Doctor Smith turned down and began reading.

  His smile at our banter quickly turned to a frown.

  He looked up at Carolina.

  “Did we get hit? I know I'm a heavy sleeper but...” Doctor Smith began.

  Carolina shook her head.

  “No nothing like that. From what Hook told me we were at the Jump point, then suddenly Brayden was unresponsive and half the ships systems weren't taking input from Hook anymore.” Carolina said.

  Doctor Smith turned back to his readouts.

  “Come on Doc, you're scaring me.” I said. concerned. as I looked through the list of red spots on my H.U.D. I started aligning them with the various aches and pains I felt, and they tended to match up.

  What worried me most were the red spots in areas I wasn't feeling pain.

  “If I didn't know better Captain Cofey, I'd say you were in a vehicular accident.” Doctor Smith replied.

  I blinked, then looked down at myself.

  I've been in a car accident before, and they are always messy.

  But other than the blood that was STILL leaking from my nose and ears, I seemed alright.

  “I don't LOOK like I was in a car accident doc, normally you have bones sticking out and your arms are pointed the wrong way.” I said.

  For the first time in a long time Carolina looked green at my description of... well anything.

  “Have you been in one before?” Carolina asked.

  “I was. I got off fairly easy, but my parents... not so much. Twisted up by the impact. And I don't look like that so...” I continued.

  Doctor Smith raised an eyebrow and gave me a look.

  You know, that look.

  The look that says 'I know you are smarter than this, and I am not sure if you are trying to be funny, but you are failing.'

  Never thought I'd experience that again since I moved out of my moms place, but here we were.

  Fuck I haven't thought about them in forever... I really did take a hit.

  Doctor Smith pulled the tablet he had been working on off the mount that had flipped it out and presented it to him; I didn't think they were detachable like that; and showed me what was on there, which was the same information that my H.U.D. Was presenting me but I wasn't going to stop him if he was going to explain things to me.

  On the tablet was a full body view of me.

  And more than half of my body was blinking red.

  “That is certainly a lot of red.” I said inanely.

  What.

  I turn into a smart ass when I'm scared. Or in pain. Or slightly irritated.

  Doctor Smith gave me a look that could curdle milk.

  “All that red? That is acceleration stress. Blood leaking through micro tears we can't detect. Only... with this much blood your organs should have been crushed to paste. And your body has similar acceleration stress injuries to someone who has been launched into orbit without protection. Or come to a very sudden stop. At least it seems that way. Except...” Doctor Smith explained to me.

  “But no obvious signs that would indicate said sudden stop, and my brains and guys aren't all mushed up.” I retorted.

  That got me another evil look.

  “No, you don't.” He said.

  “Did anyone else on the ship suffer any injuries?” I asked the question I probably should have asked sooner.

  “No, I was asleep and then my pad started blaring an alarm, and I saw a scrambled message from Hook. Only thing I could make out was Danger and Bridge, then I got to the bridge and you were bleeding out of your FACEHOLES!” Carolina started calm and trying to relay information, but by the end of her statement she was obviously frantic with worry.

  “Oh...” I said. Didn't know what else to say.

  “I'm going to need to cut off your suit to see what kind of damage we are looking at.” Doctor Smith said.

  I groaned.

  “I can just take it off.” I said, moving to get up.

  Doctor Smith tapped a button on his pad and restraints popped up to hold me in place.

  I looked at them and instinctively reached for the override through my implants.

  “Don't, Brayden, let him figure out what happened to you.” Carolina said. She must have noticed... something, and put together what I was doing.

  Instead I sighed and sent an order to the manufactory for a new suit.

  In the manufactory buffer I found the set of customized shipsuits each of my new crew had asked for.

  “Oh, you all finished the suit designs.” I said.

  “Yeah, awhile ago... I wondered why you didn't mention it.” Carolina said.

  I cringed as Doctor Smith began cutting up the leg of my suit.

  “Sorry, got distracted and honestly forgot.” I replied.

  Carolina gave me a look.

  “I've been a little busy.” I said.

  “You need to set reminders.” She retorted.

  “Or maybe have a chief who will remind me?” I said sweetly.

  She gave me a yet another stinky look.

  “Fine fine, I'll... do something to try to remind me of that stuff.” I said.

  “Didn't you get an alert about it?” She asked.

  I was about to reply when I heard a gasp from Doctor Smith.

  He had used the provided medical shears to cut away my shipsuit to the knee, and everything below the knee was a deep black and purple bruise.

  “Fuck.” I said before anything came out of Carolina or Doctor Smith's mouth.

  It wasn't exactly a uniform bruise, but it... it looked like I had gotten smacked by a heavy blanket that wrapped around a good portion of the limb.

  Carolina had stepped forward to look at it.

  “What the hell did you do to yourself Brayden?” She exclaimed.

  She looked like she was about to say more before Doctor Smith grabbed her by the shoulders and walked her out of the room.

  “Wait, what, why?” Carolina exclaimed.

  “I need to begin surgery immediately and you are in my way.” Doctor Smith said coldly and clinically, and shut the door in her face.

  The last thing I saw in her expression was fear.

  “Captain, I am going to need to make a number of incisions in your body wherever this bruising has occurred to prevent compartment syndrome. Normally I would anesthetize you, but between the suddenness of this injury and our current lack of understanding as to what caused it I would like you to stay conscious to answer my questions as I go.” Doctor Smith's somewhat casual demeanor had immediately vanished under his professional mask as soon as he saw the extent of my injuries. I think a part of him thought the scans were over-estimating the extend of the damage to my body really. It didn't even hurt that much anymore.

  This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

  That or the injuries looked worse than they were and the scanner made them look not as bad... I don't know but I was now dealing with professional 'I'm going to save your life even if you hate it' Smith now. Either way I am pretty sure he was over-reacting.

  “I'm going to go through the ships systems and see if I can figure out what happened.” I said, as I got another flash of the void.

  Dr. Smith nodded, as he tapped a few buttons and several spider arms deployed. The term 'Fasciotomy procedure engaged: Target, lower left leg.' came across my vision and I immediately closed it.

  I found it was better to ignore the specifics of any medical procedures that were currently being performed on me.

  I went back through the ships systems and found... chaos.

  Everything was desynced, or at least everything that relied on me. It was different to when I just lost connection, it was almost like I had sent junk data to all of my systems and sent them into disarray, and now they were all asking for clarification, but the requests were... odd.

  Their clocks were all in disarray as well, nothing was displaying the correct time, most were less than a second off, but the furthest plasma shotgun turrets were off by a full fifteen seconds, which was resulting in them throwing errors to and receiving errors from the rest of the ship every time they tried to connect.

  I spent the next while fixing those problems manually. The biggest issue was not just that their clocks were off though, it was why they were off. Their clockspeeds, or the speed their individual components were running at, was way off, like someone had overclocked and underclocked all of them at random. I had to go into each and adjust their settings in what was the new age equivalent of their BIOS and that seemed to have solved the issue, but I could already tell a few were starting to drift again I was going to have to keep fixing them until I could find the root cause...

  I probably had a program to handle that.

  “I can handle that if you give me permissions Captain Cofey.” Hook mentioned as I was looking at over two hundred tabs of hardware diagnostics and began pondering how to fix everything.

  Hook's sudden intrusion into my concentration made me shudder.

  Or maybe it was the sudden cold on my side.

  I had been ignoring It but Doctor Smith had fully stripped my ship suit off of me and both he and the auto-doc-spider-horror-thing had been doing stuff to me the whole time. Horrible pokey things. They had used topical numbing agents on most of the locations, but I knew they were cutting me. I had undergone enough operations to know the feeling even with the locations numbed.

  I blinked my eyes open to see several tubes now running from my side into a machine.

  “What's that doc? What's going on?” I asked.

  Doctor Smith started as I spoke and he looked up from where he had been... poking at me. I deliberately looked away from the blood stained implement in his hand.

  At some point he had donned a full smock, face covering, and eye shields.

  My eyes also shied away from some of the fresh stains on both the smock and the eye shields. How long had I been lost in my own little world in the ships systems.

  “Ah, Captain Cofey, I thought you had nodded off.” He replied. He seemed far less excitable now.

  “Was never asleep. Had to fix a bunch of ship systems that went haywire.” I said.

  “So something did hit the ship I see.” He said, sounding dour.

  “No physical damage, but it's like someone went into the BIOS of every single system and spun the dials at random. Everything is working but nothing is working the way it was when we were in realspace.” I said.

  “So we did jump then?” Doctor Smith asked.

  “I guess? Logs show we never lit up the transit drive but we are most definitely in transit space. The void between places as it were.” I said.

  He paused, digesting that.

  “So where are we at with me?” I asked.

  “Well, you suffered a full body hemotoma, or rather a series of full body Hematoma's. There didn't appear to be much actual damage, and I couldn't locate any bleeds, but there was blood all throughout your body, and by that I mean outside of the blood vessels it should be. It's choking off organs and putting extreme pressure on your kidneys, but I think we caught it in time before any permanent damage occurred. That being said, if this could happen again you may want to consider getting an additional cybernetic kidney to take the strain. As it is I have you on dialysis to give your kidneys a chance to heal.” Doctor Smith said in his normal clinical voice, which I was finding oddly soothing. When he wasn't being clinical is when I knew shit had hit the fan.

  “How the hell does that happen?” I asked. It sounded too weird to be true, all my blood had just decided to teleport out of my organs?

  “You tell me, I'm just putting you back together. I have never heard of anything... like... this...” Doctor Smith paused and thought.

  “Okay, you obviously thought of something, don't keep me in suspense.” I asked testily.

  He gave me the side eye in response.

  He sighed.

  “I've never seen a medical report, those were kept very secret... basically everywhere I've been, but there are rumors of ships found stranded in transit, and the crew aboard.” Doctor Smith began.

  I tried to move my arm to make a 'keep going' motion but it just clanked, steel on steel, against the restraints. I think I heard some metal bend.

  We both looked at the sound of screeching metal.

  Doctor Smith looked back at me. “You break your new hand either you or Chief Carolina get to fix it, I only do the installs.” He said, half jokingly half serious.

  “Okay fine but what were the rumors.” I said.

  “That everyone aboard had been exsanguinated. The ships themselves were abbatoir's, some rooms were coated in blood, but nearly every body was completely drained.”

  “So what we have space vampires now?” I asked.

  “That is what the rumors said, but the rumors also said there wasn't a mark on them. Was like they all just bled out and died instantly without any wounds. Blood all over THEM obviously, but none where it could keep their heart pumping and organs running.” Doctor Smith said.

  That was... That was bad.

  If Doctor Smith was telling the truth we had just had some kind of misjump, and I had narrowly avoided having all my internal fluids become decidedly external.

  And if that happened to me...

  “Doc, am I clear to get out of here?” I asked.

  Doctor Smith looked over to where the auto-doc was working on my far side.

  “Just about. Why?” He asked.

  “I need you to check on everyone else. If what you are saying is correct we just had some kind of misjump. So far we know you and Carolina are okay, but everyone else is asleep and the camera's cannot tell if anything is wrong with them. You need to check on them NOW.” I said.