1079: Small Boat, Big Ocean

By Lair Kellyn
100418.17
Time: Current

-=Sickbay, USS Serendipity=-

*Mud.*

Slowly, Lair Kellyn lifted her head. It came thumping back down and the reverberating vibration moved through her skull in choppy waves, like far too small a boat on much too large an ocean.

*Mud,* she thought again.

She winced in pain. She felt like she wasn't altogether tethered to this existence; instead she was floating somewhere both above and below her own body yet somehow still bloody well enough living in it to have a blinding headache.

Her mouth was so dry that all attempts to moisten her lips with her tongue were entirely and pathetically unsuccessful. At last, she managed to lend the slightest amount of sound to the thoughts in her head, producing something that could almost be called speech.

"It's like trying to think through mud."

Her slurred words immediately captured the attention of the man who'd been working nearby.

"Kellyn!" Trev Sterling set the LMH's emitter down and hurried over to her. He was joined a moment later by a small someone that Kellyn was very happy to see.

"Arie? Trev? What the hell are you-" she tried to sit up and felt her daughter's small hands protectively grasping her arm.

"Please, Mother, lie still. You were injured when the ship was damaged."

The instant she'd spoken the words her eyes widened, indicating that Arie regretted having said them. Her mother's reaction was just what she knew it'd be.

"Damaged? What happened?" Kellyn bolted up too quickly and immediately her stomach lurched. "Uh, oh..."

She felt a cold sensation against her neck, heard the hiss and then immediately felt the effects of the anti-emetic Trev had just injected into her.

"Hold up there, you," he said. "You've taken a hell of a knock, Kellyn. You can't just go charging out of bed that way."

"What happened to the ship?" Kellyn repeated, suddenly realizing that there was no medical staff present and that one of her fellow engineers had been the one injecting medication into her. "Trev, where's McKay?"

Tam Elton approached now, holding out the doctor's mobile emitter in his small, trembling hand. "We're hoping he is still in here, Commander Lair," he said.

Kellyn's eyes flashed, she swung her legs over the edge of the biobed and she reached out a hand, snapping her fingers. She wanted to ask for something, but for the moment her mind drew a blank as to what the name of the item she needed actually was.

Arie knew the look, and the gesture as Kellyn continued pointing into mid-air at nothing. She picked up a tricorder. "Here you are, Mother."

"Thank you, Arie." Kellyn began to scan McKay's emitter. "It all looks in order, well, except I don't remember doing that, or that, and how the hell did you..." she cocked her head sideways as she looked at the display. "I definitely didn't do that."

"We had to make a few temporary modifications." Trev answered. "Arie's knowledge of McKay's emitter is..." he shook his head. "Extremely impressive."

"Yeah well the whole Joe Jonas thing apparently wasn't for naught." Kellyn winked at Arie, whose cheeks took on slight color. Acknowledging the other small being in the room, Kellyn rotated slightly to address him directly. "I'm sure you were a big help too, Tam."

"I held the emitter as steady as I could, Commander." Tam answered, with utmost seriousness.

"I'm sure you did a fine job. Now will somebody tell me what the hell is going on with the ship? And get me a fractal recoupler, if we turn McKay back on before I reintegrate the primary and secondary projection systems he's gonna light up like the laser show at EPCOT and not in a good way."

"The...what at where?" Trev asked.

"Never mind. I've been spending too much time on the holodeck with Dabin Reece and you're avoiding the question, Trev Sterling." Kellyn glanced up at him from beneath hair still matted with what she coldly and correctly assessed must be her own blood before returning to the work at hand of preparing to reinitialize McKay's program. "What happened?"

"Arie, Tam, could you please go into Doctor Hartcort's office a moment so I can speak to the Commander privately?"

Arie turned and obediently led the way with Tam a step behind, but then she paused and looked back over her shoulder.

"Respectfully, sir," her small voice was clear and calm as she spoke, no trace of the fear he'd seen in her earlier remaining now that she could see her mother moving and speaking again. "Commander," she nodded to her mother now, and then directed her eyes back at Sterling who had given the order to march. "With such limited resources and the ship in imminent danger, would it not be better if you explained it to us too? We might perhaps, in some small way, be able to help."

Trev shook his head once more. "How old are you again?"

"I will be eleven on my next birthday." Arie answered truthfully.

"Going on forty. Well, it's up to the Commander if you stay." Trev suppressed a smile.

"I'm willing to bet that these two have already helped a lot more today than I'm currently aware." Kellyn replied. "They can stay."

"Okay." Trev drew a deep breath. "The ship has been hijacked, somehow. We're no longer in normal space. Most of the crew had left for shore leave before the ship was taken..."

"Or for their unofficial court martial." Kellyn whispered, thinking how very far away she must be from Vulcan in this moment.

"For that too."

"Who is in command?"

"TC Blane."

"Well, that's a good thing." Lair nodded. "But it's quiet, much too quiet and that's a bad thing." Kellyn observed Trev's clothing for the first time now. "You aren't supposed to be here are you?"

"I'm supposed to be on Maui drinking something blue with a little paper umbrella sticking out of it."

"Well, when this is over, I'll buy you several glasses of blue stuff with as many umbrellas sticking out as you want." Kellyn promised. "I take it that we can't just walk out of here and march into Engineering."

"No."

"And we have no one else right now that we can absolutely count on to help us?"

"McKay, if we did our job right and can get him running."

"And you have me."

All present turned toward a familiar voice addressing them from the doorway.

"Dane," Trev said, "I thought-"

"I did what I had to do and I tried to get back to the bridge but I can't. It's cut off."

"What do you mean, 'cut off'?" Kellyn asked.

"I mean that it's been taken by hostile TI agents and we're in very, very deep." He looked at Kellyn and added, "Sir."

"Well then, Ensign," Lair said, her newfound affection for Cristiane coming through in her voice, "We're just going to have to figure out how to best put you to good use."

Dane looked at her sideways. "How are you feeling?"

She gave a dismissive wave of her hand. "I'll live."

Dane looked to Sterling as if asking confirmation of this assertion. Lair noticed this immediately and reached out, lightly cuffing Dane on the ear with an open palm in a manner more joking than intentionally violent.

"I told you, I'm fine. Don't make me go looking for another bottle to break over your head." She looked down at McKay's emitter once more. "Before we try initializing him, is there anything I should know? Like you reprogrammed him to yodel and wear lederhosen?"

"Not intentionally." Trev answered.

"Then let's hope he doesn't come back doing either." Lair turned now to the youngest people present. "Arie, Tam, could you gather up all of Lieutenant Sterling's tools now and bring them here? I see them over there and if anything goes wrong I might need to borrow one pretty quickly."

"Aye sir," both children answered in unison, and the moment they'd walked away, Kellyn gestured for the two men with her to lean closer. She lowered her voice to the faintest possible whisper. "The Captain?"

"Taken hostage." Dane answered gravely. "Zanh, O'Sullivan, and Lindsay, all over on the Poseidon, the TI ship that is holding us here."

"I take it in addition to the bridge they've taken Engineering."

Dane and Trev both nodded.

"We need to get a message to them down there, to let them know that there is help on the outside if they just tell us what they need us to do." Lair's head began to spin again, and she felt Dane's hand steadying her as she almost veered over the edge of the bed.

"Easy, there."

"Thanks." She sighed. "I don't have time for...for... woozy. I need to think." She closed her eyes a moment and when she opened them again, she saw that Arie and Tam were nearly done with their task. "Suggestions?"

"We might be able to get a simple, encoded message to them down there. Text only. If we're very, very careful," Trev replied.

"Ah, Vol told me that you had a little 'secret agent' in you. I see he wasn't lying." Kellyn's lip curled slightly. "And you, bright boy, I know that you have all kinds of Keiran O'Sullivan type tricks up your sleeve. So you and Trev start on that, I'm going to give Dalton one more look over with the help of our young friends here and then..."

"Then?" Trev asked nervously.

"Then we find out whether we're in for clog dancing to go with the yodeling or the traditional Texas two-step."

"I've never so hoped to hear a twang in my life." Trev sighed. "C'mon, Cristiane. Let's see about sending that message."

-----=/\=-----
Commander Lair Kellyn
Engineering Research and Development
The Alchemy Project