Pain hammered through him, a liquid fire that burned through his lower extremities, searing away feeling, scorching away hope. A bleak numbness had set in, blanketing his mind with a dull fog that made thinking hard and acting harder.

Malcolm Reed was dying.

He floated in a hazy twilight of near consciousness, that half-awake, half-asleep state where dreams and lucidity warred with one another. A part of him knew how badly he was injured, knew that the twenty centimeter long piece of shrapnel in his lower ribcage was slowly killing him, knew that blood loss and shock were setting in, but he couldn't find the strength to care. The end was near.

Blaring alarms continued to echo around him, oddly muted, as if originating from an impossibly vast distance. He felt something wet on his face and, for a moment, thought it was blood; the hiss of the fire suppression system finally penetrated his mental fog and, had he the strength, he would have chastised himself for jumping to conclusions. Smoke was heavy in the air - burnt plastic and fried circuits - making it difficult to breath. Oxygen reclamators - those that weren't damaged - struggled to filter out the smoke but he could tell it was a losing battle.

"Get on your feet, boy."

It was a voice that should not, could not be here, a voice that rang with authority and tolerated no insolence. Logically, Malcolm knew Stuart Reed wasn't here, knew that he couldn't be here, but that didn't stop him from feeling the Old Man's presence. It must be the shock, he told himself, darkly amused that now, at the moment of his death, he heard his father.

"Pain is just weakness leaving the body, boy. Life is pain. You're a Reed and Reeds die on their feet, not on their backs like some bloody frog so get up!" Malcolm stirred, flailed about for a grip before sinking back down into his misery, his agony. The shade, the memory, the hallucination wasn't impressed: "GET UP!"

Malcolm got up.

He swayed on his feet, gripping the edge of the tactical board with a death grip to keep from falling back on his arse. Long minutes passed as he fought the blackness that sought to overwhelm him, fought the desire to vomit up every meal he had ever eaten, fought the urge to give up and die. His heart thudded in his ears, loud and fast, and he dimly realized that he had no feeling in his feet. Blood ran down his leg but he ignored the pain, pushed it away. He could not falter; he was the captain now.

So he struggled on.

If the bridge had been bad off before, it was a bloody catastrophe now; the damage wrought by the shockwave was incalculable. Alarms shrieked incessantly. Fires raged unchecked. The viewscreen was a shattered mess. Mayweather was down.

Travis.

Malcolm half-staggered, half-fell to the Helm station, his heart rate accelerating even faster, already knowing it was too late. He was a private man, one who had erected walls of aloofness around himself to avoid getting too close to anyone for fear of losing them. There were a select few who had breached that wall, who he could truly call 'friend': Trip Tucker and Hoshi Sato were two such people.

Travis Mayweather was another.

Malcolm fell into a kneeling position beside the Boomer's still body and felt hot tears well up in his eyes. Glass and metal from the destroyed viewscreen had torn into the young lieutenant, had ripped through skin and flesh and bone, but Travis had an expression of peace on his face, a look of contented serenity that shattered Malcolm's resolve. He wanted to rage against the heavens, to cry out and scream, to grieve in a way that Travis deserved, but he couldn't find the strength, couldn't find the will, couldn't find the tears.

"... terprise ... nder Tucker. Medical emer ... eat med ... gency. Please respo ..." The comm crackled to life and the sound of Trip's voice thundered through him, igniting hope once more. Trip was alive.

So he struggled on.

Malcolm pulled himself into the Helm seat, barely noticing the crimson trail he left. A soft touch on the helm board revealed it to be mostly functional: internal sensors indicated that most of the lifeboats had launched; low impulse was available - one-eighth at best; maneuvering jets were ... erratic. The sensor feed was shaky, flickering in and out of focus, but he was able to detect the shuttlepod on approach vector. And then, something else.

A Romulan ship.

Confusion muddled his brain for long moments as he struggled to make sense of it. He had destroyed them all. Hadn't he? He frowned then, recalling the third ship, the damaged ship that had limped away. It was the same one, still limping at less than a sixteenth impulse.

And heading for the shuttlepod.

Malcolm didn't hesitate, keyed in an intercept course and demanded speed; he could hear the impulse drive whine in protest but ignored it. There were no phase cannons functional, no grapplers available, no torpedoes loaded, but he still had a weapon. A very large weapon.

The Romulan detected Enterprise's sudden acceleration and began maneuvering to bring its weapons to bear. Disruptor beams lanced out, caressing the already scarred hull of the Starfleet ship with its scorching touch but it was too little, too late. Enterprise smashed into the Romulan ship at nearly ten thousand kilometers per second.

Fire consumed them both.