8.3 seconds.
Malcolm Reed lays with his eyes open in the darkness of his quarters.
He had never been one to sleep easily. Malcolm is a natural worrier; it is a trait that made him a good armory officer but also occasionally makes him a cranky friend the morning after his brain spends hours picking at the arrangement of weapons around the armory or the wording of an annual report.
Tonight is especially bad, as his mind has a particularly terrible moment from the day to seize upon. His excellent memory once again brings forth, as it has been doing involuntarily for some time now, that horrible moment when he realized something was going very wrong with the transport of Hoshi Sato.
At the time he hadn't been able to think about it much. The moments after Hoshi had failed to appear on the transporter pad had been full of calculations and quick decisions at the controls. Hoshi's life had been in danger now and the only thing that could help her was keeping a cool head, so he'd forced his blossoming panic under the control of cold, hard discipline. A worried and impatient Trip had been enough of a distraction; he couldn't handle anything else in his mind but pinpoint focus. He did not think about her shoulder brushing his in the decontamination chamber, he did not think about how it might feel to die broken apart into trillions of pieces and to never get put back together, he did not even begin to think about what would happen if he failed to bring her back.
In the isolation of his quarters he thinks about those things now.
It wasn't until the moment she had materialized on the transporter pad that he realized how scared he had been. There she was, whole and solid. He couldn't help the grin that appeared on his face as he finished his counting. As he met her gaze it was as if the weight of the world had fallen off his shoulders like nothing. Relief seemed an inadequate word.
8.3 seconds. Even now the time weighs heavily on his mind. Absently he thinks that might be the record for time spent in transporter transit, a person caught in the limbo between being and nothingness. And then Hoshi had arrived beautiful and alive, dashing off the pad with determination in her eyes. An anxious Trip had ran off after her but Malcolm Reed, hands still on the controls, needed a moment. Alone in the room for a moment, he leaned back against the wall and closed his eyes. After a deep breath he raised his still slightly shaking hands and pressed the palms against his eyes. They were sweaty and cold. Malcolm did not know if Trip was aware, but every second that transported molecules spend in an unassembled state halves the rates of successful retrieval. 8.3 seconds, he thought again. They had come very, very close to losing Hoshi.
It would still be another hour before he fell asleep.