Shutting Down

[Brian Graham 0]

Chief Security Officer’s Personal Log

Lt. Cmdr. Brian Graham Recording

USS Excalibur

Stardate 200602.28

 

The past few hours had been hard to describe. Suspense, terror, adrenaline, excitement, frustration, blood, smoke, sparks, noise, confusion, relief, clarity, anger, and echoes from the past coming back to reality. Most of the time one of the feelings came in, only to be thrown violently to the side by another, itself making itself the priority as certain stimuli coalesced to bring about the particular feeling. The Hundred had arrived, everyone knew it would happen sometime and anyone who didn’t suspect it at all was a fool, or had just shown up. There was no way an organization like the Hundred, with a different ideology than the dominant entity in the quadrant, possessing the military assets that it did, and no hint of bothering with the diplomatic channels, would just sit around and be content to stay in the underground, hiding in a nebulae, warping out of a system just as a loyal Dominion ship warped in, only for the chase to begin again, or walking amongst those who were bent on your elimination.

 

And so they came, almost a microcosm of the previous years of the Dominion War, except this time the nearest Cardassian was thousands of light years away, not counting wormholes and the theatre was on the other side of said wormhole, and, of course, this time not all the vessels with a Dominion configuration were firing on them, but there were sure enough. It had been fierce, it had been violent, it had been tense, with the moments where one thought the moment right now was your last moment of life function, and the next was nothing, and somewhere in between was an EPS overload, shrapnel, a disappearing bulkhead, or the flashpoint of a dilithium chamber. Sometimes you had a chance to think about your next move, other times thought and movement merged into an almost simultaneous motion where it was hard to imagine action could actually come before rational thought.

 

Every so often a sensor contact would wink out; sometimes a ship system on the display would change from yellow, to red, then to black. Sometimes, after a really hard hit, they would jump from green to red, or even green to black, that happened once. Sometimes a light would come back on, but most of them didn’t, especially as each minute elapsed.

 

Collision, venting atmosphere, order to clear the Bridge, access tunnel, tornado, loss, transporter, Excalibur, and finally warp trails. Then salvage: technology, parts, ships, bodies, parts of bodies, they were all out there. Soon they would be all be collected, the first three would go to the workshops or dry docks, the latter two to the sickbays, or the morgues.

 

The morgue ones were now here, a line of torpedo casings, each with the traditional flag with the United Federation of Planets on it. Some of them had bodies, others, just what had been recovered, some were empty, but the formality was honored regardless.

 

He’d counted the casings several times already, six of them held those who belonged to his department. Their records had already been updated though Brian hadn’t written the letters yet, he was going to right after this was over. There were others too, along the line and Brian had known all of them. Morningstar had been a small ship, so it was almost impossible not to have seen everyone who had served on it at some point or another. But death was something he had practically drilled into his mind. Starfleet was a dangerous place, every member of every department was at risk of every moment, and security was no difference, bloody, the whole thing revolved around carrying a weapon, it had to be dangerous, and so the fact that you were finite was a difficult thing to forget, and events like these made it even harder.

 

Brian stood there, amongst the crowd, not feeling much of anything, though he probably would later. That worried him. Sure the immediate, immediate danger had passed for now, but there was still things to take care of. It seemed cold, colder than an Andorian winter, to be so fixated on moving on, when they hadn’t even fired the torpedoes off yet. But the universe didn’t stop when someone died, even though it you thought it should. But it couldn’t, and they couldn’t either, even though it seemed so insulting to the dead. They couldn’t afford to get too attached, it interferes with decisions, disrupts the process, creates a pause when action is needed, that was something too dangerous to consider also.

 

I can’t let it get in the way, and when it’s me, I can’t let that get in the way of someone else either.