Safe and Sound...Or Not... ((Kent))

[Samantha_Kent 0]

Sam's feet hit the decking of the science lab and she stumbled, glancing around a little unsteadily.

 

This was where she had been when the ship had been scoured of the psychomalignant killer zombie death lint by the radiation she and Daena had calibrated. This was where she had fallen unconscious, and where she thought she had woken up a few minutes later.

 

This was, apparently, where she had lain until the "pig-men" race had found Arcadia dead in space and brought the crew aboard their own ship to purge them of the radiation poisoning.

 

Sam was still getting a grasp on the situation. The unnerving set of hallucinations which the crew seemed to have more or less collectively undergone still had her shaken; it had been one of the more unnerving things she had yet seen in her Starfleet career. And before she'd really been given time to recover from that, she'd found herself acting as a semi-translator for a race with a sketchy UT whom she'd never seen before.

 

If they were telling the truth, this porcine race had cured the Arcadia crew -- minus of course two of the engineers. Jordan Black and the Cardie with the Bajoran name...Torre...they had both reacted more severely to the radiation poisoning which had crippled them all.

 

It had taken some doing but they had managed to convince the pig-race (presumably they had a name, but Sam didn't know it) to return them to the ship. Sam couldn't help a small flash of pride -- she'd really done something there. She'd managed to make contact and negotiate some sort of terms...

 

God...I feel like my father... she thought to herself with a faint grin.

 

She looked around at the empty lab, rubbing the back of her neck as she got her bearings. It was quiet and reassuringly famliiar. One of the chairs was pulled out from a console, which was still displaying readouts on the radiation frequency which had been used to scour out the nanites. Skitter was still here; upon her arrival he had let out a high-pitched whistle and clattered over to latch onto her pants leg. As a matter of fact everything was exactly as she had left it, except--

 

"Where's Daena, Skit?" she asked, reaching down to unclasp the little spider-robot from her uniform and lifting him, letting his laser eye play over her face. "She was here with me when the radiation went out..."

 

Skitter whistled, cheerfully uncomprehending, and his legs clacked together as he wriggled in her grip. She sighed and set him down, letting him disappear back under one of the consoles. "Computer -- locate Lieutenant Commander Daena!"

 

"Lieutenant Commander Daena is on the bridge."

 

"Huh..."

 

Sam turned and quickly jogged out of the lab and into a turbolift. Daena was on the bridge...but the crew had only been returned just now. There had barely been time for Sam to get her bearings, let alone for Daena to do so and make it somewhere else on the ship. The crew seemed to have been kept good and incapacitated until now to give the porcines time to work...the only way Daena could have made it that far was...

 

...if she had not been picked up in the first place...

 

"Bridge!"

 

The turbolift hummed and Sam drummed her fingers against the wall impatiently. The trip seemed to take forever. Finally she bolted out into the Arcadia's command center and looked around wildly, just in time to see the shape of Daena's body sprawled on the floor and vanishing in the whirr and shine of a transporter beam. Jordan Black was leaning over the disappearing body and her expression said volumes.

 

Uh oh...