IBEX part 8

Posted on Wed 22nd May, 2024 @ 12:44am by Commander Geraldine "Geri" Severide
Edited on on Tue 4th Jun, 2024 @ 2:41am

1,992 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: O' the Cardiff Rose
Location: The Triangle
Timeline: MD10

Previously- https://sb109.sim-station.net/index.php/sim/viewpost/2324

And now…

Only seven days had passed, according to the console, and everyone was miserable. Climate control had been repaired to a degree, but that was a fairly simple system. It was at least no longer freezing cold. They kept the room darker than usual, a futile attempt to conserve power. The engine was well on its way to being repaired, but the repaired sections wouldn't actually click on for some time. Even if they did, the power conduits were in bad shape, but it was hope for systems to come back online if even at low power. They were conserving food as best as they could and it looked like they'd be okay on that point at least provided the emergency rations didn't cause homicide amongst the crew.

The remaining crew sat in silence, mostly. Dralir had taken to fiddling with her EV belt, as she hadn't bothered to remove it since the crisis a week ago. The suit was self-powered so surely she could make something of it to prolong their air supply. She was an engineer and had an idea. She enlisted Duke's help; he had two phasers on him when the room sealed and a fair amount of power in safe storage. The hope was to make a small CO2 scrubber with the belt's built-in functions meant for all of their use. So far she had only managed the least little fizzle of air from it, not enough to help them all; barely enough for one.

Kolor had gone silent during the last four days; the cold had gotten to him profoundly. Thankfully, with the temperature back to nominal, his health had begun to improve. The lethargy had nearly stopped his heart a few times, Grazia had taken to setting alarms if it hit low benchmarks. No one was talking, but the Cardassian wasn't even moving.

Everyone else would shift occasionally or groan from the stiffness in their muscles. With life support so perilous, exercise was out of the question. The alarm for midday announced it was almost time for their meal. The supplies dictated one a day to try to make the rations last. No one had to enforce it. The crew were trained for bad situations, and everyone knew the facts. They could eat once per day and have enough food to get to DS5. So they did just that, starving wasn’t the concern.

Grazia passed them out. For her, silence was appreciated, and a treat she wished would happen to her more often. Her ears were very acute, and even the silence to them was filled with numerous pings and scrapes as the ship struggled to keep speed. Dralir set her meal aside, elbow-deep in cannibalized circuitry. No one had much appetite, it was hard to eat when everyone was depressed, and there was nothing to be joyous about. They had a recipe for depression here that would rob even a Risan of her smile.

Another three days passed with no life support; their air had grown thick and oxygen content was dropping despite their efforts to recirculate. Kolor had begun working on something, Grazia wanted to know what he was doing, but she knew the importance of keeping busy. She fussed about the place most of the day, herself, keeping it clean and miraculously free of strong odor. Alexander had taken his own advice and spent a great deal of time sleeping- the injections helped, but everyone suspected they'd have to deal with an addiction if they made it out of this alive. It would be hard for him to find sleep naturally if he kept taking the drug. His body would forget how.

Duke and Dralir kept working silently, trying to fix systems they couldn’t access, and get the EV filters running. The belt had started whining lowly. Dralir crawled over to Grazia, some wadded fabric in hand. She knew what that was for and she didn't like it. Duke stammered out, "Sorry about the noise. It's going to get worse…" he whispered, holding the fabric out. "But I think it should give us the boost of oxygen we need."

There was no question about whether or not they were going to use it. They had to, so Grazia would just have to deal with the noise. "It will have to be in the middle of the room for best effect." It wasn't turned all the way on yet, but when it ramped up the sound wasn’t pleasant for anyone.

Dralir announced as well, "Once I am sure it's working, I am going to hibernate. I can't do any more from here. I haven't hibernated in a dozen years so it shouldn't be hard." She had learned from a Vulcan officer how to meditate daily and it had allowed her to ignore that need. She felt her body only slightly protested on occasion, telling her to just sleep.

"I won't need any tending to, but you can expect that in the next... It's been ten days? We've picked up some speed with the repairs... in the next fifteen days or so, you can expect I will lose twenty percent of my body mass. Maybe more. Usually we gorge ourselves beforehand... Can't be helped. And that is if we don't die... Anyway. Between the repairs speeding us up, the CO2 scrubber we made and all of us sleeping, we stand a chance to make it to DS5." She didn't sound overly hopeful but looked around the dim room and nodded.

Grazia started stuffing the cloth tightly in her ears. The noise was muffled when Dralir turned it on, but it was still maddening and annoying. At least now they couldn't hear Kolor's buzzing sounds. Dralir told Duke how to keep it running well and how to wake her if it went out. Hell was repetitions and boredom now; if they made it to the space station maybe there was more to see. Otherwise this was it, once she closed her eyes it was very possible they'd never open again.

***
Four days later, the crew was down to four functional members, two if digital dexterity was a consideration. Duke would use the Delta wave inducers to help keep him asleep as the pain would wake him up constantly. The medical treatments Grazia applied helped but he needed skin grafts. Even when Alexander awoke, he wasn't very effective due to the narcotic of the sedatives he was taking, and would often pass right back out. Makoto had a skill set outside of ship life and had little to offer beyond trying to conserve resources by being small.

When a quiet moment had come to them, while all others were asleep Grazia asked Kolor what he was working on. Kolor explained without hesitation to her that he was putting coded messages into the panel. Reggie would strangle him if he knew, communications were the tightest controlled and monitored system on the ship. Kolor explained that they were in a form of Cardassian code that was only spoken by himself and the retired Starfleet Admiral that helped him develop it. There was no written version of the language anywhere except their heads. He had written in English who it was to and who it was from... Other than that, it was phonetically translated. If they didn't survive, Kolor wanted to make a few things square.

Grazia appreciated that, wishing she had a similar system in place with her sister. Grazia had been exiled, no Ferengi would do business with her. Fala however was a loyal sister and a charter member of the rising Pro-Fem business alliance growing in the fringe of their economy. Grazia realized she missed her sister and began to imagine what life could be like outside of this ship.

Movement attracted her eyes. Duke stretched a bit, not exerting himself, just enough to keep himself limber. His hand was killing him. He'd kept it clean and the skin was healing, but the bones were broken and skin was only marginally healed from the burns. His hand was pretty useless for now, he hoped the delay in treatment wouldn’t make anything worse, or have long-term impact.

Alexander awoke, reaching for the PADD with its updates. He lamented at how many ships and potential planets they had passed which could have helped. Deep Space Five was their only secure berth remotely in range, Reggie would ensure nobody else would ever see them. His math was rough, but even with repairs to life support they were down to three days of air with twelve days to go until DS5.

”Reggie.” The first word he spoke in fifteen days barely sounded from a raspy throat. There was no reply. He looked, there was power for the computer to run his program and he was listening.

”We won't make Deep Space Five. Please,” he begged, because he knew Reggie had control of the ship. The Fob for override was an option, but Reggie could well vent the remaining air. The mandate was paramount, self-destruct before any measure of compromise.

The DOTS were focused on keeping the ship running; life support was simply broken, and without replicators the parts were not available. Even stopping the engines would most likely result in them slagging and shutting down. They had to stay the course or die, but even staying this course was going to kill them.

So Alex observed a room full of crew and keenly remembered the ones lost two weeks ago. He was at his wit's end and tried to muster some ego, but there was nothing there. He was going to die, but he didn't need to go silently. He put the fob into the PADD when finally Reggie spoke.

”Captain. We cannot be seen.”

”We are dying.” Alex replied very flatly, and entered a command into it, opening the communications panel.

“I cannot allow this.” Reggie sounded genuinely distraught. “The crew have agreed to this, and you swore to uphold it.”

“Reggie… if we all die and you self-destruct, what good will be served? What secrets do we carry that must go to the grave? We can ask for help and not answer questions-“

The hologram was positively offended, “There hasn’t been a breach in this ship's operational history.”

Kolor spoke up finally, “Others before us have given their lives for the protection our isolation provides."

Makoto also spoke finally, tacitly endorsing the plan, agreeing to the integrity of their mission over the peril of near-certain death. she spoke very forcefully, “If Starfleet knows about us, we become an arm of their service and people like me cannot belong.”

Alex didn't care, “I won’t just close my eyes knowing it’s the last time. I have a responsibility to keep you all alive. We have just lost half the crew; we won't lose any more. There’s another way. If I lose my command then so be it; you can all serve gladly as living crew to the next captain!”

Alex pressed the command, feeling the sedatives pull his wariness back to dreamland. He made sure his safeguards were in place, this program was simple but brutally effective. It was a direct violation of his orders, and an absolute breach of his duty. There was no direct communication to the IBEX, but that didn't mean there wasn’t a way to send a message if one had access to the antennae. Direct powered components, manually operated, and air gapped without a holo-projector in the room thanks to anger gave Alex the ability to send a blip of data.

Reggie couldn’t stop it. A single message, a blip in the cosmos so small, that it carried a single word. In cyphers and want ads, caption to photos in journals hardly seen, a message was written to relay this single word…

”Help.”

-END-

Geri Severide

 

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