Still somewhat dazed from the explosion, Wren tried to process the news he’d just received from the captain in the dim gloom of the drone ship’s hold. He was vaguely aware of a low alarm tone sounding, likely in response to the bomb. Through panicked thoughts, he tried to center himself by going back to the training he’d received at Starfleet Academy. This was a triage situation, and he had to prioritize patient safety before beginning treatment.

“A thrilling start to your nursing career, no?” Hawthorne asked, his voice calm but pained. He looked down at himself and grunted from the exertion of moving his neck. “Lucky you: if this had been on the right side, I really would have ruined your day.”

“Thrilling… Catastrophic… six of one and half dozen of another, right?” Wren quipped, matching the senior officer’s wit as he looked through his medical kit. He already knew it was safe to beam Hawthorne, but he was still figuring out how to move him without a transporter. “I need to move you to a safe area without somehow driving this further into your side.”

It was then that Lieutenant Robinson arrived with Ensign Aiden in tow. Robinson practically dove to the deck to look at Hawthorne’s injuries.

“Shit,” Robinson muttered, seemingly incapable of not escalating any situation he walked to. “That looks bad.”

“Aren’t you a breath of fresh air,” Hawthorne groaned.

Having extra hands changed things. Wren took two thin poles from the side of the medical kit and set them on the deck next to Hawthorne. He twisted the end of one of them and they both expanded to Hawthorne’s height, before rolling apart to reveal a fabric sling, and then even popping out handles to form a stretcher.

“I need to extract this shrapnel, but first we need to move the commander to a safe area. We’ll take him back to the vestibule,” Wren said, sounding more assertive than he knew how to be. “Robinson, take his shoulders. I’ll take his feet. We’ll move him onto the stretcher on a three count.”

Robinson looked dazzled for a moment, but complied. They gently moved Hawthorne over onto the stretcher without anyone questioning his authority.

“Okay. Aiden, can you grab the medkit? Let’s get him back to the entrance. Keep him level,” Wren ordered.

“Loving this bossy streak from you,” Robinson teased, as they lifted Hawthorne up.

“I think technically he’s in command right now,” Hawthorne noted, through a groan of pain. He reached up to tap his badge but then noticed that it had also been struck by debris and wasn’t operational. Instead, he reached behind himself to tap Robinson’s badge. “Hawthorne to Costa.”

“Costa here. I’ve been trying to raise you. What’s going on down there?!” Costa answered from the other end of the call.

“Sorry. My combadge is damaged. Plasma bomb in the hold,” Hawthorne managed.

“Sir, with all due respect, please stop talking,” Wren ordered. “Commander, this is Wren. Hawthorne has been hit. We’re moving him to a safe location so I can stabilize him.”

There was a pause.

“I’m trying to get the freighter’s shields online. As soon as I’m done, I’ll come find you. Are Robinson and Aiden with you?” Costa replied.

“We’re here,” Robinson replied.

“When you’re done helping Wren, you’ve gotta get those inventory scanners online. The captain said that there’s something valuable and/or dangerous down there.”

“It was probably in the giant secure crate that’s cut open,” Robinson replied.

“Mierda. Okay. We’ll deal with that later. Sweep the hold to make sure there aren’t any other surprises, then seal it and go help Shadi get the computers back online,” Costa ordered. “Keep me updated, Wren. Costa out.”

As the conversation finished, they got Hawthorne on the stretcher out into the vestibule. The stretcher wasn’t going to fit into the tiny turbolift, and Wren was running through the options he had with just a medkit.

“Okay, put him down here,” Wren said.

“What else can we do to help?” Aiden asked.

“Erm, we need to get his jacket off,” Wren said, directing the other two to help peel the leather expedition jacket off of Hawthorne.

It took a lot of effort to do so without disturbing the shard in his side, but once it was off it revealed that there was much more bleeding than Wren was expecting. Wren rolled the jacket up and put it behind Hawthorne’s head to help make him more comfortable. As he looked at the wound again, Wren held back a quip about the jackets being rated as puncture-proof, when they clearly were very puncturable.

“He’s got it from here. Go finish the cargo bay,” Hawthorne ordered, grimacing as he tried and failed to sit up. “Go,” he insisted when Robinson and Aiden hesitated.

As the other two officers departed, Wren began identifying the tools he would need from the kit. Ideally, he’d have a biobed to help stabilize his vitals, but that wasn’t in the cards.

“You’re losing blood, sir. I need to take this out and close the wound, before I can try to do anything else,” Wren explained, realizing that his emotions were creeping into the edges of his voice.

“That sounds like a good plan,” Hawthorne agreed, watching as Wren loaded a hypospray with a combination coagulant and analgesic. “Breathe, Wren. I really hadn’t planned on dying today, so I promise I’ll be an easy patient.”

Wren forced a nod, immune to the commander’s attempt at humor because of his mood. He applied the hypospray to Hawthorne’s neck, knowing it would help but not completely dull the pain, as he couldn’t risk giving him too high of a dose.

“I need to cut your shirt off, as the fabric’s already adhering to the wound. It will also help me check for other injuries. Please try not to move and let me know if anything hurts,” Wren said, his voice once again getting deeper and more professional in a way that he didn’t know he was capable of.

“I suppose I’m glad I didn’t skip the gym today,” Hawthorne quipped. “Do what you need to do, Wren.”

After taking a breath, Wren applied the blunt tip of the shears to the collar of Hawthorne’s shirt and then cut straight down the center to the hem, splitting it in half. He then split the sleeves up to the neckline the same way, leaving him with two panels of fabric. The left side was easy, as there was no blood there. The right side took more negotiation, as the combination of the jagged metal sticking out of him and the blood made it tough to pull the fabric away without further exacerbating the wound.

A quick visual inspection didn’t show any other wounds, so Wren focused on the obvious one. He retrieved a vascular regenerator from the kit. Placing it on Hawthorne’s skin, he set it to heal the ruptured blood vessels within his body, using a localized containment field around the foreign object.

“That is such a strange sensation,” Hawthorne noted. “Tingly.”

“You’re really going to prefer that sensation to the next one. I have to pull this out of you, and it’s going to hurt,” Wren admitted. “I can’t knock you out with the level of blood loss you’ve sustained.”

Wren looked at it again. He’d prefer to have Hawthorne completely immobilized, but that just wasn’t possible. The angle of the shrapnel was right under his ribs, and pulling it out incorrectly could damage any number of organs, like the spleen or the kidney.

“It already hurts, so I’m not going to hold it against you,” Hawthorne said, while Wren set a dermal regenerator to a cleansing setting to sterilize the area around the wound as much as was possible. “You’re from Isle of Mann, right?”

“I am. How did you know that?” Wren asked, taken aback.

“I’m a linguist, so I should say it’s because of your vowels, but, really, it’s because I read your file, Wren,” Hawthorne said, laughing and then wincing from his laugh. “Just trying to make small talk.”

“Right,” Wren said, blushing slightly. “London, right? You’re very posh and polished, so it has to be London,” he said, reaching for a pair of sterile tongs. “If not, you know, Buckingham Palace,” he teased.

“You and Costa will have to start your own little royalist club. He calls me ‘your royal highness,’ when he thinks I’m being haughty,” Hawthorne admitted, which made Wren grin.

“Americans are like that,” Wren said, looking at the situation one more time. He had a sudden realization and shimmied out of his expedition jacket. For the zillionth time that day, he felt under-muscled compared to his crewmates, this time because of shirtless Hawthorne, but he had an idea. “Here. You might want to bite this,” he said, folding the jacket over and presenting the shoulder to Hawthorne.

Hawthorne chuckled and then winced. “This might be the least ridiculous thing I do all day,” he quipped.

“Ready?” Wren asked.

“Do it,” Hawthorne replied, biting the teal synthetic leather of Wren’s jacket to bear down.

Wren nearly held his breath as he pulled the shard out, as the commander buried a scream of pain into the jacket. It was inside Hawthorne deeply, but thankfully he managed to avoid doing any more damage as he extracted it. He pulled it out completely and then tossed it and the tongs off to the side.

Blood was beginning to pool in the wound again, and Wren had to quickly adjust the settings on the vascular regenerator to staunch the flow. He applied another local dose of the coagulant for good measure. Once the bleeding had been staunched, Wren grabbed the autosuture and began to close the wound itself.

“You’re going to be okay. I’m so sorry. That must have hurt a lot,” Wren said.

“Please stop apologizing. You’re doing an excellent job,” Hawthorne noted, sweat beading on his face from the exertion of trying to stay still. “That feels a lot better already.”

“Thank you, sir,” Wren replied. With the wound closed, he switched to the dermal regenerator to heal the superficial aspects of the damage. “But also, I was careless, and you got hurt saving my life, so sorry for that, too.”

“You had no way of knowing,” Hawthorne replied.

Wren wasn’t so sure he believed that, so he focused on the minute movements he needed to make with the field-grade dermal regenerator. A surgical model would be much more effective, so he had to make small passes to ensure that there would be no scarring.

Once Wren was satisfied that he was finished with Hawthorne’s wound and that everything was back as it should be, he did a more careful look for other injuries. He blushed when he saw what was unmistakably a human bite mark in the center of Hawthorne’s right pec.

“Erm. While I’m here?” Wren asked sheepishly.

“Paulo…,” Hawthorne muttered when his eyes followed Wren’s. “Might as well. And just so you know, I’d be blushing if I had any blood.”

Wren chuckled. “Secret’s safe with me,” he said as he did a quick touch-up with the dermal regenerator. “I hate to push you too far, too quickly, but I’ve got to get you to this ship’s sickbay if it has one. Your blood supply is dangerously low.”

“Lovely,” Hawthorne replied. “I think I can stand if you help me up.”

Hawthorne started to move, but Wren kept a hand on the center of his chest to prevent him from standing up, not knowing where they were headed. If there wasn’t a sickbay, the best thing to do was to stay right there.

“Computer, does this ship have a sickbay?” Wren asked.

“Affirmative. Sickbay is located on deck four,” the computer replied.

“Can you beam us there?”

“Negative. Site-to-site transporters are offline.”

“Cheers,” Wren muttered.

Wren first pulled his jacket back on, then helped Hawthorne up to his feet. Hawthorne was able to slip into his own jacket as well, blood-stained as it was. Getting the taller man’s arm across his shoulders, Wren managed to help him walk into the turbolift for the short ride up to the deck they’d boarded on.

The corridors were dim, but he quickly found a Starfleet Medical insignia on one of the doors. It opened to a modest sickbay. There were three biobeds and a litany of equipment.

“Computer, activate the EMH,” Wren ordered.

“The Emergency Medical Hologram is offline.”

“At least there’s a sickbay,” Hawthorne offered.

“I’m glad it’s here, but why is there one if there’s not a crew?” Wren asked, as he helped Hawthorne up onto the closest biobed.

Even more luckily, sickbay’s systems seemed to be operating on their own subprocessors. The biobed powered up, and Hawthorne’s vitals began reading out on the monitor above it. The computer was already supplying a suggested treatment plan, even.

“These automated ships respond to medical distress calls from passing ships. A lot of civilian freighters don’t have doctors or sickbays at all,” Hawthorne explained. “Of course if someone fakes a distress call, it’s also a great way to board a ship like this without authorization…”

“There’s irony,” Wren replied.

It didn’t take a lot of searching to find a plasma infuser among the supplies. There were also sufficient amounts of artificial blood to stabilize Hawthorne’s condition.

“Are you comfortable?” he asked while hooking up the infuser. “This will take about twenty minutes.”

“I could use a gin and tonic, but this definitely beats the floor,” Hawthorne replied.

Wren chuckled and then tapped his badge. “Wren to Costa. Hawthorne is stable and in sickbay on deck four.”

“That’s the best news I’ve heard all day. I’m on my way to engineering. I’ll stop by,” Costa replied.

Now that there was nothing to do but to watch the infusion proceed and monitor Hawthorne’s vitals, Wren felt his own fatigue taking over. Saving a life was hard work! He rolled over a stool from the lab bench and sat down next to the science officer.

“You know, Costa brought you and your friends along to test you. I don’t think he was going to haze you, but this mission sure did. And you passed with flying colors,” the commander said with a very genuine smile.

Wren smiled, and began to reply but the doors to the room burst open. Costa entered the room, his tall, broad form seeming to fill up the entire space as he crossed the distance from the door to the biobed in two steps.

“Tristan! Are you okay? How bad is it?” Costa asked, first looking at Hawthorne then turning to Wren. “What’s his condition? What’s that machine? Do I—”

“Stop, Paulo,” Hawthorne interjected, tone commanding like Wren’s had been earlier. “I’m fine. Wren is an excellent nurse.”

Costa looked like he was a little calmer. “But what happened?”

“I was looking into the sabotaged cargo crate, and Lieutenant Hawthorne knocked me out of the way when the bomb went off. He was impaled with a significant piece of shrapnel that I was able to remove. He lost a lot of blood, but this machine is, erm, filling him back up, I guess you’d say,” Wren said, faltering at the last moment as he realized he was perhaps being too frank.

“95% of this, he did in the corridor, mind you,” Hawthorne added.

“Thanks,” Costa said before wrapping Wren up in a very unexpected bear hug.

Wren wasn’t sure how to react, though it certainly wasn’t unpleasant. “All part of the service,” the ensign managed, voice slightly muffled by Costa’s shoulder.

“I’m proud of you, kid. Who else can say they saved a life on their first away mission?!” Costa enthused, grinning with a pearly white smile that explained immediately to Wren why Hawthorne had fallen for this man. “And you saved a life too!” he added, pointing at Hawthorne. “So, good job… saving each others’ lives. It will make for a helluva report.”

“Quite,” Hawthorne agreed. “Not that I mind, but didn’t you say you had to get to engineering?”

“Yes. Right. Arondight is playing cat and mouse with an Orion raider. They’re ignoring us for now. I think I can use the ship’s tractor beams to snag them, if I can juice them up a bit,” Costa explained.

“That sounds… complicated,” Hawthorne said.

“Yeah,” Costa agreed, wheeling around to the doorway. Wren’s eyes turned, and he realized that Alex Carter had been standing there the whole time. “Carter, catch these two up on what’s going on and keep them safe. Got it?”

“Aye, sir,” Carter said.

“Good. Back in a flash,” Costa said before leaving in the same burst of energy he’d arrived in.

“Yeah, so, there’s an Orion ship out there shooting at our ship, so the commander wants to use this unarmed, inoperable ship to even the odds,” Carter explained.

“Christ, Paulo. I’m serious about that G&T, now,” Hawthorne groaned.

Wren couldn’t help but agree with that sentiment. How could they possibly help with what was essentially a flying cargo hold?