The Onyx Chronicles/Diagnosis

“Boren’s Syndrome…” Pete said, sounding it out as he read from the chart. “Doesn’t sound so bad, does it?”
Erin didn’t look up, reclined on the hospital bed at the perfect angle to mindlessly stare toward the window. Pete meant well, but he was trying to comfort her on something he didn’t understand. She rubbed her arm where the blood had been drawn. “Of course it doesn’t. A name is just words, it can only sound so bad. The tumor in my ovary is there whatever you call it.”
“Hey.” Pete’s hand found hers and squeezed. She hadn’t realized he was so close. “You alright?”
“Yeah…” Erin mumbled, the way people did when they weren’t really alright, but didn’t need someone else worrying about them. “I just… didn’t think this would catch up with me. Living the life of an ONI super spy, I sort of figured someone would shoot me in the back first.”
“Heh. Hell of an approach to health care. ‘Find something quicker to kill me.’ Course, you probably figured on shooting the other guy first.”
She rolled her head to meet the grizzled sergeant’s sunken eyes. War with the Covenant had harrowed Pete Stacker, taking flesh and friendships from the young man she’d met when it began. Scars and somber wisdom had filled the voids they left behind until they replaced enough to make a middle-aged Marine.
But they hadn’t replaced his humor. There was a stupid, schoolboy-ish smarm Erin had to imagine made him put tacks on high school teachers’ chairs, made worse by exactly how right he was. Erin had faced death in the form of assassins and suicide assignments, and each time fended it off with a pistol and a steady hand. She’d never imagined its skeletal fingers finding her through the failure of her own mortal form, and the diagnosis left her feeling totally defenseless.
“So, you did know maybe this was coming?” Pete asked.
“I knew it was possible.” Erin admitted. “There’s a history of it in my… family.”
She didn’t know what to call the other ORIONs, really. She hadn’t met any in decades, and longer since meeting one she wasn’t assigned to kill. There certainly weren’t going to be any cards at Christmas. But what else was she going to call the pool of genetically similar individuals whose data she based her own risks on?
Stacker just nodded, acceptingly. She felt ashamed of how easy fooling him was. “Know how you’re gonna deal with it?”
“I could have it removed with gene therapy. But it takes months, and the possibility of relapse is high. Better just to have the tissue removed.” There, at least, she could be honest, but it felt embarrassing to admit. Like Erin was going through menopause while Pete was young and vibrant, even as the first gray started showing in his hair. “So… hope you weren’t planning on having kids with me.”
“You looked outside lately?” Pete laughed, holding her hand tighter. “I think three hundred-thirty’s plenty.”
Erin laughed with him, and not just because it broke her own quiet. The idea was cosmically ridiculous. Considering the young candidates of Gamma Company, the children they’d helped kidnap to indoctrinate as soldiers for the United Earth Government, as their own was a heinous farce. And yet—they were the closest thing to her own children Erin was ever likely to have.
She blinked back tears—of mirth or grief, she couldn’t say—and shoved Pete’s hand back toward him. “That’s not funny! I stop sleeping in a cryo-tube for the first time in decades, get cancer, and now you want me packing lunchboxes for our crop of little psychopaths.”
“Well, they’ll be growing out of lunchboxes pretty quick…” Pete crossed his arms and looked sidelong at her. “Y’know, I forget sometimes, ONI’s kept you on ice most of your life. I never asked, but just when were you born, anyway?”
“Asking a woman her age now, Petey?” Erin tried to muster up some wry defiance, but ended up sinking back against the bed’s slope. Watching Pete through hooded eyes, she asked quietly, “Do you really want to know? I could be so old I went to school with your great, great grandmother.”
Pete didn’t flinch. “What’s it matter? To me, you’ll always be that mature, sexy older woman who seduced an innocent young marine and fulfilled all his wildest fantasies.”
“Oh, that’s how that went now, is it?” Erin smirked. “Well, I’ll leave it at saying I was born a long time before you, but biologically, you’ve caught up to me now.”
“Yeah? How’d you figure that?”
“Because I looked up your file when I learned you were coming to Onyx. And maybe arranged for my last slipspace jump to go a little longer to set myself back a little. I thought I’d make it a level playing field, but… I guess I wasn’t ready to start aging normally again.”
Pete shrugged, unfolding his arms to offer Erin a hand up. “We all get old sooner or later. Later for you, I guess. Just promise you won’t laugh when I have to go in for my first prostate exam?”
“I promise.” Erin grinned, but fought valiantly to hide it. She used the energy to clap her arm around Pete’s wrist and pull herself from the bed, and let him walk her out of the base’s modest hospital. While the two of them were alone in the empty hall, Erin leaned into Pete just enough to rest her head on his shoulder. She may have felt the weight of all the uninterrupted years she spent on Onyx, but at moments, even she—ONI agent, assassin, and all-around spook—could feel like a lovestruck teenager.