By -=/\=- Zanh Liis
80225.14
Concurrent with Keeping A Weather Eye on the Horizon
-=Aboard the USS Executor=-
80225.14
Concurrent with Keeping A Weather Eye on the Horizon
-=Aboard the USS Executor=-
Zanh Liis was descending, as quickly as she could, down the rungs of the emergency ladder inside a seemingly bottomless turbolift shaft on the USS Executor.
Perspiration streamed down the back of her neck and soaked her hair. Her uniform tunic clung to her body; her cheeks were flushed and felt as though they were on fire. Her pulse was up, and she was certain that her blood pressure was probably off the charts.
She hated to think what her doctors were going to say to her when she got back home.
*I'm getting too old for this.* She thought, but as she contemplated the fact that she might not live to see her thirty-seventh linear-year birthday this Spring if things turned out badly today, she realized it wasn't the number of years passing that accounted for her feeling so ancient. It was all those damned time jumps, all that cheating the clock by stealing from one time line to meet the demands of another. It wasn't how old she was. It was how hard she'd been on her poor body.
What was it a famous Terran adventurer once said? 'It's not the years, it's the mileage?'
She had been lucky enough that the doors to the shaft were already open to the bridge, malfunctioning as were many other systems on the frying Executor. Cascades of minor electrical failures ran rampant, warning of much more serious defects to follow.
At this moment all Zanh could hope was that she could stack up enough of the malfunctions in her favor by taking advantage of benefits that they never intended to offer her- such as the fact that the lift doors were already open to an empty shaft on the bridge- and by doing so, she could get both herself and Dane back to the Sera in one piece.
She grasped and released the rungs inside the shaft, moving down three decks and thinking that she was pretty lucky that the cascade failures hadn't caused the activation of the deck by deck isolation fields yet.
Just as she considered this bit of incredible good fortune, she heard a loud crackle and hum. She stopped her foot mid swing, disrupting the rhythm she'd fallen into during her descent. Her palms were slippery and she lost hold of the rungs with one hand, nearly slipping down onto the freshly activated isolation force field beneath her.
She growled in frustration and pulled the tricorder from her belt. Scanning, she learned that she had another deck to go before she reached the lift where Dane was trapped. As the tricorder sputtered and fizzled in protest, readings blinking on and off due to the intensity of the atmospheric conditions around her, Zanh stopped herself just short of forming the complete thought that she was grateful the damned thing was still working.
*Oh no. I'm not spelling it out that easily for the Fates this time. If they want to figure out how to screw up my day, they'll have to do it on their own. I'm not giving them any conscious help from here on out by being grateful for anything.*
As angry as she was at Dane for all the trouble he'd been causing, all the temper fits, all of the punk-ass brat behavior that he was far too old to be indulging in, she knew even as she stood, one leg dangling free over the abyss in this Prophet's forsaken turbolift shaft aboard a dying starship that she had made the right decision to go after him. Even if she died in the rescue effort, that would be preferable to trying to live with herself if she'd given in and allowed her crew to take her back without making an attempt.
Dane's problems, in her opinion, stemmed mostly from a deep seeded belief that in the end, anyone he cared about or trusted would leave him behind. That he could afford to be vulnerable to no one, and that being angry and keeping everyone at a distance was better by far than letting them near, and getting hurt.
She had, herself, lived for years by the same unfortunate and mistaken code of conduct.
That was why Zanh had been determined from the beginning of their rocky relationship that she would not add any merit to his misguided theory by giving up on him, come Hell or high water.
That was why she couldn't abandon him on DS23. That was why she had accepted taking him on, aboard the Sera.
That was why she would not leave without him today. She would not desert him now.
It occurred to her that soon, the men currently commanding the Sera may just lock on to her and beam her back without asking first. Salvek, she suspected, had known her so many years that this would be his absolute last-resort course of action. Blane, however, she pictured with an itchy finger on the trigger, ready to yank her back from the flames before she got roasted whether she wanted to go or not. She had little doubt that Blane would beam first, answer to any consequences later.
She needed to get Dane out of that lift, and she needed to do it now.
As she paused for just a moment to catch her breath and consider her next move, she became aware that the same sickening crackle and hum sound she'd heard beneath her before was resonating above her now, as well. That meant she was trapped in the shaft at the level she was on- there was no going up or down from here, not any longer.
She climbed back up several rungs until she was even with the doors on deck four, and pushed with all her strength down on the emergency hydraulic door release handle. The doors sighed a weary complaint as they were forced open by the release, just enough that she could wedge herself through.
She knew that the transporter rooms were located on deck four, and that gave her an idea. She hoped that because he was only trapped a deck beneath her, that she might be able to take any available energy still existent in the system and beam him from the lift to her location. Then Sera could lock on to them both.
Her first attempt to achieve a stable lock failed, and Zanh cursed, sweat dripping from her forehead down into her eyes and burning them as she struggled to see. Her thick bangs were stuck to her forehead in jagged, matted strands, and she pushed them back and out of her eyes.
Her fingers flew across the transporter control panel in a frenzy as she fought the rising wave of anxiety within her- knowing that if this attempt failed, the very last thing she would see in her life would be in the inside of a very boring, sterile transporter room.
She was not going to die that way.
And Dane was not going to die trapped inside a turbolift.
She scrambled to increase power to the pattern buffers, rerouting it finally from the life support control matrix, which was still functioning at near peak efficiency on this deck. Seconds ticked past slowly as Zanh watched the available power readings climb on the panel before her. A small green line. . .creeping across from left to right with one maddeningly unhelpful, flashing word displaying above it as it progressed on its own, tortoise-esque timetable.
Buffering
"Buffer this you son of a bitch," Zanh slammed her hand against the panel, and finally succeeded in routing all power on the deck, even from the lighting system, into that console. The room dimmed to near blackness, the panel now its primary source of illumination.
The green bar jumped to 'full' and she locked onto the one human lifesign inside the frozen lift. A very surprised looking Dane Cristiane stood before her seconds later.
"Captain?"
Zanh marched over to him and stood beside him on the transporter pad.
She held up a finger to silence him. "Later."
She slapped her badge, leaving a smear across it as her sweaty palm contacted the shining surface. "Zanh to Sera, party of two. Energize!"
As she stepped down from the dias in Sera's transporter room and ran out the door toward the bridge, she didn't even cast a look back at Cristiane as she offered him one remark in parting.
"That's two you owe me, Junior."
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-=/\=-Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
-=/\=-Zanh Liis
Commanding Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012