With most of the crew clustered towards the front, the cavalry arrived pretty quickly for Dick, and he got off with nothing worse than a few deep gouges. Nothing missing or destroyed, to his considerable relief.
Without regenerative treatments available, the healing would be slow, but modern medicine would prevent any infection or scarring.
From the sealed engine room, Lilliana organized the retaking of the ship. This undertaking was neither very quick nor very pretty. Left to their own devices, the zombies lumbered around only attacking those who stumbled too close to them, but the ghouls did what uncontrolled ghouls do in brightly lit environments: they dug in, entrenched themselves in whatever nooks and crannies they could find.
The Rebellion, you might recall, was full of nooks and crannies.
Regan and Leo took to the vents. To her credit, Regan made it her priority to find Handy, who had gone silent shortly after the second wave of invaders arrived on the scene. Her poor nervous system, which had been rather shoddily designed, had not been able to cope with the preternatural aura of cold and despair the ghouls projected and had simply shut down in the face of it. Without the necromancer pulling the strings, she was just meat waiting to be eaten.
Owing to the pressing need, Regan eschewed more heroic forms of dispatching the actual opponents she encountered in favor of blasting them on sight until the unfortunate parahuman was recovered.
The imaginary ones, she envisioned much more dramatic battles with.
While Regan and Leo took care of the ghouls in the ducts, Dick worked to put the helm back in shipshape, Galatea stayed out of the way, and Lilliana coordinated from the sealed engine room, the rest of the crew divided into two parties to sweep the ship clear of intruders.
One group, consisting of Cicada, worked from the rear. The other, consisting of everybody else who was available, worked from the front. The two groups met in the forward section.
When all was said and done, the Rebellion had lost seven men, four of the cargo handlers, two general spacemen, and one of Regan’s maintenance crew. Fortunately for them, they were merely dead… none had been taken back to the necroship.
Handy’s condition carried with it an unexpected boon: once she came around, she was able to function as a far more sensitive ghoul detector than anybody else on the ship. When the last of the foul creatures was dealt with, she was duly chastised by Regan for falling unconscious during a battle. As punishment, she was assigned all of Regan’s KP duty for the next month, though as a token kindness this punishment was not reflected on the duty roster or reported to Lilliana, Dick, or Daniel Shays, so as not to make Handy’s shame public.
With the ship clear of all invading undead, and the bodies of the missing recovered and identified, there was only one crew member left unaccounted for. Because Lilliana never did anything she wouldn’t ask of the rest of the crew if the reason she wouldn’t ask is that they would tell her to go to hell, she took it upon herself to descend to the lowest level of the fore section and find out the fate of the ship’s capable doctor.
She didn’t have to actually enter the medical bay to get her answer, though. It was waiting in the corridor outside, in the forms of three zombies and two ghouls, strung up by their feet and with their arms and heads removed.
“Oh,” Lilliana said to herself, after she’d finished with the dry heaves. “He’s alright, then.”
It is worth mentioning at this point that the ship’s sole medical officer had not, in fact, been a licensed doctor on his own home world. That is not to say that he lacked credentials, however, nor to suggest that those credentials had not qualified him to practice medicine on humans.
They were simply those of a veterinarian.
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