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 th1e 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.
Trapped
USS Nautilus, Shuttle One Crew, Sam Hayashi's Log, Day Three, Stardate 81633.1:
We found the back end of the crashed bird-of-prey. A gang of lightly armed Solarii managed to raise the wreck with a pair of cranes. We drove them off, got inside, and now we need to get out again. We've split up and found Alex, though not where we expected him to be. Carlin and Doc Howard were looking for him downstairs, but somehow he made it up to the hanger on deck 3 and became trapped. While they get back, I have to figure out how to get Alex out and onto the shuttle...before our new Orion friends decide to leave without us!
Sam tapped her combadge to close the channel and turned back to where Alex lay, his legs pinned under a fallen metal beam. "Alright, Doc Howard and Carlin are on their way," she said. "In the meantime, you mind if I ask how you got here? When I heard you over the com last night I thought the Gorn had killed you!"
"Well it...wasn't for lack of trying," said Alex. "He barely touched me and he still knocked me cold for a few hours. When I came to, he was...down on the lower deck. I used the maintenance ladder behind main engineering to get up here...but the ship's structure must have destabilized when the Solarii tried to raise it," he gestured to the beam. "Could have been worse though." He pointed to a pile of rubble behind him. "That was the ladder."
"Well the Doctor'll be here soon and he'll get you patched up good as new." At least, Sam hoped so. Carlin and Howard seemed to be taking their time getting up here. "In the meantime, Crusoe, help me with this beam!" She reached for the metal beam lying on Alex's legs.
"Don't touch it!" said Alex, interposing a hand. "It's electrified." He tossed a piece of metal debris on the top of the beam and it rebounded, with a flash of miniature lightning and a showers of sparks.
Sam's eyes widened. "That's some impressive voltage," she said.
Cruseo nodded, backing away. "How are you even alive, young man?"
Alex tapped the bottom of the beam, near where it lay on him. "This side's covered in insulation," he said.
"Well that's...um, fortunate," said Sam, though she didn't know how anything relating to being trapped beneath a bone-crushing, electrified metal beam could be considered fortunate.
Alex managed to force a smile. "I'm just lucky I guess, though I...I think my dancing career is over."
Sam managed to smirk at that. "I wouldn't give up on it just yet," she said, and began searching the wreckage. "I don't see the power cable that's conducting to this."
"It's probably still inside the wall somewhere," said Alex.
"That sounds like a problem I can solve," said Sam, leveling her phaser rifle and pointing it at a the wall.
"No! Don't shoot!" said Alex. "There's plasma coolant line just behind that wall. It's corrosive to organic tissue, and it's probably the only reason the emergency power generators haven't overloaded yet."
Sam lowered her rifle. "You know a lot about Klingon ships," she said.
"I had a tactical cadet for a roommate once...a Bolian who never shut up," Alex said. "I never thought I'd be grateful, but..." His words cut off with a wince of pain as the ship rocked slightly.
A moment later, there was a pounding of feet on the stairs. Sam turned to find the Doctor and Carlin coming up the stairs. The Doctor looked a little dazed and had a cut over his eye while Carlin's uniform was splattered with blood - especially on the right side. "What happened?!" she asked.
"We had to fight the Gorn," said Carlin.
The female Orion, Atria poked her head out of the shuttle and gave Carlin a surprised look. "You fought Rgsar...and you're still alive?"
"Well, you don't think she'd be telling us about it if she weren't, do you?" Sam shot back.
Atria glared at her.
Carlin shook her head at both of them. "We need to concentrate on getting out of here," she said. "Where's McKensey?"
"Over here!" said Alex, waving weakly.
"He's trapped beneath an electrified beam," said Sam. "We need some way to turn off the power so we can get him out, but I can't find one."
"We may not have to worry about that," said Atria. She pointed the the hanger bay doors, which were slowly opening. The opening, however, was blocked by a flickering forcefield. "If we can't disengage that forcefield, none of us are going anywhere."
"But you can disengage the forcefield, right?" said Sam.
"Oh, quite easily...using the controls that Rsgar tampered with over there," she pointed to a control panel which someone with enormous strength had simply ripped from the wall and broken in half.
"There has got to be another way," said Carlin. "Maybe if we cut power-"
Suddenly, there was a shout from downstairs. "They're in here! Bring the gun!"
"Haha! No escape now, Outsiders!" A minigun pulsed through the hall downstairs.
Atria's facade of calm finally cracked to let a little panic show through in her widened eyes. "The only way to cut the power is downstairs, in Main Engineering."
"No...there's another way," said Alex. "Lieutenant Hayashi - I mean, Sam - let me have your rifle...please."
Sam handed him the rifle, careful not to touch the beam in the process. "You've got an idea," she said. "What is it?"
"If I rupture the plasma coolant line, the emergency generators will overload. Just before they do, the power will fail and the forcefield will fall," he said, taking aim.
Sam grabbed his arm and jerked his aim off. "And about a minute before that we'll all be reduced to puddles of organic paste on the floor by the leaking coolant! Are you trying to kill us?"
Alex shook his head and tugged free of her grasp. "You all get into the shuttle. It'll protect you. The coolant only dissolves organic materials. Only one of us has to stay behind to rupture the line."
"If you think I'm about to let you kill yourself in a blaze of glory, mister, you've got another think coming," said Sam.
Alex closed his eyes for a second, then looked at her. A tear trailed down his cheek. "Please, Sam, this is the only way."
"Unacceptable!" said Sam. "You do not get to die a hero on my watch." An idea occurred to her. Impulsively, she gave him a light peck on the cheek.
Alex blinked, bewildered. "Sir - I mean, Sam...why did you do that?"
"To give you something to live for," said Sam. She stood. "Did your Bolian friend teach you how to rig a Cardassian phaser to fire on a deadman-switch?"
"A what?"
"So that it fires when you release the trigger, not when you squeeze it," Sam explained.
"Well, not exactly, but it should be pretty simple. You just bypass the safety interlocks and -"
Sam raised a hand to cut off the explanation. "You've got five minutes to do it."
She heard a phaser shot as Carlin killed a Solarii who'd wandered onto the stairs. "They're upstairs! Get the gun back up here now!" shouted another Solarii.
"Okay, make that slightly less than five minutes," said Sam, turning toward the shuttle.
"And what are you going to do?" asked Alex.
"Save your pretty human ass," Sam replied. She brushed past Atria on her way into the shuttle. "Please tell me this thing has a transporter."
Atria rolled her eyes. "It is state of the art, but I don't see how that's going to help. You can't transport anything through this polaric radiation, not without firing a subspace differential pulse, and at this range those are lethal all by themselves."
"I've been transported no less than three times without a pulse. I know it can be done," said Sam. She remembered the displays in the Solarii transporter room, wracking her brain for what was different.
"The only way it would even be possible was if you had a communication signal that could penetrate all this interference," Atria said.
Sam smiled. "That's it!" She manipulated the Ferengi transporter controls, routing the signal through the theta band, at a frequency of 6.02 gigahertz. "Now, I just have to lock on..."
Crusoe and Doctor Howard hurried into the cramped cabin, followed by Carlin, covering her retreat with shots from a Bajoran phaser. Atria was shoved up against Sam as they heard the Solarii coming up the stairs. "We're out of time and we're out of room!" said Atria. "Seal the door and tell your friend to shoot the coolant line!"
"I just have to beam him in without taking the metal beam with him," said Sam.
"The transporter won't be able to distinguish them!"
Sam gritted her teeth. "Will someone please shut her up?"
Carlin turned back to her. "The Solarii are bringing the minigun up the stairs. Are you sure you can do this?"
"Positive!" she lied.
"The leave her alone, Atria, and get ready to fly us out of here," said Carlin.
Atria looked ready to object when a Solarii arrow bounced off the roof of the cabin and shattered against the wall. Carlin turned to fire at the Solarii and seal the hatch while Atria scrambled into the copilot's seat beside Ursan.
Sam meanwhile did some quick and dirty reprogramming of the transporter's molecular scanners. It was a modification she'd used twice before, but due to her time constraints, significantly less subtle. Not enough time to distinguish "heavy metal beam" from anything else. The only distinction we can make at the moment is the most basic one that even the coolant will use: organic vs inorganic. She tapped her combadge. "Hayashi to McKensey! Tell me you're ready with the deadman switch on that rifle!"
"I am, but..."
"Just aim it the conduit. Prop it up with something if you can," she instructed.
"Got it, but I don't know...The Solarii will find me any minute and they're setting up the minigun." He paused. "Sam, there was something I wanted to say..."
"Save it!" she said. "You get no last words because you are not dying!" She had lost too many shipmates on this trip already as it was. "Squeeze the trigger and prepare for transport!"
"I...aye, aye, sir," he said.
It was a testament to Sam's desperate concentration that she did not even realize he'd called her sir. Instead, she keyed in the energize sequence and breathed a silent prayer. There was a surprised sound from the other end of her channel, then the sound of a phaser firing. A moment later, Alex materialized in the back of the small cabin. He was stark naked and his legs were a bloody mess, but he was alive. Doctor Howard rushed to attend to him.
"Wha- what did you do?" Alex asked, trying to cover himself up.
Sam shrugged. "Saved your life," she said, then quickly looked away, blaming her reaction at seeing the naked young man on all the Orion pheromones swimming around the cabin.
Meanwhile there was screaming outside as plasma coolant flooded the hanger. The minigun thrummed and sparks flew as the bolts slammed into the shuttle. Then the weapon fell silent again while the screams only intensified. Ursan and Atria poised at the controls, waiting. Another few seconds and the forcefield went down. The shuttle shot out of the hanger and into the sky. As it circled around to gain altitude, Sam could see the hulk of the bird-of-prey below, wracked with explosions. One of the cranes collapsed and the wreck broke apart, falling back into the water.
"Alright, it's time to leave this wretched planet behind us," said Atria. "Engaging cloak." More sparks flew and she swore.
"The Solarii managed to take out our cloaking device when they shot the shuttle," said Ursan. "We're vulnerable now."
"You wouldn't have stood much of a chance anyway," said Carlin.
Sam nodded. "Whatever's keeping people on this planet isn't natural."
"Then what do you propose we do about it?" Atria demanded.
"First off, stay low so it won't think we're fleeing and try to shoot us down," said Sam.
"Second, we'll need answers," said Carlin. She input the coordinates of the Dominion research base they'd seen on Matan's maps. "Take us here," she said. "That's where we'll find the information we need to figure out what's keeping us on this planet...and how to stop it!"
Author's Note: This is Alex's death scene from the Tomb Raider game, with some obvious reworking. In the game, I didn't like the scene very much. It tried to be a romantic heroic sacrifice, but at this point the game's Alex has even less backstory to indicate his interest in Lara than Ensign McKensey has to indicate his interest in Sam. This combines with the slightly hokey way in which Alex is trapped (sure, heavy-metal-beam on the leg would stop most people, but by this point in the game Lara has moved a lot heavier stuff using a bit of creativity) to make the whole scene feel a little forced - or at least, that's my opinion.
My hope is that I've done the scene better. Alex does not die, but gets to develop his character further. Sam and Alex, while interested, don't try for a full-blown romantic rescue/sacrifice. I had to get a little more creative with the trap setup, but hopefully it was worth it. Sam's "selective transport option" makes a reappearance here, as a way to more than depants an unfortunate ensign. I think that makes it my longest-running Chekhov's gun.