In the chilly atmosphere of K-74’s battlefield corridors, the away team’s fractious breaths filled the air with fearful clouds of mist as the motionless faces of the station’s fallen crew looked on with jealous, unblinking eyes. Their thick-soled boots beat a piano rhythm against the deck plates that threatened to betray their trepidatious slinking as they slowly moved forward through shadowed corridors with silent, practised frogleaps.

Sehgali raised a closed fist in the air as a shadow darted across their pathway, and the team became statues as silence gripped the corridor. She held her breath tight against her chest like a desperate lover, fearful of parting, lest it escape into the underworld and never return.

With a slight flick of her wrist, the hulking forms of Ole and Anyok slipped forward like wolves let free of their chains, phaser rifles raised to their shoulders as they hunted for the glimpsed foe. Nimbly, they side-stepped the dark fallen witnesses clad in familiar uniforms that littered the corridor, before disappearing round a corner out of sight.

“Commander?” Oscuri whispered, her normally confident tone quivering with nervous energy.

With a slight tilt, Sehgali acknowledged she was listening.

“These people…” Oscuri allowed her eyes to fall to the ground momentarily, where they landed on the dark green skin of a fresh-faced crewman, her white uniform scarred by a large black energy blast across her back. “I think they were running away.”

“The escape pods are just down that corridor,” Rhoska said grimly, with a nod to a pile of twisted metal that had once been the corridor towards the emergency bay.

Sehgali chewed her cheek as she glanced back and forth between the lifeless forms that littered the deck, each lying like fallen reeds in the field, crawling desperately towards the promise of a setting sun. A metallic tang crept across the tip of her tongue, a warm reminder that she was not one of those unfortunate souls.

“Don’t look at them, don’t get distracted,” Sehgali instructed in a quiet tone as she battled her eyes to take her own advice. “We’ll move on when Anyok has confirmed the route is clear.”

Seconds passed with agonising cruelty as the trio hovered in the unexpected graveyard, its inhabitants outnumbering the team at least two to one.

Mercifully, the twin blue forms of the advance team reappeared ahead without any injury, though Anyok shook her head with a grim flutter of her feathered crest.

“We can’t go any further forward, someone has barricaded the corridor at the Jefferies entrance.” Anyok clicked through her beak.

“With the turbolifts down, that was our only direct access route to station ops,” Rhoska announced confidently, drawing on his decades of colonial service, where the cheap and easily maintainable K-type stations had been a regular setting in his life.

“There are no other alternatives?” Sehagli could feel her frustration growing. She tapped the commbadge on her chest, activating the comm channel. “Rissikan, are you listening?”

“Yes Commander, I’m pulling up the schematics for an alternate route. Stand by.”

“There isn’t one,” Rhoska sighed. “Dedicated turbolifts and a single jefferies ingress, it’s a security tactic.”

“Are you saying we went round the houses just to find the door is blocked?” Sehgali seethed. The team had been forced up and down through the upper portions of the station, diverted by battle-damaged sections and make-shift barricades in their path to operations. The crew of the station had clearly put up a solid resistance, but many had fallen where they stood, or ran; leaving behind their bulwarks as pale reminders of their heroics.

“We could go back and see if the survivors know a route?” Oscuri offered, her desperation to get out of the Stygian corridor obvious. The team had found a pocket of survivors, further back in one of the cargo bays and opted to leave them huddled within the shadows in a weeping commune of fear until the fight was over.

“No, I won’t ask those people to do anything further,” Sehgali instructed forcefully. She could feel the eyes of a young girl burning back at her through the bulkheads from her sanctuary, chilling the woman’s heart. “We’ll have to find our own way through.”

“We could blast a hole through it?” Ole offered with a perverse twist of a smile that quickly dissipated with a pair of cold daggers from Sehgali.

“We could return to Icarus and relocate to a different airlock, we may find-.” Anyok suddenly twitched her head at an inhuman angle, tilting her acute senses back down the corridor.

The team once again held their breaths as they became marble statues once more, allowing the avian lieutenant to focus.

She raised one arm and, with a silent flutter of her feathered hand, motioned to a nearby doorway.

“Emergency battery storage,” Rhoska whispered as Sehgali offered him a momentary glance.

Sehgali flicked her wrist once more towards the doorway, setting Anyok and Ole free once more to flank the doorway.

The team took a communal deep breath as Ole extended a large finger and pressed the access panel, causing the doorway to slide open ominously.

1 second became two, then three and four with no movement or indication of any presence behind the door. The team shared a confused glance, and then suddenly Anyok reached forward in a flurry of blue feathers into the inky darkness. Slowly, she drew it back, the scruff of a stumbling Tellerite in her grasp.

“Name and Rank,” Sehgali instructed calmly.

“Isignis, Petty Officer. I’m just a service tech ma’am.” The wizened old man replied, waving his arms defensively towards the commander. A streak of dark blood sat on his temple and crept down his cheek, marring his mustard tabbard a dark brown colour. “Please…”

Sehgali glanced at his collar, where a single black pip suggested he was telling the truth.

“Explain Petty Officer.”

“When the soldiers came, I was working in the battery stacks.” He muttered in panicked tones.

The man shuffled with embarrassment and then suddenly became still as his eyes landed on the forms of his crewmates prone around him, their faces perpetually frozen in sickening tableaux of fear. Whilst everyone knew it was unlikely his presence would have turned the tide, his sudden shame at his reprieve was etched across his wrinkled face.

The away team traded quick glances, hours of preparation and team simulations condensing a conversation into a few seconds. The man would be less than useful if they encountered any hostile targets.

“Oscuri, take him back to the cargo bay to the others.” Sehgali finally announced.

“There… There are others?” The man stuttered.

“We’ll carry on towards operations.” Sehgali ignored the man’s fumbling realisation, her attention fixed on the path ahead, time was a consideration and it was quickly slipping away.

“But the route is still blocked,” Ole reminded her as he towered over the small man. “We still don’t have a route forward.”

“We’ll circle round back to deck 15 and see if we can’t access the turbolift shaft from there,” Sehgali muttered, looking to Rhoska for confirmation of her mental map.

“We could try passing through the upper cargo hold, we might be able to get through the cargo lift system.” Rhoska shrugged slightly, his eye noticeably turned to the roof, avoiding the graveyard floor.

“I know another route into operations,” Isignis whispered.

Every face turned to look at the dishevelled man slumped at their feet, his head and heart clutched in his hands.

“What?”

“I know another route into operations.”