<USS Avalon> Re: "Avalon's Ending"
- From: CamtheTreknut@xxxxxxx
- To: avalon@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 3 Jan 2006 04:01:37 EST
"Avalon's Ending"
Part One
Counselor Cailin Danaan, Ph.D.
She almost couldn't believe it. It had been what, a few weeks? If that.
But the broadcast to abandon ship had been made. Cailin growled, something
she rarely did, and uncurled herself from the couch in her quarters. They had
been instructed to bring only necessities and what could be carried, but that
was not a problem for her. She didn't have much. Quickly gathering her few
prized possessions, she stuffed them into a duffel, along with some off-duty
clothing. She picked up the medical kit she always kept with her, and with one
last look, left her quarters for the last time.
Cailin made her way quickly along the corridors. She knew she was assigned to
the Lancelot for evac, and she hurried to get there. But as she was passing
a turbolift, she heard the strangest noise. The hair on her ears and at the
nape of her neck stood on end as she stopped and listened, to make sure she
hadn't been hearing things. She heard nothing else, but she went over the sound
in her mind, and was fairly certain she hadn't imagined it.
To be absolutely certain, she pulled the tricorder from her medkit and
scanned the lift shaft. There was a lift behind it, but it hadn't stopped even
with
the deck--and there were two people inside. One human male, and another, a
female, she couldn't identify.*
Both were unconscious.
She pressed the control pad next to the door. Nothing happened. She tried
again, and still it stayed firmly closed. "Bloody hell," she muttered,
shoving
the tricorder back into the medkit and dropping both it and her bag on the
floor. There really wasn't time for this--the broadcast had said there were
only minutes to evacuate, but there was no way she could leave them behind.
But how to open the lift door?
It was only seconds before she remembered that a manual device was located
behind a wall panel to the right of the lift, as there would be by every
turbolift on every starship in the fleet. She popped the panel open and pulled
the
device out, pressing it firmly onto the door. Straining, she pulled with all
her strength, but it didn't budge. She tried again with the same result, but
on her third attempt, she was at last able to open it shoulder width.
Third time's the charm, she mused.
Cailin stuck her head inside the lift. The male occupant was a lieutenant
with an Engineering mustard yellow shirt underneath his uniform. As for the
female, her eyes did no better a job identifying her species than did the
tricorder she had used moments before. Cailin groaned again. There was no way
she
was going to be able to get them both to the Lancelot in time. The female she
could possibly carry, but not the male--and she wasn't about to leave either
one of them.
Cailin tapped her commbadge. "Counselor Danaan to any member of the crew.
Please respond," she said. Her summons was met with silence, which she knew
meant ship wide comms was down.
She tried addressing the computer next. It, too, failed to respond. "Is this
entire ship dead?" she wondered aloud.
It was then that she noticed a tool kit on the floor by the engineer's feet,
and an idea came to her. Stepping carefully inside, she crouched and opened
the kit, a triumphant "Yes!" escaping her when she found a standard tricorder
inside--it would work better than the medical scanner in her medkit.
Working quickly, she reconfigured the tricorder to interface with the ship's
computer. Avalon was indeed dying--hardly any of the internal systems were
functioning anymore, and for a brief moment she allowed herself to feel the
sadness of the vessel's loss. Clamping down on emotions that suddenly
threatened
to overwhelm her, she shook her head and set back to checking the working
systems. She'd survived the loss of one ship, she would survive this as well.
Relief flooded through Cailin when what she was looking for came on the
screen, and she saw that the transporter system was still online--for now. She
worked the device in her hand and rigged it to initiate a site-to-site
transport
on a thirty-second delay. Stepping quickly out of the lift for her things,
she grabbed them up and moved back inside, shoving the engineer's tool kit
into her duffel bag. She slung the straps of the duffel and the medkit over
her
shoulder, then lay a hand on each of the unconscious passengers.
An instant later, the three of them dematerialized, reappearing on the
shuttle Lancelot.
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