Forwarded by the ASC-VSO Posted: 30 Jan 2004 22:26:29 -0800 In: alt.startrek.creative From: thesnowleopard@hotmail.com Title: If You Can't Beat Them... Author: Paula Stiles (thesnowleopard@hotmail.com) Series: MIS Webpage: http://www.geocities.com/RainForest/Andes/3071/arch1.html Part: NEW 1/2 Rating: [R] Codes: Sawalha [OC] Summary: Some missions are no-win from start to finish. Disclaimer: The Paramount scroogies own Trek and its universe, but all the characters in this particular tale are mine. Not making any money off of the story. Really. Please don't bother to sue me. I live overseas and I'm skint. Archive: Sure, if you ask. IF YOU CAN'T BEAT THEM... "Please state your name, rank and serial number for the record." "Sawalha, Alex Lewis. Lieutenant Senior Grade. Serial number 6574531." "Your current assignment?" "My current assignment? I'm a bit between current assignments right now here at Starbase 745. But until about six months ago, I was a Trauma Nurse First Class on the SS Veracruz. And after that, I was stranded on a frigid, little ball of rock in the middle of the Badlands." "You can can the attitude any time, Alex." "I apologise, Admiral Bilal. May I ask why you have a Betazoid counselor present at this meeting? Is he supposed to be my lawyer?" "What the hell would you need a lawyer for?" "To assist me with my court martial defense, of course." "You don't need a lawyer. This isn't that kind of interview." "I still would like to exercise the privilege of consulting with my lawyer before I'm interviewed further." "Oh, for Christ's sake--look. There isn't gonna be a court martial. We're just doing a post-mission debriefing." "Then, why do you have a telepathic shrink present to tell if I'm lying?" "His name's Counselor Arik and he's not here to tell if you're lying. He's here to assess your mental state. Not that he can sense much coming from you, since you're a closed book to telepaths, but hey, it's procedure." "I see." "Wow. Did the temperature just drop in here? Now, stop glaring disruptor beams at the poor guy who is just doing his job and let's get on with this. I'm sure all three of us have better things to do than playing head games with each other all morning." "I still don't see the necessity of a psychiatrist at a post-mission debriefing." "Well, I do. Don't take it personally. I've been interviewing your 29 fellow castaways in exactly the same way." "What about the POWs?" "The ones in that camp you liberated? They get a different procedure. A lot of them were civilians. Some were even Maquis. So, they're not a happy, well-adjusted bunch at the moment. Let's get back to you. Why don't you tell us what happened when the Veracruz was destroyed?" "I take it you have the general picture already? How we got jumped by three Jem'hadar ships in the Badlands?" "I don't need the travelogue, Alex. Just tell me what happened to you." "To be honest, I wasn't in a good place to know much. It happened halfway through First Shift. I was asleep. I'd been doing double shifts for well over a month. I was tired. The Red Alert woke me up. I grabbed some clothes and ran out the door. It was a mess in the hallway, people running everywhere. Huh. This'll sound stupid, but I was still pretty groggy and it didn't get through to me just how serious it was until a group of people started shoving me down the hallway to the escape pods and not one of them said a word about my being in a t-shirt and shorts." "That was it? Nothing else?" "Well, no... The ship got hit then and we were all flung up against the bulkhead. Just picked up in a body and thrown into a heap. The lights went out; wiring was burning somewhere. People started screaming and crying. The guy who broke my fall was dead when I turned him over--snapped neck, I think. It was too dark to tell much. I got up on my hands and knees, holding my clothes over my mouth and felt my way along the floor toward the escape pods. The smoke was so thick, I could scarcely see the emergency lighting and it was hard to breathe. I had to crawl the whole way, sure we'd lose our gravity any second. I didn't stop to help anyone, in case you're curious." "Did you want to? Do you feel bad about that?" "No and not particularly. Sorry, but if somebody got to survive that, I'm quite happy it was me. The people I saw--felt, really--right around me weren't moving, either dead or close to it. I admit, too, that I panicked a bit. I was afraid there wouldn't be enough lifepods, you see. Objectively speaking, I knew that there were enough for everyone on board, but I kept thinking that they would release them to fool the enemy's sensors or that some lifepod accesses would be blocked off and everyone would flock to just one area. As it was, I needn't have worried. Out of maybe twenty people in that corridor only three of us made it into the lifepods." "I see." "I suppose I did feel a bit guilty, then--at least, after we got in and blasted away from the ship--for being so selfish." "Okay. What did you do then?" "Then? I put my clothes on. And about two days later, we crashlanded on a hunk of rock further into the system where we'd been ambushed." "Did you know at the time that there was a Jem'hadar concentration camp on the planet?" "We figured that out about ten hours in, but we didn't see that we had much choice. Our lifepod had taken some damage blasting loose and the air was getting foul. Either way, there weren't any other habitable planets about and the likelihood of our being picked up by friendlies seemed...well, low. So, not a lot of options and none of them very happy. We did the best we could and aimed for the side of the planet that seemed most inhabitable--which unfortunately had a Dominion concentration camp on it. Dilithium mining, they were doing. Equally unfortunately, the Dominion troops on the ground spotted us. They must have seen some of the lifepods before us and decided to use us all for target practice. Hence, the crash landing." "That must have been a bad moment." "It wasn't what I'd call fun, no. We all survived, though in pieces. Cramner broke her arm in two places. Samiel buggered up hir back so s/he was hobbling around all twisted up like the Hunchback of Notre Dame for the next two weeks. I cracked my head open on one of the bulkheads, so I slept through the actual crash-and-scramble-to-safety. My crewmates had to haul me out, though I woke up a few minutes later. Not too with it, you understand, but enough to help myself. I saw double for the next week, though." "The station infirmary CMO told me you got temporary epilepsy from it." "Yeah, that wasn't very much fun, either. They've fixed that now. Could have been worse. I could have suffered a bleeder and gone into a terminal coma instead. I'll take it as a blessing in disguise." "Some blessing, but considering what happened next, I can see your point. Now, that's three of you. How did you hook up with the others?" "It was necessity, more than anything else. We landed just a few miles away from the Dominion concentration camp--bad luck and onboard computer programming. The camp happened to be the most habitable part of a not-very-habitable rock, so that's where the lifepod aimed us. We grabbed what we could and got the hell out of there, since our one working tricorder told us the Jem'Hadar had come out to investigate our crash site. We made it to the hills in time. Fortunately, some of the dilithium deposits there confused their sensors. They lost us, which was just as well. None of us could have made it far, and I doubt they would have taken us prisoner. From what we could see later on, the camp's numbers were stretched to the limit, already. And as you know, the Jem'Hadar aren't known for their sweet, merciful nature..." *The Jem'Hadar sprawls on the ground--green, rotting foam oozing from his mouth. Just out of sight, the Vorta screams and screams, burning, melting as I run between the sorry, dull-grey camp barracks toward the sound. Somebody put the poor bastard out of his misery, just shut him up, already--* "Something wrong, Lieutenant?" "What? No. No, sorry, Sir. I lost my train of thought for a moment there. Must be a leftover from my injury." "Of course. Take your time. You were in the mountains...?" "Some foothills, really. Once we got there, we found another lifepod. As I said, the lifepods all came down in the same general area because the habitable areas were limited. We found some supplies in the first one, despite a lot of the pod being burned up by reentry... There weren't any survivors, though. The retro-rockets had failed. They must have taken a hit." *With some help from both of your crewmates, all of you hurting from your own crash, you wrench off a piece of still-warm hull plating that has curled back from the jammed hatchway. A cloud of scorched fuel and flesh billows out in your faces. You reel back, choking. The stink will sink into your clothes, reek in your mouth and nose for the rest of your time on this rock. And you'll never forget it, no matter how many years you outlive the poor, blackened bastards curled up and contorted inside.* "I'm sorry, Alex." "I'm sorry, too, but I suppose it's just as well we couldn't recognise them. At least we got DNA tags to bring back for their families. We found out over the next few weeks, as we hooked up with the rest of the survivors, that we lost five lifepods that way. From the scorching on the sides of the two that I saw personally, I'd say the Jem'Hadar must have shot those five down. Not that that is any surprise, I'm sure. We were lucky." "You sound pretty angry at those Jem'Hadar." "Should I have been pleased, Sir?" "Noooo. Just trying to get your state of mind at the time." "My "state of mind". That's an interesting way of putting it." "Just tell us what happened next, Alex, and leave out the present-day editorial commentary." "Of course, Sir. It was too rocky to bury any bodies and we were still worried about Jem'Hadar patrols. The dilithium was fogging our tricorder, too. They could have come right on top of us before we'd ever know it. So, we said what prayers the three of us could muster for the dead, grabbed the few useful supplies left and took off. Four days later, we stumbled across a surviving lifepod crew. Over the next few weeks, we all bumped into each other, forming a bigger and bigger group. We'd all stripped our lifepods and bugged out. Nobody had seen the point of sticking around to get shot. "At first, locating other survivors and any salvageable supplies in the rest of the pods had given us a purpose, a mission. But after about five weeks, once our numbers had grown to 30, it became clear that we'd found all the survivors we were going to find. That was a hard blow. The Veracruz wasn't a big ship, but we'd had over 300 crew and patients and all we had left were 30 alive. Only 45 had even made it as far as the planet. None of the command crew had made it. No one from Engineering. Just a few scientists and medics and maybe twenty patients from all over the sector." "We did pick up 26 lifepods in space when we took the area back. They must have gone out the other side of the ship, so their sensors wouldn't have picked up the planet." "I heard about that, Sir. You found them six months later, right? I heard they used most of those for target practice, too. I suppose they were the lucky ones, the ones who didn't have time to run out of air." "I'd say you were one of the lucky ones, Alex. Good thing you went out the other side." "Oh, I absolutely agree, Sir. I'm not morose enough to spit in Fate's eye. It's...just the idea of how close that came to being me. It gives me the shivers, you know? As if a goose had walked over my grave." "If it helps, it gave me some pretty bad nightmares, too. That's the kind of death none of us in Starfleet likes to think about for too long. We couldn't do our jobs otherwise. Good to hear you understand that." "I've always been a practical man, Admiral. You know that." "Yes, I do. And I'd like to hear what happened next. I have to be honest with you, here, Alex. This is the part where everybody in your little group gets real foggy." TBC -- Stephen Ratliff ASC Stories Only Forwarding In the Pattern Buffer at: http//trekiverse.crosswinds.net/feed/ Yahoo! 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