AZATI PRIME – CREWMANS STORY
By Lost Mercenary

I love this episode and just had to do a fan fic about it. Enjoy. This is my first Trek fic by the way.

"I don't believe this!"

Ensign Paul Newman was working on getting the secondary power couplings up and running, in Engineering. Needless to say it wasn't going very well. He had been spending the last hour trying to get them in alignment but to no avail. At one point he thought he'd finally got them to work but then Commander Tucker told him it was a glitch in the diagnostic scans.

How convenient he remembered thinking.

Paul wasn't a member of the original crew; and not a very good one at that. He had been a last minute replacement when several of the crew left Enterprise back at Earth to be with their families. He never wanted to go into space. He only joined Starfleet because of his parents. They wanted him to be part of something special, something new, and something that would do him good they said. After his graduation at the Academy Newman got the first posting he could find that didn't involve space. He got what he wanted, but after the Xindi attack that all changed.

Just the way my luck runs, I suppose.

The young ensign began focusing again on his current problem. After they blew up the weapon the Xindi were bound to counter-attack and T'Pol wanted all systems operating at maximum efficiency. Even though he hated his job he would do his best.

Suddenly the comm. system came online on all the speakers. In the split second between it's activation and T'Pol's voice Newman wondered what it was about this time. Had the Captain succeeded? Had the weapon been destroyed? Then she spoke...

"All hands, Tactical Alert! We have four Xindi warships approaching. Stand by to..."

Her voice cut off as the ship shook with tremendous force. Newman lost his footing and dropped the hydrospanner as he feel and smacked his head on the deck. The pain launched threw him, burning at his senses. He clutched his forehead as it throbbed trying to suppress the pain within him, but it wasn't helping much. He looked up just as the ship shook again. Not as bad as the last one, it must have hit a far end part of the ship.

Commander Tucker came bursting into Engineering. He nearly fell as another shot from the Xindi hit Enterprise but managed to keep his balance. He didn't have time to fall down. Suddenly a plasma conduit exploded on the upper level, while a crewman was working on it. Paul saw him hurled into the air, covered with burns and landing on top of the warp reactor. He was dead before he even landed.

"Put that fire out! Jenkins, seal that conduit now!" shouted Tucker.

Newman tried to get up but he was still in pain from the blow to his head and the Xindi bombardments weren't helping either. Then he felt someone's hand grab hold of his shoulder and lift him up with great speed. Then he heard the commander's voice.

"On your feet ensign! That's an order! Come on we need you!"

"Aye sir." He replied.

Another shot shook the ship almost making both of them lose their balance but they stayed on their feet.

"Come on," said Trip, "we need to keep this ship from blowing up around us."

Both Newman and Tucker ran towards the reactor controls, trying to see if they could keep it stable during the Xindi assault, but if it was as bad as what Paul thought it was it wouldn't really. Sure, Enterprise could hold its own against a Xindi warship, maybe even two, but no way in hell could they take on four.

So this how I'm gonna die. Hundreds of light years from Earth onboard a giant tin can surrounded by a vacuum. Not exactly what I was expecting.

In all the explosions and shakes, Paul still managed to hear the comm. again. Tucker answered it.

"Bridge to Engineering. We need one of your engineers up here. A power conduit just..." The transmission broke off abruptly.

"Newman, you go. We'll handle things here!"

"You got it!"

More explosions filled up Engineering. As beautiful as they seemed they were deadly, and Paul now understood this first hand when one of them partly caught him from behind. Luckily he wasn't badly hurt but one of the crewmen behind him wasn't so lucky. It was Debbie Marshall. Her body was all charred and burned. Where there should have been pale skin all that he saw was black. Dead black.

Those Bastards! None of us deserves this!

He picked himself up of the deck trying to focus on getting to the bridge where he was needed. But these damn blasts from the Xindi were making it very difficult. As Newman left Engineering he heard the screams and shouts of his fellow crewman trying to keep them and Enterprise alive.
Newman exited the turbolift; he was amazed that they were still operating during this ferocious attack, and stepped onto the Bridge. It was in shambles. There were pieces of debris, girders and bulkheads lying about everywhere, fires in every corner, slowly engulfing the bridge. Almost instinctively he grabbed the nearest fire extinguisher from under the rubble and aided another crewmember in suppressing them. While he was battling the fire the real battle was going on around him.
Enterprise was getting the hell beaten out of it. She was surrounded by Insectoid and Reptilian vessels, taking the harsh punishment of their disruptor beams. Scorch marks and hull breaches covered the hull, making the ships once graceful appearance seem diseased and beaten. Her Phase Cannon ports were gone, as were several torpedo launchers, and the hull plating was non-existent. One of the damaged Reptilian vessels came back into range of the last functioning forward launcher. It exploded in a blaze of fire and metal as a photonic torpedo shot from Enterprise and struck a fatal blow to its engines. Enterprise flew upward, thanks to Mayweather, avoiding the debris but not from the two disruptor blasts coming from the Insectoid vessels causing even more hull breaches to the ships already frail structure.
Newman had managed to deal with the fire but he realised it was only a matter of time before another one began. He had to repair what he could while he was hear and weapons control seemed a priority. He opened up the panel with the weapon control relays inside only to discover that they were fused together by the fire.

"No!" he screamed. "Give us a bloody chance, you sons of bitches!"

A relay from behind him exploded when the next disruptor impacted the ship, and it caught the other crewman whom he had been trying to help with the fire. He didn't have time to check if he was dead or not he needed to get either weapons, hull plating, something to work. No matter how futile it seemed.

Amongst the chaos he could hear the voices of the other officers on the bridge trying to defend their ship.

"We've got hull breaches on C, D and E!" Reed shouted.

"Close them off!"

"The bulkheads aren't responding!" he moved to another console when the Tactical one ignited a relay.

"We're venting atmosphere!"

Newman began to cut away the fused relays when he heard the faint noise of the intercom. It was badly garbled and barly understandable. He found the relay controlling it and managed to get just enough power through it to hear what was being said, but it was still badly faint and distorted.

"Tucker to the bridge! If you can hear me, we've got coolent leaks all over the place! We're evacuating!"

Oh no! They were evacuating Engineering! That means that we'll...

Paul was cut off from his thoughts when he heard the sound of an overload coming from the intercom speaker. He thought the speaker was about to blow but then he realised it was coming from Engineering, not the actual speaker. He heard voices shouting, one of which was Tuckers.

"Everybody out!" he cried out and was then the intercom cut off, immediately after yet another Xindi disruptor blast. It shook the ship hard, harder than any of the previous ones. That meant we were no longer flying, Enterprise was drifting.

He looked at the open panel he had been working on and saw a power conduit begin glow bright red. Brighter and brighter. It was about to overload.

"Shit..."

The conduit exploded right in his face. It threw him against the other side of the command display console and into the bulkhead. His face was so badly burned that he couldn't feel any pain. He just couldn't move.
Enterprise had exhausted all the fight that was within her. She was no match for the remaining Xindi vessels and their deadly beams of light and energy. Her starboard nacelle was venting warp plasma, she had lost all engines, weapons, everything. It was only a matter of time before she was destroyed.

A Reptilian vessel passed over her dorsal section and began firing. The first blast scorched the hull and the other caused it to breach. As the fire began to dissipate from the resulting explosion, crewmen could be seen being blown out into space, being guaranteed a slow painful death.
Newman was barely conscious but he could still see the chaos on the bridge. The fire, the smoke, the death. He felt his arms being grabbed by somebody, and then by a second person. It was Lieutenant Reed and crewman Janice Ball, the young blonde women who had taken over the science station, which wasn't there anymore. Both she and Lt. Reed lifted him up and tried to give him some support so that he could walk. Once up Reed returned to his destroyed station, determined to continue to defend Enterprise even though there was nothing left to defend it with.

"Don't you go dieing on me, Paul!" shouted Janice.

Newman couldn't reply. He was to badly wounded.

We'll all be dead soon anyway, he thought. I'm just going earlier. Then he was engulfed by darkness.

"Oh no!" cried out crewman Ball.

Newman was dead. Another crewmember had been lost to those damned Xindi. Suddenly Janice noticed something. The ship was no longer shaking. Everything had gone quiet. No more bulkheads were collapsing, no more power conduits and relays were exploding. The fight was... over?

They had us right where they wanted us. Why? Why would they leave? That didn't matter. Why they left wasn't important. What was was why did Paul have to die seconds before she, the crew and the ship survived their ultimate battle with the Xindi? It wasn't fair! Life never is. And neither is death...

The end...

There you go. I hope you all liked my first Trek fic.

Please R&R