The temporal rift blotted out the stars like a huge puddle of ink, roiling and swirling in the manner of a giant whirlpool of molten lava. It was a sparkling green colour, mingled with long tendrils of hot white energy. It was to this panorama that Kira woke up, inside the dark cabin. She glanced out the windows, softly whispered a Bajoran curse, then hauled herself up to a sitting position: she didn't know what had happened in the interim, but something had thrown her clear of her chair and halfway across the runabout cabin before stopping against the transporter console. Her body hurt all over, and her mind was fuzzy. Where the hell am I? Is Dax awake? What about our passengers? These questions were too much for her brain to process for now. She decided to sit up against the console's support stand and rest for a moment. No limbs or ribs seemed broken, but it was better to be safe now than to push herself and be sorry for it later.
A piece of bulkhead plating fell from it's precarious hanging position and crashed to the ground. After the insulation had settled, a low groan issued from somewhere around Kira's feet. She realised that what she thought was a collapsed piece of ceiling was actually the bent form of Jadzia Dax, covered in shredded wire insulation and sprawled on the floor. All thoughts of recuperating forgotten, she leaned forward and lifted the Trill's head as Jadzia's eyes flickered open. "Kira?" she mumbled.
"I'm here. Don't try to move. You look hurt." The Bajoran scooted over to the helm, reached underneath the console, and withdrew an emergency medical kit. By the time she had returned to her friend, Dax was sitting against a chair and running insulation out of her hair. Kira pulled a tiny medical scanner from the kit and made a quick pass with it. "Nothing too bad," she muttered to herself. "You need rest, though."
Dax grinned through the dust on her face. "Since when were you the doctor around here?"
Kira tried to return the smile, but faltered a little. "Well, the Resistance taught me a thing or two about emergency medicine. And, after Julian was assimilated…" she paused, finding a lump in her throat. Angrily, she swallowed it back. "Someone had to take care of our war veterans, didn't they?"
"Do you know what happened?"
"In a word? No," Nerys sighed. "There was an explosion, then I woke up over there."
"The Borg ship fired some kind of torpedo at us…" Dax recalled. "We hit a tachyon eddy. Worf shouted something, and then I blanked out."
Slowly, Kira wobbled to her feet and sat down in the science chair. Her aching fingers tapped the board a few times, but nothing happened. She glanced over at the helm to find it completely off-line. "It looks like the computer froze up on us," she commented. "That, or we've got connection problems. Sensor readings are all messed up." An urge to smash the console came over her, and she forced it down in case they managed to make sufficient repairs. "Computer," she said, in the foolish hope that the voice interface was somehow still working. She wasn't disappointed when she was greeted with silence. It was then that she heard a growl. Worf's awake…she thought, as she leaned forward and helped her Klingon friend upright.
He squinted, then thrust a finger forward and exclaimed, "Look! A ship!"
Both Kira and Dax turned and looked out the viewport. At first, all they could see was the slow churning of the whatever they were in, drifting past the transparent aluminium window in a dreamy, almost hypnotic manner. Was Worf hallucinating? He wouldn't get their hopes up like that. But then they saw it: a vessel, small and compact, and as a vague gap in the whatever appeared, it almost looked like a Starfleet design. Suddenly, it clicked into place and Dax gasped a little. "What's the Defiant doing here? I thought it was on a strike mission in the Gamma Quadrant."
"It was," murmured Worf. "Perhaps we have been adrift for several days."
"I doubt it," Dax replied. "But I suppose it's possible."
Kira frowned and stood up. "Something about this isn't right. Worf, can you hail them?"
The Klingon tapped a control. "Negative. All communications are dead. Perhaps we are within comm badge range." He pressed the symbol on his chest. "This is Lieutenant Commander Worf, calling the U.S.S. Defiant. I repeat, Defiant, this is Commander Worf, onboard the Allied runabout Rubicon. Can you hear me?"
His only answer was a harsh squeal of static, so he quickly disabled the channel and frowned. Finally, he rolled over and popped a floor panel open, digging into the circuitry beneath their feet. "I will attempt to restore basic computer functions. Dax, check on the civilians and our other passengers in the back."
The Trill nodded and shakily walked through to the rear sections. Kira hoped that they were okay, after their little jaunt through the whatever. Suddenly, consoles and screens flickered and reset, and Worf leaned back with a triumphant smile on his face. Kira nodded gratefully. "Let's get to work. Kira to Dax. How are we doing back there?"
"Not too badly, Nerys, but we have a lot of injuries. Recommend we contact the Defiant as soon as possible. A couple of engineers have looked our impulse drive over, and it's no good: the tachyon eddy must have overloaded it."
"Are the transporters functional?" Worf said, looking over at the two pads on the floor. "Perhaps we can beam over to the Defiant."
Kira, who had reconfigured her screen to display a simplified damage report, shook her head. "The buffers aren't in good shape. We might be able to get inanimate objects through the matter stream, but I doubt organic material would survive. Besides," she paused, and brought up a preliminary scan. Most of the sensors were down, so she had to rely on what she could patch together. "the temporal distortions are interfering with our scopes. It could be a while before we drift close enough to even get a reading on the ship, let alone a transporter lock."
The deck plates beneath her feet vibrated, and Worf swiftly rose to his feet. "There must be something we can do!" he snarled in true Klingon fashion.
"There is nothing," she replied, with what she hoped was sympathy. "The shields are down, weapons are off-line, communications and transporters are all fried. I don't know about the warp engines, but we can't even fire thrusters, and even if we could, the hull would shatter under the stress." She felt like snarling a little too. Sometimes, she wished she had a bit of Klingon DNA in her, just to excuse her fiery temper. "It's like sitting inside a hollow egg shell, waiting for someone to crush it with their foot."
Suddenly, a shrill alarm broke her train of thought, and her eyes were yanked to the damage control screen. The tiny schematic of the runabout was now replaced by a flashing red diagram of the ship's spine and nacelle section: Kira felt a fist of panic squeeze her heart mercilessly, and she prayed to the Prophets and all the Orbs that this was just a random system error and it wasn't going to say what she hoped that it wouldn't…and then the countdown timer appeared, and she vaulted herself out of the seat, instantly snapping herself into what she called 'command mode'. Why now? We survived all this temporal whatever, and now we die. Damn. Damndamndamndamndamn.
"What is it?" Worf murmured.
"Start locking everything down. Kira to Dax!"
"What's wrong?"
"Warp core breach in five minutes. I can't stop it from here."
As if mimicking her, the pleasant feminine voice of the computer rang throughout the doomed runabout. "Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in five minutes."
"Can anyone eject the core?"
"I'm not sure. I can check."
Worf shook his head as he tapped controls. "I've shut down some of the non-essentials, but the core isn't responding to software commands."
"Dax, we haven't got time. I'm dumping computer data into the backup and separating the passenger section. Come back up to the cockpit beforehand."
"Acknowledged."
Thanks to the design principles of the runabout, it could separate in case of a situation like a warp core breach. As Kira worked frantically at her station, Dax was herding their passengers into the rear section of the ship — they were going to eject it from the majority of the runabout to avoid killing them in the explosion. The Trill skittered through the doorway and fell into a chair. "The aft should be sealed up by now. I pumped as much power and life support as I could in there, but after we cut them loose, it'll be up to the emergency systems to keep them alive," Dax said, panting a little. Kira nodded emotionlessly and tried to divert the EPS conduit flow away from the core. She would feel remorse if any of their passengers died, but she could do nothing about it at the moment. War did terrible things to one's soul: it was slowly hardened and frozen, until feelings and self became secondary to reaction time and the all-important name, rank and serial number.
"Computer, detach aft section. Authorisation Kira four-nine-lambda-seven."
For once, her prayer was answered, and the computer's voice interface struggled to life, processing her speech a little slower than usual. "Authorisation accepted. Initialising separation sequence."
The runabout quaked a little as the clamps retracted, then bucked. "Separation complete. Aft section detached," said the computer. Then, on a more dire note, "Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in three minutes."
No-one could access the warp core directly: it was built into the spine of the ship. However, there were maintenance points that were accessible from different sections, and Worf stood up and headed for one of these as Kira bit her lip. "Software instructions aren't getting through. Perhaps we can reroute somewhere."
"Worf, this is Dax," said the Trill, working as fast as she could. "Try disconnecting the core from the plasma conduits. There should be a control panel you can use."
A pause. "Negative. The panel is not responding to commands. I am attempting to initiate a core ejection from here."
"I'll do it. I know the system better. Get back in here and help Colonel Kira," Dax replied, then got up and ran to the now-aft section. Worf returned a moment later.
"Dax here," the intercom said. "I've rewired some of the isolinear connections to the engines. Try it now."
"Working," said Kira. "Dammit! The signal's getting through, but the ejection hardware is jammed." She closed her eyes and silently cursed the runabout technician who overlooked the mechanics that controlled the warp core ejector sequence. A small, logical part of her insisted that the foul-up probably occurred whilst they were in combat with the Borg, and so she couldn't blame anyone except the runabout itself. Nonetheless, it felt better that way.
"Acknowledged," said Dax calmly. How could she be so damn calm in a situation where they only had…
"Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in one minute."
…one minute to live? Kira envied her friend's patience in times like this.
"Hang on…I think I've got it. Manual ejection on-line and functional. Stand by for…"
"I can't!" shouted Kira. "We haven't got time to stand by! Can you dump the core?"
Silence came over the link for a few seconds, and then the Trill replied helplessly, "Stand by."
"Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in forty-five seconds."
In the rear section, Dax tugged a heavy level downwards, and smiled a little as the screens in front of her reported success. She had physically locked down the magnetic constrictors, but had been forced to eject the core too. Thirty seconds to go. Nervous fingers fumbled with the isolinear chips, but she managed to pull out the right ones and place them in different slots. Twenty-one seconds. The computer reported an error as it read the chips and recommended that she return them to their correct places: eighteen seconds left. Gas began spewing out of a microfracture on the core's reaction chamber. Dax took hold of the lever and flipped it again. Still no success. Across the other side was another switch, identical to the one she had just moved: she scrambled over and yanked it to the closed position. "Kira! Get ready!" she shouted, hoping that the intercom picked it up.
Twelve seconds.
Heavy machinery laboured somewhere behind the bulkheads, and suddenly she heard the warp core sliding towards the ejector hatch at the rear of the runabout. It was working! "Warning. Damage to warp core. Containment failure in ten seconds. Evacuate vessel and eject core immediately," the computer droned. Dax gasped as she realised that they would be vaporised in the explosion at this rate: they needed shields if they were going to survive, and as far as she knew, the shields were dead. All that work, for nothing. Hot tears filled her eyes and she slumped to the floor, angry at the injustice of her death. It had all been so pointless. Her nerves tingled in anticipation of the boiling antimatter that would soon consume her. I'm coming, Benjamin. "Not like this," she sobbed, fighting the thickness of her throat. "This isn't right."
It's not right…
It's not right…
It's not right…
The warp core exploded.
