Holodeck 1 Running simulation of the USS Rubidoux, California Class

The sound of the red alert klaxon slowly dragged him back to consciousness. His head felt wet, and he noticed a cut on the right side of his forehead through his eyebrow. He touched it gently and came away with blood.

Fires burned from various consoles all around him. Acrid smoke hung heavy in the air. The main screen was cracked in three, with the smallest third of it just flickering in digital snow. Tiberius grunted as he pushed himself up off the deck plate, reaching for the armrest of his command chair. He grunted as he settled down into the ragged captain’s chair.

“I should have listened to Kael…” he groaned.

This was a bad idea. But he couldn’t shake it. The feeling he’d done something wrong. He needed to see for himself how things would play out. Was it healthy? Probably not. Was doing it with the safety off? Lord no. This was a stunt his old man would pull. He’d definitely get an ear full from his folks if they found out. But he needed to know. Had he done all he could? Had he made the right choice? Should he have stood his ground and fought?

He watched as Alpha fought the Klingon raider ship alone. Without the Rubidoux to back it up, the fight wasn’t going well. The command staff lay strewn about the bridge all around him. Only Lt. Jg. Thorne was still combat capable. Her hands worked feverishly at her console, but the ship was too wounded to respond.

He was about to give up. To issue the order to abandon ship, when a Klingon warrior beamed right on the bridge. Swiftly, he drew a blade that opened Thorne’s neck and she fell to the deck, choking as she drowned in her own blood.

Something in Tiberius snapped. A damn broke. All the anger. All the doubt. The resent. Everything negative he’d bottled up and put away for the last thirty or forty years? That entire shelf fell over and it all shattered. Tib saw Red. You know those video games? The shooter ones where you can get the power ups that make you really strong? Strong enough to punch a man and make him explode? That’s close to what Tiberius experienced, as he roared.

All the injuries and exhaustion of an hour and a half space battle burned away in the solar flare of his anger. You look out for your family. And your crew is family. His abject failure to find any solution here had frustrated him, but watching the crew die had done something. It uncorked all his anger at losing the ship and the crew that died.

He charged the Klingon, hitting him with a jab to stun, a strike to the throat to disable breathing, a knee to the groin. A knife hand to the armpit. Then he smashed the man’s face against the Conn. It’s shatter resistant surface spider webbing. He threw the Klingon to the deck, who laughed.

“You hit like a Feringi.”

“Get back up and I’ll show you what a hit feels like.” Tiberius growled.

Rising to his challenge, the Klingon threw his blade at Tib. It carved a deep groove through his shoulder, and fire and numbness spread through his arm. He and the other warrior exchanged several blows, sizing each other up. Tiberius wasn’t a slouch, but fighting was definitely not his preferred solution. A trained Klingon warrior or Jem Hadar soldier, he was not. But he made up for it with a ferocity and a lack of self-regard.

He took blows he could have blocked, because the warrior left himself open to counters and retaliations. It wasn’t a smart way to fight, but damn, was it cathartic. At least, it was in the beginning. But as his fight with the warrior dragged on? His stamina and rage ebbed. His blows became less forceful. It dredged up a lesson his father had given him in his childhood when dealing with bullies.

“Rage is potent. Anger is powerful. But it makes you sloppy. Stupid. You take too many risks, and make too many mistakes your opponent can use to pick you apart. Fighting smart though? Picking your shots and making them count? It doesn’t feel the same as striking when you’re mad, I know. But the result can be more satisfying. It can mean the difference between a mutual knock out, to you dominating your opponent. But you have to know how Tiberius.”

A man strode into sight from around the barn. 

“Who is this?” he’d asked his father.

“A friend of mine. He’s going to help you. You won’t win any world records, but you could in time if you wanted to. Listen to what he says. Do as he says. And no one will ever be a problem for you again.” With that, his father left.

Tiberius rose with a wince. More of his body hurt, bled, and felt numb. He contemplated ending the simulation here. But he had to finish now. This went beyond pride, or seeking answers. He’d started something. He needed to finish it. Slowly, he raised his hands.

“Your best ally is your will to get back up. To never stop. Harness that. Channel it. Everyone always wants the flashy finish. No one wants a 30 minute slug fest. Make your enemy mad that he can’t instantly defeat you, and you plant the seeds of his undoing.”

The Klingon raider captain growled at him. Gone was the mocking now. Pound for pound, he wasn’t a match for a klingon. Not on paper, at least. They were tough, with redundant biology. But he’d been on the right track at first. Disable his defenses, break down his attacks and destroy his ability to make war with his body.

The warrior charged. Tib tried to evade, but exhaustion and pain made it a sloppy dodge that turned into a tumbling tackle. The bigger man wrapped his hands around Tibs neck, leaving his face defenseless. Tib rammed his thumbs into the Klingon’s eyes and felt them both rupture against his thumbs. The warrior released his neck, clutching his face and howling in pain.

Tib rolled over and got up, able to dictate the tempo of the fight on his own time now. He coughed and wheezed as he struggled to get his breathing under control. “Don’t got a spare set of those, do ya as-” an exploding console nearby overwhelmed the expletive.

Tib picked up a piece of scrap from what was left of the science console and cracked the warrior across the ribs with it. Not enough to break any, but it would make breathing painful. That coaxed the injured man to his feet. He held still as a rock in a stream. He was trying to get a bead on Tib’s position with his hearing.

“Anticipate how your enemy is going to come at you. Know the tools at his disposal and you will know how to disable him.”

Tiberius tossed the scrap piece onto the deck next to the warrior, and he lunged with a shard of glass in his hand. This exposed his side. A mistake, he realized as soon as his lunge, met nothing but air. A phaser blast caught the warrior square in the side, hurling him across the bridge and rolling to a stop. Tib slouched down with a sigh.

“No weapon is off limits in a fight. Honor is for the dead. A fool’s notion. When a man comes at you for your life, for your body? Make him pay for every pound. No matter what you have to do. Better to act first and ask for forgiveness than to ask permission first.”

He tossed the weapon aside and fell into a crumpled seated position along the wall with a groan. Doc Sariel would not be happy about this. Let alone the admonishment he was probably going to get from his folks, or Counsellor Alaric. As if to punctuate how badly he was in for it, the holodeck doors peeled apart and revealed his commander who surveyed the carnage casually.

“So. Who won?” She asked as she strode in over the wreckage and gave a wince at her own corpse on the floor.

“We’ll call it a draw.” Tib croaked out.

Lorena knelt down and studied the strangulation bruises around his neck with a frown. Then she turned and studied the bridge some more.

“I’m guessing this is a study on how bad things would have gone had we tried to stand our ground and fight?”

“Something like that, yeah.”

She nodded, folding her arms. “You’re not alone. It’s something I’ve wrestled with too. The doubt. The feeling that we didn’t do enough. That we should have fought the raiders before heading back. That somehow that would have stopped them from pouncing on us before we made it back to base.”

“The Rubi wasn’t in any shape for protracted fights.”

Kael nodded. “Doesn’t seem like it’s suited you too well either.”

Tib shrugged, pointing to the dead warrior across the bridge. “Better than he’s doing, at least.”

“So I see.” She paused. Then glanced back at him. “Did it feel good, at least?”

He frowned. Then finally nodded. “I had a lot to unpack. But it helped me process it, I think.”

Kael turned back to the main viewscreen, her expression hard to read. “Maybe I’ll give it a go too.”

“Preferably with the safety’s on.”

“Definitely.”

“Alright. On your feet. We need to get these injuries treated.”

He sighed. “Can we skip the sickbay visit?”

“If you like, we can tell the crew I did this to you?”

He weighed that over mentally. Probably a little longer than she’d intended as she punched him in the arm, playfully eliciting a wincing laugh.

“No, that’ll be fine. Let’s go.”