Day One
Thick billows of black smoke obscured the inside of the small craft. The smoke rolled over the sensors of the emergency life support system, triggering the inside filter exhaust system. The network of ducts in the ship's envelope sprang into action, sucking the smoke away to the matter recyclers, and the recyclers stripped the soot and all particulates matter from the air and returned clean breathable air to the cabin. As air was slowly being filtered, the black haze that had settled throughout the cabin became more transparent, Shapes started to take form sprawled haphazardly throughout the compartment. One of those shapes started moving.
Shran groaned as he came to. That had been some ride down. The gravitational shear had caught them unprepared and it had felt like the shuttle was being thrown about at lightyear speeds, then violently suctioned into an endless zero-G vortex that left his stomach at one end and his feet at the other, before the shuttle hit a wall. Of sorts. There was no wall in space, but whatever it was the shuttle had encountered had abruptly stopped its fall. He knew it didn't make sense to talk of fall in the vacuum of space, but he would go to his dying bed telling people the shuttle had been falling.
If the shuttle had been falling, the people inside it had been falling equally as fast. And where the shuttle encountered the hard surface that had stopped its downward motion, the bodies inside it encountered the steel walls of the shuttle. It was not hard to say who had fared worse. The shuttle was a solid object meeting another solid object and its occupants were soft bodies encountering a solid surface.
Fortunately, Shran's fall as the shuttle plunged the last hundred yards or so had been cushioned, as he could tell from the softly yielding cushion under his head. That was his head. Every other part of his body hurt like damnation. He pushed himself off the floor, using the seat next to him to lift himself to a standing position. He gingerly stretched his limbs, one after the other, then touched his antennae. Nothing broken, nothing twisted. Bruises were the only thing stiffening his limbs. And these were deep, monstrous-size bruises, he could tell.
The shuttle was leaning to one side where the crash had dropped it. Shran quickly looked at the front screen, noted with relief that there was no crack, chastized himself for the unnecessary check. If there had been a crack in the screen, their bodies would already be floating in the coldness of space and he would have had no clue. But he did catch sight of the surface of the asteroid the shuttle seemed to have face-planted itself onto. Not a pretty sight, all a-kilter as it was.
His attention came back to the inside of the shuttlecraft, where, more importantly, there were the four aliens and two Andorians. Or there had been four aliens and two Andorians before space threw them on one heck of a roller coaster ride. There were bodies on the shuttlecraft's floor, and he hobbled to the nearest one. It was one of the MACO's from the Enterprise that were accompanying him and T'Pol in their diplomatic mission. Shran was not very well versed in human physiology, but he didn't think it was normal for pink-skins to look grey-white. He turned the MACO on his back. The head lolled impossibly. He did not need knowledge of human biology to tell a broken neck.
Shran sighed, and staggered to the next body, fighting his fast-tightening muscles. That one was still seated, giving him hope that it had survived the crash, even though the pink skin was no longer pink. He could see that the safety restraint was still holding him to his seat. And realized that the safety belt on three other seats had not resisted the gravitational stress of the fall and had all snapped. That made Shran angry. Whoever was responsible for installing subpar material on the shuttlecraft was criminal.
He couldn't help but reflect the pink skins were rank amateurs when it came to space-faring. If they didn't have redeeming Andorian-like qualities of cunning and perseverance, they would have been dead many times over from such poorly supplied spaceships. And that was not counting the deplorable fragility of the hull of the Enterprise in the Expanse.
Shran leaned towards the seated man, coming to within inches of his face, trying to tell if he was alive. The seated figure was statue-like and Shran could not detect any breathing. There was no warmth emanating from the skin. He inclined his head to one side, pensively looking at the human. "Hey", he shook the man's shoulder, trying for a sign of life. The noise sounded incongruous in the shuttle, perhaps because it seemed so loud in contrast to the surrounding silence. The human didn't move. Shran could not figure out how he had been hurt, but he was pretty certain it was no longer alive. So both MACO's were dead. That left the shuttle pilot and Shran's aide.
Shran staggered to the front of the cabin, where the pilot and his aide had been seated. He avoided looking out the screen at the asteroid, afraid that somehow the shuttle would slide off and resume its fall. He knew it wasn't logical, what a hated word, but the shuttle had been falling. All the deities in the universe were witness to that.
The pilot was still strapped in his seat, lucky for her, but her head leaned over the controls in a way that didn't bode well. Shran took a sharp breath when he leaned her back into her seat. The back and forth of the shuttle had been so violent that the restraints had pretty much sawed her into quarters. She might have been luckier if they had snapped. She may be just as dead, but perhaps of a more pleasant death.
He turned to his aide, who was splayed against the front monitor in a most awkward position, both antennae broken, his skin already turning a translucent share of green. Shran didn't need to confirm he was dead. He turned back towards the main cabin, trying to gather his thoughts. Something was missing.
The Vulcan! The fog in his brain was clearing along with the smoke in the cabin. He looked to where she had been seated, but she was no longer there, the seat was empty. Shran noticed the broken restraints, cursed once more under his breath. Could it be that he was the only one left alive on this forsaken craft?
He hobbled to the seat where she had been, right next to him, the two of them official delegates to show the new contacts how the Federation of Planets united species of all kinds. But both center seats were empty, the tatters of the safety restraints the only sign they had been in use. Shran's gaze scanned the center section of the cabin, starting from the highest side of the slanted shuttle. He saw the figure crammed into the lowest point, where the sides of the shuttle had buckled at an angle, and rushed to it before the pain radiating throughout his legs brought him back to a stiff walk.
As he staggered forward, a sick feeling grew in him as the realization dawned that she was the soft yielding cushion that had been under his head. Did it kill her? She was wedged between her seat and the wall, unmoving. Shran kneeled awkwardly next to her, gritting his teeth against the pain of bruised tissue. The petite Vulcan was dressed in her diplomatic robes, and no sign of injury was visible. He stopped, fearing she too was dead, trying to remember Vulcan anatomy and how to tell if she was. A sudden shallow rise of her chest surprised him. He wasn't sure if he had seen it or imagined it, and he waited. The shallow rise happened again, and then he knew she was still breathing.
Shran started talking to her, hopeful that it would be enough to wake her up. "Vulcan, hey Vulcan. Are you awake? Don't tell me you're not awake, I know your kind. You're probably just pretending to be unconscious so that you can..." He stopped, suddenly conscious of the fact there would be no advantage for the Vulcan in pretending to be unconscious. "Hey" he grabbed her shoulder, shook her just a little bit. But she didn't wake up. Shran realized there was something wet on his fingers and snatched his hand away. The back of his hand was covered in a green wet and sticky substance. Shran gently peered around her shoulder and saw that there was a slow forming puddle of the green fluid starting to pool around her head, and gathering in the angle of the walls.
He gingerly took a hold of her face, tuning it towards the wall ever so slightly so that he could get a look. But he couldn't see anything, the back of her head was a bloody mess. He had absolutely no idea as to what it meant and how bad it was, just knew that it was not good.
"Mother of all deities!" Shran exclaimed into the silence of the shuttlecraft. How could the deities have done this to him? It was bad enough that only he and the Vulcan were left alive in the crash. On top of that fates had to toy with him and make it so that the Vulcan was wounded. Every Andorian knew that a silent Vulcan was better than a live one, but he respected this one and she could be helpful in a bind. Instead, he was pretty much alone and the Vulcan's help was tantalizingly close and yet so very far. He needed her awake somehow.
Having at least one other person alive galvanized him into action. He stiffly got up from her side, muttering under his breath at the pain and effort that took. Once upright again, he scanned the cabin, trying to locate where the emergency supplies were stored. Once he had taken care of her wounds and she was conscious, they could talk about how to get out of this mess.
xx
Trip woke up with a start. Something had happened but he wasn't sure what. In the dark and half-asleep, he fumbled for the light switch of his childhood, remembered he was on Enterprise and called for lights. The computer obligingly set the lighting at night levels, enough to look around but not too bright to be jarring. Trip sat in bed, nursing his head. He had the mother of all migraines. He got up, lurched to the restroom, and promptly threw up, then came back to sit on his bunk.
Something was off. He didn't feel like he was coming down with something, and the migraine was already receding. He cast about mentally, trying to figure what was going on, when the realization brought him to sit even more upright. The connection with T'Pol was gone. He tried to think through the webs of sleep, whether they had talked about it before she left on the mission. Perhaps she had warned him of it and he didn't remember.
There had been so many missions, it kind of all blended together, but he knew that when the physical distance was too far or when there were some naturally occurring phenomena, the connection was interrupted. It had happened before and it must be the same thing happening again, except he forgot she had told him about it. Or perhaps they had discussed it. It all was a blend. He chased the anxiety from his mind and went back to sleep. His last waking thought was that he would have to tell her they would have to figure a softer transition the next time. He didn't exactly care for the physical manifestations otherwise.