USS Edinburgh- Sickbay – 1200

Harris lay on the bed as an orderly worked on his leg.  Reid stood above him, angry, annoyed, and sad  – her face holding it together as much as possible.  They had rushed back to the Edinburgh with the help of the USS Potena’s working transporters as soon as word reached them.  She’d had to climb Jefferies tubes to get to an overloaded and inundated sickbay where she’d found her boyfriend and commanding officer with innumerable injuries – the most concerning was his good leg.  He grimaced as the pain continued to pound through his body, “How bad are we?”

Reid had a PADD in her hand as she kept her eye on him but also worked with her team and the teams from the Potena to sort out triage.  She turned to him, “We’re still working deck by deck, sir.  Katsumi just made it to engineering and reports they’re working on stabilizing the warp core right now – her crew managed to keep it from breaching and the coolant flowing.  She’s working on sorting out the injuries.  We managed to get auxiliary power back online a few minutes ago.”  She sighed, “We’ve got three dead so far, Commander.  I’m sorry.”

Harris cringed as the orderly slowly removed the first aid measures he’d slammed onto his leg, “We lost Ensign Wolfe on the bridge.  The Eddie wasn’t built to do this.  Hell, we’ve pushed every red line this class has.  Damn!”  He shook as the last of it was removed from his leg.  The orderly didn’t apologize – she didn’t have time for such things.  She handed the medical tricorder over to Reid and stepped over the shivering shuddering bodies to continue with the next one.

Reid went to work, her mind focusing on the man on the table.  The tricorder kept beeping as she tried to scene again.  She handed it to Harris, “Commander…I’m sorry.”  The CO looked at the screen and his eyes focused on the burned ceiling above.

“I wondered…I couldn’t feel anything in it after a while.  Damn.”  He looked over to her, “Hope you can be with a guy with two mechanical legs.”  She couldn’t hold it in any longer and her tears began to flow. He reached out and gripped her hand, “Hey…it’s my only defense mechanism – I gotta find a way to laugh about things sometimes.”  

She shook her head as she attempted to recover her emotions.  That wasn’t it.  She pulled a stool so she sat down next to his head, “Brose…when they transported me aboard…I started on the bridge.”  She swallowed and looked him in the eyes as he turned his face to her, “I saw your chair…I saw the blood.  I didn’t think anyone survived that place.  I thought you were dead, Brose.”

He gently tightened his grip on her hand, “I’m sorry, Jord.  I don’t want you to have to experience that again.”

She whispered as she squeezed back, “You better damn well make sure it doesn’t.”  She composed herself quietly and pulled her hands back to her lap as her voice returned to that of the Chief Medical Officer, “We’ll have to amputate the leg, Commander.  We have temporary prostheses we can install…you’ll probably need a cane of some kind to get used to it.” She gave him a halfhearted smile when he looked at her in thanks, “I know even I wouldn’t be able to keep you in this bed.”

He laid his head back, “Thank you, Doc.  Let’s get this done as quickly as possible.”  She nodded and went to work assembling a team.

USS Edinburgh- Main Engineering – 1245

The CO hobbled his way into the room with his new cane and temporary leg prostheses.  He found it in chaos with officers not just running…but sprinting in and out of the room as the warp core thrummed at an uneven pace.  He teetered his way to where his first officer and chief engineering officer stood, checking her PADD, tricorder, and console readings every moment.  She wordlessly passed orders to officers from the Eddie and Potena as they scrambled to identify the warp core issue.  She spotted him out of her peripheral, “I would hug you, Commander but all of my hands are occupied.  You might be able to help me here.  You hear that?”  She nodded to the core.

“Heard it the minute I dropped to the deck.  She sounds off, Chief.”  

Katsumi handed him a PADD, “It’s more than off – something in the massive beam that came off that shuttle mixed in with the intermix in the chamber…and we’ve been trying to identify just what the hell got in there.”  She tapped at her tricorder, “We sent someone over to the shuttle ten minutes ago to see what they could find but so far they’re coming up with bupkiss.”  She leaned on the railing, taking some deep breaths, “If we don’t it stabilized, we’re going to have to shut down the warp core and take it apart…probably even clean and reset the chamber.  It keeps on at this pace and rate – a warp core breach is in our future.”

Harris felt the seriousness of the situation as he continued to read the PADD, “If we don’t have a functional warp core and the sun goes supernova…”

She finished it for him, “We won’t be able to get out of here in time.  The Potena would have to start pulling us via tractor beam…like now.”  Okada accepted the PADD back from him, “So, anything you got…I’ll take.”

Ambrose pulled his engineering tricorder out, “Let me see what I can see, Chief.”  She nodded and returned to her work with the gathered officers.  He awkwardly stepped around the group and ran his scans, looking for patterns.  She was right – the intermix wasn’t mixing correctly.  The plasma was holding but the compensators were starting to struggle.  He stepped under the railing cringing as the pain sparked all over his body.  He got close to the thrumming core, and put his hand against it.  A few officers stared at him as he closed his eyes and ran his hands against the container.  The sound echoed in his mind…and it sounded familiar.  He had heard the rhythm before and it had been bothering him since he stepped onto the engineering deck.  He opened his eyes and looked up to where the chamber disappeared into the ceiling.  A faint memory was at the back of his mind.  He whispered to the core…but also to himself, “Come on girl, what’s wrong with you?”

Then he realized where he had heard the sound before.  “Chief!”  Okada snapped her head up and found her CO waving her over to the core where he stood.  She wasn’t surprised to find him there – she’d done such a thing many times before as an engineer.

“Whatcha got, sir?”

He pulled out his PADD and went in search of his old logs and reports from the USS Watership.  It took him a moment and then he handed the tablet over, “When I was Chief on the Watership we had a new cadet crew cycle in early on in my time there.  Someone was performing maintenance on our chamber and somehow slipped something that wasn’t supposed to be in there – to this day I do not know how he did it.  The solution was that we suspended the chamber by slowing down the reaction and interaction…we were able to pull out the incorrect mix using transporters into plasma containers…and then at the same time…”

Okada nodded along, “Transfuse the fresh and proper intermix into the chamber as you went.  That’s…that’s…you thought of the ship as a living thing needing living medicine.”  Her appreciation for her CO grew in that moment.

For his part, he shrugged, “If one way of looking at a problem isn’t working…look at it in an impossible way…and sometimes you get an answer that works.  Put the plan in place and get your team assembled.  It’s going to wreak havoc with our power systems for a little bit while you do the work…make sure you alert departments on what’s about to happen.”  She thanked him and headed off to her team to call them to order.  Harris hobbled back out the door.