[JE] [JEF #2] Attack of Nerves 3/5

Jul 02, 2007 02:43

Title: Attack of Nerves (3/5)
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: JE (specifically, KAT-TUN)
Pairing: Akame, though others are mentioned
Rating: PG-13
Word count: 20,000
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack, comedy, fluff, angst, you name it...
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the bands, individuals or songs mentioned within.
Summary: The crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN are given a new mission, to boldly go where several men from Osaka have gone before, and find out what attacked the K8. The answer lies somewhere in Jin's murky past, and only Kame, with the help of an advanced video game console, can save the day.


Chapter 3

The virtual crowd went wild as Kame scored yet another home run, bringing the final game of the Inner Planet Series to a close. He tossed his cap in the air and listened to the roar of thousands of people cheering his victory. It was intoxicating.

But then, everything felt that way when he used the CNS Plus. The wooden bat was a solid, comforting weight in his hands; he could smell the popcorn, drink in the sights and sounds of the entire universe - so long as he had a game cartridge inserted, anyway.

But no matter how real it felt, Kame knew it was time for him to emerge from his fantasy world and get back to his life...which meant, getting back to Jin. If the idiot hadn't figured out by now what he'd said to upset Kame, he was never going to. Not without help. If Kame was in the right mood, maybe he'd deign to enlighten his cutely clueless co-captain...and then let him make it up to him.

Kame reached for the off-switch, which, in this particular game, was cunningly disguised as a small turtle painted on the wall of the dugout. One push of a button, and blissful oblivion was over. He'd have to stop pretending the rest of the universe didn't exist. Even if he couldn't leave the ship, there was no way for him to ignore everything outside the hull, and especially not when they were on assignment.

The game shut down fast, cutting off the nerve stimulation so suddenly that Kame could still feel a phantom baseball cap under the VR helmet, hear a ghostly crowd whispering their praise in his ears. With fingers still on sensory overload, he detached himself from the game gear and sank down on his bed. The soft mattress felt good after so many days of total video game immersion, interspersed with the occasional rest and refreshment break, and he was sorely tempted to nap right then and there.

Reluctantly, he pulled himself up and threw on a shirt. Sleep could wait a while.

If he didn't talk to someone who wasn't a hologram, he was going to go crazy.

He'd never have been presentable on any other ship in the fleet, but fortunately for Kame, the crew of the KAT-TUN had no use for uniforms other than the occasional bout of cosplay, and his disheveled state wouldn't be cause for so much as a batted eyelid. He made a valiant attempt at fixing his hair - so long spent under a helmet hadn't done it any favours - yanked on a pair of boots, and considered himself ready to face the rest of the crew.

It wasn't a long walk from his cabin to the bridge; even so, Kame was surprised not to run into *anyone* on his travels. The KAT-TUN was never exactly teeming with life but it had a full crew complement, and even during the night, as they kept time, there was a constant, active human presence all over the ship.

It wasn't until he turned down the corridor leading to the bridge that he spotted the first one. A young Ops trainee - Yamada, he thought - was lying unconscious nearby, one hand clutching his comm badge in a tight, painful-looking claw. His mouth moved silently, forming nonsensical words with no air behind them. His pulse beat steadily under Kame's fingers, but nothing the captain could say or do would wake him.

Kame pressed his own comm badge with still-tingling fingers. "Captain Kamenashi calling Sickbay!" He waited for a response; since none was forthcoming, he kept going. "I need medical assistance just outside the bridge. Yamada has collapsed and-"

He broke off as the trainee spasmed in his arms, muscles seizing and contracting several times in quick succession before the helpless young man slid from Kame's grasp. Kame didn't fancy trying to carry him to Sickbay single-handedly, and none of the medical team were responding to his call, which left him with the option of looking to the bridge for help. He pulled Yamada out of the way of oncoming traffic, patted him on the head, and hurried the final few feet to press his thumb to the keypad by the door.

Kame had been only mildly alarmed by the sight of an unconscious trainee. After all, they tended to pass out on a regular basis when overwhelmed by something amazing and shiny. It wasn't a major cause for concern.

What *was* a cause not for mere concern but for outright, mindless panic, was the sight that awaited Kame as the bridge doors slowly parted. He couldn't help himself; his mouth fell open and he stared blindly about the room, not really seeing anything, trying hard not to see. Ghostly ballplayers swung their bats in the corners of his eyes, remnants of the CNS Plus, and he tried to fix on them and the crack that rang in his ears as the wood connected with the ball.

But they were fake - artificial distractions only, a poor effort to hide the truth from Kame's senses. And it was an unpleasant truth. Carnage would have been easier to deal with. Anything was better than the sight of every last man on the bridge slumped over their stations, or fallen to the floor, lying in death's repose with not a mark to show for it.

Kame walked to each crew member in turn, examining them, looking into their sightless eyes and trying desperately to rouse them. None stirred. Kame's pleas for them to wake up went unheard, as did his command over the ship's internal radio for anyone who was awake to contact the bridge. In his heart, he knew there would be no reply.

In between the echoes of his baseball game, Kame could hear every breath drawn; some easy and restful, others a laboured wheeze. Until he approached Ensign Taguchi Junnosuke's station, he heard nothing else. As he paused before the flashing screens and blinking lights, he noticed a curious static in the air, a fizzing, crackling sound with intermittent beeps and whistles. It hurt his ears to listen to.

He fumbled around at the console, trying to turn off what he assumed was a malfunctioning comm link, when he realised the sounds were coming from an external source. Something outside...and close by.

Force of habit had kept him from looking at the main viewscreen - he had no wish to look out at the universe where he'd almost wiped out his own species for something as petty as jealousy - but he did so now, turning slowly to the giant viewer that dominated most of one wall, fearful of what he might see.

Nothing so sinister as he'd been imagining - an orbital station. Missing insignia, yes, but a recognisable object nonetheless. He racked his brains to remember if any independent systems used the wheel design, but came up empty. Maybe they were in an intergalactic dumping ground, one of the corners of the vast universe where obsolete and failed technology, too useless even to sell for parts, was abandoned for the scavengers.

As much as Kame liked that idea, he knew it couldn't be true. If the station was non-functional, why was it transmitting signals?

He was still fiddling with the controls, trying to at least turn the volume down, when Junno abruptly got to his feet and took a few unsteady steps away from Kame.

Alarmed, Kame took a few steps of his own in the opposite direction. The other man's usual joie de vivre was nowhere to be seen - or rather, it no longer existed outside his head. His unblinking eyes didn't see Kame, and when the captain called his name the sound never reached his ears. The entranced ensign found himself a clear space, grinned widely at an unseen audience, and began to tap dance.

To make matters even more surreal, he extended his hands and began to juggle with empty air.

Kame wasn't sure whether to laugh, cry, or kick Junno and hope he woke up. Not that the other man wasn't entertaining, but there was something horribly creepy about watching the rapid, lively movements coupled with dead eyes. It was as if a corpse had returned from the grave to pursue a life in showbusiness.

His vision blurred and he stumbled back towards the door, keeping himself as far out of range as he could. He'd been touching the ensign only a moment ago, checking for a pulse, but he felt that if he touched him now, Junno would seize him by the wrist and draw him down into the depths of mesmerized madness, from which there would be no escape.

And escape, he must. It was obvious what had happened. That station, that harmless looking wheel, was clearly what Yamapi had sent them to find. His crew were acting exactly like the similarly-afflicted crew of the K8 - either unconscious, or in a trance of sorts - and he was willing to bet his favourite chair that the strange signals were responsible. He was going to have to silence the link - destroy the speakers if he had to - and try to wake everyone up. The trainees, Koki, Ueda, Nakamaru, Junno, Jin...

Jin?

Kame scanned the bridge again, expecting to see his partner draped in some suitably seductive pose over a console, but Jin wasn't on the bridge. The rest of the command crew were, though, which meant that Jin should have been with them. There was, of course, always a chance that he'd been elsewhere on the ship when the crew had fallen victim to the station's signals. Poor Yamada was living proof that it was unnecessary to be in the same room.

Junno dropped an imaginary ball and it rolled towards Kame, so he darted hastily out the way until the juggler retrieved it and continued his routine from his new position by the unconscious Nakamaru.

Just so long as he stays away from the door, Kame thought grimly. And well away from me.

There was no way for Kame to know exactly where Jin was, but using the ship's communications system, he could find out where his comm badge was. A quick sweep of the KAT-TUN confirmed Kame's worst nightmare.

Jin was gone.

Don't panic, Kame told himself sternly. Just because you're confined to a ship currently occupied by a comatose crew and your partner has vanished without leaving so much as a note is no reason to get upset.

He didn't believe himself for a minute, that was the trouble. Kame had gotten used to lying to himself, because that made it easier to lie to everyone else. Except Jin, because Jin always wanted to believe the best of him, no matter what he did, and regardless of how much the truth hurt, Kame thought there was one person for whom only honesty would do.

Keeping a wary eye on the still-merry Ensign Taguchi, Kame checked the ship's logs. The KAT-TUN had, from all accounts, been stationary within teleport range of the station for almost two days, though the teleport equipment hadn't seen any activity since the mission briefing.

However, one of the shuttles had been launched.

It had to be Jin. According to the computers, everyone else was still on board - or their comm badges were, at any rate - and it was typical of the other captain to take it upon himself to investigate and try to keep his crew out of danger.

Shame he hadn't realised how far that danger's reach extended.

There was no sign of the shuttle on either the viewscreen or the radar mapper, so Kame surmised that it was now inside the station. He checked the reports that had come back over the comm link from Jin's space armour, confirming for himself that not only was the protective gear not required, but there seemed to be some sort of malfunction in the helmet causing Jin to hear whispers. Given the signals emanating from the station, Kame suspected the "malfunction" was anything but.

Jin's last transmission to the KAT-TUN had been to tell them that he was leaving the landing bay, and confirm that they could track him using his armour. They had, but not for much longer. From the coordinates, Kame could tell that Jin had been heading down one of the spokes, moving directly towards the central hub, but the suit had stopped showing up on the scanner after only a few minutes. There was no way to tell if Jin had actually made it to his destination, or if something had happened to him.

Whichever it was, he hadn't returned. Kame was the only person conscious enough to do anything about it, and he was forbidden to leave the ship.

A slow smirk spread across Kame's face. So maybe he was in the military now, and supposed to follow orders, but being a good little soldier and locking himself away on the ship wasn't going to help him find Jin. Besides, the longer he stayed within range of that signal, the greater his chances of falling under its spell.

It was starting to wear away at him even now, grating on his nerves and working its way through to his brain. Kame rifled under his seat for the emergency sewing kit he kept there to replace buttons during unfortunate incidents, coming up with a sharp needle. He quickly jabbed his left pinky, but instead of the sharp pain catapulting him into clarity, it drove him further from it, propelling him back towards the feel of his hands around the bat. Wood pressed against his fingers; the crowd roared incoherent support and the tang of juice drunk many games ago lingered sweetly on his tongue.

With his senses under assault from the after-effects of an extended session with the CNS Plus, Kame didn't dare pilot a shuttle, and he certainly wasn't going to take the ship closer. The best thing he could do, he reasoned, would be to program the KAT-TUN's autopilot with instructions to return to the fleet, setting a delay to allow himself sufficient time to effect a rescue. The crew weren't going to notice if they spent another half-day hanging around outside the station, but he couldn't leave them there for good.

On the other hand, if they left too early, he'd never catch up to them. The shuttles were meant for short trips only, weren't capable of anything faster than sub-light speeds and didn't have room for supplies for more than a few weeks at best. That was assuming Jin's shuttle was still in working order, of course, because if it wasn't, Kame's rescue was going to fail spectacularly.

At least if it's a one-way trip, they can't lock me up for breaching the terms of my confinement, he thought.

It took Kame all of ten minutes to prepare himself. Space armour evidently hadn't gotten Jin anywhere, so he didn't bother with any, though he did arm himself with a stunner and the blaster with a gene-locked trigger that Jin had bought him for his last birthday. He didn't actually have his own suit - the military had prohibited him from owning customised space armour until his probationary period was up, the idea being that he was less likely to try to leave the ship if he had to put up with one of the generic suits that were stored for every member of the crew for safety reasons. They weren't designed for comfort.

Programming the autopilot was child's play, even with the phantom baseball players constantly striking out just within his range of vision, though he did have a tough time dodging the invisible juggling balls that always seemed to fly in his direction. Nakamaru, while still unconscious, was somehow beatboxing in time to Junno's tap-dancing, and Kame contemplated recording the event for posterity.

Then he decided it was just too creepy.

There was nothing more he could do for the crew now. Either he and Jin would return in the shuttle - because regardless of Jin's status, Kame was bringing him back - or they'd both die on the station, leaving the KAT-TUN to make her own way home. With any luck, by the time they got back Arashi would have figured out how to wake them.

Kame sighed. Jin's selfless act had turned out to be very selfish indeed, through no fault of his own. But even if Jin hadn't been his friend, partner and lover, Kame would still have gone after him for no more complicated reason than that he owed him, and he always honoured his debts.

A few quick presses and the teleport coordinates were set for what Kame considered a "safe" place - the landing bay Jin had mentioned before he'd set off for the hub. He could send himself to the station without a problem, but unfortunately, the teleport could only be operated from the ship, and there was no one conscious to bring him back. He did experimentally poke Ueda's finger with the needle, just in case, but the commander remained solidly asleep - not that this slowed his punches any. Kame dodged a vicious right hook and slammed his free hand down on the control before he could stop to think about it.

In less time than it took him to make a trainee faint, Kame was standing in the station's landing bay, slightly dizzy from the unfamiliar atmosphere and awestruck by the number of ships surrounding him. He spotted the KAT-TUN's shuttle immediately - the large purple letters reading 'CARSHRIMP' on the side were a dead giveaway - but he didn't recognise many of the other crafts.

There was the exploratory vessel, of course, which Jin, unless he'd forgotten to report it, hadn't checked out. There were also several cruisers that he thought might have been from Ganymede, and one that he would've sworn was a Fahngarlian long-range fighter. The rest, he was in the dark about. Many of them looked old and beaten-up, and Kame wondered how many years the station had been in operation.

The landing bay was cold, and he was glad he'd thought to add a few extra layers before leaving. The plaid shirt he'd been wearing originally was all very well, but it wouldn't have done much to stop him from freezing to death, unlike space armour, with its internal temperature regulation. Nonetheless, he shivered, more from unease than chill. The silence should have been more peaceful than on the KAT-TUN, given that he didn't have to look at the comatose bodies of his friends.

It wasn't. Even with a ghostly crowd singing snatches of the International Anthem in his ears, the silence was overwhelming.

As a means of distraction, Kame began to circle the landing bay; Jin had mentioned a door, and there were many to choose from. Fortunately, Kame didn't have to guess. From the data fed back to the KAT-TUN, he knew Jin's path until he dropped off the radar, and thus he knew that he'd find what he was looking for at the far end of the long room.

But first, he wanted to see what else was out there. The last thing he wanted was to be attacked from behind.

His quest proved fruitless; all the other doors, electronically locked, refused to open no matter how he tried to cajole, threaten and downright force them. Stubborn though he was, Kame got nowhere. Eventually he approached the "right" door, and as he did so, something curious happened.

The bleeps, clicks and whistles he'd heard through the KAT-TUN's speakers were coming from somewhere behind that door...straight into his head. They even pierced the dreadful, off-key singing of the baseball fans, crawling inside his mind on twisted, skittery legs. Kame closed his eyes. It didn't help. Even in the darkness behind his eyelids, he could see the second baseman throwing to third, accompanied by a series of high-pitched squeals. Somehow, he didn't think it was the guy on third complaining because he'd been hit in the face by the ball.

The door whirred softly as it opened, but it was loud enough to startle Kame into accidentally jabbing himself with the needle he still held, and he opened his eyes. The extra sensitivity in his fingers spread to the rest of his body, to the point where he was barely even aware of his location, let alone the strange sounds. As far as his senses were concerned, he was next up to bat.

Stepping up to the plate took him through the door, and the bright lights of the corridor beyond made his eyes start to water. He walked blindly, ignoring the doors on either side of him. Jin would have done the same, he knew. He'd have gone for the hub, and Kame was going to follow. Every time the signal became too strong for him to bear, he pricked himself with the needle. He was going to look like a pincushion by the time he got back to the ship, but at least he'd be awake.

Finding Jin seemed to take forever, and the corridor never changed. One long, straight, gleaming white passage with harsh yellow lights. It was only slightly reassuring to Kame that he saw no signs of the crews of all those other ships. Were they beyond the locked doors...or dead?

Eventually, Kame reached the end of the corridor. There was only one door now - directly ahead of him. He checked his watch: though the walk seemed to have taken hours, there was actually plenty of time remaining before the KAT-TUN's autopilot began to run. That didn't mean he could allow himself to feel relieved. If Jin had made it through that door, he hadn't come back again, and Kame had no idea what was on the other side. Logically, it should have been the central computer, and alive with human activity.

That didn't seem likely.

As the door opened automatically, the signal increased in strength, the varied sounds blending into a single pulse that beat relentlessly inside his brain. With an immense effort of will, Kame forced it out, commanding himself to focus on the CNS Plus after-effects instead. His overlong exposure to the game system had temporarily wreaked havoc with his senses, but it was the only thing preventing him from ending up like the rest of his crew. With his nervous system on overdrive, the additional stimuli left over from the game gave him something else to respond to, with the occasional sharp reminder from the point of a needle.

The station's signal, Kame surmised, overwhelmed the listener's senses, feeding them false information much as the CNS Plus did, but taking the much more risky route of putting them to sleep and duping them into thinking they were really a part of the situation. It was only too obvious that Ensign Taguchi believed himself to be tap-dancing - while juggling - and if Yamapi's briefing was to be believed, some of the K8 crew were also indulging themselves in their own private worlds.

For those still unconscious, it might be only a matter of time before they "woke up" and joined in the fun. Kame had no intention of being one of that number. The CNS Plus effects wouldn't last forever, and he had to get them out of there before he lost his advantage.

Kame held the needle in one hand, poised against his palm, and held the blaster in the other. He needn't have bothered - there was no one for him to shoot.

He'd been right about the contents of the hub. The centre of the enormous room was occupied by an immense computer, set in a column between floor and ceiling, a sprawl of massive grey wires and boxes. The blank screens and casings were cracked in several places, leaving dark gaps from which thick black cables emerged to tangle on the floor below. Other cracks appeared to have been forced from the inside out - the casings bulged, and in the gaps shone what looked like pieces of red plastic. Kame thought he'd never seen anything more grotesque.

Workstations were dotted here and there, all empty. The whirring fans and electronic whines combined to form a low, hollow rumble that sounded almost alive, the roar of a giant creature intimidating its prey.

As an intimidation tactic, it was working nicely. Kame was relieved to see that Jin was nowhere near the mechanical monstrosity - the other captain was lying prone near the door, still in his space armour. Kame rushed over to him and knelt down, then fell back in horror.

The floor beneath he and Jin was the same dull grey as the walls of the room, and extended in a thick band for maybe four feet. A matching band surrounded the computer, though it was hard to tell under all the mess, and the two were joined by narrow paths at regular intervals.

But the rest of the floor...wasn't a floor at all.

It was transparent, for one thing, though the underside was badly stained and speckled with drops of dark brown and red liquid. Peering cautiously down, Kame discovered why.

What he saw made him glad he'd barely eaten in the past few days. The whereabouts of the missing crew members was no longer a mystery. He could see their bodies - some in uniforms, some in civilian clothing - stacked in an untidy heap just below him. The transparent band of floor was divided into two parts - an outer ring, closest to the door, where corpses were stockpiled, and an inner ring that ran close to the computer, where they were pulverised.

The noise that Kame had attributed to fans was, in fact, caused by all manner of tools for reducing the human body (and some that might not have been human) to nothing more than a slimy mulch. The results ran down a channel into the centre of the room, below the computer, and Kame couldn't make out what happened to it.

He didn't want to know. As it was, he was having to battle rising nausea, and he didn't think Jin would appreciate Kame throwing up all over his pretty space armour. They *had* to get out of there.

Kame couldn't carry Jin, not with the armour weighing him down, and other than the helmet, he couldn't remove any of it without Jin's cooperation. He had to wake him up. He reached for the seal at the base of the neck, intending to release it and pop the helmet off, when the rumble underneath him grew louder.

Reluctantly, he looked at the floor. It was receding, slowly but surely, into the outer band.

That didn't leave them much room to play with. It didn't do wonders for the atmosphere either, though the smell wasn't as bad as Kame had feared. Now that he had an unobscured view, the corpses were covered in some kind of clear liquid that seemed to preserve them. None of those in Kame's line of sight appeared to have been dead for even a day - assuming they really were dead, and not just unconscious. He felt bad about it, but he didn't want to put his hand down there and find out, especially since he'd have to reach so far that he'd be at risk of falling in himself.

The increased noise level helped Kame to ignore the pulse that wanted to do to his brain what the machines below would do to his body. Even so, it wouldn't be enough to wake Jin.

Kame succeeded in removing the helmet, revealing a face that, in anyone else, he would have said was deep in thought. Unpleasant thought. Jin was clearly asleep, but his dreams didn't look to be sweet ones.

Had Kame realised about the CNS Plus earlier, he'd have used it on his crew and brought it with to use on Jin. He was sure that the artificial sensory replacements would have worked, sooner or later. Unfortunately, he hadn't had that particular revelation until after he'd teleported across. He was going to have to get through to Jin some other way.

Hearing was out - if the machinery hadn't woken him up, it wasn't going to. Likewise, the smell rising from the pulped corpses wasn't affecting anyone but Kame. Jin's eyes were closed, and even if he opened them, they'd be unseeing. Taste brought with it a risk of choking.

That left touch.

Fortunately, Kame knew the place where Jin was exceptionally sensitive. A small patch of skin on his collarbone, where Kame had once hit him with a shockstick on full power. Though the skin was no longer burned, the nerve endings remained abnormally sensitive - a fact Kame frequently took advantage of in the bedroom.

It was hardly the most romantic of settings, of course, but there was no time to be lost. No time for the niceties, either. Kame pushed the armour and the shirt underneath aside as much as he could, then bent down over Jin and bit down on the spot, not quite hard enough to draw blood but more than sufficient to make the other man scream under normal circumstances.

This time, Jin did scream, but when Kame saw the look in his now-open eyes he knew his bite had nothing to do with it.

pairing: kame/jin, media: je!fic, genre: au, orientation: slash, rating: pg-13, length: multipart, series: je fleet

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