Work Text:
The restaurant is comfortably grimy, like whatever they serve will be fried and slowly toxic in an exactly dependable way. It's not an ambience that Beckett Mariner is familiar with on Earth. Also, the whole place is in high-contrast black and white.
A disheveled, bohemian type in a shabby overcoat is speaking at the counter with another man, bearded and behatted, who seems to have trapped the first man into a conversation. The man in the hat is explaining ancient Hebrew gematria by scrawling on a news periodical of some kind. Each letter in the alphabet is a number, and the numbers of the Torah are interrelated. He adds up the Hebrew letters for garden of Eden and gets 144, and then tree of knowledge and gets 233. "Cute, huh? And not just that, but—"
"Fibonacci," the first man says, begrudgingly interested a tiny bit.
"Ha! Good eye. You know, I remember when I was a kid and I first learned that the ratio of Fibonacci numbers tends to the golden ratio, it blew my socks off. What does adding up pairs of numbers again and again have to do with the diagonal of a regular pentagon, right? Who ordered that?"
"It's not hard to prove."
"Sure, sure. But when does a proof feel like a reason, right, my man?"
Mariner whispers to T'Lyn, "I take it we're not just here for the coffee."
"This holonovel is based on the surviving portions of an audiovisual entertainment work made on Earth prior to your Third World War. The question it appears to advance is whether there are scientific or mathematical truths so profound that the human species can only understand them as religious in character. I am experiencing it in order to better integrate my reflections upon Velara III."
Mariner takes a sip from the chipped-rim mug she is holding. "And is the replicated coffee period-accurate? Because this is some bitter truth, girlfriend."
T'Lyn is about to reply when all the motion around them pauses—a pancake caught in mid-flip over the oily grill—and Boimler's command voice slams through the holodeck. "Red alert. All hands to battle stations. Engineering, we need maximum warp immediately."
"Computer, arch!" Mariner calls out, already running, T'Lyn beside her. She strikes her combadge that she wears beneath her pre-WWIII civilian jacket. The alert klaxon is going off around them. "Mariner to Boimler. T'Lyn and I are heading to the bridge."
"Copy that, Mariner."
Ransom's voice breaks into their conversation. "Status, Lieutenant Boimler."
"Sir! We have a dikironium cloud creature incoming, bearing one-eight-zero, and it's a big one."
It's a hell of a way to interrupt the evening shift.
Mariner feels the Cerritos jump to warp just as they reach the turbolift doors.
"Bridge to Engineering," Boimler is saying. "We need warp with all the nines for as long as you can give it."
And then, the ensign at the Ops console is reporting, "Sir, blast doors not closing for shuttlebay two. Primary actuator failure. Secondary actuators cycling. Cycle will complete in... nineteen seconds."
T'Lyn has her science-officer padd out now and is taking in the sensor readings. Four seconds too late, she thinks, and the thought echoes through their bond.
That's this deck, next section, Mariner realizes. We go and seal the vents manually.
And they're sprinting again.
Boimler on the comm: "Captain, sir!" Ransom must have reached the bridge. "Brace for impact!"
The deck heaves under them and the corridor wall tilts away.
The half-phased substance of the cloud creature is laughing at the Cerritos' shields. "Clear the section!" Mariner orders to anyone who might be listening. T'Lyn is tossing aside a wall panel to rip into the isolinear circuits behind it. Mariner tries to remember what the junction work is like at shuttlebay two, what conduits go through this wall, when she smells something rancid and sweet.
Gas coming up the ODN line, she thinks.
Ransom's voice now: "Engineering, jettison antimatter pods one through four! All hands brace for de-warping!"
The inertial dampeners scream bloody murder and T'Lyn catches Mariner's hand as the floor becomes vertical.
It doesn't eat Vulcan blood, Mariner says inside T'Lyn's mind.
One moment, my love, T'Lyn replies. The Vulcan then wedges her body against the gas flux coming through the panel beside the shuttlebay doors.
Mariner knows hypoxia, and this case is coming on bad and fast.
And then the Cerritos' antimatter pods explode and Jim Kirk the fucking cloud.
* * *
T'Lyn carries her into Sickbay at a run, and Dr. T'Ana forgoes the hypospray in favor of jamming a tritanium needle into her arm.
"Cyanosis, hypovolemia, red cells are blended," T'Ana bites off the words. "Stand by for drugs, kid."
Mariner asks, "OK if I pass out now? Because I'd really like..."
I will provide the necessary explanations, ashayam, T'Lyn tells her through their bond.
Mariner manages a thumbs-up before collapsing.
* * *
Radiation burns, plenty of fractures and bruises, an engine limping along at warp 4, and one lieutenant who's been snacked on by a vampire cloud. The USS Cerritos has seen better days, but it's seen a whole lot worse.
* * *
T'Lyn gently deposits Mariner into bed in their quarters. "Thanks, babe," says the human woman. "I can't believe that our ship gets attacked by a bloodsucking noncorporeal being and all I get is thirty-six hours medical leave," she fingers the physio-monitor attached to her neck, "and a damn neck thingy." She closes her eyes. "And I thought vampires were supposed to be sexy."
"This is evidently another aspect of human culture with which I am not yet familiar."
This gets a stress-relief giggle out of Mariner. "Computer," she says. "Access audiobook database. Retrieve Drac—no, retrieve Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu." She beckons with the fingers of her left hand. "Settle in with me for a while, ashayam."
T'Lyn climbs into bed beside her. "This is an interesting environment in which to become further cultured. I find it most educational."
* * *
In their next holonovel excursion, Mariner gets the Bowie knife into Count Dracula's heart, while T'Lyn removes his head with her kukri. "Fucking canonical, meatbag!" Mariner screams, and it feels good.