USS Theurgy: First Battle Against the USS Calamity

June 16, 2017, 07:59:48 AM

DELETED SCENE DURING THE FIRST BATTLE AGAINST THE USS CALAMITY

"Captain!" called Nicole Howard her fingers moving deftly over the controls of the Engineering station, overriding Thea's order as best she could manage, it was as if the whole darn system was being changed just as fast as she could input new commands. "Inertial dampers just came offline and... the magnetic fields that control the antimatter containment is failing!" The panic was clear in her voice, but she kept working at the controls. If she did not get things stabilized it would spell the end of all of them, and she was not in engineering, the place she could have gotten the most done. "The injector coils are overloading! There is no way we could..." She paused and looked up, fear and panic written across her face clear for all to be seen. "We are being sabotaged!"

What happened next happened so fast that Nicole could hardly process it. A figure appeared on the bridge in the shimmering beam of a transporter. The assault began and it was still much faster than she really was aware of. It appeared to be a woman, and she quickly tore a phaser rifle from one of the guards that approached her. In a series of phaser bolts she watched as many of her fellow bridge officers were shot down, many by the intruder’s hand, and some even from the return fire of the crew, desperate to try and get the situation back in hand. But the figure - apparently holographic - only shimmered and ignored the assault, instead whipping her weapon towards Jien Ives, rapid bursts discharged to take down the Commanding Officer.

And in that moment Nicole had leapt into action. She ran and jumped, throwing her body between the intruder and her captain, the volley of phaser bolts slamming into her chest with a great deal of force. In the moment before she hit the deck plating, it was as if time itself slowed around her. She felt the energy shoot through her, knocking whatever air had been in her lungs out. She wasn't aware of the pain so much as the feeling of cold.

And then she hit the deck plating, less than gently, and her eyes were open - staring unseeingly at the ceiling of the bridge. She had never given much thought into her own mortality, life had been cheap for her and she knew she would one day die. But in the last few seconds, as the cold began to creep into her body she was surprised at how peaceful it had been. She had done her duty, both a personal duty in protecting her lover and a professional one in protecting her captain.

In the moment that followed as Nicole's lifesigns faded into the unreadable, Jien and Edena were both pulled away by the arms of the Security personnel, both of them saved by the red-haired engineer. The look in Captain Ives' hard eyes when she fell was lost on Nicole, but would linger in the forefront of Thea's memory banks for a long time.

When there was at last a moment of peace and the wounds of the ship's crew could be tended to, Nicole was placed in stasis. The young Teslyliac doctor on duty filled out the forms. Nicole would be a difficult case to revive due to the extent of the damage and the amount of time between the point of no return and putting her in stasis, but it had been on the direct order of the captain that she not be placed in the morgue as long as there was still some degree of hope, and in truth there was. If Nicole was to recover she would need to be in a surgical room with doctor's prepped before the stasis field was deactivated. In addition they would need a near custom built artificial heart as the traditional models for Humans or Bajorans would not work due to her unique physiology, the new device would need to be either more primitive or more advanced, it was impossible to tell without further scans, and it was difficult to perform such scans through a stasis field.

So Nicole was locked away in the small Stasis Pod Storage room and it would stay that way until they could at the very least give her a fighting chance of survival.