In Medical, Capa goes calmly to the supplies cabinet, locates disinfectant and sterile gauze. He washes his hands and peels off his t-shirt. Trey watches him, feeling a little numb. A shudder ripples through him when Capa passes the sharps cabinet, the gleaming scalpels in their form-fitting beds. When Capa looks down at his chest and begins to wipe away the blood, shockingly red against his pale skin, Trey rouses himself.
He reaches for a square of gauze. "Here. Let me help you--"
Capa doesn't look up. "It's alright, Trey. I can manage."
"But--"
"No." The word drops as cold and flat as a stone. Trey pauses. Capa continues cleaning himself. Then he says, more mildly: "Why don't you program a new link for me? You have access to the Comms supplies, don't you...?"
"Yes-- No."
Capa looks up, frowning. Trey meets his unearthly clear eyes.
"I don't think you should be alone," he says.
"Why--" The frown fades. Capa looks away. Breathes out, exhales a word, very softly: "Shit."
He exchanges a bloody piece of gauze for a clean one. "
Icarus," he says to the air.
Yes, Capa.
He frowns again, if less in response to affront, his brows huddling in thought. "Can you account for my movements between eleven hundred and thirteen hundred hours today?"
Extrapolating from ship's sensor readings, biometrics as transmitted by your comm link, and onboard cameras: yes, Capa.
"Proceed, please,
Icarus."
Trey listens as Capa does. What
Icarus distills for them is the fact that Capa detoured from the gym to the airlock before proceeding to the showers following his workout. At the airlock, at eleven thirty-eight, for reasons unknown, his comm link ceased to transmit his biometric data.
He doesn't recall going to the airlock. The first thing he
does recall, after being in the gym, is the water in the shower stinging his chest.
"I was lost in thought," Capa murmurs. "I didn't even notice--" He nods toward his chest, then looks again at Trey.
"Eleven minutes, Trey," he says. "I lost
eleven minutes...."
He sounds more than a little lost. Trey can't blame him. This time, when he goes to lay a hand on Capa's shoulder, the physicist doesn't shrug away.
"What were you thinking about?" Trey asks gently. "In the gym-- what was on your mind?"
"Pinbacker." Capa looks surprised at the sound of the word. "I was thinking how if it hadn't been for him--" He pauses, swallows. "-- if it hadn't been for him, none of it would have worked. Stage six, remember--? We-- I couldn't work out the programming. I couldn't work it out, and I started running through the sequence in my mind, started running through the coding, started matching the coding to the equations for the detonation, and I--"
"Went to work."
Capa stares at him. "What?"
Trey chuckles, half seriously. "You went to the payload."
"The payload's not there, Trey."
"Which explains why you got frustrated." Trey nods toward Capa's raw chest. He goes to help Capa with a bit of bandaging; Capa doesn't stop him.
"Am I going insane, Trey?" he asks, very quietly.
"I think you just spent a year and a half living inside a bomb," Trey replies. "Roughly half of that in the past two weeks. Think you're suffering from pee-tee-pee-dee."
"What's-- 'Post-traumatic payload disorder'--?"
"Yep."
Capa nearly smiles. Then his face goes still. He seems to shrink in on himself slightly; to Trey, he suddenly looks very young, very tired, and more than very uncertain.
"Shit...." he murmurs again.