by LT SG Rada Dengar
80811.2130
Hours after Senses
80811.2130
Hours after Senses
Rada knew that he was surrounded, he could feel them probing at him. Betazoids; he was beginning to feel that realise he had never met one he could trust.
He had been kicked and bloodied until he’d passed into unconsciousness and then he’d woken up here. His ribs were aching, his face felt swollen and his jaw seemed to have been forced out of place. He couldn’t move. He was in a chair with heavy restraints on his arms and legs. He struggled to jump; to scream. He tried to rock the chair back and forth, to kick his legs into the air. To do something; anything, but he couldn’t.
There was no movement; no matter how he struggled he couldn’t change his position. He couldn’t fight. He couldn’t fidget. He couldn’t even speak. Every part of his body was held in place exactly as he’d been set here. It felt like it’d been days, even weeks of him just frozen here. Rationality would have told him that since he hadn’t eaten, drank or slept since he’d woken here that it couldn’t have been more than a few days but rationality was no where to be found.
They were attempting to drive him quite mad, he was sure of it. Little did they know that he’d been on this drive before, he knew all those clever little turns to take to assure that they kept driving him around and around and never getting to their final destination.
Even his eyes which felt like they had hooks dug into them were forced to remain in place. They denied him every sense. There was no light, he kept telling himself that it would just take a few more seconds for his eyes to adjust so that he could see beyond the darkness, it never came. As for sound, like everything on this damn planet; this place was silent. Rada almost laughed to himself at the thought that a man who spent so much of his life searching for quiet solitude was going to die longing to hear again, but it occurred to him that if he didn’t hear the laughter then he may well start to cry.
He wondered if he’d even feel the tears, his body was so numb that he doubted it; he couldn’t even feel his restraints. It was crazy, he had only signed up to bloody Starfleet; to a life of phasers, violence and the constant intrusions to his life and his mind by everyone around him, for the chance to avoid just that. It’s funny, isn’t it? He wanted to figure out the path to peace and so he joined an army.
Starfleet may claim to be an exploratory or scientific agency but Rada knew better. He’d seen what those mobile weapons platforms they could Starships could do when they’re angered. Oh, they claimed that the weapons were just for self defence but Rada knew better. They fly off around the galaxy until they find somewhere that someone doesn’t want them to be and then as soon as they’re attacked they claim it’s alright to start murdering the other guy.
Sometime on the Earth several thousand years ago a primitive man experienced a moment of purest insanity. He picked up a sharpened rock, felt its weight in his hand and in a flash of raw hatred used it to kill his brother. It was the most horrific event that history had ever known. As the word spread people came to gather around the corpse; they looked at his lifeless eyes and into the gaping emptiness of his wound and at that moment something changed. They began to weigh that rock in their own hands and they realised they needed more. They couldn’t be content to just kill those in reaching distance so they developed the spear. People were getting away from the spears by moving too quickly so they developed the arrow. Drawing back a bow was far too much work for to take a single life so they invented the gun.
Suddenly it became for too inconvenient to just take one life at a time so they developed explosives and nuclear weapons and Phasers and Quantum Torpedos and…and Rada was part of it. All those old voices ran through his mind ‘We need to increase the yield’, ‘Isn’t there some way to get past their shields?’, ‘Life support can wait; we need those phasers back online now!’ over and over again he relived all those times in his life when his Engineering work had killed. It wasn’t his choice, it couldn’t have been, he realised now that the Humans must have been forcing him into it.
Everything seemed so much clearer to him now. The neurazipam hadn’t been helping him; it had just been hiding the truth. Luckily, it was now almost completely out of his system and he could see. Those Betazoids thought that they were so clever hiding away in the shadows, little did they know that he could sense them too. Oh, yes he could sense them. He could hear whispers of their thoughts as they attempted to force their way in to his. He couldn’t make out the words but he knew their meaning. Angosian brain’s on the menu, just as soon as we’re down mashing it.
His mind was like a ship under attack and he was the only Engineer left alive. He danced from deck to deck repairing and remodulating the shields. Every blow they struck seemed to vibrate through the deck plates into his bones, the doors weren’t working properly, everything that wasn’t stuck down had been shaken to the floor, the gravity was weak and he wondered how certain he could be about what was up and down. He was certain though that they wouldn’t get through the shields as long as he had a nanojoule of energy left to work with.
Yes, they definitely wanted him insane. But he wouldn’t let them! Insanity would be, would be the coward’s way out. He was no coward though, no matter what they might be thinking. He wasn’t going to let them win, he couldn’t!
A violent electric shock pulsed through his eyes and realised that there were suddenly images before him, they were trying to deceive him.
Fire, blood, a baby, a soldier, a wound, a woman silently screaming; these images repeatedly looped through his mind getting faster. There was still no noise. The baby was crying but there was still no noise. The soldier was wounded by a shot to the heart but as he collapsed to the ground there was nothing. The baby was leaking the blood. The woman was caught in the fire. No one was helping. The images kept getting quicker and quicker until they formed a single overlayed mesh. Then the noise began. The woman piercingly screamed, the baby cried like a whimpering siren and the soldier violently swore at his general.
“Give in!” came the voice over.
The screams were getting louder. “GIVE IN! GIVE IN!” a thousand voices were chanting. The screams still got through. Rada’s shields were failing. The screaming wouldn’t stop “GIVE IN! GIVE IN! GIVE IN!”
The next voices were barely audible over the chants and the screams but they were both familiar.
“You’re killing him!”
“We’re just having fun!”
“You promised me you wouldn’t hurt him,”
“But it’s such fun!”
“He’ll die before you get through. You’ve seen what he’s worth to you alive.”
The screams turned for pleas for Rada to just give in.
“But I’m just so close,”
“Don’t make me do this!”
“You wouldn’t dare hurt your brother,” Rada’s captor scoffed.
The people in his vision were begging him to save them as another barrage hit the shields.
“I have to, I love him more.” the voice solemnly answered.
There was a brilliant explosion as suddenly the image before Rada turned to pure white and all of the noises faded away to nothing except a hum. There was a twinge in his eyes as with a blink the real world came in to focus.
A blurred face surrounded by black was leaning over him. He heard his restraints being unlocked as detail returned.
“It’s okay,” she soothingly said. “It’s just the drugs. They mess with your mind.”
As his head was freed he began shaking. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her but he was fighting to get away. He still couldn’t get out of that chair. She wasn’t sure if her brother was only stunned.
Rada’s body screamed in agony with every touch. She brushed the hair from his face. His eyes were engulfed by more fear than he’d ever known. Wren tried to calm him down. His breathing was getting heavy. She needed to calm him down. He was hyperventilating. He needed to get out of that chair. She finished undoing the restraints. He leapt up from the chair but his legs wouldn’t support him. He fell face first onto the ground. Wren knelt down to help. She had a lot of explaining to do.
LT. SG Rada Dengar
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Alchemy NX 53099
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Alchemy NX 53099