A thin haze filled the small engineering bay in a cruel mockery of a dewey dawn, the light fog of acrid black smoke hanging in the air in slowly creeping layers. Through the offensive atmosphere, the beacons of the red alert glowed with unrelenting rhythm, transforming the room into a bloody battlefield as crewmen lay strewn across the deck plates haphazardly. The usual blue ambience of the room had given way to an umbral form that clung to the corners of consoles and bulkheads, lying in carnivorous wait for the unconscious crewmen to slip into its ever-creeping maw.

A sharp cough cut through the eerie silence created by the absence of Daedalus’ beating heart, followed by the sharp hiss of respirators releasing their filtered gasses.

Oshira took another deep breath of the repugnant smoke as she summoned all her inner strength to lift the toppled console from the prone form of Lieutenant Oscuri, her shock of white hair peeking out from beneath the shattered unit. The rebreather implants squealed in protest as they battled to filter the poisonous air, sending a shudder of discomfort through her jaw as the high-pitched noise resonated into her inner ear. It was almost sufficient to cause her to lose her grip as her gnarled and aged fingers clutched desperately to the panel. Barely audible to the room at large in its moribund silence, it sounded to Oshira like the scraping of glass against stone, a cry that threatened to splinter her bones from within.

The pain was blinding as every sinew and tendon in her fingers felt stretched beyond their limits. Even through the deafening screech of her rebreathers, she could have sworn she heard several joints pop and crack in protest.

But Oshira refused to fail.

She had not been defeated by Klingon pirates or Orion privateers when they beat down her door. She had outsmarted Obsidian Order spies and outmanoeuvred Tal Shiar agents. In 50 years she had not once considered herself the loser, she was not about to break that streak of victories to an inanimate object.

She took another wheezing breath, the microscopic circuitry of her rebreathers cursing her in hypersonic frequencies as she dug her heels in.

With a deep, reluctant boom the console finally slipped away and crashed to the deck plates nearby, revealing the prone body of Oscuri, her normally pristine white hair matted with thick red blood.

Another victory for the scoreboard.

“Shani?” Oshira whispered, falling to her knees beside the stick-thin form of the engineer.

“Shani, can you hear me?”

A thin wheeze slipped from the Lieutenant’s mouth before a cruelly sharp cough lept from her lips.

“Shani, I know that we don’t exactly get along,” another rasping breath that sounded like a laugh escaped the young woman’s lips.

“But I will be damned if you’re going to die to spite me.” Oshira ran her gnarled fingers through the young woman’s hair, pulling apart the twisted weave of white and crimson.

In the silence of the mausoleum-like engineering bay, each ragged breath of the woman’s unconscious body was a minuscule glimmer of light in the darkness. Oshira felt her breathing fall into a counterpoint, her own painful intakes of air pausing until the prone form of the superior officer once again lifted with an inhalation.

Then her breath stopped and Oscuri’s form lay still in the caustic air.

“Dammit Shani. You can’t keep calling me useless if you don’t breathe.” Oshira shook the woman’s shoulders, attempting to elicit a response.

Suddenly, a wave of muscle spasms lept across the young woman’s body as it cried for oxygen, her chest and shoulders beginning to twist and flail with desperate urgency. Oshira fell back on the deck as an arm lept out towards her, soft palms landing in a pool of shattered metal fragments that dug into her flesh.

Oscuri’s eyes leapt open with a desperate fervour as her instincts took hold, her pencil-thin fingers clutching at the air towards the Barzan woman. Behind the dark pools of her eyes, an unfamiliar sight crept into view, panic.

Oshira let out a panicked gasp, causing a lightning bolt of pain to leap from her fractured respirators across her chest as she stumbled away from the crazed woman now operating on animal instinct. She shuffled backwards as the arms stretched towards her until her back hit the bay’s central table with a thud that echoed in her skull.

“Shani, please, just take a breath,” she whispered, dark pools of tears beginning to form at the edge of her eyes.

“Shani… please.” Oshira thudded the deck in frustration only to find a light grey box had interjected itself between her fist and the debris-strewn floor. As she looked down her heart skipped a beat as another stroke of luck fell in her favour.

A medkit, its surface emblazoned with the large winged staff of Starfleet Medical.

“Please god… please.” She ripped open the kit, casting emergency bandages and sutures aside to reveal a small silver canister with two blesséd characters emblazoned on its side.

O2.

“I’m coming Shani, I’m coming!”

Lifting the canister and its attached face mask from the kit, she frantically crawled over to Oscuri’s body dodging the woman’s flailing arms.

“Breathe Shani, please just take a deep breath,” Oshira begged as she pressed the emergency oxygen to the woman’s gasping mouth.

On the deck, the fitful writhing subsided as the sharp hiss of pressurised atmosphere began flowing from the canister.

Another stroke of luck, another victory.

“Oshira?”

“Yes, it’s me. I’m here.” The older woman laid a hand on Oscuri’s back, rubbing in slow concentric circles.

“What happened?” Oscuri whispered thinly.

“Not sure.” Oshira allowed a shrug to crawl across her shoulders. “I was over in the maintenance bay when some sort of explosion happened.”

“We were investigating a signal.” Oscuri’s voice was deepening to its familiar tone as the oxygen filling her lungs began pushing aside the miasma of poison-filled smoke.

“Well, I think the signal might have pushed back. Whatever happened the whole deck is filling with smoke.”

“There must be a plasma fire somewhere.” Oscuri pushed herself up with an arm with a groan, before slipping the emergency respirator’s small straps around her head, her fingers pushing aside the locks of bloody matted hair. “We need to get fire suppression systems online. How long have we been out?”

“I don’t know,” Oshira confessed, helping the woman to her feet. “It took me at least five minutes to get in and get that console off you.” She motioned towards the large entrance doors to engineering, a thin gap of light creeping through them from the corridor where Oshira had slipped through.

“The air is already poisonous then. Have you checked the others?” She coughed, thick red-tinged spittle discolouring the transparent mask.

“No,” Oshira admitted with sudden guilt. The young woman’s vivid crest of lucent white hair had drawn her attention so much that she hadn’t even checked on the other crewmembers who littered the room.

“Take the medkit and check the others. There will be more oxygen in the emergency cabinet.” Oscuri waved towards a large yellow-trimmed cabinet that peered from the shadowed corner as she pushed herself to a standing position. A sharp pain erupted across her abdomen and she bit her lip in a prideful attempt to obscure it.

“Shani, you’re-”

“Check the others, I’ll get emergency fire suppression and life support back online.”

Summoning all her effort Oscuri took a few steps, heading for the large central console situated in front of the silent warp core. Just the thought of moving was painful, each step felt like she was pushing through stone.

“Oh and Oshira,” she mumbled through gritted teeth. “I never thought you were useless.”

As Lieutenant Oscuri continued picking her way deer-like through the rubble, her mustard uniform streaked with red and black tiger stripes, Oshira muttered a silent prayer to whatever might be watching for her lucky streak to continue.