He shot up in the bed, swung his feet around, and tried to get to his feet. But the blood left his head, the world began to spin, and he fell back against the bed. Pain coursed through his body, and he felt horribly weak.

“Woah there! Take it easy, cowboy!” Doctor Laurier exclaimed as she rushed to his side, steadying the Captain and coaxing him back to a seated position. “You’ve been through a lot. Let’s take it slow.”

As he stabilized, Captain Lewis looked around. He could see he wasn’t the only one. Every bed was taken, and by the weary eyes and bloodied gowns of the medical staff, he doubted he even knew the half of it. “What the fuck happened?”

”You don’t remember?” Doctor Laurier asked.

”The last thing I remember was racing the Underspace with Ingenuity and the Cardassians…” Captain Lewis began to say, and then the memories began flooding back. “They… they… they discovered us, didn’t they?” They’d been playing with fire, double crossing the Union while feeding intelligence back to the Polaris and the Klingons. The last thing he could remember was the call with the Cardassians, and the way Gul grimaced at them. It was the smile of a man who knew he’d won.

”They fired on us with a resonance pulse that ejected the ship from Underspace,” Doctor Laurier explained, her description severely understating the tragedy that had followed. “Inertial dampeners couldn’t keep up with the deceleration. You were launched into a support pylon. Hard.” If he hadn’t had the musculature he had, he likely wouldn’t have survived the impact.

“How long was I out?”

“Almost a day. Collapsed lung, three fractured ribs, spinal trauma, internal bleeding, and some head trauma,” Doctor Laurier rattled off the injuries. “But you’re a tough cookie, Cap.” Not everyone had walked away from their injuries.

”I suppose I have you to thank?” Captain Lewis asked with a light smile.

“For your recovery, maybe, but not for your life. That was all Lieutenant Tarasova. She kept you alive for over an hour before we could get up to the bridge,” Doctor Laurier explained. The fall from Underspace had knocked them completely out of commission, and it had been a struggle to even restore force fields and life support, let alone turbolifts and communications. “Even if we could have gotten to you sooner though, we had no one to send.” Her eyes fell to the ground, overcome by a mix of exhaustion and mourning.

“How’s the ship?”

”She’s built tough, just like you,” Doctor Laurier smiled. “Lieutenant Commander Eidran and those still able-bodied, they’ve been doing a remarkable job getting systems back online. The immediate damage was so bad that this whole deck was uninhabitable for a while even.” A shadow came across her face. She’d been one of the first to arrive when the force fields had gone back up and a breathable atmosphere had been restored.

“Uninhabitable?” Captain Lewis asked. How bad had it really been?

“There was a hull breach… a few actually… but one down just a couple junctions on this deck,” Doctor Laurier explained, her voice trailing off and her expression haunted by what had happened. “Everyone who was down here then, they’re… they’re gone.”

Captain Lewis looked around. There was someone missing. He’d never be away from his sickbay with this many patients, unless… “Doctor Bailey?”

”Him, and four others, plus two patients being seen at the time,” Doctor Laurier confirmed as a tear ran down her cheek. “Before power could be restored… before the force fields came up… they… they… they suffocated on vacuum.” She saw their faces, full of terror, frozen in time as they struggled for oxygen that wasn’t there, oxygen that had been sucked into void. She began to sob. “I… I’m the acting CMO now.” That thought made her shudder. “I’d give anything not to be though, to have traded place with him…”

”I’m sorry, Ashlynn,” Captain Lewis said as he reached out a hand and grabbed hold of hers. “I know how close you two were.” She’d followed Doctor Bailey, her mentor, aboard the Serenity after Frontier Day. Captain Lewis had seen the bond between them, and he knew all too well how loss and guilt felt. Over the decades, he’d seen so much himself.

After a moment, Doctor Laurier released his hand. “But now we must move forward, for our shipmates, if nothing else, right?”

Captain Lewis nodded. That was all you could do.

“I’ll be honest though, sir,” Doctor Laurier admitted darkly. “It’s not good. We lost sixty five in the blink of an eye, and another thirty since the power came back…”

Ninety five, dead.

A third of the crew, gone. 

Those were numbers typically reserved for war.

“Some, there was nothing we could do,” Doctor Laurier continued. “Others, it’s been a matter of triage since we’re down med staff and the ship is only semi-operable. But we’re doing everything we can, sir. I promise you that.” She meant it too. With every ounce of her being.

Before Captain Lewis could respond, the doors of sickbay slid open, and a woman strode through briskly. You couldn’t tell by the vigor in her step, but like Doctor Laurier, the Lieutenant in yellow hadn’t slept either since their ejection from the Underspace twenty one hours prior. Purpose and adrenaline were keeping her going.

“It’s good to see you, boss,” Lieutenant Tarasova smiled as she came to a stop at his bedside. “You’re looking significantly more lively than the last time I saw you.” She’d spent over an hour fighting to keep the Captain alive with nothing more than a handheld medkit, but that had been the last she’d seen of him. As soon as he was ferried away, she’d gotten right back at trying to fix the ship with the others.

”I hear I have you to thank, in large part, for that.”

”Phasers and torpedoes were down, so I had to entertain myself somehow, didn’t I?” Lieutenant Tarasova laughed with her typical dark sense of humor. “I know you would have done the same for any of us.”

It was true, Captain Lewis told himself. But this time he hadn’t. This time, he’d been lying motionless on the deck as nearly a hundred of his sailors died around him. He’d failed them. Or at least that was how it felt. “I gather you didn’t come down here just to bat those beady eyes at me though?”

She shot him an icy stare. Her eyes were anything but beady. “No, I come with news. We’ve found the Ingenuity.”

”We lost her?” Captain Lewis asked. There was so much he didn’t know yet.

”Yes, when we fell out of Underspace, we were split and had no idea where she wound up, or if she’d even made it,” Lieutenant Tarasova explained. “But Sharpe and Gadsen just got long range sensors working again, and we found her. She’s not moving, but she appears to be powered and in one piece.”

”Where is she?” Captain Lewis asked, his mind wandering to Commander Lee and her crew.

”Thankfully, just the other side of the system where we’re marooned,” Lieutenant Tarasova reported. It was much better than they’d initially feared. Commander Sena had initially warned they might have been scattered light years apart, but this was mere AUs. “We can only make 0.9c, but Selik has set a course.”

”And what system have we found ourselves within?” 

”An uninhabited and unremarkable system,” Lieutenant Tarasova replied. “Not named by our astronomers, and beyond reach of our explorers.” At least, it had been until the Underspace changed everything.

Captain Lewis noted her choice in words. They had been deep in the labyrinth, far from known space, when the Cardassians fired on them. They could be anywhere, in theory, based on how the Underspace worked. “How far out are we, Irina?”

”Six thousand, four hundred and twenty light years.”

”And I suppose it would be too convenient for an aperture to be out here?” Captain Lewis laughed. They might be far out in the unknown, but once they got the ship fixed, if they could find an Underspace aperture, they’d be back in Federation territory within hours.

“It’s a bit more complicated than that, sir,” Lieutenant Tarasova frowned. “According to Commander Sena’s preliminary analysis, she believes the Cardassians succeeded with their plan to collapse the Underspace. It’s highly unlikely it will be of any assistance to us.”

Good for the stability of the galaxy, Captain Lewis thought to himself. But not for them. Not with nearly a third of their crew dead, and their ship stranded, with heavy damage, over six thousand light years from home. Hopefully the Ingenuity had fared better.