Chapter Text
When Lovelace wakes up strapped to the observation table in the Hephaestus’s lab, she is convinced she is trapped in some kind of horrible nightmare. Maybe once, just once, she’ll have a dream that isn’t about the godforsaken space station that is determined to keep pulling her back to it. Today, however, is not that day. Not only is she still onboard the Hephaestus, but it is becoming increasingly clear to her that this is not a dream. No, this is her waking up to reality, one that is hazy and twinged with pain but nonetheless real.
“Captain Lovelace. Can you hear me?”
That voice. Of course it’s that voice. Lovelace focuses her vision to see the face of Selberg (Hilbert, she mentally corrects herself--Selberg was then, Hilbert is now) looming over her. She blinks at the light that he shines in her eyes to check her responsiveness, and when she opens her eyes again he does not go away.
“Not you,” she murmurs, her voice heavy with the aftereffects of being under sedation.
“I will take that as ‘yes.’” Hilbert switches off the light. “You were severely injured. Shrapnel from exploding wall panel in your abdomen. I was able to repair major damage, but you have a long recovery ahead of you.”
“Great,” Lovelace manages to rasp out in sarcastic reply. A flash of memory surfaces in her sluggish mind: the explosion of the panel in question and her shoving Minkowski out of the trajectory of its path. Not one of her brighter ideas in hindsight, but what good captain doesn’t put her life on the line in a time of crisis?
With an enormous amount of effort, she shifts her left arm. Upon catching a glimpse of her upper arm, she notices that the dead man’s switch is no longer strapped to it. “What--where--” she begins, but Hilbert hushes her into silence.
“You must save your strength,” he says.
Lovelace does not have the energy to resist him. Trying to ignore the persistent ache of pain in her body, she lies still as Hilbert continues to examine her. Her consciousness remains fuzzier than she’d like it to be, and so she is only dimly aware of the sound of the door opening a few minutes later. Minkowski’s voice follows, but the words she exchanges with Hilbert are too quiet for her to overhear.
She dozes off not long after, and when she wakes again she has no idea if minutes or hours have passed. What she does know is that Hilbert is nowhere to be seen, which immediately sets her more at ease. Instead, Minkowski is the one at her bedside, and relief crosses the commander’s face when she sees that Lovelace is awake.
“Hey,” says Minkowski. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine.” Not that Lovelace can really be fine when she feels like she has been hit by a truck, but she’s certainly not going to tell Minkowski otherwise. She tries to sit up as best as she can against her restraints, giving a groan of pain at the exertion.
“Easy, easy.” Minkowski gently pushes her back down to lie on the examination table. “I was able to convince Hilbert to give us some time to talk privately, but his conditions were that I make sure you don’t overexert yourself and contact him the minute anything goes wrong. And I’d really rather not have to call him back in here.”
“Where is he?” Lovelace asks. Even if that maniac of a man has saved her life, she does not like the idea of him having free reign of the Hephaestus. No crisis is big enough to make her forget everything else he has done to her.
“I’ve locked him back up in the observation deck for now, but he says he’ll need to keep close watch over you as long as you’re still on bedrest.” Minkowski’s forehead crinkles with frown lines, as if she does not entirely approve of this course of action. “I suppose that no matter what’s happened, we can’t deny that he saved your life. Although in his words, you’re ‘really good at not dying.’” She does a decent imitation of Hilbert’s accent with her last words.
Lovelace’s bitter laughter dies away when her abdominal muscles scream in protest at the action. “That’s me,” she says. “Too goddamn persistent for my own good.” And then, remembering the lack of the familiar weight of the dead man’s switch against her arm, she adds, “The sensor. Did it…?”
She cannot bring herself to finish the question. Minkowski’s expression darkens, and Lovelace already knows that whatever is about to leave her mouth will be nothing good.
“You… flatlined, while Hilbert was operating on you,” Minkowski explains. “He was able to resuscitate you quickly, but it… It was still enough. The bomb went off.”
She maintains a forced tone of evenness in her response, but the look on her face tells Lovelace that there is more to the story. There has to be, if the bomb has detonated without causing major damage to the Hephaestus. She thinks back to what the plan had been before she’d taken a piece of shrapnel to the gut. The shuttle. Right. They were planning on using her shuttle to get the station back in a safe orbit after the star put on its surprise blue lightshow.
“And the shuttle?” she asks.
“We were able to use its engine power to help us get back in orbit, but the shuttle ended up getting detached from the station. We were trying to reattach it when the bomb went off.” Minkowski pauses here. She closes her eyes and scrubs a hand against her forehead. “Eiffel was on the shuttle when it happened. We were able to receive confirmation that he’d survived, but the force of the explosion sent the shuttle hurtling into deep space. We lost all communication with him.”
“Oh.” The gravity of the situation hits Lovelace all at once. A member of the crew lost, their one chance to leave the Hephaestus gone--no wonder Minkowski looks so grim. “Shit.”
“Yeah.” Minkowski exhales a wavering breath. “I thought it would be better if you heard about it from me rather than Hilbert.”
Hilbert. Lovelace’s first instinct is to immediately blame him for the latest development in the unending nightmare of life on the Hephaestus, but for once, this might be something out of his hands. As long as he knew that Eiffel was on that shuttle, he would have never done anything to endanger his precious test subject. No, the blame lies elsewhere this time, and Minkowski is doing a hell of a good job of not immediately jumping to the conclusion that this is Lovelace’s fault. Her shuttle, her bomb--it’s not a stretch at all for the rest of the crew to come at her with pointed fingers. They have already been clear enough in their distrust of her from the moment she returned to the station.
“How’s the station holding?” she asks, deciding to press forward with business matters.
“It’s…” Minkowski hesitates, as if she is unsure of how to reply. “It’s functioning for now. I’m waiting for Hera to report back with a full assessment of the damage. How’s that coming, by the way, Hera?”
“Um, not that great,” comes the sound of Hera’s response. “A lot of the systems still aren’t responding, and I’ve only been able to get a few back online to run the fixes I need.”
“And how many systems are currently down?” asks Minkowski.
“One hundred and six by my last count, sir.”
“Well, that’s just great,” says Lovelace. She does not bother to keep the sarcasm out of her voice. “The star went berserk, I almost died, the shuttle is gone, Eiffel is lost in space, and on top of that half the station isn’t even running properly right now. I don’t see how things can go even more wrong at this point.”
“You think I don’t know that?” The hard edge of irritation makes its way into Minkowski’s tone. “I’m doing the best I can. But if things don’t start improving soon, I’m going to have to contact Command and request their support.”
Lovelace gives a mirthless scoff of laughter. “Command? Do you seriously think Command is going to help us? That they even care about us? As long as the station is even remotely operational, they’re not going to do anything. I’ve done this song and dance before, Minkowski. And it ends with us either getting ourselves the hell off this station without Command’s help or staying up here until we die. Those are our only options.”
“I know. I know.” Minkowski’s words break off into a sigh of frustration. She rubs a hand across her forehead again. “I’m sorry. I’ll… I’ll think of something. There’s just a lot for me to deal with right now.”
“Then I suggest you deal with it,” Lovelace says. “You’re the one in command of this station. It’s time for you to put your big girl pants on and not waste valuable time sitting around feeling sorry for yourself. Got it?”
She does not care that her words veer into the territory of harshness. During her own forays into hopeless situations (and Lovelace has become a master of hopeless situations by now), she’d certainly wished that someone besides the voices in her own head could have talked some sense into her. Everything that she has witnessed from Minkowski thus far has proven that she is an extremely capable woman, and Lovelace will be damned if she has to watch her give up in the face of potential disaster.
At first, Minkowski does not respond, and the only sound between them is the background noise of the medical equipment in the laboratory. She then takes the deep inhale and exhale of a calming breath. “You’re right, Captain,” she replies. “I’ll see what I can do to assist Hera with any preliminary repairs. You should rest up in the meantime.”
As if Lovelace can rest when she is under Hilbert’s care and observation. A quiet whisper in the back of her mind immediately jumps to the worst-case scenario-- what if he has done something to you, what if you’re going to become the latest iteration of his sick experiments --but she quickly dismisses those thoughts. Hilbert is not foolish enough to try anything to incapacitate her, not unless he wants another death wish on his head. Not after she has made it perfectly clear to him that she is not afraid to employ violence against him.
She takes a bracing breath when Hilbert enters the lab again and continues his examination of her. One thing is for certain: it’s going to be a long few weeks of recovery for her.
This is not the first time that Lovelace has been laid up in bed with a serious injury, but she has forgotten how mind-numbingly boring bedrest is. When her only interactions are with the doctor whose guts she hates, the commander who only visits to give her status updates, and the autopilot who remains a model of passive-aggression throughout the majority of their communications, Lovelace grows stir-crazy after the very first day. Minkowski brings the TV into the lab to give her at least one method of entertainment, but the Hephaestus’s film library is equally as disappointing now as it was during her first stay on the station. There’s only so many times she can endure Home Alone 2 before she loses all tolerance for Christmas spirit and cleverly-placed booby traps.
When Hilbert finally lets her leave the lab, and then later clears her for light exercise along with the physical therapy he has instructed her to do to combat the effects of muscular atrophy, it’s like a holiday in and of itself. With the thought of how far she can stretch the words “light exercise,” she heads for the treadmill on the middeck and straps herself in for a run. It’s the same machine that had been on the station three years ago, and she’d become very well-acquainted with it during that time. There’s nothing like running for miles to help her forget how screwed everyone is if conditions on the station do not improve soon--although the concept of running for miles and going nowhere is not lost on her on a metaphorical level.
She sets her pace at a light jog, forcing herself to show at least some degree of restraint lest she end up stuck under Hilbert’s care again. He has already preemptively denied her access to his stash of painkillers except in the case of extreme emergencies, clearly having learned his lesson from the last time she’d been injured on this station. It’s probably for the best, Lovelace decides. Minkowski will not take kindly to the idea of her using the occasional painkiller high to help her through difficult times.
And speaking of Minkowski, the sound of an opening door heralds her arrival about halfway through Lovelace’s run. “Commander,” Lovelace says to her in terse greeting. “What do you want?”
A slight frown crosses Minkowski’s expression. “Are you sure you should be exerting yourself like this?” she asks. “Hilbert said--”
“I don’t care what he said,” replies Lovelace. “I know my limits. I’m not going to sit around and do nothing whenever you don’t need me for repairs.”
“All right,” Minkowski says, although the tone of her voice remains doubtful. “Have you messed with the settings too much? Because I have it set specifically to what I’ve been using for my own workouts and--” She breaks off with a sigh. “I suppose that’s not important right now, is it?”
“No, it’s not.” Lovelace slows her pace so that she does not tire herself before their conversation is over. “What do you want?” she asks again.
In the weeks that have passed since she has learned that the shuttle has been lost in space, Lovelace has been anticipating the moment that Minkowski lays the blame for that incident directly at her feet. She understands if Minkowski has wanted to hold off on the accusations until Lovelace is on the other side of her recovery, but by now she has no reason to remain silent on the matter if she truly blames Lovelace. Perhaps Minkowski is more charitable in her judgment than Lovelace expects, and yet that does not stop her from wondering “Is this going to be the conversation?” every time they speak with each other.
“I need to talk to you about Hilbert,” says Minkowski.
“What about him?” Lovelace replies, trying to keep her response as nonchalant as she can when the matter of Hilbert is involved.
“There are still a lot of repairs that need to be done on the station. You’re not well enough to be on a full rotation schedule yet, and even with Hera’s help one, sometimes two, pairs of hands won’t be enough. So…”
Minkowski leaves the unfinished thought hanging in the air, but Lovelace does not need her to say anything more to understand her meaning. “No,” she says in immediate response. “I’ve already cooperated with him enough to last me a lifetime. I don’t care if he saved mine and Eiffel’s lives. That doesn’t excuse everything else he’s done. And I really don’t think we can afford the time to have one of us pointing a gun at his head 24/7 while he’s working.”
Minkowski huffs out a frustrated breath. “This isn’t up for debate. We need another person working on the station or else we’re going to fall even further behind in repairs than we already are. And like it or not, Hilbert is the only option we have.”
“So why even bother coming to me?” Lovelace asks. Her feet pound against the treadmill with heavy footfalls as she makes a valiant attempt to not unload all of her negative feelings onto Minkowski. “Clearly this is a decision you felt fully confident in making yourself. Why say you need to talk to me about Hilbert and then completely disregard my opinion?”
“Because.” Minkowski stands unwavering in front of her, her arms folded in front of her chest. “I think you deserve the respect of knowing my plans before I carry them out so that you’re not left blindsided. And I will make sure that he’s working under my supervision at all times. I’ll have you paired with either myself or Hera whenever I need you for a two-person job. With any luck you won’t even have to interact with him at all.”
At least Minkowski is smart enough to have the two crew members who hold the most contempt for Hilbert working as far away from him as possible. Having to cooperate with Hera, however, has already established itself to be a trying task for Lovelace in the time that has passed since she has been permitted to work short repair shifts. Like Minkowski, Hera has not outright stated any direct accusations about Lovelace’s involvement in Eiffel getting lost in space, but her attitude speaks louder than words. Hera wields passive-aggression as if it is a weapon, and for an AI programmed to have a polite and friendly disposition she has certainly been giving Lovelace an abundance of carefully worded sass lately. (“I don’t know, Captain, can I?” she’d said when Lovelace had requested her to raise the temperature on the bridge yesterday, the tone of her response as cold as the chill in the air.)
“Well, isn’t that generous of you, Commander,” Lovelace says. Now is not the time to be petty, though. With the Hephaestus still far away from its dubiously operational conditions prior to the star’s change in behavior, the major choice seems to be between “being petty” and “surviving.” No matter how bad the situation gets, survival has always been Lovelace’s top priority. Not even the issue of Hilbert is enough to make her budge from that stance.
“Fine, we’ll do it your way.” she relents. “But if this blows up in our faces, I’ll be the first one to say ‘I told you so.’”
The tight-lipped expression on Minkowski’s face does not give way to the irritation or perhaps even bitter humor that Lovelace has expected to elicit from her. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.”
A brief silence falls between them, broken only by the quiet sound of Lovelace’s footfalls on the treadmill. “Well,” Minkowski continues on, “I have to get back to work and give Hilbert his new assignment. Thank you for understanding, Captain.”
“Understanding” is the last word the Lovelace would use to describe her acquiescence to Minkowski’s words. She will never understand why Minkowski is perfectly content to let a murderer wander free around the Hephaestus, and so the most she can offer is grudging agreement. Despite the boiling undercurrent of tension between her and the other members of the crew, cooperation is the only thing that will keep all of them from dying out here on a malfunctioning station.
“Minkowski,” Lovelace says to her as she turns to leave.
She stops in mid-motion and turns back to face Lovelace. “Hmm?”
“When was the last time you slept?”
Lovelace is the last person who should be concerned about another person’s sleeping habits, considering her own sleep schedule has been shot to hell for a long time thanks to the winning combination of nightmares and insomnia. But she knows how easy it is to slip into the pattern of pulling all-nighters in the name of fixing just one more thing, and she refuses to let Minkowski create a trend of Hephaestus commanders who stop knowing the definition of a good night’s sleep. At least until they can find a way to fix the major systems and leave the station, there is too much at stake.
“I’m fine,” Minkowski replies. “If you think that sleep deprivation is clouding my judgment, you’re wrong. Maybe I haven’t been sleeping as much as I should lately, but I’m fine. I understand your concern, but you don’t need to worry about me.”
“I’m not worried at all, Commander,” Lovelace says to Minkowski’s retreating back as she departs.
She picks up the pace of her jog, pushing herself as far as her still-healing body will let her. Running for miles and yet going nowhere--yes, there has been no better metaphor for her life than there is in this moment. Unlike her last stay on the Hephaestus, this time there is no shuttle for her to build, no daring escape plan that will finally free her from this godforsaken place. She is trapped here with Minkowski, with Hera, with Hilbert, and the only way forward for her is to survive.