Inferno (Part 2 of 2) [18+]
Posted on 19 Jan 2025 @ 2:39am by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius & Lieutenant JG Sofie Ullswater
3,383 words; about a 17 minute read
Mission:
Episode 20 - Reconstruction
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 4, Geology Lab
Timeline: MD 04, 1401 hrs
Previously, on Inferno (Part 1)...
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!"
And Now, the Conclusion...
[ON]
As Lamar pulled her into his arms she kept laughing. The horrible mangled thing that was her body didn't seem to have the strength to do anything but laugh and experience the ecstasy of the fire. After a few more spasms of anguished laughter Sofie found herself looking up into his face. It held the same intensity it had on that day the two of them had invaded the brig. If her burned features could portray any emotion it would be pity. She'd trapped him in her nightmare. "No, you're not."
He managed to open his eyes amid the thick smoke and cast his attention across the still-breathing remains of her body. Holding his breath in shock for several long moments, he stared at what her burned anatomy had become. Her brown hair had long since disintegrated and her usually-pale creamy skin was a charred canvas of brown, blackened and red flesh. The soft features of her expressive and colorful face were hollow and her gray eyes were melting, with white ooze seeping down the remains of her nose bridge. ".....Sofie..." he finally managed to whisper in shock. He took her hand and shook it hard before feeling the burned flesh de-glove into his fingers.
A look of horror overcame Lamar who couldn't comprehend why she was still laughing and what she meant. He was here. Wasn't he? Was this...a dream? "We-we have to go, co'mon!" he grunted while squatting to pick her up into his arms.
"No, you have-" She tried to say one last thing but before she could finish her words the fire destroyed what was left of her voice. This wasn't going to work, she couldn't even laugh any more. Just as the flayed man willed, Sofie had to feel it all as the fire dragged the life out of her body. Those seconds were like years. She died in Lamar's arms.
Her body went limp after her final words and only the remains of her fire-mutilated corpse remained. He shook her lifeless form several times while flayed pieces of charred flesh broke off from the remains of her epidermis. "No...no!! Sofie! Wake up!" But she was dead. He'd seen enough casualties during his former career in the Corps to identify a Human carcass when he could see it. "...Sofie..." he whispered, his eyes closed with heartbreak and willing to succumb to her similar fate via flame. "I...can't leave you..."
A woman appeared at Lamar's side. She wore a dress woven from grey and orange threads pulled from the smoke and flame around them. As it's folds reached the ground it was hard to tell where the fabric ended and the fire began. It was flame and it was smoke and it was wholly magnificent. She took a moment to gaze down at the corpse that laid in front of them and shook her head.
"No, you have to go Lamar." It was Sofie definitely, that was her voice and she wore that same unmistakable smile, but it was not the Sofie that Lamar knew. Beneath the elaborate stage makeup she was clearly younger and she held herself differently than Sofie ever had, less defensively. The burning world did not hurt her. "I don't get to leave."
Pained eyes from the chief warrant officer incredulously looked up and through the thick smoke which was somehow parting around the new form of a female Galileo officer. Sofie Ullswater. It was impossible. He took in her appearance and the flaming dress she wore with shock and awe. She was alive? Lamar looked down to the dead body in front of him then back up to her. "...Sofie? How?" What was this?
The woman wreathed in fire spoke again. Her voice was commanding and awful as that of a divine messenger. It rang out, projecting and reverberating through whatever room they were in. "Go! You are dreaming Lamar, wake up." She glanced again at the remains of the figure in his arms. The look on her face was half pity and half contempt. "Leave it. She is still alive out there."
Still alive...leave it. The fiery semblance of Ullswater spoke with a fortitude which burned into his subconsciousness to reveal the awareness of this hallucination. Or whatever it was. "Go!" her words repeated in his head over and over until he released his grip and rolled his wrists over to allow her fallen body's remains to slip from his arms onto the deck. Fever dream or otherwise, she was dead.
Lamar stood and grounded his feet within the inferno, teeth gritted and discerning eyes scanning the fiery room. This wasn't real and this wasn't his place. Someone or something had temporarily trapped him here and the deception angered him in a primal manner. He clenched his fists then crushed his eyelids closed before letting out an angry cry. "You won't take me!"
A bright shimmering wave of light and cerebral shimmer coursed through him, and suddenly the roar of the fire and the stench of both electrical and flesh-scented smoke dissipated. He sharply inhaled a fresh breath of oxygen then slowly opened his dark brown eyes which had become dilated and were now streaming tears. Lamar was back in the geology lab...and Sofie's smaller hand was held in his which he was threatening to crush from the pressure. He sharply inhaled then blinked while slowly releasing his grip on his friend's digits. Words to describe what he'd just experienced were more foreign than an Aenar's mating ritual.
On the other side of the workbench Sofie was trying very hard to calm herself, to slow her breathing. Those last moments that she could remember had been worse than any nightmare before and all the techniques and practices she had learned couldn't hold back the terror of that experience. The pain of it still lingered across her nervous system, each hurried breath a reminder of how much it had hurt to die. The hand that Lamar had let go of was shaking, all of Sofie was, she stared at it. What had she done? How was this possible? Her mind was so drowned in fear that she couldn't even begin to start forming answers.
After a moment she lifted her eyes to meet his. A second passed and then another. She had no idea what to say either.
He opened his mouth as if to demand answers from her but quickly shut it while reformulating a different question borne out of concern for her psychological welfare. "...You see that kind of stuff often? That...nightmare we were just in?"
"I didn't think that would happen. I was pretty sure nothing would happen." It wasn't that she was dodging the question but more that she was still trying to get what had just happened sorted in her mind. There was still a morsel of panic in her voice. "How did you see that? We need to understand how..." Sofie shook her head, still struggling to comprehend.
Lamar wiped the lingering tears from his cheeks and lower eyelids with his knuckles. "I don't know, you're the scientist!" The exasperation in his deep voice wasn't directed to her but rather a result of a new and palpable emotion. Fear. "Can you run some tests or something?"
Could she run some tests? What did he think she was doing? Her mind might be racing but she was trying to think this through. She needed some room to calm down and think. If only he was more logical, more like a Vulcan, more like- Before she could finish the thought a new even more immediate issue found itself growing in her stomach.
She held up her hand in a jerky motion to indicate pause but only for a brief moment. She jumped down from the stool and ducked behind the work bench, scrambling around in its bowels to find some sort of container. Something like a bucket perhaps, there! She threw a bunch of equipment behind her, emptying out a large plastic tub. It would have to do, time was up and her lunch was not going to be sticking around. The distinctive sound of vomiting came up from where she was crouched.
He'd seen the urgent look in her gray eyes many times in the past, usually after extreme PT exercises or post-combat assessments. He was up off his own seat and slowly following behind her when she spewed, and laid a reassuring hand on her back while pulling stray strands of her hair back behind her neck and out of the way. "I guess El Diablo doesn't like mac and cheese," he jested to try and lighten the mood.
She tried to offer a little chuckle in response, it wasn't very convincing, especially not since there was still more lunch to make its way up, but she really did appreciate the gesture. Afters few more seconds of retching she straightened up and looked at him. "That was unpleasant." After a little moment, "That was more than just unpleasant. Are you alright? Did it hurt you?"
He hadn't really thought about his own peril ever since 'returning' several minutes ago. Lamar held his arms out then looked himself over. Fingers, arms, legs, toes. All check. "I think I'm fine?" Was he? Physically, perhaps, but cerebrally? "Head's a little cloudy but..." he shook his chin from side to side, "no, nothing." For now. "Have you been to counseling recently? I mean, reported this to someone?"
"Of course I've been to counselling, I tell them everything is fine like I do every time." The irritation in her voice was tempered by the nausea she was still feeling. How many times had she already said it today? Was the message not clear yet? "You know what will happen to us if we tell them. We can't do that, neither of us can breathe a word of this."
"Sof, don't try and frighten, just repeating yourself isn't going to help. Try reassurance. Say you've got things under control." Unasked for advice from the flayed man echoed in her head. Hadn't this entity been responsible for what they'd just experienced? And now it was trying to give her advice? The seeming contradiction just scared her even more.
Sofie couldn't fault the logic of the advice though. With a hand on the workbench she shakily pulled herself up to standing again and looked Lamar in the eyes, trying to assert some kind of authority, or as best as she could given the height difference. "Look, I can work this out. We don't need them and they wouldn't understand, they might not believe us and then whatever this is could spread and cause even more chaos. Let me take charge of this situation, figure out what is going on and how we can beat it. I can get us out of this. Trust me."
"Uhh.." He reached up and rubbed the back of his neck. A healthy amount of suspicion surrounding her claims of solving this mystery propagated into his inflection. "I know you know your science, but don't you think we're in over our heads? Maybe this thing wants us to keep it a secret so it can do whatever it does without anyone else knowing? What solution are you even thinking of that the two of us could pull off?"
"You're right. I'm sorry, I don't know really if I can find a way out of this. I'm just scared and I'm trying to say the right things. I don't know what the way out is." The confidence she had been trying to project was instantly replaced. A look of sincerity was plastered across her face and her words dripped with contrition. Beneath the surface though the cold and calculating Sofie was looking for another point of attack, another way to ensure that Lamar kept their secret safe. This was a dangerous moment and her mind was still reeling somewhat from what they had just experienced. She wanted time to think.
"It's like you said just before though: we can't go back to sickbay. It would be the end of our careers, they'd take us away and we'd never see this ship or its people every again. I am scared to lose that. I'm sure you are too." She thought about all the people on this ship she cared about, the love she had for her friends and for-- She felt the nausea return, the remnants of lunch once again clamouring for liberation. She scrunched her eyes shut for a moment, willing her body to pull itself together. "Maybe we do need help though."
Sofie's hand gripped tightly to the reassuringly solid workbench and ungracefully pulled herself back to sitting on one of the stools. She tried to ignore the smell of vomit. "We need to think carefully before we tell anyone else about this. We need to be sure we can trust them, that we can both trust them. We can't rush into this."
He moved back to his former seat next to her then sighed and rubbed the back of his neck in deep thought. Her assessment of this quandary they faced was sound including her reservations. There had to be a way through it. "I'm with you, Sofie. They're not strapping us back down onto biobeds again, I promise you that much. We need to find someone who we can talk to who can't tell anyone else, even if they want to. Maybe..." Who was the blond psych woman? "Carlisle? That's her name, right? Counselors have to respect patient confidentiality. Maybe we can test the waters with her."
"Confidentiality can be ignored if we pose a risk to our health or the health of others. Mimi almost died because of us, Turell too." This time the guilt in her voice wasn't covering up anything else. Even after her conversation with Mimi the previous day she felt weighed down by what had almost happened, and also what had happened. "And there was Locksley."
Another frown spread across his face and wrinkled the smooth, dark contours of his skin. "I...I almost broke her face," he started to remember. "I wasn't me and she tried to keep me in sickbay....but I had to leave. She didn't deserve that."
"She didn't. None of them deserved what we put them through." Sofie nodded, her voice now more sullen. "You didn't deserve what I put you through. If I hadn't shown up that day, if I hadn't convinced you we were still on the station, you and Locksley and everyone else could have avoided this." She wasn't really sure what she was getting at, was it just another exercise in pointless self pity? She shook her head very slightly and then straitened up again. "I think every time I ask you to trust me it is probably a bad idea but I really don't think we can talk to any doctors right now."
Sofie glanced down at the plastic tub on the floor again. There was a grimace on her face, clearly it wasn't just the smell of a half digested lunch she was thinking of. The whole experience of the day had been horrible. "After what we just went through I'm scared and I'm maybe not thinking as logically as I'd like to. Maybe we should take a couple of days before we make any decisions on this."
"A couple days?" The hesitation in his voice was palpable but followed by a reluctant sigh of discerning logic. This was a lot to absorb - the recent return to the 'other side' along with the possible revelation that something much more dangerous was perhaps stalking them across dimensions. "We have to do something. Well, eventually. Probably soon. You're right, we have to be smart about it. Two days," he agreed.
"Right, two days. I just need to clear my head a bit." Sofie made a gesture with one of her perfect hands, holding it up for a moment. "We should make sure not to have any physical contact with each other. That might cause things to happen again. I don't know if maybe I should be avoiding touching anybody..." Her voice trailed off, there was so much she still didn't understand.
Touching. Physical contact. Lamar glanced down when his thoughts interpreted her directive with slightly alternate nuance. "I, uh...you're pretty, Sofie, don't get me wrong, but I didn't know you-" he swallowed a small lump in his throat before looking back up into her gray eyes, "-didn't know you wanted that. It's a little complicated for me right now."
"It is not complicated. I am completely uninterested in you." Sofie snapped at him. She wasn't sure if the irritation and harshness in her voice was a product of their experience in the nightmare, lingering pain in her hands, her unquiet stomach or just the miasma of confusing thoughts racing through her head but she knew that right now she just wanted him out. She sighed and rattled off three corrections "That wasn't what I meant by contact. I'm not pretty. It would never work out between us."
"I have a busy afternoon ahead, I need some time to clean things up here and to think." The look on her face said it much more clearly: I want you to leave.
The subsequent silence in the room created a thick and permeable atmosphere which seemed to produce a combination of sweat and goosebumps across his arms beneath the uniform. She didn't want him. A part of his heart was broken for she was the only - and closest - member of Galileo with whom he could share their terrible combined experiences. "I'll get out of here. Back to my place in the shuttlebay, right?" he quipped at her while rising to his feet and turning his head away. He walked toward the geology lab's exit door which swished open but paused to look over his shoulder toward her one final time. "If these things happening to us continue then we better get used to each other." The exit door hissed shut behind Lamar after he departed.
Had that really hurt his feelings? Sofie sat in confused quiet for a moment. Did he actually like her like that? Sofie had never been that great at reading allosexuals and that thought had never crossed her mind. Maybe she was just reading too much into it though. Maybe he'd just reacted like that because of her annoyed dismissal, that kind of tone from a friend could upset anyone. Lamar was her friend and she hoped he thought the same of her.
She waited in the almost-silence of the geology lab. The only sound was the engine's ever present hum. She waited for the fire to come back. It always did.
She didn't have to wait long. This time she'd face it alone.
[OFF]
--
LTJG Sofie Ullswater
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo-A
CWO3 Lamar Darius
Conn Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Tarin]