Turning off the shower, he emerged and grabbed at a towel before going to find some clothes. The inner shakiness he still felt would be dealt with by a high-protein drink and then he would run a systems check on the ship and see what had to be done.
His body convulsed under the terrible burden of the pain it was feeling; a nervous system tried to the limits of its endurance being forced beyond those limits and still trying to function. Reb's throat was raw from the mindless screams he had made and now his cries were soundless but threatened to shake his world apart. Along with the pain was the driving, overwhelming need to be somewhere else. Wherever here was, it was wrong.
Memories surfaced and then became sucked under into the maelstrom of confusion that was his mind. Alarms blared and shrieked, a control board turned fiery under his hands, red lights flashed on and off in a rhythm which spelt death and disaster. He could heard Yuna screaming his name and part of him wanted to turn and go to her, leaving this hellish place and seek the solace of her presence. A greater part of him, however, knew that he had to stay, that this was his place. If he left his post, the others would all die and that was something he wasn't prepared to accept, no matter what the cost to himself.
He desperately tried to make sense of his surroundings. Not only his, but everyone else's survival depended on his being able to avert the disaster that was looming. His fingers danced with urgent speed across control panels while eyes and ears sought to make sense of the wildly conflicting signals he was receiving. He could hear super-dense glass shattering, feel the heat as metal buckled and ran like honey. His vision swam as heat and pain intertwined within him like deadly snakes.
The surface of the panel he had been working at suddenly became starred with cracks, the supposedly shatterproof plastic it was faced with having been stressed beyond its limits. He threw himself away from it scant seconds before it exploded. Reb felt shards strike his suit but nothing penetrated and he drew in a shaky breath with relief, since he had already been injured and he didn't know how much more abuse his body could take.
Had he done enough? He didn't know. His thoughts were fragmenting, chains of procedures being short-circuited and disrupted by his body's own damage-control system alerting him that he needed help. He couldn't stop, though, not until he could be certain that he had bought them all enough time for him to be able to afford himself the luxury of wondering if he was going to survive.
There was the sound of an explosion, muffled by a bulkhead, and the deck danced beneath his feet. He had been turning, looking for a panel that still worked so he could check on what he had done. Something struck him from behind and he abruptly found himself flying across the room to smash into the far wall. Sharp spikes of metal sticking out from a previous explosion tore through the suit, finding flesh already traumatised by other injuries. He tried to push himself free to continue with his work, but a treacherous weakness was flooding through his body. His hands slipped against shattered plastic and glass, then fell back. Despite his stubborn resistance, the darkness came....
.... and then he was back in the howling vortex of pain and panic.
The urgency was still there as well, trying to drive him beyond the pain. He had to find out if he had done enough to prevent Deepwater from blowing up. He had to get to Engineering and check that the emergency protocols were in place and running. Movement was impossible, though. There was some kind of resistance every time he tried to lift an arm or turn over and he had too little strength to fight it for very long.
The taste of failure was sour in his mouth as he subsided back. Not even his eyelids would obey him and open. A small, selfish part of him was glad that he had failed so completely. He didn't want to open his eyes on his own personal Armageddon, to witness the seared corpses of the friends he had failed so absolutely. He had to have failed. If he had succeeded, then the others would have come for him and he would have received medical attention. He wouldn't have been in this place of pain and terror, listening to the muted cries of his dead friends as they reproached him for his failure.
He had failed, they had died and he would soon follow them, to be condemned to whatever hell awaited commanders who failed to keep faith with their crew.
Reb awoke to find himself wracked with sobs. He hated prexing during his sleep. The memories became intertwined with dream images and you spent the next few months trying to separate fact from sleep-inspired fantasy. This time all he had really brought back with him were the memories of intense pain, guilt and an anguish so huge he simply lay where he was for some time and let the tears come. They helped a little, easing the tearing pressure on his chest and letting his throat loosen enough so he could breath again.
After a while the worst of the emotional storm passed and his sense of duty pricked at him to move. He had only come down to his cabin at Gen's insistence, her demeanor almost terse as she informed him that his performance had been so depleted by exhaustion that he was close to doing more damage than good to her systems. Any kind of censure had the capacity to strike home at the moment, and the knowledge that Gen was right had merely served to increase the power of her observation.
Now she appeared and gazed down at him as he sat, slumped, on the edge of the bed. He hadn't bothered to pull on any nightclothes when he had shed his grubby coveralls and he shivered a little in the cool air. After a moment he felt the ambient temperature rise appreciably and he realised that she had noticed his discomfort.
"Can we afford the energy?" he asked worriedly.
He'd reduced life support to bare minimum until he repaired more of the damage, taking Deepwater's environment from normal to uncomfortably cold. His reasoning had been that he didn't notice the cold when he worked but last night he had forgotten when he'd climbed into bed. In fact, he would have thought that the cold would have awoken him long before this point, since he only had the one sheet...
Getting to his feet, he staggered over to the environmental panel, hating the weakness which still dogged him. After one quick look, he turned to give the hologram an accusing look. "You'd already raised the temperature!"
Gen simply gave him her 'I'm-your-mother-don't-argue' look. "You were uncomfortable with the temperature the way it was and you needed the sleep. I assessed the situation and decided that I had sufficient energy to spare to heat one small cabin back to something approaching normality."
"It wasn't your decision to make!" Reb flared.
A hint of steel entered her dark, fathomless eyes. "Where the well-being of my crew is concerned, no decision is beyond me. You have been working yourself back into a state of ill health, Reb, and it must stop. I understand the emotional impetus behind your drive to return Deepwater to as close to optimum as possible in the shortest possible time, but I do not have the energy or resources to re-clone you again if you are foolish enough to render yourself inoperative. In most things I will defer to you, but not in this. You will not kill yourself on my watch!"
Reb stared at her, knowing that his jaw was sagging from shock but unable to do much about it. He knew that Gen had an emotional quotient but she rarely displayed more than gentle good humour or mild reproof. This had been close to a tantrum! After a moment, he managed to gather his scattered thoughts together and nodded. "Yes, ma'am," he acquiesced meekly.
"Good," Gen said in satisfaction. "Now, I have prepared something for you to eat. Please go and consume it and then I shall lower the temperature again."
She winked out and Reb realised that there was going to be no arguing with her on this matter. Sighing a little over the way he was being henpecked by a computer, he decided to take a shower before he went to eat. In his current state he was irritated to discover that the water was also back up to normal temperature, even while his constantly aching body revelled in the pleasure of warm water cascading over it. Determined not to give in to his self-indulgent streak, Reb washed as quickly as possible and then pulled on the warmest clothes he could find before going to the Habitat Centre, expecting to find his usual breakfast of wheatgerm toast spread thickly with jelly and orange juice. His eyebrows shot up as he took in the plate of crisply fried bacon, hash browns and scrambled eggs which awaited him under a heated cover, with several slices of toast at the side and a pitcher of orange juice.
"You expect me to eat all this!" he spluttered into the air.
"Eat or I lock the hatch to your cabin the next time you go in," Gen's disembodied voice came back.
Reb considered rebellion for a few seconds, then abandoned the idea. Gen was more than capable of carrying out her threat, knowing that Reb would be driven insane by enforced inactivity long before she needed his services desperately. With a sigh, he took the plates over to the table and tucked in. The food wasn't real, of course, but it still tasted good. The only thing Deepwater could produce for herself came from the hydroponics bay; mainly salad stuff and some herbs. Flowers, too, and hadn't Bren given him a hard time when he'd realised that the roses and other blooms had been Reb's idea!
The memory hurt, more than he had believed it would. From their original antagonistic beginnings, he and Bren had forged an unlikely friendship and next to Yuna, Reb found he missed the soldier more than anyone else. Although Lise came a close third, with her gentle ways and habit of softly pointing out the obvious without making you look like a total moron. Gret, with her strange mood swings, and Zak, with his refusal to take almost anything in life seriously, were a little more distant, but their deaths still left gaps in his life.
His mood rapidly darkening, Reb ate the food out of duty rather than pleasure, wanting to get it out of the way so he could get back to his work. He wanted to get away from the sudden memory of a similar breakfast, shared by Bren when the two of them had been injured. Lise had been the one to insist upon it on that occasion and she and Yuna had sat next to the two of them, counting every mouthful and giggling at their growls of embarrassment.
He missed them all so much. Why did he have to be the engineer? Why did he have to be the one to wake up and live? And - cold thought - how would they react when they were reborn a second time and stepped out of the Cryo chambers to find him, the reason they had died, waiting for them?
All appetite vanished and Reb shoved what was left of the breakfast into the waste disposal. "All right, Gen, lower the temperature back again," he ordered briskly. "I need to get back to work."
"As you wish."
Time to get back to work, although that was becoming frustrating in its own odd way. Reb knew Deepwater by now. He knew every part of her and could often tell what was wrong from a note in her engines or the way she responded to one of Yuna's maneuvers. He'd nursed her through a wide range of problems, ranging from attack damage to the lashing of Tachyon storms. He knew her in all her moods and through all her trials and there was something definitely not right with what he was finding now.
Internally produced damage had a different pattern to externally created problems. He knew what both looked like. His memories included nothing about an attack, although he couldn't be certain that meant there hadn't been some kind of assault which had started the entire disastrous sequence of events. While the damage he was having to cope with now was horrendous, it was also strangely patternless. Absorbed in the urgency of his work, a small part of Reb had been putting together all the different pieces but the jigsaw he was constructing made no sense.
He was also starting to fret about the way his body seemed strangely weakened. Although his memories of having been decanted the last time were annoyingly vague, overwhelmed by strong feelings of confusion and pure terror, he was pretty certain that he had been a lot stronger than this after the initial shakiness had passed. He had been eating well, if irregularly, and while he could have rested more, Gen had made sure that he had the minimum required to keep him healthy. For some strange reason, though, the lethargy he had felt on emerging from Cryo was continuing to persist.
"Gen?"
"Yes, Reb?" The hologram materialised immediately and stood gazing at him in silent curiosity.
"Did something go wrong with my regrowth?"
"Specify."
Feeling a little foolish, Reb did as he was told, detailing how strange he felt and how the data he was gathering didn't seem to explain what had happened to them. "Were we attacked?" he asked.
Gen hesitated. "I... do not know," she eventually said.
"What do you mean, you don't know?" Reb demanded, his initial unease becoming alarm.
"I... I do not remember an attack, but that does not mean there wasn't an attack," Gen continued after a moment.
"Gen, that makes no sense," Reb snapped. "Either there was an attack or there wasn't. You told me that you had to initiate regrowth of the crew after an accident killed us all. Now there might have been an attack that you didn't notice? What's wrong with you?"
Gen was flickering like a badly eroded image. "I.... may have sustained damage which I was not aware of until this moment."
Reb shook his head, fear and anger mingling nicely. "Not good enough, Gen. You'd be aware of damage the moment you ran a standard diagnostic. There's something you're not telling me and I want to know what it is!"
He was lying on the floor of Engineering, staring up at the overhead five decks above him. Behind him was the humming beat of the fusion reactors, no longer in harmony and sounding out a stuttering moan which warned of imminent disaster. A klaxon was shrieking its urgent wail in the distance, but Reb simply lay where he was, gazing upwards and trying to deal with the strange double vision which was claiming him.
The confusion inside his head was growing. Reb was no longer certain of when he was prexing and when he was wandering the corridors of Deepwater, trying to make sense of what he was seeing. So long as he didn't think too hard about what he was doing, the strange glittering insubstantiality didn't shimmer into existence at the edge of his vision.
What frightened him more than anything else was the way he could no longer depend on Gen. After the initial awkwardness after his first Deepwater birth, Reb had come to depend a great deal on Gen, finding her calm good sense and practical observations a welcome change from the emotional responses of the others. Gen never ran roughshod over his suggestions, or left him talking to open space, and he sometimes thought that was all that kept him from throwing the kind of tantrum which would leave the others protesting that they couldn't understand why he was overreacting like that. Gen had never lied to him before this, and knowing that there was no other explanation for the way she kept changing her story did little to cheer him. With Gen an unknown and potentially hostile quantity, Reb didn't know what else to depend on.
He certainly couldn't depend on his own mind. His prexes of the accident which had led to his death became ever more confusing as their complexity increased. He frequently heard the voices of his dead companions even when he was awake and trying to concentrate on solving the riddle of what was going on. Bren's sharp anger, which barely covered his concern, was normal enough to be reassuring, but the despair which coloured Yuna's voice cut into him like the memories of pain that dogged him. Zak and Gret came and went, smoke against the fire of his anguish, but Lise... Lise sounded afraid.
The commander in Reb, the impulse to protect and guide which had made him the leader of Deepwater before it had been officially confirmed, ached to take away the anger, despair and fear and make things right. He no longer knew how, however, his instincts overwhelmed by his confusion until all he could do was lie where he was and try to decide where reality ended and the vivid terror of the past began.
"Reb?"
The sound of Gen's voice made Reb tense. For a moment he contemplated leaving the room, then he caught himself as he realised the foolishness of trying to outrun a holographic projection which was part of the ship's mainframe. "Yes, Gen?"
He turned in the direction her voice had come from and bit his lip when he saw how she seemed completely normal. In his present state of mind, he was perfectly willing to believe that she was the one in the right and he was the one weaving paranoid fantasies inside his head. Then he would catch himself, angry at the doubt which had invaded his soul and made him so ready to give in.
"You seem a little distracted," Gen was saying calmly. "I was wondering if there was anything I could do to help."
"How well are the repairs going, Gen?" he asked carefully.
"Better than I had hoped," the computer informed him, "although there is a great deal left to be done. You are an outstanding engineer, but you are still only one person."
"Surely it would be wiser to decant one of the others?" Reb pressed. "Zak would be a great help with the computers, for instance."
Gen gave him a warm smile. "The computers are the least of your worries, Reb. It will be a while before I need Zak to repair the areas of my mainframe which were damaged. None of the others have areas of expertise which are essential."
"It would be nice to have some company, Gen." He watched Gen narrowly, not sure what he was looking for, but feeling the need to push at the boundaries being imposed on him.
Gen continued to gaze at him with the same expression of calm interest. "I regret that it isn't feasible to decant any of the others at this stage, Reb. To do so would simply repeat the problems we had the first time."
"We survived," Reb countered.
"But why put the others through that when it isn't necessary? Reb, you are acting irrationally. Perhaps you have been working too hard. I recommend that you take some time off and relax."
"No!" How could he explain to her the depth of terror the idea of relaxing now held for him? It was when he relaxed, when he let go of the tenacious need to get Deepwater up and running again, that the prexes got worse and the voices wailed against his soul like waves against a shore. "I just want to have some company, Gen."
She cocked an eyebrow at him. "You have me."
"That's... not the same," Reb said helplessly. "I can't touch you."
I can't hold you, and be held by you, the way I can Yuna. I can't be working at a station and suddenly get half-strangled because Bren's decided he's in a good mood. You can't run me over in a corridor the way Zak does when he's had this 'great idea' and he can't wait to try it out. You don't stalk me with orange juice and carrot cake the way Lise does when she's decided I'm working too hard. You can't even flick me on the nose after you've finished lecturing me the way Gret sometimes does.
He cut off the desolate memories before they overwhelmed him. Was this how his other self had felt like while he was all alone on Deepwater Gold? No wonder he had been a little crazy by the time they had found him. Reb now thought it a miracle that the man had been as sane as he had been. Of course, he had only had Yuna to mourn, if the word 'only' could be used to describe such a life-destroying concept.
"Reb?"
Gen sounded concerned, but also a little distant. Reb gazed at her without much interest, seeing the way she seemed to shimmer and start to come apart into her component pixels. A dim part of him noted that he should be worried about such an obvious malfunction, but the greater part of him just didn't care.
The revelation came as a bit of a shock, but he realised that it was true. The huge, driving urge to repair Deepwater and get the others back out of Cryo had died somewhere along the way, eroded by the constant memories of pain which seemed overwhelmingly real while he had endured prex after prex. The conscious mind might forget the reality of pain, but the body itself remembered, in the blood and the bone. There came a time when the flesh could no longer endure and it failed, for all the driving force of the will.
Reb had reached that point, now. He had 'died' one too many times, felt the tearing pain of knowing that he had failed and allowed his friends... no, his family... to die because of his failure. Alone and lacking any emotional reinforcement, afraid to trust the one other being he had for company, Reb had been unable to ride the successively more powerful prexes which had claimed him and which had started to rip his universe, such as it was, apart.
"Reb, you must not do this!" Gen's voice was suddenly sharp with a concern which was almost fear. "Reb! Concentrate on my voice! Reb!"
"We're losing him!"
"Damn it, Lise, I thought you said this would work!"
"Get out of my way, Yuna; I need space to work in."
"But-"
"Do as she says, Yuna. Come on, stand here with me."
"Let go of me, Bren, or so help me... Why isn't it working?"
"Because Reb is too stubborn an idiot to stay unconscious in Cryo and let the healing process work. He keeps trying to wake up and go and repair the ship."
"Well, that's our Reb for you. Mr. Conscientiousness... ow! What was that for?"
"Like you'd be lying there and doing what you're told? You men are all the same."
Confusion whirled through his mind like the voices of his friends, everything being driven and torn to the point of incomprehensibility by the shrieking pain which had returned, even more powerful than before. Reb wanted to black out, to die, to do anything to escape the agony which was eclipsing everything. Instead he simply endured and tried to understand this new prex he had landed in.
"Let him wake up."
Gen's voice, to add to the confusion. Reb wanted to scream his fury at the way his world had become so chaotic, but the words remained sealed within a throat which refused to obey him. His entire body was playing the traitor yet again and his rage increased until he thought he would choke on it. He was tired of simply reacting to events, tossed from one nightmare to another until he could no longer separate one from the other and everything blurred into one huge primal surge of adrenaline. He wanted out.
With one last effort which felt as though it would tear the heart out of his chest, Reb finally won past the pressure keeping him in place and opened his eyes....
Lise jerked back as Reb's eyelids fluttered the way they had done so many times previously over the past four days and then opened. Blue eyes filled with the kind of pain and terror she could only imagine flashed around in a panicked dance, then found and focused on her. When she reached out to touch his forehead gently, the terror in his eyes simply increased and only the stasis of the Cry tank kept him from flinching away.
Bren must have noticed that something had happened because he was suddenly by her side, scowling down at Reb in an effort to conceal his own delight. For some reason which escaped Lise, Bren refused to admit that his initial antagonism towards Reb had altered to become a friendship, and he still maintained a quasi-belligerent attitude towards Reb.
"Look who's awake, then!" he snorted now. Then he looked closer and shot Lise an accusing glare. "He doesn't look that good to me. You sure this gizmo's supposed to make him better?"
"This 'gizmo' has already saved his life, in case you'd forgotten," Lise reminded him in exasperation. "He would have died from his burns if we hadn't put him into cryogenic regeneration."
"That's for sure." Bren cocked a sardonic eyebrow at Reb, who was staring up at them like someone who wasn't certain he'd woken up from a nightmare. "You should have seen yourself! Southern fried chicken and no mistake!"
He gave a yelp and danced to one side as Yuna made her presence felt with a strategically placed fist in his kidneys. She leaned over to give Reb a critical once-over and Lise saw the way Reb's eyes immediately changed, the panic giving way to yearning. She smiled and shook her head. Anyone with half an eye could see that these two were already more than half in love, but they danced around the idea like it was loaded with boobytraps. Given the uproar Aurora had caused, she reflected after a moment, perhaps that wasn't too farfetched an analogy.
"He should rest," she cautioned as Yuna reached out to touch Reb gently on his forearm, where the newly regenerated flesh shone like pearl.
"I know, but I don't want him to be frightened like this," Yuna protested. "Reb, you're going to be all right. We got you to Sickbay in time and Lise put you in a cryogenic regeneration pod to heal the burns you'd got."
"Yeah, maybe next time you'll remember not to stay next to an exploding fusion reactor," Bren observed sarcastically. "'Course, if you did that, the rest of us would be so many atoms flying around the universe, so maybe it'd be better if you forgot that little detail."
"Accident?"
Reb's voice was barely recognisable as he croaked out the word and it was obvious the effort had cost him. The two girls exchanged confused looks but Bren suddenly realised what was bothering Reb. Maybe it was because it was the same kind of question which would eat away at him if he had been responsible for the lives of everyone on Deepwater, but had passed out before he got to know the answer.
"Oh, man, why didn't I think of that before?" he berated himself. Pushing Yuna a little to one side, he leaned over Reb. "Okay, listen up, hotshot, it's debriefing time. One of the fusion reactors got damaged during a meteor strike; you remember that?" When he got a minuscule nod, he continued: "The automatic shutoffs were also damaged, so we couldn't close down the reactor and it looked like the whole thing was going to go kablooey and take Deepwater with it. You decided to go in and do the shutdown procedure manually."
"He knows all this, Bren," Yuna said impatiently. "Don't make him relive it all over again."
"You sure he remembers?" Bren shot over his shoulder. "I don't think he does, not completely, and that's what's been driving him out of stasis. He can't remember if he saved us, right, Reb?"
"But that's..." Yuna's voice trailed off as she considered his words and realised they made sense.
"That would be consistent with his behavioral pattern while in stasis," Gen put in smoothly. "His brain patterns have displayed considerable stress."
Bren had been watching Reb's eyes and saw the desperate hope bloom into life in them, balanced by a wariness which the soldier in him approved. He grinned down at his commander. "Thought I was supposed to be the hero of this bunch?" he mocked gently. "You did it, Reb. You went in there and shut the sucker down before it went up, but you were pretty badly injured in some of the secondary explosions. We got you out-"
"You got him out, you mean," Lise snapped, "and gave me some extra work by not following proper safety procedures."
"If I'd have done that we'd be growing a new Reb now, not trying to pound some sense into the fool head of the one we've always had," Bren shot back. "Besides, it gave Gret something to do while you were putting our pot-roasted leader into stasis."
"Ummm?"
"Huh?" Bren gave him a look of confusion for a moment, trying to work out what the mumbled sound was supposed to mean. Then he saw the way Reb was trying to look past him to where Yuna was hovering. "Oh, right. I guess my fantastic good looks are just too much for you to take so long after waking up. I'll let you look at plain ol' Yuna for a while."
He nimbly dodged out of the way as Yuna went to respond appropriately, then moved back and watched as the pilot slipped past him to take up station beside Reb once again. Most of the terror had left Reb's eyes now, and exhaustion seemed to be winning against his determined attempts to stay awake and aware.
"Hey, you can let go, Reb," Lise said gently as she gave up and went to stand beside him on the opposite side of the Cry pod. "Your body needs the rest. We'll be here when you wake up."
Reb continued to gaze up at Yuna for a moment, then his face creased with effort. "Promise?" he whispered.
Meeting his eyes, Yuna felt her skin crawl at the expression she saw in them. She had seen it before, in the eyes of the Reb she had cornered in the corridors of Deepwater after he had tried to take the ship to avenge the death of her own clone. It was the kind of look which sometimes kept her awake at night as she struggled with the temptation to tell Reb how she felt. If he hadn't realised he had succeeded, if he had wandered in some strange kind of fever dream while he had been in Cryo...
"I promise, Reb," she said softly. "I'll be here when you wake up. We all will."
"Unless there's something interesting happening elsewhere," Bren put in, then danced away laughing when Yuna spun around to glare at him.
"You can be so tactless," she growled, but when she turned back, she was pleasantly surprised to see a faint smile glimmering in the depths of the azure eyes which were gradually closing. She supposed that Reb was so used to Bren's sarcasm that having it around again was just another piece of normality. "Go to sleep, Reb," she crooned as she stroked his cheek, not caring who saw the tender gesture. "Go to sleep and dream of us all alive and on our way to Earth."
Lulled by her gentle voice, Reb did as he was told, but this time he didn't dream.