The captain woke to screams. Screams of agony. He opened his eyes. He could see only darkness and smoke. He drew a shallow breath. A sharp pain shot through him. He tried again. He got half a breath and a chest full of pain. His vision began to blur, and then darkness came again.

Even in a sea of anguish, the pain of three hundred souls crying out, Lieutenant Commander Ekkomas Eidran felt the pain of the captain as he came to, and then felt as he slipped away again. It was like deja vu. It was happening all over again. His crew was dying all around him, and his captain too. No, he couldn’t let his captain die. He couldn’t let any of them die. Not again. Not like last time.

A thick haze covered the bridge of the Serenity, illuminated only by the blue emergency running lights and an eerie orange glow from a small fire at the science station. The Betazoid first officer traced back in his mind where the captain had been standing when the pulse hit them amidship, and he followed where the momentum would have carried him. And then he saw Captain Jake Lewis lying there, motionless on the deck by a support pylon.

Lieutenant Commander Eidran rushed to the Captain’s side. He was still breathing. The worst had not befallen him. Not yet at least. But his breathing was shallow and labored. “Help! Help! Over here!” But who was going to respond? The bridge, from what little he could see make out through the deep smoke, was pure chaos. “Medic! Medic! Anyone!”

For a moment, no one came. Everyone was busy in their own little slice of hell. There was a figure over by the science station, fighting the fire that had broken out. Another looked like they were trying to get up, but then they fell back over. Their fall out of the Underspace corridor, the deceleration from 365,000 times the speed of light to a near stop, it was a miracle there was even anyone or anything left. 

But then a slender silhouette stepped out of the smoke, illuminated by the glow of the fire. Lieutenant Commander Eidran looked up. It was Lieutenant Irina Tarasova, their Chief Tactical Officer. She’d been strapped into her jumpseat when the resonance pulse hit them, and she’d come through relatively unscathed. In her hand, she held a first aid kit.

“The Captain?” she asked, squinting to make out Captain Lewis in the low light. She knelt down and began to scan him with a medical tricorder. “Punctured lung, head trauma, three fractured ribs, moderate internal bleeding. We need to get him to sickbay.” 

As if it was that easy.

“No way the turbolifts are still functional,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran frowned as he glanced around the broken bridge. “And even if we get down there, will there be anyone to help?” If the bridge was any indication, he could only fathom the state of the rest of the ship.

“Let me see what I can do from here to stabilize him,” Lieutenant Tarasova said as she began to pull lifesaving gear out of the kit.

The Serenity‘s Executive Officer just stood there in a stunned daze.

“I got this, Ekkomas,” Lieutenant Tarasova assured him. She’d spent enough time on the rim, beyond hospitals and clinics and support ships, to know how to save a life with little more than shoestring and good intentions. “Go deal with the rest of the ship.”

Meanwhile, below deck, Lieutenant Commander Sharpe was doing hero’s work with what was left of his team in Main Engineering. “Focus on stabilizing the core! Then we need to get power back to life support!” 

Prioritization, he knew, was everything in moments like this. You had to decide which of your children to save, and which to leave for later. Right now, avoiding being annihilated by an uncontrolled matter-antimatter reaction came first, followed by ensuring the ship remained habitable so they wouldn’t succumb to a lack of oxygen or a deregulation of temperature. Only then would they be able to worry about safely patching the rest back up.

”What about her?” an ensign in yellow asked as he cast his eyes at the body of a young warp core specialist who’d been too close to one of the plasma manifolds when it started venting superheated gas during the explosive decompression caused by the negative pressure gradient of their rapid deceleration.

Lieutenant Commander Sharpe glanced over. The young woman on the ground was covered in burns, head to toe, and her uniform had been fused into her skin. 

“There’s nothing we can do for her,” he said regretfully. She was already dead. Or so close they wouldn’t be able to save her in time with the limited medical equipment they had. “Just focus on getting that intermix pressure back under control.”

The ensign looked conflicted. How could they just leave her here?

“It’s our duty, Ensign, to ensure this ship survives,” Lieutenant Commander Sharpe pointed out. “Otherwise, we’ll all be joining her shortly in the afterlife.” He knew the young woman well. Her name was Jane Elliott, Petty Officer First Class, an excellent warp core specialist. He’d shared many a meal with her, as he made a habit of doing with all his staff. But they needed to put that in a little box and put it on a shelf until the ship was stable. “Later, there’ll be time to grieve, and to tend to our wounded, but for now, lifesaving comes secondary. The core comes first.”

The Chief Engineer’s message was clear. For now, the bodies were to be left where they were, both those that had passed and those just barely hanging on. They had to save the ship first. Once that was done, then they could worry about their wounded. And grieve their dead.

Back on the bridge, Lieutenant Commander Eidran had left Lieutenant Tarasova with the Captain, and he’d rallied those who could still stand on their own two feet – even shakily – to put out the fires, to start trying to get critical control systems back online, and to tend to the others who, like Captain Lewis, had become casualties of their ejection from the Underspace.

After a few minutes fighting chaos in the darkness, the lights suddenly came back up, and a moment later, the quiet din of the air circulation system returned, swiftly sucking into its recessed vents the smoke that covered the bridge. 

“Well, that’s a start,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran smiled meekly. “Looks like someone’s still kicking down in Main Engineering.” He looked over at Lieutenant Gadsen, who’d put out the fire at the science station and was now replacing a bio-neural circuit board that’d been burned by a sparking EPS relay. “Can we get a system check?”

The Chief Operations Officer nodded and moved back to his station. His console controls, he was pleased to see, were no longer dark. They’d come back online at the same time as the lights. Quickly, he queued up a status check and began rattling off details: “Core is stable. Power at forty percent. Hull breaches on decks three, four, eleven, fourteen, twenty one and thirty, but force fields are now online.” The undertone, which he didn’t say aloud, was that he was pretty sure they’d been offline until just a moment ago. He could only fathom how many sailors might have been sucked out into the cold void of space while they’d been down. “We have life support, deflector control, communications…”

That was all good, Lieutenant Commander Eidran thought to himself, but it wasn’t what was top of mind for him. “What about lifesigns?” He could still hear the screams in his subconscious, but they were less now. Was that because they’d recovered? Or because they’d passed beyond?

“Biosensors partially operable,” Lieutenant Gadsen cautioned. “I can give you the number of living beings aboard, but nothing more.” He looked over at Lieutenant Tarasova, who was tending to an unconscious captain, and then towards Commander Sena, who was applying a dermal regenerator to a large gash on Lieutenant Selik’s forehead. “We won’t be able to discern those wounded from those who are not.”

“I get that,” Lieutenant Commander Eidran dismissed it. “But how many are alive?” He needed to know.

Lieutenant Gadsen choked on the words as he said them: “Two hundred and thirty five.”

This was a ship of three hundred. 

Or it had been.

Lieutenant Commander Eidran stumbled back, catching himself against the railing of the command island. “I… I…” He couldn’t even process that loss of life. A quarter of the crew, gone in an instant. And how many more, like Captain Lewis, were just hanging on by a thread? He cast his eyes forward at the viewscreen, trying to stabilize himself with the familiar, but the starscape was foreign to him. “Where… where are we?”

“We are… we are…” Lieutenant Gadsen fumbled with his response as he rechecked what the navigational systems were suggesting from the relative position of the stars around them. “Six thousand, two hundred and forty light years spinward and coreward from Federation space, in the far reaches of the Beta Quadrant.”

They were unfathomably far from anyone or anything that could possibly help them.

“And the Ingenuity?” Lieutenant Commander Eidran asked. They’d been racing through the Underspace alongside Commander Lee’s ship when the Cardassians fired on them. Maybe she’d be able to help… no, that was probably too optimistic… maybe she’d survived. That was all he could rationally hope for, given their own state.

“Sensors are still offline, but I’m not seeing the ship on visual scans.”

They were truly and completely on their own. 

Purpose suddenly surged through the Betazoid. He knew what mattered most. Their people. They’d be the only way they got through this. The only way they survived. They needed to save all they could. He tapped his combadge: “Eidran to all who can respond. The ship is, for the moment, stable. As long as that holds, direct all priority to lifesaving efforts.”