Stardate 2258.42
Dagny jerked upright at the screaming, flashing siren above her head. Sleep still clouded her eyes but she was awake enough to jump from the top bunk and land gracefully on the hard floor.
"What's going on?" Ingrid yelped, rolling from the bottom bed.
"I don't know," Dagny replied. "Round up the little ones and have them ready to go to the escape pods."
"Escape pods?"
Her eyes darted to the pulsing red light on the wall. The Albret was on high alert. She couldn't remember the last time the ship had been placed on high alert. "Yes. Escape pods. But only if the bridge gives the order."
She grabbed her coat and rushed from the tiny room she shared with Ingrid, Frida, and Hedda. She was terrified but refused to show it. The corridors were pure chaos as people raced to man their stations. She prayed she wouldn't find many casualties when she got to the clinic.
As she ripped open the clinic's battered door, she was shocked to find it empty. What was going on? Why had no one issued an emergency broadcast?
Then she remembered they'd had issues with the ship's internal communications yesterday. She wheeled around and raced toward the bridge. There was so much panic everywhere she looked.
She burst through the wide double doors of the Albret's command center and found her father barking orders to the various stations. "Engineering, I need warp four, now. All transporters, standby!"
"Dad?"
"Get to the clinic, Dagny," he growled.
"What's going on?"
"Vulcan has issued a general distress call and has ordered an evacuation."
Surely she'd misheard him. How could a whole planet send a distress call? Why would a whole planet send a distress call?
"What?" she cried. "I don't understand, how-."
"Get to the clinic!" he roared, pointing her toward the door.
She stumbled backward and asked, "What are we going to do?"
Without turning to acknowledge her he replied, "Save as many as we can."
Her numbness and confusion morphed into shaky purpose. The bridge crew continued yelling orders and status updates, but this wasn't her place. Her father was right: she had to get back to the clinic. But what was she going to do with a medical staff of one? The Albret had a crew of ninety-eight plus forty-three family members aboard, but theoretically had a maximum passenger capacity of 5,000 if the cargo holds were emptied.
A sudden shock knocked her off her feet, sending her headfirst into a nearby bulkhead. Brilliant stars flashed through her field of vision and she could feel warm blood trickling down her forehead. She scrambled to her feet but hesitated as she passed a tiny, aluminum glass portal.
Dagny hadn't bothered to actively look out at the blackness of space for many years, but the space outside the Albret was far from empty. They were in the middle of a battle. It was nothing but debris and the flashing lights of energy weapons and torpedoes as far as the eye could see.
Her stomach sank. Were they all going to die?
As she staggered back down to the clinic, the ship jolted again and her knees knocked together from trembling. She'd lived her entire life in space and was well acquainted with the uncertainty that came with it. She'd seen bodies after depressurization accidents and corpses made unrecognizable by plasma burns, but somehow those had always seemed like things that happened to other people. She didn't work in engineering or run salvage operations—she worked in the tiny clinic on Deck 3.
"Dagny, we need you down in the cargo holds!" cried a voice far from behind her.
She glanced over her shoulder to see her cousin, Anders Eriksen, propping up an unusually tall man with jet-black hair rendered reddish gray from dust. She paused and stared at him with wonder. The left half of the man's face was slathered in green liquid. Green blood. He was Vulcan.
She didn't know anything about Vulcan medicine or physiology, other than that they had copper-based blood. Her yearlong paramedic course at Deneva Station had included two weeks of training in alien emergency medicine, and almost all of that had been practice in using the tricorder database to determine a course of treatment.
She knew how to point a tricorder at a Vulcan, run a quick scan, and get some vital signs. The tricorder could then tell her whether things like blood pressure and heart rate were normal and if they weren't, it would offer standard methods for correcting the problem. It was an awful system, but even the most experienced interspecies doctors were forced to rely on it at times because ultimately, no one individual could know everything there was to know about treating the hundreds of known sentient species throughout the galaxy.
Dagny had never had to treat any alien species; everyone aboard the Albret was human. The ship's corridors were fast becoming overrun with the lanky aliens with the severe haircuts, and she sensed that was about to change. Time seemed to slow.
Many of the Albret's children swarmed the corridors, directing their new passengers into the cargo holds. Apparently, the captain, her father, had dumped their cargo to make room for as many evacuees as possible. That cargo was their livelihood, but even as she wondered how they would find a way to eat for the next six months, her heart swelled with pride.
When she arrived at the clinic, she found Frida and Johan ransacking her sparse supplies. She didn't stop to question them but threw everything that remained—every bandage, every half-functioning dermal regenerator, every shoddy hypospray—into a plastic bag and headed for the belly of the ship with her younger brother and sister in tow, pushing through throngs of Vulcan evacuees.
She arrived to a sea of oddly subdued pandemonium. There had to be close to two hundred people in Cargo Bay 2 alone and more kept flooding in behind her. Most of the Vulcans were coated in a thin layer of reddish dirt. Many were injured, some seriously, but everywhere she looked, they were claiming small spaces for themselves and injured companions in a manner that seemed unnaturally orderly under the circumstances.
She didn't even know where to begin. She was only certain of one thing—there had never been enough medical supplies on the Albret in its 189-year history to handle the devastation lying before her. What now?
"Dagny, do something!" Johan shouted. "Help them!"
She took a labored breath and tried to remember her training. Triage. She needed to sort people by the severity of their injuries, but even still, she was only one person with no supplies. It suddenly occurred to her that given that the ship's swelling population, she couldn't be the only person aboard with medical training.
She twisted around and grabbed Frida's arm. "I need you to start stripping the sheets off every bed in this ship. Get anyone you can to help you. We need bandages and anything that could work as a bandage or a tourniquet. Johan, go with her."
Dagny could count on one hand the number of times her younger sister had followed an order without question, but Frida's pale eyes were wide with shock as she nodded and fled from the cargo hold. Dagny turned and reached for the intercom to address the burgeoning crowd, wondering exactly what she should say, when the ship trembled again and the overhead lighting dimmed.
She heard a few screams but no one panicked. How could these people be so calm? Her fingers groped at the comm's toggle switch and she discovered intership communications were still offline. Her eyes drifted out of focus as she gazed at a man with a crushed leg and observed a woman struggling to tie a belt around his upper thigh to stop the bleeding. People were dying and she was watching it happen. She wanted to cry but somehow found a way to channel her terror into vehemence.
"Please listen!" she shouted. The din faded in her immediate vicinity and people turned to face her. "Everyone, please!"
The noise grew quieter still. That would have to do. "I need anyone with a medical background, doctors, nurses, medics, anyone, to please identify yourselves. We're- we're working on getting supplies. I- I have some here, but our resources are very limited. If I could get everyone who isn't seriously injured to please move to the back of the room. Please."
Miraculously, people started to obey. She nodded to herself and rushed over to the man with the shattered leg but realized he was already dead. She'd seen death before and had the feeling she was going to see a lot more of it before this day was over, if she even survived at all.
"Excuse me," murmured a monotone voice behind her in crisp Federation Standard. She whirled around to find an older Vulcan man with his hands folded behind his back. "Are you the ship's medical officer?"
"More or less."
"I am Sevek, the chief thoracic surgeon in Gol's third district hospital. I am willing to provide assistance."
"Great," she breathed, reaching for the plastic bags she'd brought from the clinic. She upended one and started sifting through its contents. She only had one working tricorder.
"Excuse me," Sevek insisted. "Does your ship have emergency action procedures?"
"Not for anything like this," she admitted, grabbing a broken tricorder and waving it at the masses of people littering the cargo hold.
"I have already begun triaging patients. Will you permit me to continue according to my hospital's protocols?"
Was he really asking for her permission? "That would be… great. Thank you, sir."
"We require medical supplies. Is this all you have?"
"Yes. We were coming to Vulcan to get resupplied," she explained.
Suddenly Johan returned with an enormous pile of dingy, white linens.
"Start tearing them up!" she barked at her younger brother. "Long, wide strips."
Sevek cocked an eyebrow at the odd assortment bed sheets and Dagny suddenly felt angry and uncomfortable. "This is all there is! We're going to have to make it work!"
Two Vulcan woman stepped forward and set to work cutting the sheets into the long strips Dagny asked for and she felt a huge wave of gratitude.
"Have you any diagnostic equipment?" Sevek continued, eyeing the tricorder in Dagny's left hand.
"I don't know. Do you have anyone handy with fixing tricorders?"
A woman stepped forward and replied, "I am a robotics engineer."
"Great, now you're a medical tricorder repair technician," she said, tossing her the broken device.
She dug through one of the bags Frida had brought from the clinic, found her lone working tricorder, and handed it to Sevek. "I'm in way over my head here, Dr. Sevek. I'm just a paramedic. I can handle lacerations and simple fractures, but I can't do the major stuff. I need your help. Please."
He accepted the tricorder and nodded deferentially. "I do not suppose you have any surgical equipment?"
She reached back into the bag and quickly located Birgitte's laser scalpel and gave it to him. "Other than that, surgical supplies are whatever you can beg, borrow, or improvise. I'm serious; take whatever you can find."
Dr. Sevek quickly disappeared into the crowd. She spun around to find Frida with another stack of sheets in her arms. Dagny pointed her to the door and said, "Follow me to Cargo Bay 1."
She found twice as many evacuees in the enormous cargo hold on the starboard side of the ship. She began a new quest to organize physicians and supplies and enlist the help of anyone with skills even remotely relevant to the task of accommodating thousands of people in a space built to hold shipping containers.
She assumed Vulcan was suffering from some kind of catastrophic natural disaster or full-scale attack based on the injuries she was seeing and the powdery red dirt covering everything, but even the Vulcans didn't seem to know what was going on. No one knew anything.
The ship continued to creak and shudder but Dagny tried to push the thought of imminent death from her mind. What good would it do?
She asked Arvid for an update when the ship's chief engineer came through the lower decks to recruit computer, mechanical, and warp field engineers, but he admitted he only knew the status of the Albret's ancient warp drive. Apparently the heart of the ship was on life support.
While the crew and a fresh batch of Vulcan volunteers fought to hold the ship together, the crew's family members, many of them children, found their way down to the cargo holds to offer any kind of help they could. Dagny gave orders to the newly minted army of young Skjeggestads, Eriksens, Karlsens, Nygårds, Svendsens, Jørgensens, Brekkes, and Hellands, and soon they were stripping away the interior of the ship to produce makeshift stretchers and locate food, tools, and clothing.
At Dr. Sevek's advice, they began moving the most critical patients into the smaller forward cargo holds. She saw her mother waddling through the huge group of people, offering water, coats, and a few threadbare blankets to the Vulcan children. Just as the chaos of the lower decks slowly became organized, the ship started to lurch and the lights went out.
A few of the smaller children screamed. Dagny wanted to join them but clapped her hand over her mouth and braced herself on a nearby steel ladder. The ship started rocking violently and she got the sense it was being torn apart. When the quaking stopped a minute later, the only sounds came from crying infants and the shallow breathing of several thousand people packed into close quarters. Why wasn't there more panic?
Suddenly, a piercing note sputtered over the loudspeaker and she heard her father clear his throat.
"Attention all crew and passengers…" His voice cracked and Dagny froze. The stoic tension in the cargo bay was suddenly amplified in the darkness. "Vulcan- Vulcan has… been destroyed."
Dagny's breath caught in her throat and her head began to buzz. She expected to hear reactionary screaming, but the silence only grew more persistent. Even the babies had stopped crying.
"I don't know who or why or how. I'm trying to reach anyone in the Federation, but the residual radiation is making subspace communication difficult."
His voice faltered but the communication link remained open. The bridge was normally a lively place full of bawdy jokes and irritable commands, but Dagny could hear nothing but the sound of her father's labored breathing.
"I'm sorry," he croaked. "I'm so sorry."
The lights flickered and Dagny looked around at the sea of faces. Their eyes were dead. Her father's words had made her numb, but the Vulcans' universal stunned reaction immediately sent tears down her cheeks.
"Our focus now is to get our warp drive operational and set a course for Andoria," her father continued. "We're low on supplies and tight on space. We appreciate your cooperation and understanding. We're doing our best. Skjeggestad out."
Dagny cupped her hands over her face and massaged her forehead. How could a whole planet be destroyed? How many people lived on Vulcan? She didn't know. Probably billions.
The next hours became a blur of setting broken limbs, patching lacerations, hundreds of questions, and trying to stay one step ahead of death at every turn. Information and rumors trickled in but Dagny no longer felt interested in hearing it because none of it was good.
Apparently Romulans had destroyed Vulcan, Earth was now facing a similar threat, and people kept dying. A number of smaller ships from nearby sectors started to rendezvous with the Albret to offer supplies and assistance and take on passengers to alleviate the burden. Not all of them were Federation members.
A Nausicaan freighter offered all the biobeds in its sickbay. An Orion captain wanted for piracy gave up half his medical supplies and emergency rations. Three hours after her father made the announcement, a team of Andorian surgeons brandishing sophisticated equipment arrived and it seemed like the death toll would finally stop climbing.
As the hours ticked on, needs began to shift and become more mundane but nonetheless important. People needed bathrooms, diapers, food, and bedding. The need for fresh bandages never ceased.
Dagny was exhausted but so was everyone else. She stopped for a moment to lean against one of the bulkheads and her eyelids started to flutter. As appealing as sleep sounded, she didn't look forward to the dreams that were sure to come.
A few seconds later, she sensed someone was watching her and forced her eyes open. Daniel was gazing her. She smiled at her sixteen-year-old brother but quickly realized something was wrong. His eyes were red and his face was contorted in a look of sad confusion.
"Have you seen mother?" he asked. His voice sounded cold and disconnected.
"Not recently," she admitted. "What's going on?"
His chin started to quiver and he bit his lip.
"Daniel?" she probed.
"Aksel and Benjamin," he muttered. "They're dead."
Her jaw fell open. How could they be dead? Her two oldest brothers couldn't be dead. That didn't make sense. Dagny's chest started to constrict and she felt herself going weak at the knees and sliding down the wall to sit on the floor.
She stared straight ahead, dimly aware an elderly Vulcan man was watching her. She'd been confused by the Vulcans' dazed reactions upon learning that their planet, their homes, their friends and loved ones were all gone. Now a small part of her understood.
Voris could no longer feel his bondmate's mind linked to his, but he rarely consciously thought about it. When was the last time he'd taken a moment to sense T'Sala's consciousness? Was it hours ago? Days? It didn't matter—she was no longer with him. As he considered the implications, he knew the most logical conclusion was that she was either unconscious or dead.
He sat upright in the small chair in the lobby of the Vulcan consulate next to his father, eyes trained on the holographic projector cube in the center of the room. They were lost in the midst of nearly a hundred other Vulcans.
Starfleet security protocols didn't allow for live broadcast coverage, so much of the news was speculation and irrelevant facts. The limited information they were receiving was more than eight hours old now, but none of it was good.
Just ten minutes earlier, Federation officials had finally identified the aggressors as Romulan. Twenty minutes before that, Starfleet had admitted it had lost contact with the fleet of ships it had sent to defend his home world. Though the Romulan Star Empire had yet to claim credit for the attacks, it seemed likely the Federation was on the brink of war.
Voris glanced at his father, noting the unusually empty expression in his eyes. Silek turned his head to regard his son and though neither of them spoke, they shared an understanding. Something was very wrong.
Suddenly the room fell silent and Voris was aware the news anchor had stopped speaking. The man's hand was visibly shaking and pressed to the device in his ear, his mouth forming silent syllables of confusion. "We have some breaking news. The ships sent to answer Vulcan's distress call… Starfleet Command has- what?"
The man's features locked into an expression of fear and bewilderment as he turned his head to the left and mouthed something to someone standing off screen. His hand returned to his earpiece and he stared ahead lifelessly. Silent seconds ticked by as the crowd packed into the lobby of the Vulcan consulate awaited an answer from the pale-faced reporter.
The sliding of the pneumatic double doors leading back to the consular offices interrupted the stillness. The Vulcan ambassador to Earth was currently on Vulcan and his deputy was engaged in an emergency meeting with the Federation Council. The secretary to the Vulcan ambassador appeared and started speaking, and though denial of truth was illogical, Voris wasn't certain he was hearing the news correctly.
Vulcan was gone. Destroyed. The precise method of its destruction was unknown, but sensors at nearby relay stations weren't even recording the presence of debris. It was simply gone. There were currently no reports of any survivors.
The remainder of Starfleet's force was engaged in the Laurentian system and the Romulans had obliterated the small contingent that had answered Vulcan's distress call, leaving nearby Federation member planets virtually defenseless. The Terran government had yet to issue any guidance, but the consular secretary was urging all Vulcan citizens to evacuate Earth.
People started speaking in hushed voices but Voris could find no words. He stared listlessly at the holographic projector, watching the anchor with the increasingly pale complexion. "Starfleet Command is asking concerned citizens to please refrain from contacting headquarters until further information becomes available. Again, the names of the missing vessels are Antares, Armstrong, Enterprise, Hood, Mayflower, Newton…"
"We must go," Silek said, his voice barely rising above a whisper.
"Where?" Voris replied. Though he struggled to comprehend the enormity of the news, he recognized there was nowhere to go. Their home was gone. His mate was gone. His mother, his sisters, his friends and colleagues… gone.
Voris noticed his father's chin quiver slightly. Voris understood. The ability of the Vulcan mind to repress emotion had its limits and everywhere Voris looked, those limits were on the verge of being breached. The pain was so profound it became physical. His heart thundered erratically and his hands trembled.
"It is logical-" His father's voice cracked and he clamped his mouth shut.
People started filing from the lobby and Silek stood. "It is logical to leave Earth."
"And go where?" Voris repeated, feeling a surge of shameful and perplexing anger. He took a slow breath to collect himself.
"I do not know," his father admitted. "Yet I believe it is prudent to attempt to secure passage away from this planet while there is still time."
Voris blinked. "No."
"Now is not the time for disgraceful and illogical defiance," Silek replied, his tone growing firm.
"It is not defiance; it is acceptance," Voris countered. "Vulcan is destroyed. Earth has been my home for the past five years and it is the closet thing to a home remaining to me."
"Voris, I urge you to reconsider."
His father's unusual use of his given name did little to sway his decision. Silek had asked him to reconsider nearly every decision of his adult life, and rarely had Voris ever complied. He rose to his feet, formed his right hand into the ta'al and said, "Live long and prosper, father."
Silek's lips thinned and his eyes narrowed but he nodded and replied, "May you have peace and long life, Voris."
He watched Silek disappear into the crowd of Vulcans filing from the lobby and Voris returned to his seat. As far as he knew, his father was the only kin he had left and he wondered how severely his regrettable, irrepressible emotions were clouding his judgment. He could not know. Was it logical to leave Earth? Should he join his father before it was too late?
Voris stared at the central holographic screen, observing the news as it scrolled by on a ticker at the top of the screen. They still had not reported on Vulcan's demise so it seemed logical to conclude the consular secretary had access to information not given to the media outlets. If the consulate recommended evacuation, it was also logical to conclude they had reason to believe Earth was no longer safe. Earth was the home of Starfleet and Federation offices; it would be a worthy target for a belligerent enemy.
Yet if Vulcan had been destroyed and Earth were no longer safe, what place was safe? Trickles of emotion dripped through his consciousness, winding their way into the darkest depths of his soul. His anger dueled with his despair, threatening to topple his rational mind. He required extensive meditation and a private area to grieve.
He felt as if he were operating on instinct. He made his way to the door and stepped into the late morning. The summer air was cool—many of his colleagues at Sarah April Memorial Hospital would call it a "scorcher"—and a light breeze rolled in through the bay. Vehicle and pedestrian traffic was thick and he was unable to hail a taxi. Were his logical faculties properly functioning, he would have recalled it was the hour many humans took a midday meal, but it was all Voris could do to subdue his frustration.
He turned left at the sidewalk and trudged toward his apartment building. It was more than thirty blocks away, but time and distance felt irrelevant. He wasn't long into his trek home when a young woman gently grabbed his arm and said, "I'm so sorry about your home." He recoiled at the stranger's touch but managed to maintain his fragile outward composure.
He wanted to tell the woman that unless she had been involved in the destruction of his home world, she had nothing for which to say sorry, but humans had a curious way of apologizing for things as a way of expressing sympathy even when they were not culpable. Empathy was logical; sympathy was not. Empathy was an attempt to understand the plight of another, whereas sympathy implied a person wished to actually feel another's sorrow, pity, or hardships.
Voris could think of nothing to say so he simply nodded to the woman and continued on his way. He received more sympathetic glances and gestures as he walked. The humans' well-intentioned but illogical reactions to his presence only gave him cause to reflect on that which he was grieving. He felt his psyche starting to crack as he recalled memories of his life on Vulcan and he finally started to acknowledge the sum of what he'd lost.
T'Sala was dead. His mother and sisters and secondary relatives were gone. He would never return to the family estate. He would never again observe the season of T'Khut in Vulcan's Forge. His emotional pain began to manifest into physical symptoms. Voris realized he was trembling and having difficulty breathing. He needed to find a place to be alone, but he was still so far from home. Home. Where was that?
Home was no longer a Minshara-class planet sixteen light years from Earth, but a cramped apartment slathered in purple paint on 17th Street. His breathing grew more erratic and walking became an enormous effort. He stared at the ground, attempting to conceal his regrettable condition. When he looked up to reference his location, he noticed two women pointing at something in the sky. His shaking grew violent, but after a fraction of a second, he realized the ground was the source of the disturbance. An earthquake?
He spun around and observed the presence of an enormous object reminiscent of an antiquated a space elevator linking the ocean to the upper atmosphere. The sidewalk continued to tremble and people started screaming and running for shelter. Voris remained frozen in place, gazing at the mysterious, serpentine object that had descended from the sky.
He couldn't see its precise point of entry, but he started to get the sense it was a large-scale mining drill. He swallowed hard. Voris wasn't a geologist, but he knew what would be coming if his assumption were correct about the object's purpose. San Francisco was situated along a continental transform fault that extended for more than a thousand kilometers. Drilling through the planet's crust at this fragile location would almost certainly result in devastating seismic activity and subsequent damaging waves of water.
He watched the drill, momentarily mesmerized by the swell of steam and water pulsing up from the bay. He found himself shrouded in a powerful sense of calm. He didn't know who was drilling into the planet or why— speculation was illogical, after all—but San Francisco was likely on the verge of catastrophe. He would probably die today and he found this revelation was surprisingly easy to accept.
The sound of screeching metal interrupted his trance. He turned his head to locate the source and reflexively dove behind a nearby tree, narrowly avoiding being struck a spinning vehicle. The ground was shaking harder and several of the taller buildings were beginning to sway.
"Somebody help me!" screamed a male voice.
Voris scrambled to his feet and saw a man clawing at the door of private hovercar. The passenger side was wedged against the tree and the driver's side was deformed, presumably from a collision with the transport shuttle sitting idly in the middle of the road. The front of the hovercar was on fire.
Voris rushed around the front of the vehicle and saw an unconscious woman in the driver's seat. It was evident from the odd angle of her head that her neck was broken and she was dead. The man wasn't trying to save her though; he was focused on the occupant in the back seat, a small girl with the same dark skin as the dead woman in the front. Her eyes were wide and her tiny hands clutched the restraints on her chest.
"Move," Voris ordered, shoving the man aside.
The glass had shattered but the narrow dimensions of the rear windows prevented him from extracting the child and the front of the vehicle was now fully engulfed in flames. He wedged his fingers between the buckled door and the vehicle's frame and pulled. It creaked and groaned but refused to give. The heat wafting from the engine fire was becoming unbearable and he started to choke.
His lips curled away from his teeth and he pulled harder. The girl started to scream. Voris' fingers ached. He could feel the tendons in his hands, arms, and shoulders straining from his efforts. He couldn't breathe and his ears rung with the piercing cries of the child and the shouts of hundreds of people running for their lives.
Then the door flew open and he stumbled backwards, but he caught himself and quickly lurched forward into the hovercar's backseat. The girl was nodding in and out of consciousness as he fumbled with the buckles of the harness tethering her to the vehicle. He wriggled her out of the web of the restraints and she threw her weak arms around his neck. He grabbed her around the midsection and pulled, extracting her from the burning vehicle.
She turned her head in the direction of the woman in the front seat and started to bleat, "Mommy!" Voris looked for the man who'd originally come to her aid but he was nowhere to be seen amid the bedlam erupting on the streets of San Francisco.
He clutched the girl tightly to his chest and staggered forward when the ground suddenly bucked ferociously and they were consumed in a wash of dust and deafening thunder.