Starship: Rogue

Chapter Eight

 The days until Fox Squad was to return to Earth slipped past uneventfully, until, one morning, when Carter did her rounds, she found that Rowan was quieter and more withdrawn than usual. Carter checked her vitals carefully, but it seemed as though everything was getting back to normal.

"Everything feel okay?" she asked Rowan.

Rowan shrugged. Her fingers skimmed over her bandaged knee, barely touching it. "Pretty much," she said, which wasn't much help.

Carter rolled her eyes. "Right," she said pragmatically. "Well, I've got a handful of patients to check up on, so, if you need me, just page me."

Again, Rowan just shrugged, so Carter left her alone and got on with her rounds. As well as Rowan, she had been assigned another half-dozen patients into her direct care until she deployed with Fox Squad, all of them military who had fought in the battle at the power station. Their injuries were minor, but slow to heal, and their treatment distracted Carter for the rest of the morning.

One man had broken several ribs, but, using new technology that sped up the fusion of bones, he was mostly healed, and Carter felt a little burst of pride that she was able to discharge him with a little bag of mild painkillers and an instruction to see one of her colleagues in a week to check on his healing.

By noon, she was in a decent mood, and she shucked off the latex gloves she was wearing and slipped into a small bathroom. Her hair, usually held back in a neat braid, was coming undone and her cheeks were flushed, but she didn't feel the least bit tired. Even running around a hospital all day, fetching medicines and nursing supplies, wasn't even a physical challenge anymore.

When she'd first started, she'd thought she was fit after her time in the army, but running around a hospital was different than running around an obstacle course or a battlefield. It had taken her a few months to adjust to the new pace, but now, after all her training, all the time she spent acting as a fully-trained doctor, her body had adjusted, and the work wasn't a challenge anymore.

The truth was, other than the chaos caused by the Battle of Hosk, Carter was bored. Rowan's offer of a job couldn't have come at a better time.

She redid her braid, splashed water onto her face, and slipped out of the bathroom. In the hall, she took a moment to decide what to do next. Mentally, she ran through her list of patients, hesitating at the thought of two people. One of her patients had been shot only a few inches from his heart, and was being transferred to surgery and Dr. Piper's care, and she wanted to make sure he was all set.

Then there was Rowan. There had been something off about her early, Carter thought, not that she knew her well enough to judge it. And her condition was more severe than most of her patients. Still, she was pretty sure Rowan would have told her if anything was wrong.

So she decided to check in with Dr. Piper about the patient she was handing over. Of course, first, she had to find Dr. Piper.

She typed Dr. Piper's name into the locator in her tablet and watched as a map of the hospital flashed onto the screen. Dr. Piper's ID code popped up in a room right near Rowan's: Lieutenant Stark's.

Well, Carter thought, two birds, one stone, and all of that.

She turned off her tablet and hurried back to the other side of the hospital, where high-ranking patients were kept. To access that wing, Carter had to enter a code in a panel by the one door in, then scan her fingerprint and palmprint, and, finally, press an access pass against a reader, and only then could she get through.

It made sense, though. This wing housed the highest-ranking patients, the ones who had valuable information and quite a lot of power. No one wanted military secrets getting out to the Colonial Network's enemies because commanding officers hadn't been kept safe while recovering.