Difficult Patient

“Sure, give me a second…” Cass’ voice echoed across the room out of the speaker. Tu’Vass was laid on her side moaning when Cass got back to them. “It’s downloading now, although you aren’t going to like it.” Jade could imagine the slight sideways frown on Cass’ face as she bit her bottom lip analysing the data.

"Ms. Jones, please just push the data to Quarantine, time is of the essence" Artemis said impatiently.

Tu'Vass mumbled something, pointing the computer as it displayed a readout from her ship. Artemis gently grabbed her arm and put it back down, "it's best you stay still with all the equipment running"

Jade and Artemis studied the display, as did South from the corner of the room.

"She's right, this isn't good" Jade remarked.
"Completely and utterly opposite of human DNA" Artemis laughed sheepishly "Absolutely anything we use could very well kill her, ah....good"

Tu'Vass didn't speak English, but she understood Artemis' tone...something was wrong.

Jade dragged Artemis away from the table "Don't talk about the patient in front of the patient" she whispered.

"Sorry, most of the creatures I work I typically don't give a shit about" Artemis said. "So, I'm drawing a blank, anything you have in Medical or that I have down here is inherently lethal"
"And on top of that she has literally no immune system. If she steps outside containment she's got half an hour before the insane amount of contaminants kill her" Jade added.

Artemis looked to Tu'Vass, then to the display.

"Ms. Jones, see what they have on stock for medical supplies and foodstuffs, anything will work, I just need to get a good profile" Artemis said.

"Gimme a minute..." Cass replied.

"It's possible, just barely, that if I could get a look at what kinds of solutions won't kill her, I could try to use what we have on hand to manufacture meds in my chemical workstations" Artemis whispered to Jade.

"That's a longshot....but it might be the only choice we have at the moment, but we have to entertain the possibility that there might be nothing we can do" Jade said with a sigh, not wanting to give up on her patient.

"The ISL Module is equipped with a few stasis chambers for experiments, I could place her in stasis until we can save her, but I don't know if stasis is even an option, the radiation from the chamber might kill her. I mean, we can survive it because its the equivalent of what we get on a daily basis just walking around this behemoth, but she's fragile...science only knows what that might do"

"Have a chamber prepped just in case, it'll be our last resort"

Artemis swapped the intercom to the lab. "Darling, can you prep one of the stasis chambers for a humanoid alien? We might need to uh...put the patient away"

"I'll get on it" The Missus replied.

"Okay, looks like they've got jack shit for meds, they burned through most of them trying to cure themselves, but there's just a little bit left that you could use for samples. Does Boyd still have that ship?" Cass reported.

Jade swapped the status monitor, the airlock was still occupied by Boyd's ship with the alien craft in tow. "Yeah, he's still there"

"Get him on it, I'll keep sifting around to look for anything that might help" Cass said, turning the intercom off.

"Boyd, it's Dr. Black, I need you to look for some items on the alien ship, I'm sending Dr. South down with a list and pictures of what they look like" Jade said as the lab printer popped out the data Cass had pulled up.

"'kay, just warning you though, it's a mess in there. Like, Event Horizon meets Aliens meets Friday the 13th..." Boyd replied.

"I don't want to go down there, let the freaking space jockey do it!" South exclaimed.

Artemis put with arm around South. "Dr. South, this is a tenuous situation. I understand you're a biologist, but Dr. Black and I have this covered, we don't need you eyeballing the alien with the same demeanor as a middle schooler, so kindly go help Mr. Weathers find the things that will keep her alive, okay?"

"You know..."

"Dr. South, please, for the sake of the patient, just stop arguing with me and GO! Also, I outrank you, so it's technically an order, GO!"

South knew that Tu'Vass needed whatever was in the ship below. He grudgingly took the list from the printer and headed down to help Boyd look for the items.

"Okay, in the meantime, let's see if we can figure out how to communicate with it...err...her" Artemis said. "Didn't we have a linguist onboard?"

"He got fired while we were in port right before the accident, something about GELF's and pornography" Jade said, remembering the incident. "But....I think they got translators as part of their standard loadout, it might be in his office computer!"

Artemis repeatedly buzzed Cass.

"For fucks sake, I got it the first time! What?!" Cass yelled through the intercom.

"Can you hack into the linguist's computer and push us his translators?"

"Oh, yeah, one sec"

Literally one second later, the translator was in the lab computer. The office computer being nothing of a challenge for Cass.

"Thank you" Jade said. "It's supposed to be automated, so I guess we just talk"

"Hello, Tu'Vass, I'm Dr. Artemis K. Pritchard the Sixth, can you understand me?"

The translator scanned Tu'Vass, and repeated what Artemis said in a broken version of her language.

Tu'Vass heard "SADFNAADFKJ TU'VASS ADSKFJIOEA DR. ARTEMIS K. PRITCHARD THE SIXTH FOOSRGHOSDF FOOD"

Tu'Vass raised an eyebrow and replied in her own language, Artie and Jade heard "ADFKJAEFJNADJFN I CAN'T UNDERSTAND AIDFNONAFIHNO, BUT, UH, HELLO?"

"Oh great, it's corrupted" Artemis said.

<tag>

South: see if you can recover any meds from the shuttlecraft so we can try to engineer some more, also, there's plenty of dead aliens in the ship to study if you're inclined (Artie's already got dibs on some for autopsy, so don't be greedy!)

Boyd: Help South find some meds in the remains of the ship, is there anything else there though? Weapons, food, perhaps some data we missed?

Jade and Tu'Vass: we have a barely working translator. It's translating broken bits of our conversation because it can barely understand Tu'vass' language. Is there a method that we can employ to get full translations or are we stuck?