Baseline

Posted on Sun Jul 5th, 2026 @ 12:39pm by Vaelira Daro & Lieutenant S'reessa

1,485 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Prologue
Location: Sickbay, USS Sulaco

Vaelira would have preferred almost anywhere else on the ship.

That thought came and went with the quiet honesty of instinct as she stood outside sickbay, looking at the closed doors as though they might decide she was medically uninteresting and spare her the trouble. They did not. They remained precisely what they were: bright, sterile, inevitable. For a moment she just stood there, shoulders straight, face composed, feeling the old, irrational tension gathering beneath her skin.

It was ridiculous, in a way. She could stand in front of an unstable power grid and feel calmer than she did outside a medical bay. She could argue with a spore drive, walk into a lab full of dangerous equations, and place her hands on systems most people would rather admire from a safe distance. None of that touched this particular nerve. Sickbay did. The smell, the light, the waiting instruments, the quiet assumption that she would lie down, hold still, and let someone else decide what condition she was in. Too much of it brushed up against older things she never quite stopped carrying. Not memories she let herself sit with often, but impressions that had sunk deeper than thought: being observed too closely, assessed without choice, spoken to in calm voices that expected compliance because there was nowhere else to go.

She hated that it still got to her.

Not enough to refuse. Never that. Vaelira understood perfectly well why she was here. Civilian or not, nobody with access to an experimental spore drive and a ship full of tightly wound systems was going to be waved past medical clearance. On principle, she respected that. In practice, she would rather have spent three hours elbow-deep in a failing coupling matrix.

When the doors finally parted, she stepped inside with the same controlled composure she brought to every room she didn’t trust. Her eyes moved quickly, taking in the biobeds, the diagnostic units, the trays of instruments arranged with that neat medical precision she had never found reassuring. Sickbay always looked so gentle at first glance. Clean. Bright. Orderly. That, somehow, made it worse.

Vaelira let her hands fold lightly behind her back, more to stop herself from fidgeting than out of any real formality, and made herself keep walking until she was properly inside. Engineering asked what you could fix. Sickbay asked what had already been damaged, and whether it might fail again under pressure. She had spent fourteen years learning how not to answer that question unless she absolutely had to.

When she finally spoke, her voice was calm, with just enough dryness to stop the moment from feeling too exposed. “I assume this is the part where I’m told to sit still and answer questions everyone insists are routine.” A faint, fleeting smile touched her mouth, more habit than ease. “I did come willingly, which feels like it ought to count for something.”

"Yes indeed it does. I am Dr. S'reessa. Who are you, please?"

Vaelira let the brief smile fade completely. “Vaelira Daro,” she answered, calm and concise. “Mycelial systems specialist. Engineer, if you prefer the shorter version.”

"Wonderful! Well nice to meet you Valeria Daro. So are you here for a medical check-up, or psychological assessment?"

Vaelira let out the smallest breath through her nose, her fingers tightening briefly against one another behind her back before she forced them still again. “Just the medical check-up,” she said, calm enough on the surface, even if the words cost her more than they should have. “I think that’s enough for one visit.”

"Very well. Then let's give you a physical. Make sure everything is working properly. Mycelial systems specialist. Must be very specialized indeed. Well it sounds like you are the one to make the ship go and keep going through the mycelian space. It is a pleasure to meet you."

Vaelira’s expression softened by a fraction, more out of reflex than intention, as if S’reessa’s enthusiasm had caught her slightly off guard. The doctor’s presence was difficult to read as threatening when she was standing there with white fur, bright attention, and the sort of open curiosity that belonged more naturally in a lab than in an interrogation. “That’s more or less the idea,” she said, her voice easier now, though she still kept her hands loosely linked behind her back. “I don’t make her go on my own, thankfully. I just try to make sure she keeps speaking the same language as the rest of the ship.”

Her eyes drifted once around sickbay before settling back on S’reessa, and for a moment the faint smile at her mouth turned a little more rueful. “It’s nice to meet you too, Doctor,” she said. “I’m just not especially good at this part. Medical spaces have a way of bringing back things I’d rather leave buried. Too much standing still. Too much being handled. Too much of that pause where someone decides what you are to them before they decide what they’re going to do.” She let out the smallest breath through her nose, then added with gentler dryness, “So if I seem a little tense, it’s not personal. I’d still rank this somewhere below a plasma fire on my list of preferred ways to spend the morning.”

S'reessa chuckled. "I understand and I do very much appreciate you coming in! Now let me look at you. Hmm, not bad at all!" she said as she looked at the readings on the biobed. "Very good indeed. Now I do need to put you through your paces so to speak. I want a full baseline to start with. It will help in the future."

Vaelira’s eyes flicked briefly toward the biobed, then back to S’reessa. “Define ‘paces’ before we start,” she said, not sharply, but with enough firmness to make it clear the question mattered. “I’ll cooperate. I just do better when I know what someone is about to do to me before they do it.”

"Ok well check all your vitals and make sure everything is as it should be. We will do a stress test and see how you heart and lungs are function. Check your reflexes. A typical physical."

Vaelira listened, her eyes moving once toward the biobed before returning to S’reessa. None of it sounded unreasonable. That helped. It did not make the room feel any less bright, or the instruments any less present, but at least the shape of the thing had been named.

“Alright,” she said after a moment, the word calm but not quite casual. “That sounds manageable.”

She let her hands uncurl from behind her back and stepped closer to the biobed, though she didn’t sit immediately. A faint, dry edge returned to her voice, gentler now. “I should warn you, I’m much better with machinery than treadmills. So if the stress test proves I have the stamina of a badly maintained relay, I’d like that kept out of my permanent file.”

The flicker of humour faded into something quieter, more honest. “Just tell me before you touch me or start any close scans,” she added. “That’s all I need.”

"Of course. I will do that!"

Vaelira got through the rest of it.

Not comfortably, exactly, but she got through it. Vitals, reflexes, balance, heart and lung response, the usual string of small indignities wrapped in clinical necessity. S’reessa kept her word and told her before every close scan and every touch, which made more difference than Vaelira wanted to admit. It did not make sickbay pleasant, but it kept it from becoming something worse.

By the time the final readings settled, some of the tension had eased from her shoulders. Not all of it. Enough.

She slipped down from the biobed once she was cleared, smoothing her hands over the front of her uniform more for something to do than because it needed it. Her eyes moved briefly around sickbay again, less wary now, though no more fond of the place than she had been when she walked in.

“Well,” she said, drawing in a slow breath as she looked back to S’reessa. “That was less terrible than advertised.”

A faint smile touched her mouth, small but real. “Thank you, Doctor. For explaining before you did things. I know that probably seems minor from your side of the room, but it isn’t.”

She stepped toward the doors, already feeling herself lean mentally back toward engineering, toward machinery and systems and things that made sense when they broke.

“If anyone asks,” she added, the dryness returning as the doors parted, “I was exceptionally brave.”

Then she left sickbay with her clean bill of health, her composure mostly intact, and the quiet, private relief of having survived a perfectly routine physical.

 

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