Palinopsia: (noun) From the Greek palin meaning "after" and opsia meaning "seeing." Medical term in psychology that refers to persisting or reoccuring visual imagery after its corresponding stimulus has left. This prolonged visual is often referred to as an "afterimage."
Plasma storms.
They were violent, unpredictable, and if Ezri didn't know any better she'd call them downright malevolent. But anthropomorphizing the storm would make it no easier to battle. She walked along the deserted promenade, checking off to make sure each window and airlock leading out into space was secured with the heavy duty, magnetized plates Chief O'Brien had designed. Her mind wandered to the last plasma storm Deep Space Nine had encountered, going on 6 years ago now, and felt her stomach twist at the memories - some Jadzia's, some Verad's.
When Ezri had done a full pass around the habitat ring she tapped her communicator badge and called for Ops.
"Yes, sir?" O'Brien's voice came over the comm link, staticy from the storm.
"All's clear here, Chief." said Dax.
"That's great. You'd better head back up here to Ops. You can help me make sense of some of these sensor readings."
"On my way." She tapped her badge again, ending the call.
Unlike last time, the crew had made sure that while evacuating the station Quark had been aboard the first shuttle down to Bajor. And while he wasn't happy about it, he'd put up little resistance. Ezri had said she didn't find it necessary, but Kira, still in command of the station since Benjamin's sudden departure a few months prior, had insisted. The Colonel herself wasn't even aboard. She'd gone down to Bajor to help with the relief efforts. This storm had been even worse than the last and it was wreaking havoc on power systems all over the planet. Even if it was just passing out blankets or Starfleet field rations and sending up replicator requests to the station, Dax knew her friend would have never been able to live with herself taking a purely administrative backseat when Bajor found itself in the crux of an emergency. Kira was always more of a hands-on type.
Within the hour, the eye of the storm would pass over the station. The remaining skeleton crew, a small collection of both Bajoran and Federation officers, led by Chief O'Brien, who'd been asked back on temporary assignment from his professorship at Starfleet Academy, were doing all they could to make sure that Deep Space Nine sustained as little damage as possible. And after approval from the provisional government, several Vedek's stayed aboard as well, guarding the Orb of Clarity, one of the Tears of the Prophets which remained on DS9. They were in the monastery round the clock, praying to the prophets to see Bajor through this difficult time.
As the Cardassian lift opened onto the command deck and Ezri stepped off the platform, the Chief, alone in the normally bustling Center of Operations, shot her a quick glance before shaking his head and waving his arm over the monitor he'd been working at. "These Cardassian systems," he said in a huff, "I don't know how I ever dealt with them day in and day out!"
As she came to stand beside him, Ezri patted him on the shoulder, one part sympathy, one part amusement. "Don't tell me you've lost your edge already."
"It's amazing what a few months back with comfortable, state-of-the-art Federation technology will do to you."
"You're still the best man for the job. Nobody off of Cardassia knows these systems better than you. Maybe not even then."
"That's what's got me worried."
"Oh?"
"Those readings I was telling you about. Can't make heads or tails of them. Here, have a look." He called up the program and Dax crossed her hands behind her back as she leaned in to examine it.
"That… doesn't make any sense," she said, scrunching up her nose in confusion. "There must be something wrong with the external sensors. Have you tried realigning them?"
A somewhat ridiculous question. Of course someone with as much experience as the Chief would have already tried that. And about half a dozen other quick fixes any engineering student would know. Still, the kind man that he was, O'Brien didn't say all that. Instead, he just nodded his head. "Already tried it. No luck. These readings are genuine."
"But, according to this, the storm is going to be nearly twice as powerful near the eye than we originally calculated!" Ezri's voice broke slightly on the last note. It had been awhile since she sounded like the frightened and confused young woman who had first walked onto Deep Space Nine over a year earlier. The sound of her voice just then surprised even her.
"I know…" O'Brien said, sounding grim.
"Will the modifications to the station hold?"
"I'm not sure. But there's not enough time to do much else. I'm going to try an older method of polarizing the hull plates. Might give us just a hair more protection. And once the storm hits I'll divert all power other than life support to the shields."
"Will that be enough?"
"It'll have to be. But - there's one more thing…"
"And that is?" Ezri tried not to sound panicked.
"The wormhole. There's never before been a recorded plasma storm so close to one. There's no way of knowing the effect it'll have."
They each paused for a long moment, soaking in the details of the situation and each arriving at the same, uncolorful conclusion.
"Well…" Dax said after a moment, always one to try and break up a tense situation with humor, "Jake sure will have something to write about for his article this week."
The Chief laughed, but it seemed forced. "Yeah… that is, saying we survive it."
As the storm drew closer, the distress calls from Bajor began to flood in. Electrical systems going haywire, atmospheric control centers malfunctioning, artificial satellites going wild or projecting false readings. All the while, the situation on the space station wasn't much better. The remaining officers were working like mad to keep systems operational at the same time as replicating and beaming down much needed supplies to the planet below.
"I don't believe this," Dax shouted, jumping away from a monitor as a circuit blew and a spray of white hot sparks shot out. She just barely pulled herself away in time.
"Believe it," O'Brien answered. He was shielding himself from another power overload, rolling out from underneath the center console as the smell of electrical fire filled Ops.
"We've got to get someplace more secure," Dax said, making her way over to the fire extinguisher and spraying down the overheating consoles. It would be a headache to clean later, but at least it put out the flames that were threatening to surface.
Chief O'Brien gave a nod, "I just remembered — I was looking over the skymatics for the station on my transport from Earth. There's a cargo area we retrofitted when we first took over the station. The Cardassians had used it as the main armorments bay for Terrok Nor."
"Is it more fortified?" asked Dax.
The chief nodded, "That, and it's got it's own power generators. They're old, and probably haven't been started up for years, but—"
Right at that moment, another spray of electrical sparks shot out from the monitors. This time, the pulse of the storm outside sent a shockwave through the entire station. Ezri gropped wildly for something to grab onto as she and the Chief were each thrown against the side of the Ops central station. The whole deck went dark.
Dax finished off the statement for the chief: "...But it's the only chance we've got."
The heavy doors of the seldom-used cargo bay opened with a wailing sound of twisted metal scraping against the floor. Dax grinded her teeth and covered her ears with her hands. O'Brien winced, too, but nodded for Ezri and the rest of the small Engineering crew that it was safe to enter. It was nice to get out of the flickering lights of the station, which were beginning to turn off and back on again with such frequency that it was practically a strobe effect. The Starfleet personnel turned on their standard tactical flashlights, secured to their wrists with a thick, stretchy material.
Ezri walked over to a dead monitor and began to brush dust off it as the Chief moved to take down a wall panel, revealing the inner workings of a Cardassian designed. He opened his toolkit and set to work restoring power to the area. The storm continued to rock the station every few seconds or so with another powerful jolt.
Ezri set her hand on the monitor for balance and closed her eyes, trying not to feel space sick. It was remarkable the way that the rocking of the station in the storm resembled the sensation of a shuttle crash landing. Or, at least, the facimaly of the memory made it feel that way to Ezri, as the symbiote inside her recalled the final moments of a previous, far more adventurous host. If it weren't for Dax, Ezri thought, I wouldn't even be here. What use is a counselor on an abandoned space station in the middle of a plasma storm?
The question sounded like the set up for a bad joke, and Ezri resented herself some for thinking that way. It had been awhile since she'd thought of herself and Dax as separate entities inside her. She'd been making progress, reading the texts the Symbiosis Commission continued to send her, having to cancel replicator orders with decreasing frequency, and all around getting to something closer to normal with regard to her behavior as a joined member of her species.
But the thoughts persisted, especially in moments like these. Moments where it was the Tobin or the Torias or the Jadzia in her that had her on an assignment. The engineer, the Starfleet pilot, the Chief Science Officer — not the assistance ship's counselor.
Before she could ruminate much longer on the subject, light came to the console she was leaning against, and she looked up to see Chief O'Brien smile to himself as he replaced the wall panel. "I'll say this much for the Cardies," he called out, "They build their systems to last. Now let's see if we can get these transporters up and running." He turned to his crew and started assigning tasks. Dax stepped up beside him and asked how she could help. The Chief perked up a brow, "Think you remember how to reconfigure the plasma flow on an old Cardassian RCL unit?"
"I'm sure somebody in here does," said Ezri, tapping her temple, as she took a spare tool kit and moved to open a panel by the transporter pad. In moments like these, Ezri had learned to just relax and let muscle memory do the job. If she tried to think too hard about what she was doing or how she knew how to do it, she'd find her concentration broken and the skills difficult to recall. Dax moved with a methodical rythme, almost possessed, recalling a conversation she'd once had with Julian on the replimat when they'd first been stationed on Deep Space Nine. A conversation about how the Cardassians had probably stolen this very technology from the Romulans. 'Retrofitted' would have been a stretch. By the looks of the conduit she was working on, it looked more like a frustrated child had forced a puzzle piece that didn't quite belong into place and no one had bothered to correct them. It was strange — Ezri never thought she would have been able to relate and sympathize with a piece of hardware.
This is like AR-558 all over again, Ezri mused, dissociating slightly from the task as she let her hands work. She recalled the excitement she'd felt when she'd been able to jury-rig the tricorder to pick up on the Hudinis, but she also remembered the instant sensation of having no clue in the world how exactly she'd done it, or which of the previous lives inside her head she had to thank for it.
And just as it had been then, when a sudden sound of a transporter powering up startled even her, Ezri found herself crawling out from behind the platting to baffled looks of the remaining engineering crew. "You did it! I'll be damned," O'Brien said, half jogging over to transporter controls and clicking through the settings to see what she'd done. "How'd you get it up and running so fast?"
When greeted with silence O'Brien looked up, only to read the listless expression on Ezri's face as answer enough. "Right, well— however you did it, it looks like these systems are going to hold slipshod at best. We better start beaming supplies down now before we lose the connection."
At that moment, another tremor rocked the station and the lights in the cargo bay began to flicker. The crew stumbled as they all reached for something to grab on to and ride out the wave.
"I thought you said the power system here was independent of the rest of the ship," Ezri said as the lights around the transporter padd dimmed and flickered.
"I did, but they haven't been used in so long it's stressing the system." He looked up at Dax and his eyes widened a little, the look of a man who'd just gotten an idea, "I know! Maybe we can link the two power sources. They're each unstable on their own but if we pair them it might be enough to get the transporter stable enough to operate."
"Cardassian and Federation power systems don't exactly talk well to each other," Ezri pointed out, "It won't be easy to feed both into one unit without overloading it.
O'Brien gave a nod, "I wouldn't trust it enough to beam any personnel down, but for supplies it should be steady enough so long as somebody is manually controlling the power flow." He started to call to one of his men when Ezri stopped him, "No, let me do it. I set it up, and I'm the only one small enough to fit back there comfortably, anyway."
Another wave hit the station — this one with more force than all the previous ones combined. Chief O'Brien clung to the transporter controls and Dax was thrown with such force against the wall that for a moment she saw stars without even being close to an airlock.
"You alright?" O'Brien called.
"I'll be fine," Ezri said, clutching her head for a moment before grabbing for the kit that had slid and scattered tools all about the floor. She picked up the one she needed and crouched behind the transporter pad to see the exposed innards behind it.
"We must be close to the eye. Once we're at the center we'll only have about 90 seconds of smooth sailing to make contact with Bajor and transport down supplies."
"Then let's make them count! Ready when you are, Chief."
"Alright, I'm connecting the systems now…"
Right at that moment, another wave hit the station, this one accompanied with a deafening sound like thunder in the middle of a lightning storm, and every console in the cargo bay exploded with a golden spray of a dozen firecracklers. Chief O'Brien was thrown from the controls, and Ezri's whole body slammed into the conduit she'd been working on. The connection point where her instrument was touching the exposed power array lit up in her hands like a roman candle, and a scalding pain forced her to drop it as she kicked back with all her might, just barely getting out of the way as the electrical spray fired off inside the panelling. A chain reaction began as traveled along the wall plates until it reached the transporter pad. The lights above popped and blew out as blue-white lightning lashed out from the system and angry crackling sounds emitted from the ground unit. Blinded by the light, the entire crew covered their eyes as they grabbed onto anything that wasn't red hot as a second and a third shockwave sent the station reeling.
And then — stillness. Silence.
The cargo bay went dark.
They'd entered the eye of the storm.
After a few seconds delay, the emergency lights powered up, and a computer voice informed them that emergency power was in use, currently operating at 75% efficiency. Power was being diverted to life support and other key systems.
As Chief O'Brien blinked away the blindness from the electrifying flash of the transporter, he made out the form of a tall figure, standing unassumingly on the pad.
"Chief," said a voice he hadn't heard in months. There was a lilt in the tone. A comical confusion like somebody who'd just walked in on a surprise party, "What in the hell's going on here?"
He stood up and squinted.
On the transporter pad stood Jadzia Dax.