The Last Voyage of the Sakura - Conclusion

Posted on 19 Jun 2018 @ 5:05pm by Ensign Miraj Derani

2,577 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Episode 15 - Emanation
Location: SS Norfolk Island
Timeline: MD 128 23:30

[ON]

"Computer?" Miraj stood on the transporter pad of the Sakura, flexing her shaking fingers, her hands moving awkwardly in the rad-suit gloves. "Energise." She closed her eyes, and when she opened them she was in the reactor room of the ancient colony ship. Everything was as she left it. All the rods ready to go.

She sat at a fold down seat next to the control panel. She wasn't going to flip that switch until she was sure the Visophage was inside the Norfolk Island, but she wanted to be close to it all the same.

By her estimate she had maybe two minutes to flip it, close the hatch, and then run to the conn and seperate the two ships before the ancient vessel went boom. It would be tight. If they were even close, let alone still attached, when the reactor went critical, Sakura would likely be obliterated alongside the Norfolk Island.

"How am I supposed to know when you get here?" she asked aloud, not expecting a response, but needing something in the silence. Her voice echoed weirdly inside the rad suit.

She wasn't sure surviving was even preferable. This would be the second ship she'd lost when she was at the helm. Forget a bunch of stroppy captains. No one in Starfleet would want her after that. Who'd want a pilot that couldn't fly out of a five direction ambush? Or whose standard tactic for things she couldn't fly away from was blow them up? She shuddered, thinking of the strange cyborg skeleton thing that she and Dr Sandoval had encountered. She'd been willing to blow Mazakeen up to make sure that thing didn't escape. Now here she was, less than two months later, about to do it again.

But was there any alternative? They hadn't even tried talking to it. Borgon had just gone straight to blast-it-with-fire, and she'd followed along, grateful for someone else making the decision.

She tried rubbing her hands through her hair, but only bumped the helmet of the rad suit with her gloves. She didn't know what to do. This was a job for science types. She took a breath. What would Bloodbeard do?

She snorted. The fictional pirate had never had to deal with creatures that lived in subspace. The time her pirate novels were set was the very superstitious eighteenth century Earth. A time of ghosts and changelings and fairies. Not visophages.

"Think!" She hissed at herself. "There must be something." It was a subspace creature. Maybe she could try that? Try a comm? That was all subspace frequencies. She tapped her combadge awkwardly, fumbling at it through her suit. "Computer? Open a hailing frequency to my location. Broadcast a message all know languages: Hello, do you need help?" There was a beep of acknowledgement but then silence fell again.

She paced around the engine room. Okay, that hadn't worked. What else could she do. Subspace, subspace. Think, woman, or you'll end up sharing grog with Davy Jones.

There was laugh from nearby. It was high pitched, and infectious and full of delight. A child's laugh. Miraj's heart went to warp speed. She didn't want to look. Did not want to at all, but she couldn't help herself, turning slowly, trying to see and not see at the same time. She couldn't see anything. Auditory hallucination.

This was how it started. The visophage was coming to eat her brain. Her hand twitched towards the overload switch. Wait, she thought. Don’t panic. She giggled at the old reference. She didn’t know where her towel was. She giggled again. Maybe she was going mad and it was just eating her alive. One more try. Before she risked blowing herself to Old Hobb.

"Did you hear me?" She asked the empty engine room. She pawed at her combadge again. "Computer broadcast this to my position: If you understand, send me a sign."

There was more silence. She had no idea if the computer had done it or not. And then she heard another laugh, coming from the corridor leading to the engine room. And then she saw them, a teenage boy gangly with the first burst of hormones and shaggy dark hair, jogging towards her, And a small girl, five years old, hanging onto his shoulders, laughing her head off. And she had short pink punches standing up off her head like fluffy antenna.

Miraj put her hand to her mouth. Her suit gloves bumped on the faceplate of the helmet. It was her and her brother. Was that a yes?.

Mal was breathing hard, whilst young Miraj clung to his neck. "Mal," the little girl asked in a thoughtful voice. "Your mummy left you because your daddy had me..."

The teenage boy didn't look at his little sister, so she couldn't see him wince. But Miraj saw it. She had vague half memories of the conversation. Her heart went out to her big brother. It must have been so hard. Her existence had led his mother to abandon him. But he had still adored her, been the best big brother a girl could ever want.

"...but why didn’t my mummy want me?"

What a question to ask a teenager. But what would a five year old know.

Young Mal paused, shifting his little sister to a more comfortable position. "I’m sure she loves you.” he paused, thinking. “It's just... she does a dangerous job. Too dangerous for a baby."

"Oh. What job?"

"Er, She's... a... treasure hunter!" Mal said, "They go into dangerous places to find treasures."

"Like volcanoes?" Little Miraj asked.

"Like volcanoes," Mal agreed. "And...Klingon ghost ships…. and subspace rifts."

Subspace rifts? Was that why she was seeing this? Is that what this thing needed? "Computer, broadcast everything I say to this position via subspace radio. She didn't know if this was communication, or just hallucination before the Visophage imperceptibly ate her brain.

"Is that where you came from?" Was she right? "Do you need to get back?"

Behind her there was the sound of a a mother shushing her baby. Miraj whirled, looking for them, but the first thing she saw was five kneeling men, their backs to her, heads bowed. Beyond the kneeling men, was a woman. She had purple hair hanging to her waist in a thousand tiny braids. A fresh scar ran down the side of her bare arm, a fingers width thick. But she stood comfortably, a weapon in one hand, and a tiny baby with a shock of pink hair in the other.

"You're all idiots," said Lianej Derani. For a moment, her heart left. Miraj had no memories of her mother. Could this thing be pulling them from her mind? Would she get a glimpse of what her mother had been like? As she looked she began to hope not. Miraj had never seen an image of her mother looking quite like that. Her father had an image, and Lianej had looked...normal. Older than her father, by some ten years, but looking vivacious, and...soft.

Now the Boslic pirate just looked hard as steel, moving to one end of the line of men, weapon at the ready. "So lets make this clear. To you. To your friends. To the sympathizers skulking out in the cheap seats. My baby stays out of this. Come at me through my baby... " She put the weapon to the first man's unseen forehead, and pulled the trigger.

With an ear splitting thundercrack, his head vanished into red and grey mist. Miraj turned away, fighting to keep her stomach from trying to empty itself. "And I will-" Bang! "Take your head-" Bang! "For her finger paints." Bang! "Do we have an accord?"

Miraj turned back, and realised she had miscounted. Lianej Derani pulled the trigger on her weapon a final time. Hallucinatory ichor and blood pooled from the piled bodies and ran towards her. She shuffled back away from it, as it crept towards the large boots of her rad-suit, but then the scene vanished.

Miraj clamped her jaw shut, and forced herself to breath slowly. Finally she managed to stutter out, "You have a baby in danger?" Was that what the Visophage trying to say. She was guessing. Ascribing human motives. What was it they had said at the academy. The political/philosophical units of the command course were a fuzzy blur. She couldn't remember. "We need to get you home. Okay. We need a subspace rift." How to do that? The Norfolk Island was pre-warp. There was nothing here to bend space with.

"I'm going back to the Sakura. If we're going to send you home, I'm going to need to be there to do it."

She moved back to the cargo hauler coupling, and sealed the Norfolk Island. Then she entered the release sequence. The old DX class wouldn't survive if it was still attached, and it was a vital piece of history. If she survived what she was about to do, she could go back for it. Starfleet would kick her out after this, for sure, so she'd have some time, and the salvage rights on something as full of history as that ship would keep her busy for a year.

She shucked the helmet of her suit and started stripping it off as she headed for engineering, leaving a trail of clothes behind her. Creating a subspace rift would need a warp core overload. And surviving those needed a careful hand. Try the wrong subspace layer and you got a tear and not a rift, and that would try and eat you even as you tried to fly away.

To make a rift in subspace:

Take one warp core capable of warp 3 or higher. Retune the warp field alignment through repeated percussive adjustment of the first warp coil you can reach through the left nacelle access panel. Red-line your warpdrive, and then execute a handbrake turn at several multiples of the speed of light. This will result in a warp core breach. Eject warp core and cross fingers.

Miraj ran back up the corridor from the Cargo Hauler’s engine room to the its bridge, throwing the lump hammer she had used to smash some warp coils into a corner. The warp core was online, and it wouldn't last long once she jumped to warp.

Behind her came the voices.

"Report!" That was Lirha Saalm, an urgency in her voice, a fear, and anger.

"Main Power Offline, sir." That was Lieutenant Ryan Alexander. He had sacrificed his life to help LIrha destroy the first Galileo. Fate had served him poorly.

"Attempting to reboot systems, but so far nothing." That had been Noah. He'd died of his injuries down on the surface after the Klingons had tortured him.

"The port nacelle pylon has been destroyed!" Natalya had been left on Kreanus, too badly injured to come with them.

Miraj realised what she was hearing, the death cries of her old ship, Galileo. "Alright, alright!" she protested, running faster. "I'm going as fast as I can!" She vaulted over the railing that seperated the bridge door from the helm console and slid into her seat. "Hang on to your hats!"

She wiped her thumb up the warp controls so hard and fast she got a friction burn; the ship lurched as the warp bubble sprang to life, the inertial dampeners only managing to reduce it down from insta-jam to mild concussion and she was slammed against the panel. Her ears rang, and she shook her head to clear the cobwebs, trying to keep one eye on the engineering outputs. Velocity was showing warp four, four point five, five. That was the ships operating maximum.

Warp Five. Warp five point five. The core was beginning to overheat. Good. Sort of. She had to turn at just the right moment, so the sheer would rip the warp field apart in just the right place. and hey presto, one rift in subspace The core gauge crept higher.

She lost sight of the bridge. This time the hallucination was visual, as well auditory, all encompassing. She was falling through the Paulson nebula, watching the wreckage of Galileo, fear and sadness gnawing at her guts. "Not helping!" Miraj shouted. "I need to see the dial! Or I'll die and you'll be stuck." She shook her head trying to clear out the visions as the Galileo exploded in one final bright flash.

Just in time her eyes cleared. The Warp Core was at critical. She wrenched her hand across the helm, a manual course change that was hard and violent. Alarms screamed, and the warp core went critical. She slammed her hand on the release control.

The engine room doors sealed themselves. The hull dropped away directly under the warp core. The explosive bolts that held it place blew, forcing the core out at speed. Detached from the ship, the antimatter containment field drained itself in a few seconds.

Miraj closed her eyes. There was nothing more she could do but hope. "Bon Voyage." The world went white a second time. She squeezed her eyes shut, praying to Davy Jones that she’d get to open them again.

The explosion rocked the Sakura. The Engineering panel to her right exploded and she was showered with burning sparks and shredded safety glass. She was hurled from her seat liked a ragdoll, and hit the side bulkhead with a bone jarring thump. For a moment she lay on the floor, trying to breathe. But if she was trying to breathe, she wasn’t dead yet. Carefully, she sat up, her brain thumping inside her skull. She blinked hard, clearing the after images from the bright light.

She looked through the view screens. They were cracked, but holding. She was in normal space. The cargo train Sakura had been hauling was gone, the Norfolk Island was gone. Hopefully it was floating free a dozen light years away, but she had no way of knowing.

And the Visophage? "Are you there? Did it work?" There was minimum sensors and no science station. Nothing answered. “Computer? Did you broadcast that?”

“Affirmative.” There was a static to the normally serene computer voice. Had the Visophage gone? Or had she just out run it?

And then there was a gurgle, a baby cooing, little squeals. Miraj felt her heart sink. Was the visophage still here? She pulled herself up to her feet and turned towards the sound. Standing in the doorway down to the engine room, only translucent this time, the warning lights around the engine room blinking through her body was her mother, still hard faced, but with no weapons this time. Instead, the violet haired Lianej Derani was holding her baby girl, rocking her in her arms. And Miraj heard singing. She didn't understand the language. Some form of Cortian, but the rise and fall, the soft gentle singing of a lullaby was universal. Lianej bent over, laying her tiny baby down in a basket. "You can’t stay. The Serpent's Tooth is no place for you. Fair winds find you, little one."


The vision faded gently away, and Miraj knew that it was a goodbye, or a thank you, or possibly both. Now, she was alone.

[OFF]

Ensign Miraj Derani

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