Survivor Reaent

[WxMurray 0]

“Son of a…”

 

An explosion drowned out Murray’s sentence. The Reaent was entering a state of destruction that was beyond description. Deck four had depressurized; who knows how many people they lost. Casualties were piling up in sickbay, and the ship’s morgue was on the verge of standing-room-only status. Consoles were blown out across the ship; hull breaches made the ship look like Swiss cheese; power was out across the majority of the ship. How fitting that Lieutenant McLean had described it as a living hell: the red glow from the red alert lights fit that picture perfectly.

 

On a more personal level, there was a trickle of blood running down his face from a cut on his forehead. He and that console had not been on the best of terms during the battle. A slight headache also indicated a mild concussion. His left knee had banged the console at one point, and a particularly hard blow to the ship drove him to the ground, aggravating an old sports injury. He had some minor burns on his hands from exploding and sparking consoles. His uniform was torn, sooty, grimy, grungy, scruffy, ragged, tattered, grubby, smudged, soiled, filthy, and just plain dirty.

 

To say that things were not looking good was quite an understatement.

 

Then the evacuation order came. It surprised him, and yet it didn’t. It was the logical course of action, unless one was particularly fond of trying to hold one’s breath for an extended period of time. And yet, it was something that he had never thought he’d hear, not so early in his career at least. Evacuating ships was always something that happened to someone else. Now it seemed that the Reaent was that someone else.

 

As Murray’s escape pod launched, he could only think about his first assignment, that of a security officer aboard the USS Reaent. It hadn’t been that long ago that he had been at the bottom of the commissioned totem pole. Then Lieutenant Commander Shamor left, followed by Lieutenant Flek. Murray returned to the Reaent to suddenly find himself in the position of Acting Chief of Security, something a junior lieutenant would hardly expect to be.

 

Murray watched the pod’s sensor readouts for as long as he could before they entered the atmosphere of the destination planet. A slight glimmer of hope sparked in him as the continued not to explode. Perhaps once the battle was over the Reaent could be salvaged. At the moment, though, that was not important.

 

After landing, Murray exited the escape pod to survey the area. As the ranking officer in the pod, he immediately took control of the group.

 

“Alright. Let’s break out the tricorders and start looking for other pods. Until we can regroup with other survivors or find a more suitable location, this will be our base camp. I want reports every ten minutes.”

 

Murray leaned over to start handing out the weapons that had been salvaged before evacuation and grimaced in pain. He turned to the group. “And the first person to find a doctor gets my dessert rations.”