---Emergency---

---Cường’s perspective---

I sit in the medbay, looking at my girlfriend’s transparent blue face while she sulks at me.

“I know it’s selfish, alright?!” she pouts “I know that you’d obviously choose to stay here and save lives over coming back with me! A man who’d do otherwise would not be the one who saved me on Vogo’a, wouldn’t be the one I fell in love with, wouldn’t be you!… I just… I hate it is all! I feel like I only just found you, after [decades] of searching… and… and now…” she trails off.

“Now?” I prompt, my tone and face pained but sympathetic.

Her gelatinous features morph into an expression of forlorn shame as she finishes “…now I feel like I’m going to lose you again… and that’s terrifying!”

“Soo…!” I exhale, reaching out a hand to place on her squashy jelly shoulder “…you’re not going to lose me! As much as you were waiting for me I was waiting for you!… I was waiting for someone who could make me feel like you do. I was waiting for someone to come along who’d light up my life like you have… A year, two at most, of being alone on this planet and then we can be back together again… It will be hard, I know, but is it too long to wait when we can have the rest of our lives together afterwards?”

She pauses, looking at me, before asking “The rest of our lives?”

I panic for a moment, realising the words that just slipped from my mouth, but I don’t back down, confirming “That’s what I said, Soo.”

She smiles “You really think…?”

“If you don’t get bored of me…(!)” I quip “…then… yeah, Soo… I really think…”

At that moment, I hear a cacophony that sounds as if a team of angry pickaxe wielders were rapidly thundering their way towards our location from down the corridor, trying their very hardest to render the floor unwalkable after them as they go!

A distraught, guttural, translated voice screams “HEALERS! BRING ME THE HEALERS!!!”

I hear the thundering stop, just outside the medbay’s door.

I take one step towards it as it opens but, the instant there’s a 5cm wide gap, a pair of thick, armoured, scarlet clawed fingers are thrust through and wrapped around the side.

The door is wrenched open in a powerful slam that sounds as if it completely destroyed the mechanisms that drive it back and forward into the wall!

I start back in fear at the deranged look on the face of the terrifyingly large woman who just ripped my door open as she fixes me with an eight eyed stare.

There is a moment where my mind irrationally shows me a brief tableau of her rushing forward and stabbing me through the chest with one of her unshoed feet, currently buried in the metal floor!

A quarter of a second later, though, I see the face of the grey furred man on her back (that I’m 97% sure is already far beyond saving) and smell the coppery scent of the blue blood I can see absolutely drenching his body.

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The fearsome woman looks at me and, her quavering, out of breath voice utterly desolate, entreats “Save him!”

My instincts as a former combat medic immediately wrest control as I enter 'emergency mode'.

“Bring him in. Put him up here.” I instruct, my voice decisive, gesturing to the operating table.

She steps in and reaches behind herself, easily lifting the (relatively) tiny, grey furred man from her back and bringing him around to lay out on the slab.

It’s worse than I initially thought…

His throat has been wrapped in a bandage of what looks like freshly spun silk but both it and his clothes are utterly drenched in bright blue blood.

His legs have stiffened, suggesting a lack of hydraulic pressure keeping them flexible.

As much as it looks like the man before me is already a corpse, I’ve still got to treat him as if there’s a chance he might make it, for the moment.

A 97% chance he’s already dead is still a 3% chance he can be saved… he wouldn’t be the worst looking patient I’ve ever brought back from the brink.

“What happened to him?” I ask his daughter, still looming over me.

“I-I-I… he… the criminal… s-stabbed him with his hand…” she stammers, chaotically.

“Soo, please alert the ambassadors and Emiko that Stetter was sighted in Khawekh.” I instruct my girlfriend.

She immediately melts her humanoid body into a rough spheroid and rolls out of the door, much faster than she can manage walking on her legs.

I take out my medical holo and bring it to the man’s skull.

The numbers my scan returns are… not good…

As I expected.

“I’m sorry, General… It’s too late…” I say in a low, sombre voice.

“Wh-what do you mean?”

“Your father is already gone…” I state, looking up at her.

“Then bring him back!” she demands, her desolate expression turning angry.

“That’s not possible.”

“You brought me back from the dead! You brought the Twigg back from the dead! Why can’t you do the same for him!?” she snarls.

“I didn’t bring you back from the dead. I was able to stabilise a wound that would have been fatal without intervention. There’s a difference. The time your brain was without oxygenated blood was minimal. His brain has been without oxygen for far too long at this point… There’s nothing of him left to save.”

“But…!”

“I’m not a sorcerer, General!” I cut her off “I know it might seem to you that the medicine I practice is indistinguishable from magic but there are limits to it and bringing a person back to life, after brain death, is outside of my power!”

The woman stares down at me, her breaths coming rapidly as her eyes scan my face.

What’s building could be a violent outburst… or a panic attack… or…

The more than half tonne woman collapses to the floor with an immense *boom* and chokes out a sob… her eight eyes all obscured by maroon eyelids.

Option three; a sobbing fit.

“It’s not fair!” she wails “It’s not fair that I get to live and he just has to die! It’s not FAIR!!!"

Clear tears spill down her face before turning blue from the contact with the air.

Trying not to be perturbed by the revelation that Vrakhand apparently cry a dilute form of their own blood, I do my best to console her “I’m… incredibly sorry for your loss, General…”

“Khr'kowan!” comes a woman’s voice from the door.

I look up to see Lhamo, Ngngomg and Emiko entering the room.

The trio take a moment to look from the man on the operating table to his sobbing daughter and draw the obvious conclusion.

Emiko is the first to approach the woman.

Her tone apologetic, she begins “Khr'kowan, I’m sorry to have to ask this of you right now but… Stetter? Did anyone see where he went after he did this? If we can move quickly enough, we might be able to stop him before…”

She grimaces and waves a negating gesture, sniffing “He didn’t go anywhere!”

Clearly taken aback by the miserable woman’s assertion, Emiko asks “Sorry… So he’s still in Khawekh?”

The Vrakhand gives a dismal affirmative.

“Does he have hostages or…?”

“No… I caught him… held him down while my sisters restrained him with webbing… When we had him secured, I ran here carrying my father…”

Clearly as shocked as everyone else in the room (but managing to catch herself before she acts too delighted by that news) Emiko simply answers “Oh… I see… Well done, Khr'kowan…”