As if in slow motion, the Epsilon Section main relay burst outward, tossing a few crewmen backwards like ragdolls.
All hell broke loose.
Everyone was screaming, running, trampling people underfoot. Most of them were running away, but some of them, Trip included, were running towards it.
Immediately, he pulled the shunt valve lever, redirecting the plasma far, far away from Epsilon Section.
His head throbbed like nothing else from the impact, and the fumes made his throat sting and his eyes stream, but he waded through the debris.
He spotted a cluster of bright flames, and smothered them in carbon dioxide vapour. Their dying light illuminated a figure lying on the floor, brown hair splayed like an aureole.
It was the woman he'd run into earlier, the frightened one.
Wasting no time, he took an ankle in each hand, and dragged her free of the rubble. In the emergency lights, he could see the disarray. A jagged hole was blown in the wall like a giant wound. Debris surrounded the area, broken beams and bits of conduit.
Two crewmen lay at its edge, prone. One had landed on his neck, head bent at a sickening angle. Trip swallowed bile, trying to tear his gaze away from the man's empty eyes.
The woman he'd dragged out of the debris groaned, snapping him back to reality.
He turned to the damage control team. "Morra! You contact the bridge, tell the captain what's happened. Valen, Sawyer, you cut off the remaining plasma flows! After that, get outta here! I don't want you getting asphyxiated."
They nodded, a silent "Aye, sir." The commander pulled an emergency procedures kit off the wall, and snapped together the emergency stretcher with shaking hands.
Hooking his arms under hers, he transferred her to the stretcher as gently as he could. The maglev assist motor took over to carry what he couldn't, but every gram of her mass felt like it was doubled in his leaden, numb limbs.
He found the turbolift, gasped out, "Sickbay," and fumbled for his communicator. "Tucker to Phlox. Doc, there was an accident in engineering. Don't bother going down there, it's gonna be fulla Xenon in five minutes. I followed the procedures, so I'm bringing the most critically injured one left living to sickbay." He didn't wait for the doctor to say so much as "Acknowledged," before saying, "Tucker out," and snapping shut his communicator.
He let his head rest on the hard turbolift walls before the door slid open. The stretcher coasted through the hallway and into sickbay.
Breathing hard, Trip helped Dr. Phlox transfer the patient from the stretcher to a bio-bed. He noticed cursorily that the smile had gone out of the good doctor's eyes, replaced by pure professional purpose. He tried to school his own expression, which he guessed was somewhere between nausea and abject panic.
"25 CCs of Cordrazine," requested Phlox, holding his hand out expectantly. Trip, despite his fatigue, remembered his emergency training and slapped a hypospray into the Denobulan's waiting hand.
The doctor frowned at it. "Commander, this is Anaproviline. I, er, recommend you get some bed rest, hm?"
Distantly, Trip nodded, his eyes half closed. He slurred, "Just about to do that m'self, doc..."
A wave of ear-ringing and eye-blurring static passed over him, and, dimly, he felt his knees buckling.
Then the world was mercifully dark and quiet.