Disclaimer: Star Trek and all associated characters and situations are the property of CBS studios. Star Trek Online is the creation of Cryptic and Perfect World. Tomb Raider and the situations therein are the property of Square Enix. All are here used by myself for entertainment purposes only, without permission or intent to profit. Stardates were calculated with the help of the TNG Stardate Calculator available on TrekGuide .com and may be slightly out of sync with those used in the game's lore.
After the Crash
USS Nautilus, Shuttle One Crew, Sam Hayashi's Log, Supplemental:
We made it out of the ancient palace the Solarii have turned into Creepy Scavenger Central, and we pretty much burned it to the ground in the process. Go us. Unfortunately, right after that we were beamed up by a bunch of Orions in this old bird-of-prey who decided we'd make good prisoners.
Carlin doesn't think this will work out. Quite apart from the whole being-prisoners thing, she believes there's something on this planet, on this island, that won't let us leave. She think's its a device of some kind. I'm not so sure. Whatever it is, if the Orions try to leave the planet without dealing with it first, they'll crash...and I don't want to stick around for that! Carlin and Commander Drel are going to the bridge with the Orion commander's girlfriend to try and talk him out of it, but if he fails, I've got to find a way to get us all of this ship in one piece before it goes down.
As soon as the Orion lady, Atria, left the transporter room, the guards trained their weapons on the remaining Starfleet survivors: Sam, Alex, and Doctor Howard. They jerked their weapons toward the door. "Come with us," one of them ordered. "We've got a couple cells down on deck three that I'm sure you'll find to your liking." The other guard barked a laugh.
Sam rolled her eyes, but had no choice but to follow them out. The Orions had let her keep her yumi and even her arrows, apparently not believing that such primitive weapons posed a threat. Sam was sure she could prove them wrong - under the right circumstances - , but at the moment they had Klingon disruptor rifles trained on her and her friends...and that made it difficult to argue with their conclusions. Besides, I need to play nice right now, she reminded herself. Even now Carlin was on the bridge, trying to convince the Orions of the very real danger the storm that had brought down Shuttle Two posed to them. Sam might not think it was a weather-control device, per se, but it was definitely something unnatural and powerful - and if they didn't deal with it first, Sam put their odds of getting off this planet in one piece at slightly less than none.
The guards led them out the door and down a long corridor. They passed through a heavy blast door and a set of stairs leading up. The guards led them to a second set of stairs, leading down. "Stairs? Seriously?" Sam quipped, playing up her sarcastic nature in a bid for time. "You guys have never heard of a turbolift?" The Orions ignored her barbs, though, both of them casting sidelong glances down the corridor, to what seemed to be main engineering.
"I guess for a ship this small, the designers figured you didn't need turbolifts," Alex said.
"Even the Aerie-class I bought when I was eighteen had turbolifts," said Sam.
"Well, the Aerie-class is nearly twice the size of this thing," Alex pointed out.
"You know your ships," Sam complimented him. "But that's still ridiculous. The Aerie-class is a glorified runabout. Nothing half its size can possibly be considered a starship, much less a warship - especially if it lacks turbolifts!"
One of the Orions bared his teeth. "I wouldn't say such things so close to engineering if I were you," he warned.
Just then, the deck trembled. Sparks flew from several panels down the hall in engineering. Sam couldn't see much of the room, but she heard a resounding roar, followed by an Orion man getting thrown bodily out into the hall. One of the guards turned to the other. "Take the prisoners, quickly," he said. "I'll try to calm down Rsgar."
"Be careful!" said the other. "Gorn are immune to the stun setting on these things, and the Commander won't want him hurt...as little chance as there is of that."
The first Orion nodded and cautiously headed toward engineering while the other herded the Starfleet prisoners down the stairs. Sam wanted to ask what a Gorn was doing in the engineering of an Orion Syndicate ship, but the way the guard prodded her forward when she tried to turn and ask told her he wasn't in the mood for questions.
At the bottom of the stairs was a short hallway, running perpendicular to the one upstairs, with a pair of cramped holding cells at the end. The guard motioned for them to get inside while he stood at the security console, hand hovering over the forcefield controls.
He never got a chance to use them. A moment later the ship bucked violently, throwing everyone to the floor as the lights flickered. The guard reached for his rifle but Sam got it first. She grabbed it with one hand and punched the Orion in the side of the head with the other. The blow knocked the guard out, but it also bruised her knuckles. "Dumb move, dumb move," Sam said to herself. She passed off the rifle to Doctor Howard while she massaged her hand. "Alex, you seem to know a fair bit about Klingon ships: see if you can pull up a sensor feed on that security terminal," she said. "We've got to find out what's going on out there."
"Yes, ma'am," said Alex, making his way to the console.
"Ma'am?" Sam repeated, making a face. "Please, Ensign, don't call me ma'am."
"Oh, right, Starfleet regulations," he said. "Sorry, sir."
"Sir?" That was even worse! "How about Sam, or Samantha if you absolutely must? I'm told that's my name."
"Right, s - Sam," he said, blushing. "Sorry."
"You're forgiven this time," she said. Then cleared her throat. "So, what's out there?"
"We're definitely taking hits from what looks like polaric ion discharges," said Alex. "These sensors aren't too accurate, but from what they're giving me I'd say its exactly the same thing as what happened to our rescue shuttle, only a lot more powerful!" He keyed in another sequence. "Also, we're still on a course for planetary orbit."
"Yeah, that won't last long," Sam said. Alex nodded. "Alright diplomacy has failed. New plan, then: if the Orions want to get themselves shot down by the Creepy Polaric Storms of Yamatai, we let them. Meanwhile we get ourselves and our friends off of this ship so they can crash it alone!"
"Agreed," said the Doctor. "We'll need to get back to the transporter room."
"We have to emit a subspace differential pulse first or the polaric radiation will scramble our transport signals and scatter us across the face of the planet," said Alex. "I can't do it from here. I'll need to go to main engineering."
"You do remember that's where the Orions are keeping their angry Gorn - the one even they are afraid of?" asked Sam.
"Yeah, well it's either that or the bridge, and we can't wait that long," said Alex. "If I go in alone while you two go to the transporter room, I'll have the pulse ready by the time you're there. You can target me, the Commander, and Lieutenant Agran remotely and we can all beam off together."
"Are you sure about this?" asked Sam. She did not like the idea of splitting up, particularly when it involved putting someone with such little combat experience at risk, but it didn't look like she had much choice.
"I know exactly where the deflector controls are," he assured her. "I'll be in and out in no time: the Gorn will never see me."
"He'd better not," said Sam. "Hand him the rifle, Doc," she directed. Then she nocked an arrow to her bow and led the way upstairs. Halfway up the deck shook again. Sam managed to keep her footing by grabbing one of the handrails, but it was a near thing. "Why'd it have to be stairs?" she wondered aloud before continuing on.
At the top of the stairs they found themselves back in the long corridor, which was now dim and clouded with smoke. The body of an Orion guard lay crumpled by the stairs. His disruptor rifle was still in his hands, but his head was a mess. "I guess that whole calming the Gorn down thing didn't work out for him," Sam said as Doctor Howard retrieved the unfortunate man's weapon. Sam turned to Alex, wishing one last time for another way - but she knew there wasn't one. She patted him on the shoulder. "Come back alive, that's an order."
"Yes, s...Sam," he said and smiled. Then he disappeared in the the smoky haze of the engineering compartment.
Meanwhile Sam and the Doctor made their way up the long passageway back to the transporter room. They had just passed the set of blast doors halfway down the hall when suddenly those doors snapped shut behind them. Sam whirled, looking for a reason why the doors had slammed down when suddenly the whole hallway shook and she was thrown backward against the doors. The shaking didn't get much better after that. It just continued. Sam pushed herself off the door and turned around, grabbing one of the metal struts that ribbed the hallway for support. "We have to get to the transporter!" Doctor Howard was already pulling himself along, but he was shorter and less limber, which meant he was having a harder time grabbing the struts for support. Sam didn't dare try to help him. The best thing I can do is get to that transporter room and beam us all off before the Orions get us all killed!
Then, there was a tremendous crash. Metal screamed as it was ripped apart. The whole world pitched forward and Sam went tumbling through the hall. She managed not to break anything, including her bow, and she managed to catch herself - but that last only after the ship had come to rest again with a final concussive boom. She looked up, blinking and trying to get her bearings. "The transporter room!" She had stopped right in front of it. She stood and rushed to the doors. They didn't open at first so she pushed on their rough surfaces, prying them slowly apart. She stopped and stepped back once she had a gap of a few centimeters. Acrid smoke poured through the gap and the room beyond it looked like a dramatic representation of Hell, complete with pillars of roaring fire. She slammed the door shut again. "Okay, we are definitely not getting out that way," she said to the Doctor, who was just picking himself up a little further down the hall.
"There should be escape pods...or at least, there might be. I'm not sure where they'd be though," said Howard.
"I guess we'll have to go back and get Alex," said Sam.
"I'm afraid that won't be possible." Howard pointed to the blast doors at the end of the hall. "Unless I miss my guess, when those doors at the end of the hall closed, the head and neck of this thing separated from the rest of the bird-of-prey. I saw the Klingons do it a few times during the Dominion War. If that's the case, Alex could be hundreds of kilometers away - or dead..."
The news hit Sam like a hammer. She clenched her fists. People died: she knew that - good people, smart people, fun people, people like Alex: they died all the time. They were at war after all, and even if they weren't there were always other incredibly dangerous and deadly things out there waiting for some intrepid explorer to come along and get killed by them - like this planet, for instance. Alex was not the first friend she'd lost, but he was the first person to die under her command. If he's dead, she reminded herself forcefully. He could be perfectly fine...a hundred kilometers from here with no way of contacting the rest of us - but still perfectly fine! In any case, there was nothing she could do about him right now, and she still had other concerns: other friends.
"Carlin and Commander Drel are probably still on the bridge," said Sam. "Let's go get them."
They moved to the doors to the bridge and pried them open. Another, lesser inferno waited on the other side, but Sam caught sight of movement, close to the door. A female form was dragging a man's body toward them. "Help!" she cried out. "I need help!"
Doctor Howard squeezed through the gap in the door to help her and Sam started to follow, then stopped. That wasn't Carlin's voice, and it certainly wasn't Carlin. The woman was taller with green skin and black, singed hair, and the man she was dragging was a massive Orion male. The woman she recognized as the so-called Lady Atria, their captor's little hussy. She hesitated.
The Doctor turned to her. "Open the door, Lieutenant!" he ordered. "We need to get this man out of here before this whole place goes up!"
Sam blinked and scolded herself. You signed up to Starfleet to save lives, right? At the moment, the war doesn't matter, and neither does the skin color of the people you're saving. She braced herself against the door and pushed it open about halfway, which was thankfully wide enough to accommodate the unconscious muscle-bound Orion that the Doctor and Atria were dragging out together. She held the door open until they were through then turned back to the burning bridge. "Where's Carlin and Commander Drel?" she asked.
"Dead!" said Atria, coughing. "They were in the very front. A discharge arced right through there. It killed my helmsman and your science officer. Your Commander was in the front when we crashed, nose first. There's no way he survived."
Sam pounded the bulkhead. "No!" She felt hot tears running down her cheeks. Her eyes scanned the smoky interior of the bridge, but she could see nothing. A line of fires and debris cut her off from the forward sections of the bridge, and her bare feet told her the deck was already uncomfortably hot where she was standing. She pounded the bulkhead again in helpless frustration.
"Look, I share your pain," said Atria. "Most of my crew is dead and the rest may be so before morning, but we have to get away from here. The EPS relays around the bridge could go critical at any moment. We don't want to be anywhere near them when they do."
Sam gritted her teeth and made herself step away from the bridge. She took the disruptor rifle from Doctor Howard and started searching for a way out. The blast doors at the end of the hall were still sealed, and without power Sam didn't think there was any way they would get them open again. Yet as they headed that way another opportunity presented itself. Something had hit the side of the bird-of-prey's "neck" and hit it hard. The whole hull bent at a slight angle and at the apex of this bend was a tear that went all the way through the outer hull into the night of Yamatai - on a forested island somewhere, by the looks of it. The opening was less than a third of a meter wide, but Sam fiddled with the settings on the rifle for a minute, bringing it up to full power, and fired at the edges of the gap a few times. She was able to more than double the size of the opening, enough to allow her to squeeze through and drop down onto the dirt on the other side. Dirt and rocks! Her feet reminded her painfully that she wasn't wearing any shoes and that this was a mistake.
She tried to ignore the pain and focused on helping Doctor Howard and Atria bring the unconscious Orion through the opening and lay him on the dirt slope beside the wreck. When that was done, Sam cast a glance backward and saw her fears confirmed. Everything aft of the bird-of-prey's "neck" was simply gone. God, please let Alex be alright! she prayed.
Meanwhile, Doctor Howard was fussing over the Orion's body. He ran his tricorder over the wound: a piece of shrapnel embedded in the man's side. "Left lung is punctured and badly damaged, but it could be worse," he said. "Hold him still. I'm going to sedate him."
"But he's already unconscious," said Sam.
"I'll have to get that shrapnel out of him before I operate - and I'm certain that will wake him up!" Howard explained.
Sam nodded and decided to leave the Doctor to it. She had no medical training to speak of so she decided to keep watch. She picked her way down the slope and looked in either direction, weapon ready. She saw nothing but silent woodlands. Somehow that wasn't very comforting. There were explosions from the forward sections of the wreck. She tried not to think about whose bodies they were probably destroying.
She tapped her combadge. "Lieutenant Hayashi to Ensign McKensey, do you read me?" she said. "Alex, please respond!"
There was silence for a moment, then a voice replied, "Lieutenant Sam, is that you?"
"Yes!" she said. Close enough. "Are you alright? Where are you?"
"I'm still in engineering," he said. "I found the Gorn. He hit his head pretty hard in the crash. I think he's dead. I'm working on emergency power only, but I can't seem to access deflector control."
"That's because the forward sections of the bird-of-prey separated," said Sam. "There is no deflector anymore."
"Ah, that makes sense," said Alex.
Sam looked around. "We're on the main island, just a few kilometers west of the Solarii city. I can see the fires on the hill from here. Where are you?"
"I'm checking the sensors - or what's left of them." There was a pause. "It looks like we went down just beside the coast, about a half dozen kilometers south-southeast of your position. The water's shallow and I think the wreck is stable...I think."
"We need to go there," Atria said, looking up from where the Doctor was operating on her companion.
Sam nodded. "We're not leaving anyone behind."
"I agree with your sentiment, Starfleet," said Atria, "but there's more to it than that. I converted parts of Deck One into a shuttlebay. My private shuttle is there. It should get us off the planet."
Sam looked at Atria, then at the wreck behind them, then back again. "Are you sure you've been paying attention? Because I think you just lost a starship trying to pull the same stunt."
"My shuttle is a modified Ferengi design, with a state-of-the-art cloak," said Atria, smiling. "It'll get us off just fine."
Sam shook her head. "I'm pretty sure whoever or whatever wants us stuck on this planet isn't relying on conventional sensors."
"You make them sound almost supernatural?" The Orion woman smirked. "Tell me, are all humans this superstitious, or is it just you?"
Sam was about to fire back a retort when she heard a clattering sound over her combadge. She turned to it instead. "What was that, Alex? Please tell me you didn't trip and die."
"Negative on the tripping...uh, but last part's still...still an open question!" There was more clattering, followed by a roar. "The Gorn is definitely not dead...and he's angry - very very angry!"
"Alright, get out of there and get somewhere safe," Sam instructed. "There should be a shuttlebay on deck one-"
"The shuttle is keyed to my biosigniture," said Atria. "If I'm not alive and present to touch the controls myself, it won't unlock."
Sam swore. "Okay, forget the shuttle! Alex, just try to get outside!"
"A little busy right now!" Alex said. "I'm gonna try to - Oh, no!" There was a louder crash, then silence.
"Sam to Alex!" She tapped her combadge. "Lieutenant Hayashi to Ensign McKensey! Alex, do you read me?" She gritted her teeth. "Damn!"
"Rsgar is not to be trifled with, even on a good day," Atria said. "If he's been badly injured, his anger may have driven him beyond the reach of all reason."
"Great, just great!" She stormed over to where the Doctor was working, ignoring the pain in her feet. "Doc, please tell me you have good news."
"Well, the patient's going to live, if that's what you need to know," he said and laid down his tools. "I just need to bring him around..." He stopped suddenly, looking up in the direction of the bridge.
Sam did too. A minute ago there'd been a particularly large explosion from that direction, but this sound was something different. Weapons-fire! she realized. She handed the disruptor rifle back to Howard and readied her bow. "Waking him up will have to wait. Somebody's shooting at somebody else over there, and I'll bet anything that the Solarii are involved."
"Solarii?" Atria asked. "Friends of yours?"
"You could say that - in a murderous-worst-enemy sort of way," said Sam. She started picking her way forward. Doctor Howard followed after handing a hypospray and his medkit over to Atria. Sam wasn't exactly comfortable with that arrangement, but she had more pressing concerns. She moved down the slope and tried to stick to the grass and leaves there, which were easier on her soles. Meanwhile the fighting continued, intensified, and then died away to silence after some indistinct shouting. Sam drew her bow and advanced around the corner. Seisha hicchu, she reminded herself, but what she saw when she rounded the front of the wreck drove all thoughts of accuracy from her mind.
It was Carlin and Commander Drel. Both of them were lying on the ground near the bodies of several Solarii. For a panicked moment, Sam thought both of them were dead. Then she saw Carlin's shoulders heaving as she embraced the Commander's still form. She was alive! Relief and concern flooded through Sam as she rushed toward her friend.
"Carlin! Carlin!" she called. The other woman looked up. "Are you alright?"
"Is she alright?" said Atria. Sam turned to find the unwelcome woman coming around the corner holding the medkit in one hand and a small disruptor in the other. The big Orion plodded along beside her, obviously weakened, but clutching a matching disruptor pistol in his fist. "It's your Commander who has an ax in his back," Atria pointed out.
Howard moved to the Commander's side and scanned his body. He shook his head.
"He gave his life to save me," Carlin explained and sniffed, holding back tears, but just barely.
"I don't doubt it, but there's still a lifesign here," said Howard, hovering his tricorder over Drel's belly. "It's his symbiont."
Carlin's eyes went wide. "Drel's still alive?" Her hand went to the spot on his abdomen as if her touch could give her as good readings as a tricorder. "Can we save it?"
"It's to weak for stasis, even if we had a container big enough for it. We'll have to transfer it to a new host immediately." He looked to Carlin. "And to my knowledge there's only one other Trill on the planet."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa!" said Sam. "You're going to put Drel - the Drel symbiont - inside of Carlin? If I understand my Trill correctly, when a symbiont and a host join they essentially make a new person: the old Carlin and the old Drel would just be memories...and unless I completely failed every remedial biology lesson you gave me, that's kind of permanent."
"It can take up to 93 hours for the physiology of the symbiont and a host to become fully interdependent. Given the weakened state of, well, both of us, I'd expect practical interdependency to occur much more rapidly, possibly in as little as 24 to 48 hours - assuming we're both not dead by then," said Carlin. "And even if the symbiont were removed in time, the psychological impact for me and the Drel symbiont would be irreversible."
"Yeah, like I said, permanent," said Sam. "I'm all for saving people, but I don't want to lose my best friend trying to save my already-dead XO."
"But he's not dead, not completely," said Carlin. "The part of him that lives on is still there, in Drel." She closed her eyes and blinked back tears. "I want this, Sam. I want to save him, and you know I've wanted to be joined since before you met me."
"You wanted to piss off your dad - who was joined - by beating him at his own game," Sam corrected.
"I did genuinely want to be joined though," said Carlin. "I've had a couple years to think about it, and the only reason I haven't reapplied to the Symbiosis Commission is because I didn't want it to complicate my relationship with Antori." She laid her hand gently over his closed eyes. "That's over now. I have to accept that and move on."
"Antori Drel wanted this too," Howard put in. "He had a will on file. It's contents were confidential, but he did request that, in the event of his death, Carlin become the next host - if she wanted to."
"And I do," Carlin said firmly.
Sam raised her hands. "Alright! I just...I just wanted to make sure we were all thinking about long-term consequences here."
Carlin managed to give her a smile. "I will still be your friend," she assured her. Sam studied her own toes. Then Carlin turned to the Doctor. "I'm ready. Let's do this."
Doctor Howard nodded. "I'll need to treat some of your own injuries before we begin, or you could die in surgery, even a minor one like this." He turned to Atria. "Give me the medkit."
"We need to get moving," said Atria, shaking her head. "Your friend and my crew are still in danger on the other half of the ship."
Sam turned on the Orion. "When you go there, you'll have wounded, and you can either visit them with two medical officers - my friends here - or not at all!" She drew her bow. "Now give him the medkit!"
"You certainly don't lack for spirit," Atria teased. She handed over the medkit, then laid a hand on the big Orion, directing him to retreat. "We'll be at the crash site. If you want to save your friend and get off this planet, meet us there." With that, she turned and left.
Sam watched her go for a minute, then turned back to Doctor Howard and Carlin. The Doctor knelt over the young Trill and opened his medkit. "Let's get started," he said.
Author's Notes: The layout, size, and stairs of the D12-class are based on the schematics of an unnamed three-deck bird-of-prey available on cygnus-x1 .net. Its length is listed as 168 feet, or 51 meters. By contrast, most sources attribute 8 decks to the B'rel-class. The Aerie-class is the unofficial class of the USS Raven, the ship taken by Annika Hansen's family in their unauthorized study of the Borg (VOY: "Dark Frontier"). It was designed for minimal crew and appears to really just be the big brother of a runabout. Memory Beta lists its length as 90 meters and lists it as having 4 decks. However 5 decks can be counted on the MSD that appeared in "Dark Frontier" and symbols I would interpret as turbolifts service each one.
Of course Sam's jab about the unsuitability of the D12-class as a warship based purely on its size shouldn't be taken too seriously. After all, the largest battleship ever built, the Imperial Japanese battleship Yamato, was less than half the size of the largest ship ever built: the oil tanker Seawise Giant...but that doesn't mean that Yamato wasn't by far the more dangerous of the two! As Yoda would remind us, size matters not, especially when comparing the combat capabilities of a military reconnaissance and ambush attack craft to those of a civilian long-range explorer.
As Sam observes, striking someone in the head with a closed fist will hurt your hand. It'll probably hurt the other person more, but this is why boxers wear padded gloves.
Atria having a shuttle seemed like a natural idea to me, since she is not directly in command of the Cluros but rather supervising it for the Syndicate. Since the Ferengi Alliance is neutral in 2409, Star Trek Online allows captains of all factions to purchase and operate Ferengi shuttles, known as Na'Far class small craft. Cloaking devices are not standard technology aboard such ships, but could be easily acquired and installed by the Syndicate.
Eventually, Sam will come up with a name for most everything on this planet using the form "Creepy _ of Yamatai." Just watch her. It'll happen! In the meantime, she should really try to find some shoes. Her objection to Carlin's joining is based, in character, on her fear for its effect on her friendship (as Carlin rightly surmises). Out of character, I just needed someone to play devil's advocate in order to remind us all that sticking a sybiont in someone has consequences. The 93 hour time limit is from the DS9 episode "Invasive Procedures," but I thought this was too long, especially for my story's sake (so far our protagonists have spent less than half that time on the planet), so I made up the shortened time limit for a symbiont and host who are under stress or weakened. Drel's willingness to be joined with Carlin was hinted at in chapter 10 of "The Best Revenge." As of the end of that story, she was still undecided about whether or not she wanted to be joined.