May 31, 2386

"Containment failure in three minutes," the computer chimed blankly.

B'Elanna had tried everything she knew to stabilize the reactor, but nothing was working. Her frantic problem-solving had given way to reluctant defeat, and it was heavy on her shoulders. She had run out of time. "We're evacuating engineering! Everybody out!" she shouted. She stood at the base of the enormous pillar, the menacing red lights bathing her face in a devilish glow as she gazed up, helplessly searching for any other solution, some possibility that she may have overlooked.

"B'Elanna, what are you doing?" Aaron asked her tensely.

"We have to eject the reactor. I can't stop the containment failure." Her voice was elevated over the din of the alarm.

"The ejection mechanism is only at 50% power! It'll blow the station to bits!" he howled.

"If we don't eject it, we'll be completely vaporized! At least if it's out, we have a chance at maintaining partial integrity, at least until Endeavor arrives," she replied sternly.

"That's a big risk, B'Elanna," he countered.

"We don't have another choice! Out, Aaron. That's an order," she yelled, pointing sharply to accompany the order. "You need to get as many people as you can as far away from the reactor as possible!" She squeezed her eyes closed tightly, desperation on her face when she opened her eyes again. "Go, Aaron! Please! My daughter is in the Infirmary!" It almost physically hurt him to turn and go, but he understood. Complying, he ran as fast as his legs could carry him.

She waited, giving them as much time as she could, until she couldn't wait anymore. One by one, the noises of loud conversations, shouted orders, and the droning of a room full of machines faded away to silence, suddenly filled with only the sound of her beating heart. It was deafening, so strange now that everything was so quiet. She thought of calling Tom, but couldn't think of anything that would have been sufficient enough to say to him in such a short amount of time. She told herself anything she would have said, he already knew. She also tried to think of another way, but instinctively knew inside, that there wasn't one. Her plan, as dangerous as it was, had the best chance of saving as many lives as possible.

"Containment failure in two minutes."

The reactor needed to be ejected before it blew--that was unavoidable. But if the reactor was frozen, or at least partially frozen, it would deaden the blast, effectively lowering the yield, so that it would destroy less of the station when it exploded.

She grabbed a utility strap and started anchoring herself to the command console, knowing she would still have to eject the reactor after the room had emptied of air and the frigid vacuum had been allowed to cool the reactor. Her eyes filled with tears when she thought of her baby, an innocent victim. Her hand shook when she reached for the bay door release, realizing, too late, that she should have called Tom, if only to apologize, for what she was about to do. Station duty has always been the safest option in Starfleet, she rationalized. But nothing, not a single place in all the universe, was without some form of danger. Today, she was unable to protect her son from that danger. "I'm sorry," she whispered to no one, then blew the doors.

She forced the air from her lungs and squeezed her eyes shut. The cold, unbearable cold, and a sucking cold wind, the likes of which she had never even imagined, so cold it felt like heat, pulled on her. She felt her clothes, her hair, whipping in the wind as she struggled to hold her breath. She counted, slowly, every second an eternity of agony, until 20 seconds had passed. Her hand was white and almost frozen solid as she reached for the manual eject, unable to speak to issue her authorization code. Her vision swam with dark blotches as she felt the rush when the reactor was forcefully pushed out into the vacuum of space. Her hand had frozen to the console. She left part of the flesh from her finger as she pulled it up one last time, to close the bay doors. Her blood that had smeared onto the panel vaporized instantly. She blacked out, unconscious, hitting the deck, moments before the reactor exploded 20,000 kilometers away from the station.

}LS{

As the computer continued to countdown, Tom waited. Cramped into Auxiliary Control with the rest of the Ops team, he hovered behind the engineering station, again, just hoping and praying that those under his command were doing what they were supposed to, as he had every faith that they would. Every face around him was stern, tense but poised, and hyper focused on the tasks they were working on in the current crisis.

"Commander, someone has opened the bay doors in the reactor room," Ensign Palmetto announced with worry.

"Lifesigns?" Tom asked, amazing himself with his composure, even as he was almost paralyzed with fear, almost coughing at the dryness in his throat.

"One. Klingon, Sir," she added, an undisguisable sadness under her professional tone. Palmetto gasped loudly, then shouted, "The reactor has been ejected!"

"All hands, brace for impact!" Tom yelled over the comm, his brain registering the sequence of events as they happened.

And then the entire world, or at least what was left of it, turned upside down.

}LS{

When Aaron reached the Infirmary, he caught the straggling end of the evacuation. The most seriously injured patients had already been moved one by one, by what remained of the skeleton crew. The alarm continued to blare, the red lights casting an eerie light, changing the once calming decor of the room to a macabre mosaic. The computer also, so exasperatingly calm, continued to remind them of their impending demise. "Commander!" he heard through the cacophony of people and machines.

He saw Dr. T'Lassa, walking gingerly with a crewman under her care, his arm slung over her shoulder. "He is the last patient. Admiral Paris and Ensign Gallbladt ensured all the others had been relocated. The rest were moved into crew quarters on the outermost ring on the west side of the station. Security is assisting."

The man she was helping was almost twice her size, and though Aaron knew she was much stronger than a human female would have been for her size, she was still struggling. He eased the burden from her, and she ran back inside. "We have to move, now! The reactor is critical!" he called back to her. After what seemed like an eternity, but was in fact only 30 seconds, she returned, overburdened on both sides with what looked like luggage, although he knew she had grabbed as much emergency medical supplies as she could, to continue to treat patients.

"Ops has been evacuated to Auxiliary Control. The comm system is down," he informed her as they moved at a brisk clip.

"Engineering?"

She watched the dark cloud cover his features, alarmed at his failure to answer her. She felt it through their bond–B'Elanna. It wasn't even words--just an image. An image that hurried her along faster, knowing the casualties on the station were about to drastically increase.

}LS{

Admiral Paris had coordinated the set up of a makeshift triage in the largest conference room. This room, from what Aaron could tell, held a little over 500 people. The rest, he told himself, were in the crew quarters on the outskirts of the west side of the station. Moving this many people in such a short amount of time was nothing short of miraculous, he knew. They all kept order, just barely, on the edge of chaos.

Aaron and T'Lassa only had seconds to get their bearings, when underneath them, the deck began shaking. The next few seconds blended together. The shaking intensified like a crescendo, followed by a horribly loud blast, the scream of metal coming apart. The deck became the wall, and then the ceiling, and he felt debris both large and small start to pummel him. He guarded his head with both arms, gasping as he felt his body lurch, and he was airborne. The last noise he heard before he blacked out was the smack of his head colliding with something hard and unforgiving.

}LS{

The first thing Tom thought as he opened his eyes, was that he should have kept them closed. He felt a wave of dizziness crash into him, nauseating him. The second thing he thought was that he had gone blind, because what he could see with his eyes open and closed appeared the same--only blackness. The more he tried to focus his eyes, the dizzier he became, until he finally felt his nausea overcome him, as the bile rose from his stomach into his mouth, gagging him. He rolled to his side to keep from drowning in his own vomit, realizing he was pinned beneath something huge that only gave him a few inches of leeway on either side.

When he stopped coughing, he felt his head start to throb along with the pounding of his heart. The pain intensified, to the point that he felt he wanted to climb out of his skin, sensing the irrational urge to run away from how painful it was. Something wet was smeared across his cheek, and as it reached his mouth, he tasted blood. Must have been from his head, he fathomed, as the skin on his face was just about the only thing that didn't hurt. It seemed to take hours, but he finally could focus his eyes enough to realize that he was not in fact blind, only encased in almost total darkness. Emergency lighting was offline, at least where he was.

He tried to move farther, to roll to see what he was pinned beneath, when nausea overcame him again. Bad head injury, he thought, his long ago years of training as a medic on Voyager coming back by instinct. He didn't have time to nurse his injuries, he thought frantically. He kept fighting, swallowing down the nausea, forcing himself to steady. Inch by inch he crept, feeling a sharp, stabbing pain in his leg as he began to first move it.

"Commander Paris?" he heard someone call to him. A man's voice. Lt. Baytard, he realized after a moment of confusion.

He tried to answer, but could only groan. At least, he hoped, they had heard that.

"Give me a hand!" Tom heard Baytard yell to someone else, and an instant later, the sheet of metal on top of him began to shift to the side. It was too heavy for them to completely remove, so he had to slide along the floor to extricate himself.

He was blinded by a wrist beacon when he emerged, howling in pain as the light assaulted his burning eyes. "Sorry, Sir," Baytard realized, pulling down his hand.

"I need the medkit!" Someone else, a woman, called. Ensign Palmetto. "He's severely concussed and he has a bad laceration on his scalp." Well, that explained it, he thought. He heard the scanner hum, felt a hypospray against his neck, and slowly, the pain and disorientation began to subside.

"Report," he asked as he attempted to stand, relieved that his voice sounded strong despite his injuries.

Baytard answered him. "The main computer, external and internal sensors, and auxiliary power are all offline. The comm system is down. We're completely shut down. Only minimal life support is still functioning."

Tom's mind started racing. "The reactor," Tom breathed, his heart nearly beating into his throat. B'Elanna…He stopped himself. Right now, there was nothing he could do to answer any of his questions, or allay or confirm his fears. In times of extreme crisis, it was always a task to prioritize and execute, and nothing else. No room for anything else.

"The reactor was successfully ejected, and exploded, based on my extrapolation, about 20,000 kilometers outside the station. That's all I got before the power went out," Baytard explained.

Still foggy, he was slow to absorb what Baytard was saying. Exploded. Which would mean, at the very least, there were breaches all along the east side of the station. It could be worse, but until sensors were working, he had no way to know. They were still here, which was better than he'd hoped when the reactor went critical. A memory popped back. B'Elanna had blown the hatch in the reactor room, effectively cooling the reactor's internal temperature before ejecting it.

Thank God, he thought briefly, while at the same time, feeling the cold hand of fear grip his heart, as he pondered any number of ways she could have accomplished the feat. Almost none of them were conducive to her continued survival.

Keep going, he told himself. No time.

As Baytard turned his wrist beacon to survey the room, Tom could see the devastation the explosion had wrought. The deck wasn't actually level, he noticed. The sensation of standing erect was an illusion, he realized, as they were actually standing on debris. The wake of the graviton wave had destabilized the station's rotational position. Now, this explosion could very well have knocked the actual station completely out of orbit.

He admonished himself again for speculating. They needed functioning sensors, a way to get at least limited communications online. They needed an accurate status report. And, he thought sadly, a way to triage casualties, which, if this room was any indication, would be severe.

}LS{

"Please refrain from movement, Commander. The back of your skull is fractured," T'Lassa said gently just as Aaron had started to regain consciousness. Her face slowly came into focus. A huge gash on her forehead oozed a stream of bright green blood. Her hair, always so impeccably smoothed into place, was frazzled and tangled, twisting in frizzy wisps about her face. The front of her uniform was covered in blood, visible as dark wet patches against the blackness of the cloth. Not her blood, he comprehended silently, calming slightly. Only slightly.

Are you all right? He asked inside her head.

I am uninjured. It was only her simulated voice in his mind, but he sensed the tension, the tightness in her tone. It's all right, he heard afterward, in a softer tone.

He sat up, feeling like he was falling forward. "Commander, you are still injured, and require rest," she said.

"Not now. There's too much--"

"Every system on the station is down except minimal life support. The vista from the only viewport I could find shows the station is listing to the left, and it appears it could be in a decaying orbit. The reactor exploded in very close proximity to the station," she explained.

"Excellent status report, Doctor," he grumbled. He struggled to his feet, pushing aside the dull ache that had started pounding behind his eyes.

"I assume you are disregarding my medical advice," she said flatly.

"How many casualties have you treated so far?" he asked.

"There are eight dead, hundreds of injured, many seriously. There is only so much I can do without the Infirmary's resources. Endeavor is still 34 hours away," she informed him.

"Where is Dr. Conlin? And the rest of the medical staff?" he asked, realizing she was the only doctor in this enormous triage area. He counted three nurses or technicians darting about the rows of injured individuals.

"Dr. Conlin has attempted to reach the upper levels, to search for injured. The other physicians are also searching in other locations, assisted with the other nurses and technicians," she expounded.

Aaron nodded. "We need sensors and emergency power, and to keep life support from totally failing," he said quickly. She saw his face, the grim determination, as he was about to charge away from the area.

As he turned, T'Lassa grabbed his arm. "Commander, I must inform you, Admiral Paris was one of the deceased."

He closed his eyes tight, absorbing the news. He felt her hand tighten, realizing she had sensed his pang of regret, knowing how the loss would affect Tom. "He did not suffer," she said softly.

"I have to find Tom," Aaron said, "Or at least make the attempt. Auxiliary Control sounds like a good place to start."

"There's nothing left of Auxiliary Control," Aaron heard from behind him, and turned to see the small group emerging from a hatchway. Tom had spoken, his voice punctuated with heavy breathing as he limped along, at the head of the tiny crowd.

"Commander!" Aaron rushed to him.

"Report...what you can, at least." Aaron recapped the information T'Lassa had been able to glean from her keen observations.

"Tom…." Aaron started, and hesitated. Aaron watched Tom's forehead creased with worry. "I'm sorry, but Admiral Paris is dead."

He heard Tom's sharp intake of breath, noticing how he seemed to hold it for an interminably long period of time, as if he were afraid to start breathing again. "How?' Tom croaked.

"Cardiac arrest," T'Lassa said as she walked up behind Aaron. "The power failure prohibited any medical intervention aside from cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. I am sorry for your loss."

Tom paused, only for a moment. His Starfleet training took over. Compartmentalize the grief, to be dealt with at a later time, when the crisis would be over. "Aaron, I need you to take a small team and try and get auxiliary power back online. Sensors and life support are top priority. We don't even know how badly the station's been damaged. Wherever you can, assign repair crews. I know the crew is scattered, but do your best. Route as many wounded as you can down to us here. Wounded take priority."

"Understood," Aaron said.

"Us?" T'Lassa repeated him.

"I was Voyager's senior medic for over four years. You can't do all this by yourself. There isn't all that much else I can do at this point anyway, at least until some power is back," he explained. The truth be told, he was so anxious he needed something to occupy his mind or he would start to spiral out of control. Commanding the station forbade him from indulging in that type of emotional instability.

Aaron motioned to members of the team Tom had arrived with, and reassembled them on the way out. "Aaron, a moment," Tom called him, pulling him aside. "What happened in engineering?"

Understanding, but hating to be the bearer of bad news once again, he chose his words carefully. "B'Elanna ordered me out to help evacuate the Infirmary." He paused, watching the worry on Tom's face increasing. "The reactor room could have been within the blast radius."

"I know," he snapped, then pulled back. "Is there a chance she had time to get out before…." he swallowed, unable to finish. He clung to the memory that Palmetto had detected a Klingon life sign adjacent to the reactor. She had survived vacuum exposure. But the explosion? Tom ran his hand over his face, smudging the blood and grime into the sweat that covered him. "You have to prioritize the wounded. But if you--"

"You have my word, Sir. I'll do everything I can to find her and get her to safety," Aaron assured him intensely.

He was warmed at his friend's promise, despite the pain filling him on the inside, as he realized he had little hope that Aaron would be able to do what he'd promised.

}LS{

As Aaron and his makeshift teams slowly advanced through the station, more and more wounded began to trickle down to Tom and T"Lassa. Tom shut off the part of his brain that felt, and triaged the wounded as they straggled in. He had done this more times than he could even enumerate while he served on Voyager, the worst being during the onboard war with the Hirogen. This was slightly worse than that, he thought, but at the same time was thankful for the distraction of the work, because feeling anything was more than he was capable of at the moment.

His father was dead, B'Elanna was missing. His daughter's whereabouts were unknown, although T'Lassa had reassured him Joanna Harkins had taken all of the children to shelter after the Infirmary had been abandoned.

To escape the horror, he became a robot, each movement a repetition of the one before. He scanned, assessed, treated what he could, and moved on. Eight hundred people had been left on the station, and it seemed, there were barely any who had not been injured in some way. He kept moving, focusing on one person at a time, and hours passed. The stream of wounded only increased as the time progressed. Each time he checked the chronometer, he had to tamp down a shrill of anxiety, acknowledging he still had no word on anything he so desperately was waiting to learn.

The crackle of static over his combadge startled him. "Michaels to Paris," he heard through the device.

"Paris here," he said, surprised by the ragged sound of his own voice, which he hadn't heard for hours.

"I have auxiliary power online. Emergency force fields on the east side of the station are holding. The internal sensors are blinking on and off...but from what I could see, most of the east side is gone. The outermost ring where I detected a functioning forcefield was ring five." Tom briefly lost his breath at the news. Five rings destroyed. All the shuttle bays, most of the research labs and computer modeling stations. Eight years of his life, blown to bits in a matter of seconds.

Aaron continued, though Tom remained silent. "We are almost done sweeping, sir. The reactor room is intact. We're headed there next. We should be back to your location within 15 minutes."

"Understood," Tom managed to say, quieter than he had attempted to be, but at least thankful his voice hadn't broken. What Aaron was about to walk into, Tom could only imagine, like a scene from the worst nightmare he had ever had. He turned back to his work, desperate for the distraction.

Now that the sensors were functioning, and the Infirmary had minimal power, the most severely wounded patients were being relocated back to the actual Infirmary. He was in charge of sorting them to triage here, and if they needed more elaborate treatment, moving them back to the Infirmary.

As he worked, he realized most of the wounded streaming by him slowly now were ambulatory, limping, supported by other medics or friends. The muscles around his eyes ached as he scanned them, assessing their injuries. He would have time to go back, reprioritize, regrouping patients mentally until those who needed help first would get it. His breathing calmed, his pounding heart slowed.

But, then the shrill alarm in the back of his skull that he could not silence came to the forefront. B'Elanna. Whatever the vacuum had done to her, she had survived. But, that was hours ago. The room she had been in was intact, but that didn't necessarily mean she hadn't been hurt in the explosion. They would get to her, he kept repeating the mantra in his brain. She was the strongest person he had ever known, and the thought bolstered him. A brief flash of selfishness arose, as he considered calling Aaron again, when an anguished wail pulled him back to his surroundings.

He turned and ran at the latest stream coming towards him. The man's face was almost unrecognizable, blackened and burned, his uniform dirty and soaked with blood. In his arms, he carried the body of a woman, almost as badly disfigured by injury. It was only as he reached to take the man's burden that he realized who they were. Dan Hawkins, and his wife Joanna, the counselor. Tom sank down to his knees with the dead weight, feeling the hole in her back as he gently laid her onto a cot. Adrenalin surged through him, fueling a wave of nausea, as he realized with a jolt that she was dead.

Miral….

It was a primal scream, coming from deep inside him, that never found its way into his mouth.

He forced himself back to the moment by sheer force of will. He tried to focus on what Dan was saying. "...panel exploded….." was all Tom could discern through the other man's hysteria. He had to know Joanna was dead, but still, had run all this way--

Coming up quickly behind them was a crowd of about 50 people. Teenagers, ushering a group of younger children, making up the largest crowd. The children under Joanna's care, he thought. They were safe, for the most part. But the crowd parted, and he heard cries of despair and pain at what was coming through. It was a group of officers, medics, nurses, even some civilians who obviously did not evacuate, running, carrying injured. In seconds, Tom made out Aaron's form heading toward the front. It took only two more seconds before Tom was close enough to completely understand, but once he did, he felt reality begin to dissolve around him.

Aaron carried the broken body of his daughter, Miral, in his arms.

Tom stood shakily, nearly tripping over Joanna Hawkins' body and the crouched form of her husband, and ran to Aaron. "Oh my God…." Tom heard his voice, but didn't remember making the sound of the words in his throat. He sank to his knees again once his daughter was in his arms, Miral's head lolling back against him in a frighteningly lifeless way. Her face was black and bloodied, and her skin felt cold where he could touch her.

He didn't know it at the time, couldn't have fathomed the extent of these moments' consequences, but this memory, of grabbing Miral from Aaron, would be the last thing of this day, or the subsequent morning, that he would be able to recall with any clarity, well into the future.

Aaron had continued talking, screaming almost to be heard over Tom, who had also started screaming for the doctors. His face too, had been covered in blood and sweat, the tracks of his tears visible through the grime. Tom missed the report, his explanation of the situation they had found–an internal explosion caused by a power discharge, effectively trapping this group behind a wall of debris. Joanna Hawkins, apparently, had shielded as many children as she could with her body. He also missed Aaron's report of finding B'Elanna. Aaron was on autopilot, speaking though he knew Tom couldn't absorb what he was saying.

Aaron himself watched as T'Lassa ran, scooped the child out of her father's arms, and turned quickly to lay her across the gurney. She spoke quickly to the medics beside her. Her catching of Aaron's eyes as she spun was almost not noticeable, but Aaron nodded, gesturing with his hand to the group of children, where her daughter, T'Mira, was sitting, mostly unharmed. Joanna's daughter, Leila, as well as two other children plus Miral, were carried in, their injuries most severe. Aaron bent, lifting Joanna's body onto the gurney to help clear the pathway, and physically lifted her husband up off the ground into a chair beside the bed.

Aaron tucked the emotions that flared at the sight back down inside himself. The man was grieving for his wife. The pain he had to push far into the center of himself was extreme, both sympathy and empathy. As a person, Aaron didn't know them that well, having kept to himself most of the time. They were friends with Tom and B'Elanna, he understood. It made him focus his attention on his friend, uncertain how after so much all at once, he was still functioning.

Hysterical was not a word Aaron would have ever used to describe Tom, his friend and commanding officer. He had never seen it, never even heard of an instance where he had ever come close. But hysteria was the only word Aaron could use now to describe him. He seemed almost unaware of his surroundings, or his responsibilities, only his injured daughter. Another doctor had run into surgery, leaving Tom outside, as he crumpled to the ground. Aaron watched helplessly as T'Lassa pressed a hypospray against his neck, and worried at how oblivious he seemed to be, not acknowledging that she had even done so. He staggered away heavily.

Aaron turned to follow him, but was startled by another shout. "Commander! Your assistance, please!" T'Lassa shouted as she ran through another set of doors. In the room he had just entered, on the biobed in front of him, was B'Elanna. He had been with the team that had found her, but hadn't had time to examine her closely, letting them move her while he searched for other survivors. Half of her hair was missing, the same side of her face blackened and burned. Her eyes had bled in dark streams down her cheeks, that were almost white in pallor. Her uniform was ripped and bloodied. Worst by far, beneath her was an ever increasing puddle of blood.

The baby, he thought in alarm.