Caretaker - L. A. Graf [28]
This will not be my fault! I will not let a patient die!
"... Computer..." Fitzgerald heard the console stagger sluggishly to life on the other side of the smoke-filled room.
"... Initiate emergency..." T'Prena's pulse continued to flutter beneath his shaking hand. He held it tighter, willing it to strengthen, willing it to stay.
"... emergency medical..."
It fluttered, thickened, faded...
Fitzgerald's breath caught painfully in his chest, and T'Prena felt cold almost the instant her heart stopped beating. No patient, he told himself. No reason to fight anymore. He was a doctor, and by his hand a living being had died. Lowering his head to the deck beside her, Fitzgerald closed his eyes to let that swelling final darkness take him.
* Engineering glowed like the depths of Hell.
Janeway took a deep breath before striding out of the turbolift, trying to take in a thousand images at once. She counted three dead on the floor just inside the main doors, their bodies reduced to little more than blurred outlines beneath a shroud of torn, discolored tarps. She suffered a sudden, uncomfortable worry about what they were going to do with all these bodies.
That wasn't something they talked about much at the Academy, either. A small group of engineers were already helping those of the injured who could walk into the corridor, and someone else knelt beside crew members who were so badly wounded that Janeway couldn't bring herself to believe they would actually survive--even if sickbay was only half this damaged. From speakers out of sight in the gas clouds overhead, the computer's dry, uninflected voice droned, "Warning. Warp-core microfracture. Breach imminent... Warning. Warp-core..."
Janeway pushed between two suited engineers to grab Carey by the shoulder. "What's the warp-core pressure?"
He twisted about at the sound of her voice, his face a study in frustrated dread. "Twenty-one hundred kilopascals and falling."
"Lock down the magnetic constrictors."
"Captain..." He followed her deeper into the engine room, waving silent commands to the two engineers with him as he went.
"If we lock them down, at these pressure levels, we might not be able to reinitialize the dilithium reaction."
"... Warning. Warp core microfracture..."
"We haven't got a choice," Janeway told him. About being here, about surviving this, about any of it. "We've got to get the reaction rate down before we try to seal it."
Otherwise the rest of it wouldn't matter. And, for Janeway, that just wasn't an option.
* Damn her. Damn her, anyway! She'd looked him straight in the eye, acknowledged his presence next to Stadi's lifeless form, and then excluded him as though he were the enemy on her bridge.
What did she think he would do? How badly did she think he could screw up, compared to all the damage already done?
Is that how you have to measure yourself now, Paris? In relation to how much worse you can make a situation?
And what proof did he really have that Janeway wasn't right?
"I'm reading fires inside." Kim's voice interrupted his brooding, jerking Paris back to the dark, cluttered corridor just outside the sickbay doors and the sickly stench of burning meat from somewhere within. He'd followed Kim out of the bridge for lack of anything more useful to do. At least putting things together down here would amount to something, would help other members of the crew even if Janeway didn't think Paris had what it took. "We'll have to be careful when we open the doors," Kim said.
Assuming they could get them open. Leaving the ensign to stare at his tricorder, Paris banged on the emergency panel to the left of the entrance until it popped open, dropping half its contents with a startling clatter. Kim jumped around with a gasp, and Paris waved him over as he pulled the fire extinguisher loose from