• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Archer sighed, then moved back to the desk and toggled the channel open one more time. “Go ahead, Commander.”

“Captain, we are approaching Tarod IX. Starfleet and MACO triage teams are assembling presently.”

Archer raised an eyebrow and did a quick calculation in his head. “We beat the schedule by at least six hours. Looks like Mike Burch in engineering deserves a commendation. What’s the condition of the outpost?”

“There has been no response to our hails. According to the medium-range sensors, the Romulan attack here was quite severe.”

Jogging, napping, and even shaving would have to wait. “Thank you, Commander. I’m on my way. Go to Tactical Alert, just in case there are still Romulans lurking in the system.”

“Aye, sir. Assuming that we can find them before they find us.”

Not about to debate that assumption, Archer closed the channel without replying and left his quarters almost at a run.

The good news, Phlox discovered to his enormous relief, was that there were indeed survivors to be found at the Tarod IX outpost following the Romulan sneak attack that had reduced it to smoldering ruins.

The bad news was that he had never seen so many injured people crammed into his sickbay, not even when he’d been swamped with some fifty wounded patients at the Matalas refugee camp. Within an hour of Enterprise’s arrival in orbit of Tarod IX, the main treatment area had already begun to burst at the seams. The influx of dozens of wounded civilians forced him to expand even his basic triage operations out into E deck’s corridors, and he quickly filled up two cargo holds with lower-priority patients. And he’d had no choice but to dragoon all available Starfleet and Military Assault Command Organization personnel who’d had even rudimentary first aid training into service as ad hoc corpsmen, nurses, and medical technicians.

As the doctor finished taking a diagnostic reading on one of the growing multitude, he looked up from his handheld scanner in time to see Master Sergeant Fiona McKenzie helping a pair of her MACO troopers struggle a fully laden stretcher through the transparent aluminum doors and into the sickbay’s crowded periphery.

“What’s her condition?” Phlox said as he moved past several burn victims whose condition seemed to have stabilized, at least for the moment. His newest patient was an unconscious young woman, human like all the rest. Her hair was singed, her skin all but broiled in places.

Phlox closed his eyes tightly for a moment, but opened them immediately to ward off an unbidden memory of the seventeen corpses he’d found very early in his medical career. The encounter had occurred on the bridge of a cargo vessel whose crew had died messily in a shipboard explosion while orbiting his native Denobula Triaxa, and Phlox had the misfortune of being part of the first response team.

He was determined never to allow another such death tableau to plague the memories and dreams of anyone else, if there was anything he could do to prevent it.

“Radiation burns,” said Corporal Matthew Kelly, one of the two MACOs who had done most of the heavy lifting on the stretcher. “Hypothermia, too, probably because she ended up exposed to the elements after the Romulans blew apart the structure she was found in. She’s also got some lacerations or punctures on the torso.”

“Administer ten cc’s hyronalin,” Phlox said. “And I need to take a good look at her other injuries.”

Corporal Ryan, a trained MACO corpsman, dutifully injected the woman through a relatively unscathed patch of skin on her neck. McKenzie and Kelly quietly left to see to other wounded people while Ryan stayed behind to assist Phlox in slicing off the remnants of the burned woman’s distressed, blood-soaked garments.

He didn’t need his scanner to see from the woman’s blue lips and gray skin tone that her body temperature had fallen dangerously because of direct exposure to the harsh conditions of Tarod IX, whose average temperature reflected its extreme distance from its primary star. Nor were the severity