The Death of Aeryn Tigan (Part 4)

Posted on 31 Mar 2020 @ 11:09pm by Lieutenant JG Aeryn Zal

2,330 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Empty Creche
Location: Starfleet Medical, San Francisco, Earth
Timeline: ED2 0500

Aeryn watched silently from her biobed as Doctor Ulla, Starfleet Medical’s foremost expert on Trill physiology, addressed President Zal for the final time and began the surgery to remove the symbiont from her abdomen. Fascinated and terrified in equal measures, Aeryn watched as the doctor gently exposed Zal from within its safe harbour and cautiously severed the neural cord that connected symbiont to host. Almost immediately, the President turned her head to face Aeryn and gave her a warm smile. Behind the smile, the lieutenant could see, was deep pain and anguish on the President’s part. This did nothing to ease her immediate anxiety as Ulla stepped towards Aeryn with the symbiont.

Never in her life had Aeryn considered the possibility of joining. To be joined was a high honour among her people, but, as hosts vastly outnumbered symbionts, the possibility of being joined had never really crossed her mind. Now, with barely six hours to consider the consequences Aeryn was about to be joined with the Zal symbiont; no initiate training, no medical examinations, and no mental preparation. She either joined with Zal, or allowed the symbiont, and all its knowledge and wisdom, to perish with the President.

For any Trill there was no debate.

Ulla approached Aeryn’s biobed and glanced down at her. The mild panic brewing up within her must have been obvious to everyone in the operating room. “Are you certain that you want to go through with this?” Doctor Ulla asked calmly, but assertively.

As her breathing was too rapid to allow a verbalised response, Aeryn simply nodded in the affirmative and allowed Ulla to continue with the procedure. Nearby, Doctor Inverness informed Ulla that Aeryn’s anaesthetic was optimal and her abdomen prepped for receiving the symbiont. With little hesitation, Ulla placed the symbiont head down just above the incision on Aeryn’s abdomen and stepped back to grab her medical tricorder and begin to observe the joining process.

“The symbiont is very weak,” Ulla commented, to everyone and no one at the same time. Concern was etched across her face, but she remained still as the symbiont began to bury itself in Aeryn’s abdomen.

The sensation was odd. At first Aeryn wondered if the process of joining felt like the reverse of a caesarean section; she could feel touch and pressure but was aware of no pain. As the pressure within her began to build, so did Aeryn’s anxiety. Her biggest fear from joining – with the exception of whether she would survive exposure to the virus that had killed the President – was the question of how much of Aeryn would remain once Zal exerted it’s influence on her. Was this the death of Aeryn Tigan by another name, or would she continue to exist in an altered form?

‘This is why the Symbiosis Commission insists on years of training before joining’ Aeryn thought to herself as she tried to ignore the sensation of Zal rummaging around inside of her.

“How do you feel, lieutenant?” Ulla asked, redirecting the sensor of her medical tricorder towards Aeryn.

“I,” Aeryn started, beginning to notice a sudden increase in her heart rate. “I don’t know. How should I be feeling?”

Aeryn glanced past the doctor and once more caught sight of the President. Her eyes were closed and the biobed readouts were not positive. This did nothing to help Aeryn’s anxiety, as she continued to feel the symbiont squirm within her abdomen. She had little knowledge of the joining process, but an innate sense alerted her to the fact that something wasn’t right.

Ulla approached Aeryn again and placed a hand on her forehead. Her expression changed from mild concern to panic. “I have never seen anything quite like this before,” the doctor said hurriedly, pulling a hypospray out of its holder and charging it with a vial of some unknown pharmaceutical. “Your body is reacting violently to the joining.”

“Define ‘violently’,” Aeryn said assertively.

“Your immune system appears to have gone into overdrive. I have never seen IgM production on this scale before.” Ulla pressed the hypospray against Aeryn’s neck and the lieutenant felt a discharge of cold liquid into her carotid vein. Aeryn’s heart rate continued to climb, pushing her anxiety towards the realm of sheer panic.

“It has to be the anti-virus in my system reacting to the virus within the symbiont,” Aeryn said as calmly as she could. Between the symbiont seemingly doing somersaults within her, and her heart threatening to break speed records, Aeryn knew that the outlook for both her and the symbiont were beginning to look very grave indeed. “Doctor,” she added, “close me up and just let the anti-virus do its thing.”

“Lieutenant,” Ulla said firmly, “I don’t think you quite understand how dangerous this joining has become for you.”

Aeryn lifted her arm off the bed and grabbed Ulla by the wrist. She locked her eyes with hers. “This joining was always going to be dangerous for me, doctor. I understood that the moment that Commander Rhyan presented it to me as an option. We have to give the anti-virus a chance to work.”

When Aeryn released her arm, Ulla glanced immediately at Doctor Inverness. Despite her expertise and experience over many lifetimes, Inverness was still Ulla’s superior at Starfleet Medical. Even Aeryn outranked the ensign.

Inverness nodded her approval to Ulla. “Close her up and monitor the situation closely.”

“Understood,” Ulla said in compliance, seemingly unhappy at the order. She picked up what Aeryn assumed to be a dermal regenerator and began to wave it over her lower abdomen, closing the surgical wound Inverness had earlier created. Within minutes the procedure was complete, and the anaesthetic reversed.

Aeryn pushed herself up from the recumbent position she had been in for nearly an hour and shook her legs as if to wake them up. Her heart continued to bound at a phenomenal pace, but at least Ulla was able to confirm that it had plateaued at a rate still compatible with life. Barely. When she caught sight of the President once more, with Commander Rhyan now by her side, Aeryn asked the inevitable question. “How is she?”

Doctor Inverness answered her with a grim expression. “She passed a few moments ago, I am afraid. Losing the symbiont was enough to tip her body over the precipice.”

A deep sadness swelled up within Aeryn, threatening to consume her in that moment. She didn’t know where the grief had come from exactly but used all her strength to quell it below the surface. Seeing the grief etched across Rhyan’s face did little to help her control the unwanted emotion. “This is what she wanted,” Aeryn commented, gently pressing a hand against her lower abdomen and noticing for the first time that the symbiont had stopped stirring within her.

“What about you?” Ulla asked, cautiously. “Can you sense the symbiont yet?”

A bead of sweat ran across Aeryn’s brow and dropped to the biobed below her. Her body was fighting the virus like it would any other; her basal temperature was undoubtedly more than a few degrees higher than it had been pre-joining. She wiped the brow of her forehead with fingertips and then grabbed the uniform under-shirt and tunic beside the biobed and slipped them on. She was surprised to find that even with the symbiont within her, the uniform remained well-fitting over her mid-riff. Only once all of this had been done did she contemplate the doctor’s question.

“I don’t feel any different.”

“Something must have gone wrong during the joining process then,” Ulla said, grabbing the medical tricorder once again and waving the sensor probe over Aeryn’s abdomen. The lieutenant attempted to decipher her facial expressions but was unable to do so; the doctor remained grim and stone-faced throughout.

Doctor Ulla presented her findings: “The symbiont is still alive and remains in a stable condition. It appears to have made a rudimentary connection with your neural cord, lieutenant, but I am not seeing much activity along it.”

Aeryn pushed Ulla’s hand holding the tricorder probe away from her abdomen and slipped down from the biobed to stand on her own two feet. “What exactly does that mean, doctor?”

Ulla looked at her blankly. “I honestly don’t know, lieutenant. I have never seen anything like this happen before; not in this host body, or any that came before her.”

Aeryn found herself marginally unsteady on her feet. “Would it be reasonable to assume that there is some sort of reaction going on between my body and the virus within the symbiont that is leading to a neural block?”

“It is a reasonable hypothesis,” Ulla commented, “but we may have no way of knowing until your body completes the job of fighting off the virus.”

“If it fights off the virus,” Aeryn added, remaining uncertain as to how effective the antivirus she and Rhyan created, using Doctor Afton’s research, would be. For now, it seemed, she was going to have to wait before experiencing the full effects of her joining to the Zal symbiont.

Her attention then shifted towards the grieving Commander Rhyan. “Commander, what are we to do now?”

Rhyan looked up at Aeryn, his expression revealing a deep sadness; an emotion that looked out of place on a Vulcan’s face. She knew that the commander would take their failure to cure the President personally, leading to self-blame for her death. But in reality, it was the Confederacy of the Underdark who were to answer for the death of the President; they would need to pay for their actions, one way or another. If Rhyan did not make it happen, Aeryn would make sure that it did.

“I,” Rhyan started, uncertainty in his voice, “haven’t given it much thought. I just assumed…” He trailed off.

“Do we find the Redemption? Do we address the Federation Council, and let them know what happened here today? Do we assemble a fleet and take it to Andor and confront the Confederacy once-and-for-all? Commander,” Aeryn approached the Vulcan, as unsteady as she was on her feet, and demanded a plan of action. “We can’t let the President’s death be in vain!”

“I. I,” the Vulcan said, muttering as he grieved.

Lucy Inverness then suddenly lashed out at the Commander. “This is just typical of you, Rhyan! You have failed yet again, and now you don’t know how to clean up your mess!”

“That is a bit unfair, Lucy,” Ulla said, scolding her superior officer.

Aeryn grew frustrated. “None of this was Rhyan’s fault,” Aeryn said directly to Inverness, irritated by her apparent dislike of the Vulcan. She had shown nothing but contempt for him since they had arrived at Medical Headquarters. She understood that they had a turbulent history together, but nothing that she had seen or heard made the Trill believe that the commander deserved Inverness’ disrespect. “The Confederacy exposed the President to this virus, and they are the only people to blame for this!”

“Enough!” Rhyan shouted, now standing on his feet. His expression had shifted from grief to one of anger. The room became immediately silent. “This is not what Elesa would have wanted and, in fact, this is exactly what the Confederacy wants us to do: bicker amongst ourselves while they start carving up portions of the Federation for themselves.”

Inverness attempted to say something, but Rhyan stopped her in her tracks before she could utter a word. His steely gaze looked down at the body of Elesa Zal and then returned to the Starfleet officers around him. “Each of us did our best to save the President, but sometimes our best just isn’t good enough. Doctor’s Inverness and Ulla did a wonderful job of keeping Elesa alive long enough for the Lieutenant and I to save Zal: let us not forget the successes we have made today.”

Rhyan paused to take a breath, repositioning himself from behind the President’s biobed to approach Ulla, Inverness and Aeryn. “The President gave her life to protect the Federation. It is therefore our job to spread the word of what she gave up in order to protect the planets, colonies and citizens of the Federation.” He looked directly at Aeryn. “You were right about one thing, lieutenant. The Confederacy cannot be allowed to get away with the murder of President Zal.”

“What are you proposing,” Aeryn asked, interested to hear the commander’s response.

He looked at her, his eyes broadcasting nothing more than cold logic. “Once Doctor Ulla has given you the all-clear to leave Medical Headquarters, you and I are going to find ourselves a starship so that we can bring Shrell, and her Confederacy co-conspirators, to justice.”

Lucy scoffed. “And what crazy person in Starfleet is going to give you command of a starship?”

Rhyan grinned in such a manner that it unsettled Aeryn. She had only known the man a short length of time – or was it longer, she couldn’t quite decide – but she had never seen him quite like this. Something within her made her wonder if his determination was being driven by grief: was it really a good move to chase the Confederacy back to their own territory?

Still grinning, Rhyan answered Inverness’ question. “The only person in Starfleet who trusts me more than I trust myself: Admiral Azura Ashcart.”


OFF: And thus ends my rather long run of "The Death Of Aeryn Tigan" posts. Sorry it has taken me a while to get this out, but I think the current situation worldwide is going to affect us all. Will hopefully follow this up with a few more posts before getting Rhyan and Aeryn back on board the Redemption! Keep posting guys - I'm loving what you are all putting out at the moment!

 

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