Post-Apocalyptic Views From the Bridge

Posted on 08 Jul 2024 @ 9:24pm by Lieutenant JG Dylan McConnor & Ensign Emilie D'Astous & Captain Bane Plase & Lieutenant Commander Stovek & Lieutenant Maralen Seitha & Lieutenant JG Lisald Vaat

2,340 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Stranded
Location: Bridge
Timeline: Immediately following Playing Tugboat

Ensign Émilie D'Astous opened her eyes carefully, the ringing in her ears worse than the bells of Notre-Dame de Paris. But once she did open them, she almost regretted doing so.

Nothing on the Bridge was familiar. Nothing and no one was where it was supposed to be. Commander Stovek, at the Ops station that was usually on her left, was sprawled halfway between his station and the viewscreen. His console - or what was left of it - was turned on its side, and smoking. The viewscreen was shattered and splintered, the broken paneling showing the circuitry behind it.

The lower half of... Someone, she couldn't guess who... Was on her right, close to the doors leading to the battle bridge turbolift. She tried to turn around to get a view of the rest of the bridge. But she discovered that she couldn't move. A heavy structural beam had fallen across her lap and was pinning her down. Her brain suddenly screamed in alarm - why couldn't she feel it? She tried wiggling her toes, but there was no sensation below her waist.

At the back of the Bridge, McConnor stirred back to consciousness. He felt something warm and sticky soaking his uniform. He reached up and touched the side of his neck, and saw that his hand came away covered in blood. His hair felt heavy and matted down with blood.

There was little to no light in his section of the bridge. McConnor hit the button for the emergency lights, feeling for it from muscle memory in the near-total darkness.

There was a sudden flickering of amber light coming from his left as he felt for the emergency light switch. He turned and saw fire coming from the environmental control station. Clearly the fire suppression systems were off-line. McConnor felt a jolt of panic. If the fire suppression systems were inoperative, the fire would burn through the oxygen on the Bridge within three minutes.

Adrenaline took over as he ran to an emergency panel and fetched a fire extinguisher. He sprayed the environmental control station until the extinguisher was empty, sputtering its last few drops of carbon foam. That was when the emergency lights finally kicked in, drawing power from the reserve batteries.

Chief Petty Officer Sorbek groaned and tried to lift herself up, but failed. Instead, she looked around as best she could. The Bridge was on fire. Bodies were laying everywhere, and nothing was where it used to be, including her. Where she had been standing at Ops II in the aft of the Bridge, she was now somehow laying behind the Executive Officers chair in the command area of the bridge on her side, her right arm pinned under her. Her body was wedged between the support struts that held the chair to the deck, and the horseshoe panel that was Tactical and Security that dominated the bridge. She took a moment to listen to her body and came up with the understanding that she had fared well; she was not in any pain, thankfully. She looked down to her feet and moved them. Thankfully they moved. She then moved her free arm and wiggled her fingers in front of her face. All of them worked. She looked at her body. Other than a scorch mark and some tears in her uniform, she wasn't bleeding bad enough for the blood to soak through her uniform. She attemtpted to move, grunting as she did so, to free her other arm. Successfully, she did so, and found that she was able to move it. She lifted her hand up to wiggle her fingers....and screamed. Where her hand had been only a few moments before was now a bloodied stump, with shards of bone in the soft tissue. Blood oozed from the severed veins, and tendons and ligaments jerked and jumped involuntarily.

McConnor whirled about at the sound of Sorbek's scream, and let out a yelp of his own when he saw the bloodied stump she was holding up. He looked around, and a few meters away saw a hand just lying there on the ground. He turned his eyes back to Sorbek, just in time to see green blood squirting out of the stump in fast bursts, coinciding with her heartbeat.

Instinct took over as he reached under the shattered environmental console next to him, and pulled out a length of optic cable. He ran next to Sorbek, and tied the cable tightly around her forearm, using it as a makeshift garot to prevent her from bleeding out.

From beyond the brink of a Stygian abyss, Stovek shook into consciousness. Emergency lighting was intermittent, and apparently everything was on fire. The most terrifying thing was the silence. Silently, the Vulcan Operations Officer took mental inventory of himself. He appeared to be intact, although his body was peppered with bits of shrapnel and there was a dripping green gash on his left cheek. He considered himself fortunate. He sat upright and began to stand up; he was having difficulty both with equilibrium and clarity of thought. Stovek managed to find his way to the Operations console, or rather the tangled mass of optical cable and polymer shards that was once the Ops Console.

Lieutenant Lisald, the Acting Chief Science Officer, had his back against the panel that had blown up almost in his face, looking out onto what was left of the bridge, his knees up to his chest, arms wrapped around them. His eyes were wide, staring at a severed hand on the deck. As the moments strung out to minutes, he could hear on some deep level lost to him of people starting to whimper, then cry out, some moving to help themselves, still others to help their more seriously injured crewmates. Lisald himself was paralyzed, not from injury, but from fear, and shock.

D'Astous pushed hard against the be that was pinning her down to her seat, grunting with the effort. Slowly but surely, the beam moved by a few millimeters - enough for the blood to start flowing back into her legs, reassuring her that there was no major injury. She took a deep breath, and gave it her all as she pushed as hard as she could. It was finally her chair that gave way under the beam, sending her tumbling to the deck. The beam fell with a loud metallic noise, but she was free. She rolled in the opposite direction and felt her legs. There didn't seem to be any break, but the jagged edges of the beam had given her a nasty gash on her left upper thigh - thankfully missing the femoral artery.

The Captain found himself on the deck in front of his Captain's chair. He had a gash on his left arm that was slowly bleeding, something he discovered as he pressed his hand to it and came away bloodied. Beyond that, he did not think he was injured more. Before he stood, he looked around at his destroyed Bridge, and wondered what the hell had happened. "Report," he croaked weakly. He swallowed, then with more effort, said it again, this time coming along with more authority in his voice. "All stations, report. What in the bloody Prophets just happened?"

"There's no power to the Bridge, Sir," called out McConnor, pulling out a palm beacon from a supply panel to cast some light on the Bridge. "We're completely blind."

His light fell on the inanimate form of Lieutenant Commander Bast, who was lying unconscious in a pool of blood. The Trill officer's left leg lay at an odd angle, and blood was flowing from his ear. His chest was laboring to move up and down.

"Medical team to the Bridge," called out McConnor. He had a distinct feeling that his call would fall on deaf ears. He hurried over to the emergency supply compartment, grabbed another fire extinguisher, and got back to work putting out fires before all the oxygen on the Bridge burned away.

- - - - - -

Maralen had been on his way to the bridge when the ship -- or maybe it was the universe; he couldn't tell from here -- went completely mad. The lift jerked as power fluctuated, feeding it one second and not the next, then again feeding it. But that was not the most pressing problem. That occurred when the gravity went batshit and tossed him around the lift car randomly. He hated random!

Fortunately for Maralen, his feline instincts took over, and he curled into a ball, allowing the universe to toss him about until it had finished. When it had, it seemed that it had also finished with everything else. The lift car had stopped, and the lights were out. Not even emergency lights were on in the car.

Panic tried to assert itself, but his training forced it to submit... for now. That would not last forever; even the Cold could only shield him so long from the claustrophobia. He needed to get out of this lift car, and soon.

Uncurling himself from the ball on the floor he had become, he did a quick assessment of his form. Lots of bruising, and his tail ached -- it had gotten pinned between his body and the lift walls, floor, and ceiling a few times during that, and he suspected there might be a break or two along its length. He moved it slowly, assessing each tail segment as he did. No breaks. Good.

Next, he assessed the lift car itself. That appeared to be mostly intact. The control panel was non-functional, but that was to be expected. His examination led him to the hatch in the ceiling of the car. Yes, he could get out that way and climb the shaft the rest of the way to the bridge.

Hurry! his mind urged him. The fear was nibbling at the edges of his mind again. Closing his eyes for a moment, he focused on the training. Don't feel it; use it, he recited, the words echoing back to him in the voice of the Executive. Fear becomes caution.

After a few moments, he was once again focused and used the escape hatch on the top of the lift to get out of the car and into the shaft above. This bought him a few moments as the shaft was slightly larger around than the car, but he still needed to hurry. This time, though, his urgency was not his own state of mind but the state of the ship and crew. As Security Chief, their safety was his responsibility, and he needed to get to the bridge to assess it... if he could.

He climbed until he found a set of shaft doors. They refused to budge, and he began to wonder if this was the wisest course. If the Bridge doors were equally recalcitrant, he would be in some trouble.

Flawed, the Executive's voice echoed in his mind. Focus on only the task, not the possible outcomes. Or as Humans said, don't borrow trouble. Good advice. He continued climbing.

- - - - - - -

After a moment or two of waiting for more responses, Bane looked around. Stovek was sitting on the deck, not too far from him, but was looking around, dazed and confused. Ensign D'Astous was trying to help him, or at least had a tricorder and was fumbling with it. Chief Sorbek was currently screaming about her hand being missing, and Bast was laying on the deck, blood coming from his ear, and a pool of blood under him. Lieutenant Wong was nowhere to be seen, though there was a dismembered body laying over there. Plase looked behind him and saw Lisald sitting there, arms wrapped around his knees, rocking back and forth. "Lieutenant. Lieutenant Lisald," Bane said again, louder. Still, the scientist didnt even flinch. "VAAT!" Bane yelled. That got Lisald's attention. "Lieutenant, I need you to check on Commander Bast," he said softly, and calmly. "Grab a medical tricorder from that storage bin, just there," he said, pointing.

Lisald looked to where the Captain was pointing, and nodded. He stood, got the storage locker open, and first selected an Engineering tricorder, but shook his head and got a medical one, identifiable by the caduceus emblem on it. Lisald had to step over a huge support beam. As he did so, he caught sight of Lieutenant Wong, or what was left of him. His eyes were wide, his mouth agape in a silent scream, teeth bared, but there was no life in him. His body stopped at his abdomen, his end-trails spilling out from where his pelvis and lower half of his body should be. Vaat vomited all over the beam and deck before stepping back. "I can't do this. I can't. I can't!" The last two words jerked as his back collided with the scorched bulkhead behind him.

Bane stood about the time Lisald wretched, and saw what the Lieutenant had saw. Before, the beam had obstructed his view. "Oh...prophets..."

McConnor had finished putting out the fires and looked at the Science officer, sitting shell-shocked near what was left of his console, a medical tricorder two feet away. The Engineer took the device and lay a hand on the Bajoran's shoulder.

"Deep breaths," he said.

He flipped open the device and walked over to the First Officer. "He needs immediate medical attention," he said to the Captain. "The tricorder is picking up massive internal bleeding, and possible brain injury. Multiple fractures. The symbiont seems bruised, but otherwise uninjured."



To Be Continued.....

A JP by:

Ensign Emilie D'Astous
Flight Control Officer

and

Lieutenant (jg) Lisald Vaat
Chief Science Officer

and

Lieutenant (jg) Dylan mcConnor
Engineering Officer

and

Lieutenant Maralen Seitha
Chief Security Officer

and

Lieutenant Commander Stovek
Chief Operations Officer

and

Lieutenant Commander Temerant Bast
Executive Officer

and

Captain Bane Plase
Commanding Officer

 

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