Inferno (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on 19 Jan 2025 @ 2:21am by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius & Lieutenant JG Sofie Ullswater
Edited on on 19 Jan 2025 @ 2:22am

3,998 words; about a 20 minute read

Mission: Episode 20 - Reconstruction
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 2, Mess Hall; Deck 4, Geology Lab
Timeline: MD 04, 1320 hrs

[ON]

The door to Galileo's mess hall hissed open within deck 2 and in walked CWO3 Lamar Darius. The well-built conn officer wore only a simple Starfleet T-shirt and a pair of athletic shorts and sandals - and also appeared half-asleep. He wiped the corners of his eyes with the back of his knuckles then put a fist to his lips in a futile attempt to suppress a yawn. He wasn't exactly in his most alert state following an early wake up call and sought out the nearby cuisine line on autopilot. The background chatter from several other crew members present was little more than a buzz in his head but the scent of carbs and hot sauce permeated his nostrils and awakened his appetite. It was mac and cheese day.

"...and I do get it, our whole phylogenetic classification goes back to things that drink milk. I just think that it has some uncomfortable implications. The whole industry for hundreds of years has been-" The closest of the buzzing voices cut itself off before buzzing back again, this time with some accusatory indignance "You aren't listening to me are you?"

It was Sofie, standing right next to him, clearly having been trying to have some sort of conversation. How long had she been there? Long enough to have a slightly peeved look on her face. "Are you awake Lamar? What were you doing last night?"

"Huh?" He raised his eyebrows then blinked while taking in his surroundings once again including the shorter brown-haired scientist standing next to him. "Oh, yea...the polygenetical milk doesn't always taste the same..." he tried to fake a valid reply before shaking his head. "Sorry, I was up late. New exercise routine."

"It's all good, was just saying how I think cheese is strange." Strange or not she didn't hesitate to help herself to a portion of the cheesy meal. It looked fine, not particularly exciting, but fine. Once her plate was loaded she stepped slightly to the side and paused to let him collect his own lunch. "Don't let anyone else catch you falling asleep though."

"...Affirm," he muttered while moving through the short line with his plate and procuring a larger than normal helping of crimson-looking cheese pasta mixed with small chicken bites. A side of Ferengi crab salad was also taken, and with both food articles in hand, he looked to Ullswater to guide the way toward a table.

With a little tilt of her head she indicated him to follow her to one of the vacant tables on the other side of the room. She didn't say anything on the way there and even once the two of them were seated she didn't take the time to say anything either. She tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear, let out a wistful sigh, and tucked in to the cheesey delight in front of her. It had been a busy morning. It was going to be a busy afternoon too.

Staying close in tow, he followed her lead then plopped his food and butt down into the chair across from her. He tried to quell another yawn but it escaped him and he stretched his arms out to the side and craned his neck. Several satisfying, pressure-releasing pops ensued within his vertebra's cartilage and he let out a content and reinvigorated sigh. Ullswater's silence was welcome at first, and Lamar began to stab at his pasta mix and fork healthy amounts of carbs into his mouth. He happily chewed and consumed the spicy portion which possessed much more kick than he'd been expecting. It wasn't long before he sniffed then wiped his lips with his napkin while the culinary burn began to mount. "What's this sauce called? 'Fek'lhr'-something? That's the Klingon devil, right?"

"If we're comparing to human mythology I think its more like Cerberus or Niutou and Mamian. A guardian at the gates of death." She carefully eyed a patch of the sauce on her own dish before grabbing some up in her fork and testing it for herself. There was a pause.

Sofie cleared her throat but when she started talking again her voice had been transposed a few semitones up. "Mhm, yes. That is something." She cleared he throat a second time before continuing. "There is a river. I mean of course there is a river, the death-river symbology is present in almost every culture that developed on a planet with rivers. But there is a river that you get ferried down and I think, though I might be misremembering, that the Fek'lhr is present at the end of the boat journey." Then came an uninvited thought, the sort of thing she wouldn't share if it had been anyone else across the table. "The descent into Avernus... Appropriate."

Avernus... That name tickled his shallow knowledge of ancient Earth's history then his dark brown eyes captured her gray irises when he finally caught on to the reference. "Hell." Unseen beneath the table, Lamar curled his toes within his boots while an anxiety-filled sensation coursed through his nervous system. "You still think about it? The cold station?"

"Well Sof? Do you still think about me?" The all too familiar voice in her head chimed in, echoing the question. She couldn't help but smile a little, just a private little grin between the three of them.

"I would never admit that to anyone and neither should you. Remember that the two of us are in this together." Alongside the hallucinated vocal embodiment of the trauma of their experiences on the cold station there were someone else's words echoing around in her thoughts: Warraquim's threat of medical discharge and institutionalisation. Sofie had no intention of letting Lamar drag her towards that end. "If you want to talk about this we should definitely be somewhere more private."

"I, uh," he didn't need to contemplate her recommendation very long before he adamantly shook his head and lowered his eyes back to his spicy pasta, "no. Been trying to forget it all, actually. In a weird way, all these hallucinations or visions I've been having took my mind off of it. But some of them are almost as bad." Almost. Nothing could approach the horrors he and she'd witnessed inside that science facility.

She wanted to talk to him about it, tell him that to her the visions of the alternate future had become one and the same with the lingering effects of the cold station. Would he get it though? Or would he just send her back to the doctors. Counselling's down on Deck 3. How long had it been since that breakfast? Only a few weeks. So much had changed.

"I'm not sure I'll ever be able to forget it." Looking at a forkful pasta she suddenly felt like she'd lost her appetite. She put it back on her plate and folded her arms.

He shoveled a healthy portion of chicken mac and cheese into his mouth and chewed, sniffing from the capsaicin's ongoing effects. "Yeah. Stuff like that will stay with us forever. I still got some old war memories that keep me up at night, but what we saw? That other dimension or whatever it was? That ain't right. It's an abomination."

"You told me once about a mission during the war, on some L-class planet where the intelligence was wrong." Sofie didn't remember the details as such, she'd been a bit to overwhelmed with pathetic self pity and guilt at the time to have payed much attention. "You ever get injured during the war?"

Lamar glanced up to her momentarily then back down to his meal. He continued to eat, this time in silence, for close to a half-minute before finally lowering his fork then procuring his napkin to wipe the remains of Fek'lhr hot sauce from his lips and fingers. His hands traveled up to his uniform collar's undershirt which he unfastened along the line of his rank pip, then pulled it down to reveal scarring crossing his neck on both sides just above his collarbone. "Shrapnel from Jem'Hadar fire," he curtly explained. "The blast hit the top of the cover I was behind and sent rock fragments into me. Could have been worse - a couple inches higher and he would have disintegrated my head. They're good shots and I got lucky."

"I'm glad you got lucky, glad you're here." Sofie's eyes darted down to her unfinished food. How many close scrapes had there been this last year? They were all still lucky to be here. She unfolded her arms and beneath the table balled up her hands, the pain was back again. She winced a little. "Were they never able to fix the scarring?"

He, too, was glad for the universe's fortunes. There hadn't been a day that passed ever since that engagement which he'd taken for granted. "The field docs did a good enough job after it happened. By the time we all got back from deployment, I guess I was just used to it. I've thought about it but at this point it'd be 'plastic' surgery. I don't want to hide it. It's a part of my life. Like the cold station is, now."

“You ever take a good look at my hands." She held one up for a moment and then quickly waved it away "Don't worry there's nothing to see, not on the outside. I was caught in a fire once. I'm young and I've still got a lot of time in my life to experience all sorts of unpleasant things but those minutes as I half suffocated in the smoke while my skin burned, they were the most painful minutes so far." How many times had she told this story in her head? It all came out like it had been practiced, words perfectly following one another, placed with lyrical precision. "I woke up weeks later in a hospital on Cardassia Prime and I looked great. Wonders of medical technology meant all that skin could be remade perfect. No scarring on the outside."

"Healing still takes a while though, it hurt for a long time and came with this horrible itch. It was like I could feel deep down that there was something wrong with my arms, that they weren't mine anymore. Doctors can somewhat medicate for itches but it doesn't always work. You can't control an instinct like that. Some mornings I'd wake up to bloody bedsheets having spent all night trying to scratch down to whatever it was inside me that was calling out so loudly." Sofie didn't talk about this. The only person on the ship who she's said this to before was- Well actually Aria wasn't on the ship anymore. Sofie gazed at her own hands as she told the story, outward perfection covering up the damage. She resented how obvious the metaphor was.

"I made it through though. It feels like one of the defining features of life is that we get through, we keep fighting and we make it out the other side. Life went back to normal. I joined Starfleet and aside from the odd nightmare I didn't think about it." There was a time when Sofie had been proud of that recovery. Proud of the resilience it showed. Really she still was, it had been a difficult road. Only now it seemed like slightly less of an accomplishment given every month on board this ship seemed to be throwing another horror at her that she had to try to get past.

"When that thing touched me on the cold station it took me back there. I was inside the nightmare. Ever since then the pain has been back. I try not to think about it, try to push it out of my mind but I am surrounded by fire." Only a couple of minutes ago she had said that they shouldn't talk about it here, not where other people might overhear. Breaking her own rules. The last few days had been so bad and there was only one person on the ship who she could talk to. Only one other person who might understand. Only one person who she trusted. "I hear the voice of the flayed man. He's still speaking to me."

Lamar slowed his chewing while she revealed a very personal and intimate injury history which provided several uncomfortable details. He'd known a few marines who'd suffered similar burns and amputations resulting from blast wounds and none of them had ever been the same person ever since coming out the other side. The other side. He narrowed his eyes while glancing up to her and spoke in a discreet voice, "Don't say that. That's impossible. We're not on the station anymore..."

Reality was collapsing. With unwanted voices and the unwelcome memories of an unchosen futures forcing their way into her head it was impossibly difficult to determine truth from the mire. He was right though. She hadn't looked up from her hands, she couldn't: were they even hers? But he was right. "We aren't." She gave the smallest nod. She'd just spilled out so much of herself right onto the table, right in the middle of the mess hall. This was the most vulnerable she'd felt in a long time. She looked up and met Lamar's gaze for just an instant before her eyes darted back down again.

"Do you think..." He lowered his voice as low as it could go while leaning forward and tilting his head so it appeared he wasn't directly facing her. His eyes focused on the mess hall's entrance door which swished open when another blue-collared crewman entered to obtain chow. "...Do you think somehow...like scientifically, that one dimension can enter another?" The thought now created a heavy lump in his throat and a feeling of terrifying anxiety which produced goosebumps on his arms beneath his uniform. "...Can that thing follow us here?"

"You really can't hear the voice?" she closed her eyes and sighed. Part of her had been secretly hoping these last few days that he was in the same boat. Maybe there was some way she could make him hear. She held out one of her perfect hands. "Hold my hand."

Before he could answer though Sofie pulled her hand back. Her eyes darted around the room. They could eat and chat here but the moment they started doing anything strange people would start talking. "We should go somewhere else."

Lamar half-reached for Sofie's digits then halted and withdrew his hand when she retracted her own. A paranoid gaze followed which snapped his head across the dining facility from side to side in search of anyone who might be staring at them. None were sighted apart from a tall, brown-haired female crewman apprentice who captured his gaze and revealed a private pearly smile to him. Lamar instantly shifted his eyes away and shuffled his feet beneath him while procuring his food tray to dispose of. "Where?" he asked his science colleague and friend.

What was the one place on this ship they could have privacy, the one place she would feel secure, the only safe haven? "The geology lab of course, deck four."

Of course. How could he forget her final bastion of freedom and one of the places on the ship he'd only set foot in less than a handful of times. He wiped his mouth and hands with his napkin, blew his nose to alleviate some of the spicy Fek'lhr sauce aroma, then grabbed his tray and stood with her before depositing it in a nearby recycling receptacle then following her out of the mess hall in silence.

Only a few minutes later the two of them finally made it to safety. Though their walk had been hurried Sofie had tried her best to keep the pace from moving into alarming velocities for anyone watching. As they passed people in the corridors she had smiled and nodded and done all the right things that a good healthy normal person does. But now that they were safe she could let that guard down.

She plopped herself onto one of the stools at the workbench and, elbows on the surface, she buried her face in her hands for a few seconds. There were a few deep sighs. "We can't tell anyone. You understand?" She didn't disguise the fear in her voice. "They'd take us away, even if it is real."

He sauntered around the strange specialized science lab, distractedly peering at some samples left in a collection tray then poking a crystal-clear, diamond-like rock with one with his fingers. It suddenly changed color across the EM spectrum, its outer shell transitioning from reds to blues then to yellows before returning to its original appearance. "...Oh," he mumbled. "Won't tell anyone, you know that. We're not going back into sickbay again either." That hadn't been a pleasant couple of days.

Sofie followed him with her eyes for a moment before turning back to the bench to clear a space. If the frumkinite could amuse him for a moment then all the better, beauty like that is wasted without people to witness it. Once she had moved a smattering of lab equipment out of the way she called over and indicated the adjacent seat "Sit down." She rolled up her sleeve, she wasn't really sure why, you don't generally roll up a sleeve to hold someone's hand. Not that she had any reason to think any part of this experiment would work anyway. She wasn't psychic and hadn't she already decided this was all from her imagination? Yet she knew she had to keep going.

Doing as instructed, Lamar walked next to her position then deposited his rear end on the assigned bench. The sight of her newly-exposed bare arm piqued his curiosity and he observed her smooth cream-toned skin before looking up into her stormy gray eyes. "So, uh, are we going to..."

"I guess we're going to hold hands and then maybe then you'll be able to hear the voice because..." Why? Again she had no reason to think this would work. If there was any way that it could work though, if she could find out that this was something real rather than just her imagination, she had to know. "Look I don't know why. Just hold on." She held out her hand to her friend and steeled herself for what was to come.

Hear the voice. A shiver rippled through his veins which forced his eyes to drop to the carpet in the geology lab. Where would she take him? Back to the creature? The one she called the 'flayed man'? Maybe that was their destiny to explore, or maybe they simply needed each other right here in this moment. He looked back up into her eyes then reached out and clasped her smaller hand with his own large fingers.

Sofie stood atop a cliff, beneath her roiled a pool of fear and pain. If she was going to make Lamar feel anything it would make sense that she had to be feeling it as intensely as possible. She had to pull down all the barriers she built to keep the pain at bay. Embrace it. Let the fire consume you. She stepped off the cliff and into the flames.

The pain instantly got worse, waves of it crashed through her and she couldn't help but let out a little yelp. Her hold of Lamar's hand tightened and her eyes scrunched shut. The suffocating heat felt like it was going to kill her. It was just like that night those years before: her skin consumed by flames, her lungs screaming for air. Just when she thought she couldn't keep it up for another moment the voice came. It was hoarse, carried on a dry hot wind: the voice of fire.

"He can't hear me Sof. That's not how this works, it's just you and me forever."

A sharp and painful stab shocked Lamar in a similar manner to electrocution. A cold and searing knife cut into his thoughts which suddenly consumed him and forced an audible gasp from his lips. Where was he? In Hell? The air was hot and thick, full of burnt members and reeking of the scent of charred flesh. Ullswater's flesh. He tried to take a breath but coughed when his lungs began to burn. He couldn't see through the thick smoke and large wisps of flame surrounding him but he could feel her hand still clutched to his. "Sofie, wh-what is this?" he tried to ask with futility before the eerie voice reverberated through his consciousness. It was...the entity. The 'flayed man' he'd encountered on Cold Station 31.

Everything was slipping out of Sofie's grasp. The pain and the smoke had become so overwhelming she couldn't form a coherent thought. All she was sure of was that she'd lost control. She cried out. Her grip on Lamar's hand began to loosen. Things began to fade. As the whole world became subsumed in fire she felt something pat her on the back. "You'll be alright, just bit off a bit more than you can chew."

"Sofie!" he yelled again. Her fingers slipped away which suddenly left him on his own in the charred atmosphere. His eyes burned and he continued to cough while dropping to one knee and quickly pulling his uniform jacket off his torso to wrap in front of his mouth. Then, he heard it. In a different cadence but nonetheless the same. It spoke to him directly - terrifyingly beckoning. "...LaammAARRRr..." Where was his phaser? In his quarters? How could he get there. "Sofie!!" he frantically repeated.

She didn't answer, she had fallen out of view. The smoke closed in. The only thing that let Lamar know she hadn't vanished completely was a distant sound. Was she crying? The crackling flames made it easy to miss but no, it wasn't crying. It was laughter. A bitter and pained laugh cutting through the inky black fog. It was not a pleasant sound.

Oh how it had all gone wrong. Everything was worse than she could have imagined. She couldn't help but laugh, despite all the terror and pain it was the absurdity of just how badly she had misjudged the situation that was overwhelming her. Tears stung in her eyes and each burst of laughter sent another shudder of agony through her body. It was perfect, it was sublime: her nightmare brought to life once again. There was nothing else to do, nothing else she could do but embrace the flames.

Lamar squinted and turned his head away from a nearby crop of new fiery blazes which seemed to erupt in front of him. His arms frantically reached out in front then to the sides, spearing into the hazy abyss in an attempt to catch hold of his fellow officer's physical form. Searing heat against his flesh forced him to cry out through his jacket in a muffled manner as deep burns developed across his hands and forearms. Then he heard something across the roar of fire; something which sounded like...a laugh? A series of them.

Guided only by the undecipherable sounds of the female voice, he reoriented himself toward it then quickly trudged through a think wall of flames which singed the short curly hair on his chin. Lamar reached out again, then again, and finally he came in contact with something solid. Something resembling a humanoid body which he latched on to and furiously pulled toward him. "Sofie! I'm here!"

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

LTJG Sofie Ullswater
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo-A

CWO3 Lamar Darius
Conn Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Tarin]

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