Thinking in the Darkness

[Samantha_Kent 0]

It wasn't so much that Sam was afraid of the dark in the barracks. It was just that the dark there was very different somehow than any she had encountered before. It wasn't impenetrable, but it gave the impression of being so when all it hid was stone walls and ceiling. Curled up in her top bunk, exhausted, hungry, aching with their work and tense with worry, with only a foot of space between herself and the cold stone roof, she felt claustrophobic, buried in it. It was enemy darkness somehow. Captor darkness.

 

Merely an absence of luminescent phenomena, she thought wryly, the cool Vulcan voice of one of her academy science instructors creeping into her head. "Science is the ultimate antidote to fear," he had said once. "The scientist, in a ship's emergency, is the one best equipped to keep their head, for they can look at the situation as it is, not as they want it or fear it to be."

 

Prophets... Sam thought with frustration. I'm trying...but I feel so helpless. It wasn't her lack of tools that bothered her -- though she was becoming uncomfortably aware of her dependence on her tricorder and science equipment -- so much as her lack of a firm understanding of what was going on, a feeling of being at the mercy of others. So far she'd been doing her best to follow her orders and keep her mouth shut, letting people like Servo and Eagle do most of the talking with their captors, but the knowledge that she was doing her duty did little to alleviate her displeasure at not understanding.

 

She rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling. So this is a labor camp... she thought. In her heart of hearts, she knew that their situation here was not that bad. They had been lucky. She had seen some of the Cardassian camps on Bajor during her youth, though thankfully she and her father had managed to evade them...this was nothing compared to that. And Josh had taken weeks to fully recover from his experience in that Jem'Hadar camp...no, she had been very lucky. She knew that, intellectually, but the vague sense of claustrophobia and fear in the pit of her stomach didn't listen very well to intellect. And there was always that thing at the back of her neck, itching and pressing against her cot as she lay there, reminding her of the danger following them at all times.

 

But she wouldn't let it take over. She was a Fleet officer now, and that meant staying focused, working with the people around her. They all seemed to know what they were doing, or at least how to stay calm; she would learn from their example. Maybe they'd even be able to make something out of that confounded piece of equipment lodged in a crevice in the wall, if they were lucky. She wished she'd thought to ask Josh for a crash course in small-electronics engineering when she'd last seen him, but somehow it hadn't occurred to her.

 

She wished she'd said a lot of things to him before they'd last departed on their respective ships...and it was too late now...she was never going to see him again. They were all going to die on this rock. She had no faith in their "Public Attorney" and only the vaguest grasp of how the legal system even worked here, and they'd seen no sign of what Arcadia might have been doing all this time. What a first mission...

 

A feeling of despair washed over her but she fought it down. Focus...focus... She turned over on her side, burying her head beneath the thin covers they had been given, an expression of determination taking hold of her features. You're not down yet...Bajorans don't give up till they're licked. Stop wallowing in self-pity -- you earned those pips so you can bloody well live up to them. Somehow. And with that, she forced herself to relax and ignore the darkness around her and surrender to the exhaustion in her body.