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azarias. Happy birthday. Here's some near-death experience, courtesy of the Authority.
Friendly Fire: Part 6/?
The Authority belong tointernet Jesus Warren Ellis and Wildstorm comics. I am merely borrowing them without permission.
//...// indicates communication via nanite-telepathy.
For those who have forgotten about this fic totally during my months-long hiatus from it:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
And behind the cut-tag:
Jack still felt slightly dizzy, could still feel the Carrier’s pain from the nanites eating, destroying, invading her stinging in his skin, but he and the team were doing something now, and having something to focus on helped him block the sensations out.
Well, the Doctor and Angie were doing something. He and Shen were pretty much standing there being useless, but at least watching the Doctor attempt to ward off the oncoming nanites was a distraction.
They had managed to beat the things to the engine room, and he, Shen, and the doctor had taken up a triangle formation between the reactor core and the doorway. Angie was off to the left, bent over a console and frowning intently as she searched for a way to take the stardrive offline temporarily. If she could manage it, it would buy them some time, but Jack was pretty sure there was no way to take the drive offline. It was a living star, and stars kept burning and performing nuclear fusion until they ran out of fuel, which in the Carrier’s case, was going to be in about 1.6 billion years. Or, if they weren’t lucky, about fifteen minutes.
The nanites were flowing slowly but steadily down the corridor toward them, pooling in the doorway mere centimeters away from the Doctor’s forcefield. The deckplates in front of them were covered in sugar, sawdust, flour, and other fine powders of more dubious origin, the remnants of nanites that had gotten too close to the man’s magic.
//Doctor?// Jenny’s voice broadcast over the comlink. //We’re bailing out a sinking boat with a teaspoon, here. If you’re planning on pulling a Harry Potter for us, now would be good.//
The Doctor jumped a little, but didn’t move his eyes from the nanites. //Machines aren't my strong point, and these… every time I get a fix on them they change, move. If you could shut them down for even a second or two, we'd be in business, but as it is?// He shrugged, then let his shoulders sag guiltily.
And speaking of shutting things down… “Any luck?” Jack asked Angie. She shook her head, not looking up from the console. In the bright glow of light from the stardrive, her nanite sheathe glinted like polished chrome, completely different from the oily surface of the alien nanites.
Jack turned back to the doorway, and the room titled for a second at the movement. Not good. He rested a hand against the bulkhead, letting the wall hold him up for a moment as he blinked the dizziness away.
“Jack?” Shen’s voice. “Are you all right?”
The room had been cold a few moments ago, but now he felt overheated and slightly sick. His shirt was sticking to his ribs, soaked through from the saber cuts that still hadn’t stopped bleeding.
“Jack?” and now Angie was joining in.
“Fine,” Jack managed. It was a blatant lie, but there was nothing any of them could do about the situation at the moment. And his right hand was starting to burn.
“Ow! What the hell?” Jack jerked his hand away from the wall and inspected it. His palm was covered in a thin film of nanites, the pain growing worse by the second. “Shit. I’ve got some of them on me.” He shook his hand violently, trying to dislodge them. It didn’t do any good.
“They’re climbing up the walls, Doctor,” Shen announced, directing her voice towards where the man sat cross-legged on the floor. He blinked up at her, eyes unfocussed, and the forcefield expanded slightly, the green light spreading up the walls and vaporizing the nanites in its path.
“Somebody get me something to wipe these off with,” Jack demanded, as the burning in his hand increased to a level that brought tears into his eyes. Shen handed him the belt from her pajama set, and Jack took it in his left hand and scrubbed vigorously at his right, succeeding in removing most of the nanites, which immediately began eating through the thin silk. Feeling sick from something other more than bloodloss now, Jack tossed the fabric toward the Doctor’s forcefield, where it vanished with a flash of purple smoke.
A handful of tiny silver specks remained on his palm, glittering malevolently from a mess of reddened and bloody skin. It looked like he was allergic to nanites after all. “Nobody touch the walls,” he ordered.
//Don’t try to touch the nanites// Shen broadcast over the commlink, passing the warning on to Jenny’s side of things. //They will adhere to your skin and eat it off.//
“Let me see your hand,” Angie said, abandoning the power console and crossing to stand beside Jack. “I might be able to remove the rest of the-“
//Angie?// Jenny’s voice interrupted, //Power source?//
Angie frowned, then took Jack’s hand and turned it palm up, staring intently at the little silver flecks that dotted his palm. Jack could swear there were more of them than there had been a moment ago.
//I'm not completely sure;// Angie “said.” //They're like nothing I've ever seen before. But they give off an electronic signal. I think it's how they communicate with one another.//
//So, we assume electromagnetic.//
“Electromagnetic,” Angie repeated. “I wonder if I could communicate with them.”
“I don’t think they’re interested in anything we have to say,” Jack told her. “I think we’re their lunch.”
“It might be worth a try.” Shen eyed the Doctor as she spoke, and Jack followed her gaze to see sweat dripping down the other man’s forehead. Just how long could he work his “mojo,” anyway? He’d keeled over after that trick with the trees in Los Angeles, but he’d never mentioned any other limit to his powers in Jack’s hearing.
Maybe Angie ought to give communicating with the nanites a shot.
Jenny’s voice came back. //We're going to try something, Doctor. If I overload the nanites with energy, it might give you a window to work your magic in.//
“Good idea,” the Doctor mumbled, as if talking to himself. “Stop one kind of change to start another.” He closed his eyes, and the light around him brightened.
//Brace yourself, Engineer// Jenny ordered. //This will probably hurt.//
And then the world turned white.
And Angie started screaming.
The /00110111/ registered a spike in ambient energy, the levels climbing higher and higher for 0 .3 milliseconds. The portions of the /00110111/ closest to the energy source went offline, followed by other portions, mere hundreds of a millisecond later. There was disharmony. There was—
Angie screamed, high and shrill, and collapsed to the floor with a dull thud, the nanite sheathe draining off her to pool on the deck.
Jack hit his knees on the floor beside her, reaching for her shoulders as the screams choked off into shallow gasps. She was naked now, silver skin gone, and her body was twitching and shuddering as if trying to tear itself apart.
A wave of orange and green light rippled over them, and for a moment Jack thought he could hear music. Could hear the Carrier sighing in relief as the invaded that plagued her died. Then it was gone, and there were only the horrible gasping sounds as Angie struggled to breathe.
“Angie?” Was that his voice? It sounded odd.
Angie’s spine arched backwards with the force of her convulsions, and Jack threw his weight onto her shoulders, trying to keep her pinned to the floor. “Shen!” he shouted. “Help!” One flailing hand hit Jack in the face, snapping his head back, but he held on anyway.
Shen joined him on the floor, throwing her slight weight atop Angie’s feet as the other woman continued to seize. Then, abruptly as the fit had started, it stopped. Angie went limp and silent, and Jack watched in horror as a thread of silver fluid began trickling from her nose.
“That doesn’t look good,” the Doctor observed.
Jack looked up to see the other man looming over him, peering down at Angie with a concerned expression. “No shit,” he snapped. “Do something.”
The Doctor frowned, and prodded Angie’s naked shoulder with one foot. “Her nanites are dead. All her blood is congealing.”
Hellstrike had died. Winter had died. All of Stormwatch Black was gone, chewed apart by alien monsters or burned away by solar radiation. Jack refused to think about Angie joining them.
“Then make it un-congeal.” The Doctor took a step back, and Jack realized that he was snarling. He tried to force his voice into something less harsh. “Fix her.”
The Carrier was no longer dying—the muted wailings in the back of his head had stopped—but Angie was. Her face and torso were covered in red smears of blood. Jack’s blood, because her own, oozing in shining streams from her nose, mouth, and the corners of her eyes, hadn’t been red in years.
“I don’t know if I-“ the Doctor stammered. “I mean, I’m not as good with mechanical things, and I-“ he broke off, holding his hands out in a helpless gesture and staring down at Angie’s motionless body with what might have been fear. It was hard to tell through the goggles.
“All you can do is try,” Shen said, with far more calm than Jack could have mustered, but with a hollow look in her eyes that told him that she, too, was remembering Winter and the others. “I don’t think you can make things any worse.”
The Doctor took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and held his hands out over Angie, making little pushing motions as if he were shoving something towards her. He mumbled something in Dutch that Jack didn’t catch, and a swirl of psychedelic colors rippled out from his fingers to envelope Angie.
When they washed over Jack’s skin, he could feel something inside him twitch, the part of him that was concrete and steel waking up at whatever the Doctor was doing. The effect on Angie was more dramatic.
She twitched again, groaned, and the pool of nanites that had gathered around her began flowing back over her body, washing across Jack and Shen’s hands as they did so. The sensation felt exactly the way it had the last time, and for a split-second, Jack flashed on the sensory memory of nanites covering his entire body, spreading from Angie’ skin to his. He’d wanted to do that again, before the other nanites showed up…
Angie groaned again and opened her eyes, then began pushing at Jack’s hands, trying to sit up. He automatically helped her, feeling as if he were watching something that wasn’t quite real.
“Brace yourself?” Angie choked out. She coughed, and spat a glob of silver fluid into her hand, where it gleamed for a moment before absorbing back into her skin. “That’s her idea of a warning? I’ll give that bitch ‘probably hurt.’”
Jack closed his eyes, feeling the dizziness of a few minutes ago return as adrenaline drained away. “Nice work, Doctor,” he mumbled, belatedly remembering to thank the man.
“Anytime.” The Doctor waved a long-fingered hand dismissively, then bent down to give Shen a hand up. She accepted it, rising to her feet in a smooth motion that Jack could only envy. He might just stay here on the floor for a little while longer. The floor was kind of nice.
Angie collapsed back against him, not seeming to notice that the blood from his shirt was being smeared all over her bare skin. “I hate this job,” she moaned.
“Sometimes,” Jack admitted, “so do I.”
azarias. Happy birthday. Here's some near-death experience, courtesy of the Authority.Friendly Fire: Part 6/?
The Authority belong to
//...// indicates communication via nanite-telepathy.
For those who have forgotten about this fic totally during my months-long hiatus from it:
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
And behind the cut-tag:
Jack still felt slightly dizzy, could still feel the Carrier’s pain from the nanites eating, destroying, invading her stinging in his skin, but he and the team were doing something now, and having something to focus on helped him block the sensations out.
Well, the Doctor and Angie were doing something. He and Shen were pretty much standing there being useless, but at least watching the Doctor attempt to ward off the oncoming nanites was a distraction.
They had managed to beat the things to the engine room, and he, Shen, and the doctor had taken up a triangle formation between the reactor core and the doorway. Angie was off to the left, bent over a console and frowning intently as she searched for a way to take the stardrive offline temporarily. If she could manage it, it would buy them some time, but Jack was pretty sure there was no way to take the drive offline. It was a living star, and stars kept burning and performing nuclear fusion until they ran out of fuel, which in the Carrier’s case, was going to be in about 1.6 billion years. Or, if they weren’t lucky, about fifteen minutes.
The nanites were flowing slowly but steadily down the corridor toward them, pooling in the doorway mere centimeters away from the Doctor’s forcefield. The deckplates in front of them were covered in sugar, sawdust, flour, and other fine powders of more dubious origin, the remnants of nanites that had gotten too close to the man’s magic.
//Doctor?// Jenny’s voice broadcast over the comlink. //We’re bailing out a sinking boat with a teaspoon, here. If you’re planning on pulling a Harry Potter for us, now would be good.//
The Doctor jumped a little, but didn’t move his eyes from the nanites. //Machines aren't my strong point, and these… every time I get a fix on them they change, move. If you could shut them down for even a second or two, we'd be in business, but as it is?// He shrugged, then let his shoulders sag guiltily.
And speaking of shutting things down… “Any luck?” Jack asked Angie. She shook her head, not looking up from the console. In the bright glow of light from the stardrive, her nanite sheathe glinted like polished chrome, completely different from the oily surface of the alien nanites.
Jack turned back to the doorway, and the room titled for a second at the movement. Not good. He rested a hand against the bulkhead, letting the wall hold him up for a moment as he blinked the dizziness away.
“Jack?” Shen’s voice. “Are you all right?”
The room had been cold a few moments ago, but now he felt overheated and slightly sick. His shirt was sticking to his ribs, soaked through from the saber cuts that still hadn’t stopped bleeding.
“Jack?” and now Angie was joining in.
“Fine,” Jack managed. It was a blatant lie, but there was nothing any of them could do about the situation at the moment. And his right hand was starting to burn.
“Ow! What the hell?” Jack jerked his hand away from the wall and inspected it. His palm was covered in a thin film of nanites, the pain growing worse by the second. “Shit. I’ve got some of them on me.” He shook his hand violently, trying to dislodge them. It didn’t do any good.
“They’re climbing up the walls, Doctor,” Shen announced, directing her voice towards where the man sat cross-legged on the floor. He blinked up at her, eyes unfocussed, and the forcefield expanded slightly, the green light spreading up the walls and vaporizing the nanites in its path.
“Somebody get me something to wipe these off with,” Jack demanded, as the burning in his hand increased to a level that brought tears into his eyes. Shen handed him the belt from her pajama set, and Jack took it in his left hand and scrubbed vigorously at his right, succeeding in removing most of the nanites, which immediately began eating through the thin silk. Feeling sick from something other more than bloodloss now, Jack tossed the fabric toward the Doctor’s forcefield, where it vanished with a flash of purple smoke.
A handful of tiny silver specks remained on his palm, glittering malevolently from a mess of reddened and bloody skin. It looked like he was allergic to nanites after all. “Nobody touch the walls,” he ordered.
//Don’t try to touch the nanites// Shen broadcast over the commlink, passing the warning on to Jenny’s side of things. //They will adhere to your skin and eat it off.//
“Let me see your hand,” Angie said, abandoning the power console and crossing to stand beside Jack. “I might be able to remove the rest of the-“
//Angie?// Jenny’s voice interrupted, //Power source?//
Angie frowned, then took Jack’s hand and turned it palm up, staring intently at the little silver flecks that dotted his palm. Jack could swear there were more of them than there had been a moment ago.
//I'm not completely sure;// Angie “said.” //They're like nothing I've ever seen before. But they give off an electronic signal. I think it's how they communicate with one another.//
//So, we assume electromagnetic.//
“Electromagnetic,” Angie repeated. “I wonder if I could communicate with them.”
“I don’t think they’re interested in anything we have to say,” Jack told her. “I think we’re their lunch.”
“It might be worth a try.” Shen eyed the Doctor as she spoke, and Jack followed her gaze to see sweat dripping down the other man’s forehead. Just how long could he work his “mojo,” anyway? He’d keeled over after that trick with the trees in Los Angeles, but he’d never mentioned any other limit to his powers in Jack’s hearing.
Maybe Angie ought to give communicating with the nanites a shot.
Jenny’s voice came back. //We're going to try something, Doctor. If I overload the nanites with energy, it might give you a window to work your magic in.//
“Good idea,” the Doctor mumbled, as if talking to himself. “Stop one kind of change to start another.” He closed his eyes, and the light around him brightened.
//Brace yourself, Engineer// Jenny ordered. //This will probably hurt.//
And then the world turned white.
And Angie started screaming.
The /00110111/ registered a spike in ambient energy, the levels climbing higher and higher for 0 .3 milliseconds. The portions of the /00110111/ closest to the energy source went offline, followed by other portions, mere hundreds of a millisecond later. There was disharmony. There was—
Angie screamed, high and shrill, and collapsed to the floor with a dull thud, the nanite sheathe draining off her to pool on the deck.
Jack hit his knees on the floor beside her, reaching for her shoulders as the screams choked off into shallow gasps. She was naked now, silver skin gone, and her body was twitching and shuddering as if trying to tear itself apart.
A wave of orange and green light rippled over them, and for a moment Jack thought he could hear music. Could hear the Carrier sighing in relief as the invaded that plagued her died. Then it was gone, and there were only the horrible gasping sounds as Angie struggled to breathe.
“Angie?” Was that his voice? It sounded odd.
Angie’s spine arched backwards with the force of her convulsions, and Jack threw his weight onto her shoulders, trying to keep her pinned to the floor. “Shen!” he shouted. “Help!” One flailing hand hit Jack in the face, snapping his head back, but he held on anyway.
Shen joined him on the floor, throwing her slight weight atop Angie’s feet as the other woman continued to seize. Then, abruptly as the fit had started, it stopped. Angie went limp and silent, and Jack watched in horror as a thread of silver fluid began trickling from her nose.
“That doesn’t look good,” the Doctor observed.
Jack looked up to see the other man looming over him, peering down at Angie with a concerned expression. “No shit,” he snapped. “Do something.”
The Doctor frowned, and prodded Angie’s naked shoulder with one foot. “Her nanites are dead. All her blood is congealing.”
Hellstrike had died. Winter had died. All of Stormwatch Black was gone, chewed apart by alien monsters or burned away by solar radiation. Jack refused to think about Angie joining them.
“Then make it un-congeal.” The Doctor took a step back, and Jack realized that he was snarling. He tried to force his voice into something less harsh. “Fix her.”
The Carrier was no longer dying—the muted wailings in the back of his head had stopped—but Angie was. Her face and torso were covered in red smears of blood. Jack’s blood, because her own, oozing in shining streams from her nose, mouth, and the corners of her eyes, hadn’t been red in years.
“I don’t know if I-“ the Doctor stammered. “I mean, I’m not as good with mechanical things, and I-“ he broke off, holding his hands out in a helpless gesture and staring down at Angie’s motionless body with what might have been fear. It was hard to tell through the goggles.
“All you can do is try,” Shen said, with far more calm than Jack could have mustered, but with a hollow look in her eyes that told him that she, too, was remembering Winter and the others. “I don’t think you can make things any worse.”
The Doctor took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and held his hands out over Angie, making little pushing motions as if he were shoving something towards her. He mumbled something in Dutch that Jack didn’t catch, and a swirl of psychedelic colors rippled out from his fingers to envelope Angie.
When they washed over Jack’s skin, he could feel something inside him twitch, the part of him that was concrete and steel waking up at whatever the Doctor was doing. The effect on Angie was more dramatic.
She twitched again, groaned, and the pool of nanites that had gathered around her began flowing back over her body, washing across Jack and Shen’s hands as they did so. The sensation felt exactly the way it had the last time, and for a split-second, Jack flashed on the sensory memory of nanites covering his entire body, spreading from Angie’ skin to his. He’d wanted to do that again, before the other nanites showed up…
Angie groaned again and opened her eyes, then began pushing at Jack’s hands, trying to sit up. He automatically helped her, feeling as if he were watching something that wasn’t quite real.
“Brace yourself?” Angie choked out. She coughed, and spat a glob of silver fluid into her hand, where it gleamed for a moment before absorbing back into her skin. “That’s her idea of a warning? I’ll give that bitch ‘probably hurt.’”
Jack closed his eyes, feeling the dizziness of a few minutes ago return as adrenaline drained away. “Nice work, Doctor,” he mumbled, belatedly remembering to thank the man.
“Anytime.” The Doctor waved a long-fingered hand dismissively, then bent down to give Shen a hand up. She accepted it, rising to her feet in a smooth motion that Jack could only envy. He might just stay here on the floor for a little while longer. The floor was kind of nice.
Angie collapsed back against him, not seeming to notice that the blood from his shirt was being smeared all over her bare skin. “I hate this job,” she moaned.
“Sometimes,” Jack admitted, “so do I.”
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Knowing what's coming just makes this even better.
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The Midnighter's fly-by-wire nervous system is going to be even more fun to play with than Angie's metal blood.
Mostly because Jenny and Apollo are not going to react nearly as well as Jack, Shen, and the Doctor.
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LOVE LOVE LOVE.
LOVE?
Things that are loved: the Doctor being a fuckup AND capable at the same time. Friendly fire. Tiny woobie nanites. Jackness.
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Ooh, and if you haven't already, you have to read GNARGH Means I Love You (http://yuletidetreasure.org/archive/31/gnarghmeans.html)--it's the Yuletide Authority fic I would have requested, had I the initiative to sign up for Yuletide (Zombies! Sex! Random property damage! Apollo snark!).
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GNARGH Means I Love You
Fandom: The Authority
Written for: platoeatssouls in the Yuletide 2006 Challenge
by azarias
I've been giggling about that for days, along with going "EEEE! She liked my story enough to rec me to me!"
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