The Good Of The Many

[DrDMatthews 0]

He was a handsome young man....tall and muscular with fair skin, dark hair and eyes and an engaging smile. And now, at the age of twenty-four, he was dead....for the good of the many.

 

His name was Ensign Eric Russels Lukjanenko. He was from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in the United States on the North American continent of Earth. The third of five children and the first, so far, to pursue a career in Starfleet. He was interested in all things mechanical from a very early age. That and his above average aptitude in math prompted Eric Lukjanenko to specialize in Engineering. He graduated nineteenth in his Academy class. Reaent was his first assignment. He had been with the ship for less than a year.

 

Debbie Matthews stared at the photo in Lukjanenko's personnel file. For the life of her, she couldn't remember ever laying eyes on the man. But from this day forward, his name and his infectious smile would forever be engraved in her memory.

 

After their latest skirmish with the Romulans, the injured poured into Sickbay. Deb and her staff were swamped with injured ranging from extremely critical to minor cuts and bruises. There wasn't time to even think about what happened. All she could do, was focus on the situation at hand...help treat the patients and ask questions later.

 

It was three or four hours later that Debbie was briefed on just how close they actually came to total annihilation. They were saved by the selfless act of one man, a young engineer who happened to be in the fighter bay at the most critical of all moments. The flaming wreckage of a once mighty Warbird was seconds away from colliding with the Reaent. It's course was intentional, the desperate act of a defeated Riov who sought revenge as his own ship and crew prepared to meet their fate. Reaent was essentially dead in space. With no propulsion, she was a sitting duck unless the fighter bay could be instantly decompressed. The discharging atmosphere would push the ship just far enough to avoid the imminent collision.

 

Unfortunately, the doors jammed. The fighter bay had been seriously damaged during the Reaent's earlier confrontations inside the nebula. Ensign Lukjanenko happened to be one of the engineers assigned to the repair team. He was still in the area when the orders came to decompress the bay. When Lukjanenko realized the doors had jammed, he rushed into the fighter bay and manually opened them.

 

The plan worked perfectly. The escaping atmosphere nudged the ship out of the way and the derelict Warbird floated harmlessly by. But everything in the fighter bay that wasn't tied down was sucked out into space along with the atmosphere. That included Ensign Eric Russels Lukjanenko.

 

It was Aaron Scherer who finally told Debbie what happened. His department had been especially hard hit with at least half of his engineers either killed or injured. He came by Sickbay to check on some of them and took a few minutes to tell Deb about Eric Lukjanenko.

 

Shortly after the Chief Engineer left, Ensign Maggie Davison was finally told about her boyfriend's heroic sacrifice. She, too, was an engineer who suffered second degree burns in one of the many explosions to rock that section of the ship. Apparently, the two had been dating for a few months. Her reaction to the news was even worse than expected. Lukjanenko's death sent her into hysterics. She was finally calmed but only after she received a hefty dose of melorazine. After Davison drifted off to sleep, the medical team working with her was forced to take a ten minute break. The entire episode left them badly shaken....and that included the CMO.

 

Debbie retreated to her office, determined to learn as much as possible about the young man who, single handedly, saved what was left of the Reaent and her crew. As she looked at his image on the small view screen, she wondered what his final thoughts were. Did he hope to survive the decompression? Or did he know his was a suicide mission? Did he think of family, friends and Maggie Davision? Or did he allow the training to take control of his thought processes only to have the end come so quickly, there was no time to think?

 

She would never have the answers to those questions. However, there was one thing she knew for certain. She would never forget his name or his face or the way he gave up his life for the good of the many. Debbie hoped every surviving member of the crew would remember Eric Russels Lukjanenko, a young Ensign with a promising career ahead of him. For if it wasn't for him, none of them would have lived to see another day.