SCENE 7-I

A loud clattering racket echoed down the hallway, startling Jase out of his daydream as he spills coffee in his lap. He jumps to his feet, swearing and dripping, and swipes a towel at his shirt and pants. Satisfied that he was at least somewhat dry, the lieutenant stalks over to the door and throws it open. From there it’s just a quick jaunt to the sickbay, and he wrenches the door open, eyes blazing.

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!” He yells, hands coming up to mime strangulation far too earnestly. Fosher had ordered he not mess with the prisoners at all, in order to keep them fresh for the jail, so that someone could actually learn something from them. This meant that they could rattle and bang about in his sickbay and he couldn’t even temporarily paralyze them or their vocal cords.

Really, it was only two of the five that were a problem; two burly men he’d taken to be grunts, whereas the other three, two men and a woman, were perfectly polite and carried themselves with the air of someone used to skulking about in shadows with sharp things. A basic search had uncovered tattoos on the underside of their forearms; the men bearing COMBAT, the woman BLACKOUT. He hadn’t a clue what they meant, and help hadn’t exactly been forthcoming, and stupid Fosher wouldn’t even let him try and scare it out of them, suffocation or stabbing pains to the chest had been his methods of choice for the time being.

The three oddities were dressed in black jumpsuits, and had neon eyes —orange for the men, pink for the woman— whereas the assholes who were currently bashing their chains against the bed frame were in army green, which, in his opinion, looked like a cadaver washed up in the flotsam.

One of them tosses something at him —a test tube stopper, he recognizes— and it bounces off his chest. Snarling, he grabs the offending prisoner by the lapels and shoves him back against the wall. “The only thing stopping me from just- just thickening your blood until it tears your arteries to pieces is that my captain wants you to arrive in one piece for the torturers. And I figure, there’s two of you, they only need one, so I wouldn’t push your fucking luck.”

The older man gives him a frightened look, even though Jase is pretty sure he doesn’t actually know what an artery is, and raises cuffed hands in a gesture of peace. Jase, gentleman that he is, shimmies back off the bed, and smoothes out his uniform. The army man edges closer to his neighbor, eyeing Jase warily all the while, and damn if he doesn’t feel so much better now.

The three guerillas, because Jase figures that’s either exactly what they are, or close enough that it doesn’t matter, are watching this with mildly unsettled expressions, because yeah, there’s two of the grunts, but there’s three of them. Jase, satisfied with his results, turns on his heel and marches into his lab room, slamming the door behind him.

He has a blood sample and a skin sample, taken from each of them while they were unconscious, lined up on the counter in specimen jars. Plopping onto his stool, Jase grabs a clean slide, an eyedropper, and a blood sample. Efficiently, he places a small amount of the brilliant red fluid on the center of the slide, drops a cover over it, and drags his microscope, snapping everything into place.

Despite having done this multiple times since the prisoners had first been dumped on them, he still has trouble believing exactly what the red blood cells are trying to tell him.

Flicking the microscope’s light on, and the lab’s off, Jase peers through the lens. A searching hand grabs pencil and paper, and he starts scribbling notes, finding no more answers than he did the first time he did this.

And that’s about when the door to his lab is thrown open, and Jamie stalks in, absolutely fuming.

“What a—”

“I am going to kill him!” Jamie explodes, pacing the small room. “Kill! Maim! Torture!”

“Connor?” Jase asks, carefully sliding the microscope and sample to the back of the counter, away from Jamie’s flailing limbs.

“Who else? WHO ELSE?!”

“Uh… deep breaths; or your heart’s gonna blow.”

Jamie turns on him, looking for all the world like a wolf with rabies, and Jase leans back, cold counter pressing against his spine. “Just thought you might want to know.” He mutters.

“Grape juice! All over my log book!” Jamie yells, face red, hands clenched into fists.

“Won't that make it kind of hard to read?”

“AGH!”

And Jamie storms back out of the lab, and into the hallway.

“These people could really due with some anger management.” One of the men with the freaky orange eyes mutters, and the others nod, blinking nervously at each other and Jase.

Jase groans, and thumps his head down onto the counter.

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Scene 7-I

Next: Scene 7-II