Hunter's Resolve

Posted on Thu Feb 13th, 2025 @ 8:25am by SubCommander Saa & Captain Rovak & Lieutenant S'Lace & Lieutenant JG Ga-Tirothai & Petty Officer 3rd Class Atrali

2,382 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Masters of the Stars [2]
Location: Deck 95 Medical Center
Timeline: Some time after 'Hunter's Perils', MD02

Saa was at work in the fabrication staging area of Alpha Dock. Her new Operations Chief, Gaz, was telling her something, but she couldn't quite make out what it was due to the interference of Petty Officer Atrali, who kept interrupting in his unnecessarily loud, avian voice, his sharp words pecking into her brain. She needed to go somewhere she could think. Then she was back home on Vulcan. She was going to be late for work! Then her mother was swimming beside her. Saa, what are we going to do with you? Annoyed by the intrusion, she burst-pulsed back, Mom, get out of my dream!

The realization popped the fragile bubble of her dream-state and sent her shooting abruptly up to the surface of consciousness, into an awareness of bright, silver light and curved walls. She was in a brightly lit room. She was naked. She was immersed in a medical saline tank of double-walled acoustic duraglass. The sound-amplifying material gave her an unusually crisp view of her surroundings, which looked like a patient ward, too big for the dock's small infirmary. Several other tanks lay empty. There were no active alert statuses on the walls, and the familiar acoustic soundscape of station life felt calm, relaxed. Peaceful. Whatever had happened, she realized, it was long over.

She tried to reorient herself, but a sharp pain in her side told her to hold still. Annoyed, she glanced back toward the source of the pain and was surprised to find the remains of a livid gash, partly regenerated, cut deep into the flesh of her left flank, along with a flashing device fixed just behind her left fin, which she recognized as an emergency oxygenation unit, feeding life-giving tri-ox directly into her bloodstream. That explained the foul taste in her lungs. Maneuvering more carefully this time, she kicked softly up to the surface, spumed out the stale air, and took her first breath in hours. Then, with a sinking feeling of dread, settled down for what she knew had to be her next steps.

There was a comm panel embedded in the tank, sonar-activated, but if she used that, chances are it would only summon a nurse, who wouldn't be able to tell her what she most needed to know. Instead, she used her dataport to access the station computer directly, and then, bracing herself for bad news, opened an internal comm channel.

"Saa to Ga-Tirothai."

"Subcommander! You're awake." Ga-Tirothai's voice was briefly excited, but quickly returned to her usual professional tone. "How can I help, ma'am?"

The Efrosian's voice would have brought some degree of relief by itself, if Saa hadn’t been determined on keeping herself steeled for the worst. "First: tell me we didn't lose anyone," she commed.

"Happy to, ma'am. You got the worst of it. The Captain will be limping for a while, but everyone else got away unscratched. Hazmat lab is going to need some work, though." Ga-Tirothai said happily.

Saa basked for what felt like too long in the warm glow of comfort those words brought, before acknowledging them.

"Situation?" she asked.

"We were able to shut down the newcomer's armour with phaser fire into the power system. He's being held in suspension in the lower dock. Chief Gaz has found a containment facility in the zoological database that should allow us to store him without running afoul of any legal considerations. He's tried to escape a few times, but the docking systems seem to be more than he can overcome, even if he is remarkably resilient to vacuum exposure." She took the opportunity to move further away from the worksite.

"We've had to reinitialise the lower sphere reactor to ensure we don't have any brownouts he might take advantage of, but everything's looking good." Ga-Tirothai said. The sounds of those working around her were difficult even for her combadge to drown out. "The Chief expects us to be done by this time tomorrow. Also ma'am, your own personal equipment might not be done until after then. All hands on deck, and such." She tried to cup her hands around the combadge in a way that she hoped would enhance the sound quality, but it was not supported by science.

Saa was surprised that the lieutenant even mentioned her equipment. There were plenty of replacements aboard. “Don’t worry about that, Tir. Thank you. I'll read the reports and join you when I can."

"Understood, ma'am. Feel better." Ga-Tirothai said.

She signed off, leaving DS13's acting Chief Engineer alone with her thoughts.

Well. That wasn't so bad. Not half as bad as she'd expected. For a Starfleet operation, that was well above average.

For a moment, Saa merely drifted in the comforting reverberations of the exchange, letting her relief wash over her in waves. Eventually, her sense of crisis having fled, her thoughts flowed back along the path of least resistance to the dream she'd just awakened from. Unconsciousness was a rare event for a cetacean. That had been only the third actual dream she'd experienced in her lifetime. But, as she tried to recall it, she realized with a sense of disappointment that, if anything, it'd been even more disjointed and devoid of meaning than her first two. She was drawing closer to the conclusion that dreams weren't all they were cracked up to be. Or maybe her dreams were just less interesting than most.

But no matter. Other priorities beckoned. The first thing to address was her present nudity. Being without clothes didn't bother her, but being without tools did. She glanced around the tank for a utility harness, found a lightweight, stripped-down model clipped to the inner wall, and began wiggling into it. While she was so engaged, her senses registered movement in the corridor outside.

"Room service!" she called cheerily. "I'll have the catfish, hold the lemon."

Rovak had been doing laps in what he assumed were the mostly empty halls around sickbay when he heard the request, and for a moment he wondered if he wasn't having some kind of reaction to something he'd been given. He hadn't yet got used to the hoverchair he'd been assigned, and although he wouldn't need it for long, he did not wish to be perceived as moving inexpertly, even unashamedly injured he still had a certain standard to maintain in the eyes of others. But to be hearing voices.

He stopped outside the door, and it opened. He thought he recognised the voice, so he approached the threshold. "Subcommander?" Rovak asked the room, seeing her in her tank. "It is agreeable to see you are awake. How are you?" He asked, approaching slowly.

"Captain!" Saa was only half into the harness, the oxygenator making it a challenge to get her left pectoral fin through the loop. She swam to attention still working on it.

S'Lace noted the alert on her office's wall screen. She had set sensors in Subcommander Saa's tank to register a chance in her mental status. She rose and grabbing her tricorder headed out to see her patient.

"Just a few cuts and scrapes." She looked him over. "You look good in gravitics, sir. You should consider using it full time."

"Thank you, Subcommander." Rovak said, moving closer. "It is an adjustment. But certainly preferable to immobility." He said, unconsciously glancing at the cuff on his knee. "Fortunately, our injuries were not for nought. We have managed to contain our visitor, he is being suspended in an oxygenated forcefield in the lower dock until such time as a more permanent enclosure can be constructed. Chief Gaz has begun scouring the archives, but the regulations surrounding prisoner containment were not designed envisioning any humanoid so large or quite so thoroughly lethal. If you have time to review the catalogues, I'm sure he will appreciate any suggestions."

"Consider it done, sir," she said, and meant it. She already had a few thoughts about containment. Having finally got her fin through the harness, she extruded one of its slender manipulators and carefully removed the oxygenator from her skin, releasing it to let it float to the surface. The Captain's report had tamped down on some of the exuberance she'd been feeling, her almost jubilant wave of relief over what hadn't happened, by reminding her of what did. She wobbled slightly as she reoriented to face him.

"We were lucky today, sir, weren't we? ‘Fortunate,’ I mean.” She added the correction out of habit, knowing from experience that many Vulcans looked on her first word choice as a form of superstition.

"Indeed." Rovak agreed, both eyebrows rising involuntarily for a moment in an unconscious gesture suggesting understatement.

"And we're not out of it yet," she added. After an accident in which personnel were injured, Starfleet was required to perform an investigation and report on what could have been done to prevent it. Ordinarily it would be conducted by the station's own staff and end no further than the Captain's desk, but her hunch was that, with an admiral in the vicinity, she and Atna may have created a bigger problem for Rovak than that.

"Admiral Gali will most certainly have questions upon his return. We will have to wait to see what they are." Rovak agreed once again. Foreboding wasn't logical, but he did all he could to keep it out of his voice.

Saa drifted in thought for a moment. Amplified by the duraglass, Rovak could sense her pulses wash over him, soft and searching, as she slowly mapped out the thought she was about to express.

"I've been thinking, sir, about asking for a different assignment," she said at last.

"When I accepted the position of dock foreman here, this was only a maintenance station. Now we're exploring other universes. That's a riskier business, sir, a lot riskier."

"That is understandable, Subcommander. It will be a shame to lose you, but I can understand how an injury such as this may lead one to reconsider one's priorities." Rovak said, a forthright tone without judgement or reservation.

"That's not what I meant, sir." She flicked lightly up to the surface for a breath, then dove back down again. "I mean if I'm going to be here, I'd like to be in deeper. Somewhere I can prevent problems instead of reacting to them. I'd like to be considered for the permanent engineering position. If you're still looking."

"I see." Rovak said, considering for a moment. "Ga-Tirothai's appointment as Chief Engineer was only ever intended to be temporary, and we do not yet have a replacement lined up. Assuming there are no objections from Vulcan, I see no reason to refuse your request. And as there are no other candidates under consideration, I believe the position is yours."

She stared at him in surprise. She'd prepared herself for some degree of resistance. At least to have to make a case for herself. She'd spent the last several days floating through the permutations of this conversation in her mind, and now felt almost cheated.

"Well," she said, composing herself. "Good. You're going to need someone around here to keep this place on an even keel."

The doors swished open again. Her spirits buoyed by the exchange, Saa whistled a heartfelt greeting upon seeing Dr. S'lace enter the room. "Hello, Doctor! Thanks for these cozy accommodations. Five stars."

Fortunately S'Lace had interacted with humans enough to understand what passed for humor with them. She supposed it should not be surprising their jokes would be adopted by others, "Feel free to say so on the guest comment card before your departure," she gave the Captain a polite nod and sober visual assessment before directing her attention to Saa's readouts on the wall, "And speaking of which...I would say you will be ready for departure in twenty four hours at this rate..."

Saa rolled in the water to follow S’lace’s movements. "Sorry to impose on you folks. Maybe there's something around here I can take a look at for you, other duties permitting."

"I have no objection to you engaging your mind," S'Lace replied, "But unfortunately much of my work entails a statistically improbable amount of bureaucratic work that seems to spawn itself." an idea occurred to her and she glanced at the Captain before turning to the engineer, "Perhaps...the Emergency Medical Hologram can be reprogrammed to process it on my behalf..."

Saa blinked. "An Emergency Bureaucratic Hologram? I wonder why no one has thought of that before." Although the answer was, maybe, a little obvious.

"It would solve a great many problems," S'Lace noted, glancing at the captain. It was difficult for an even a Vulcan to tell if she were joking...

"There may be certain authorisations that you alone as Chief Medical Officer are able to give, and others still that would require a flesh and blood officer to approve in a way a hologram could not. That said, additions to the programming of Supplementary and Emergency Medical Holograms are not out of the question. Particularly those that would allow them to complete paperwork and give authorisations at the equivalent level of a Chief. We can also look to requisition more administrative staff for the Medical department with our next influx of crew, or I can perhaps in the meanwhile offer the assistance of one or more of the Yeoman staff." Rovak suggested.

"Exposing yeomen to that sort of bureaucracy might prove detrimental," S'Lace noted with the barest hint of wryness, "Since it would likely create more work for the counselors. But since I may be seeing more....'customers', with the influx of Romulan civilians more help may be needed in the immediate future."

She paused, then added, "But if the Emergency Medical Hologram can suffer in my stead then I would prefer that..."

"I can certainly take a shot at reprogramming it for you, but I can’t promise realistic suffering," Saa replied. The last thing Starfleet needed was another holographic rights case. "And I'll need a workstation," she added hopefully.

"I will ask Chief Gaz what can be organised. But, you must excuse me, I have tarried too long. Subcommander, Doctor." Rovak said with a nod to both, moving his hoverchair towards the exit.

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