Crazy Prepared

[Tachyon 0]

"Crazy Prepared"

Cdr. Tandaris Admiran

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Space was usually dark. Light was the anomaly. Without internal lighting, Tandaris' quarters were almost completely dark. The ambient starlight filtering through his windows helped little; unfortunately, his side of the ship faced away from the system's sun, which otherwise would have nicely illuminated the entire room. As it was, only a few of the emergency lights functioned, and those sporadically. Whatever had caused a power failure had done some damage as well. Tandaris' first guess would be an EMP--in which case the jolt the ship had taken would have been the nuclear explosion that had caused it. But he wasn't about to voice his suspicions aloud, not with the unprepared Guardian with him. This was going to be traumatic enough, even if it did turn out to be nothing. There was already one traumatized Trill on the Excalibur. Two would just be greedy.

 

"What are we going to do now?" the Trill Guardian asked, her voice wavering with a mounting sense of fear.

 

Tandaris stood up. "You are staying here. It's as safe a place as any until we figure out what has transpired. I am going to engineering." He crawled across his quarters, detouring around the more sizable chunks of debris. Finally locating the door to corridor, he tried to open it--no luck. So he popped out the manual release lever and pumped the door open. Beyond lay only darkness.

 

"Power's out in the entire section, looks like," he said.

 

"Great. Just great," muttered the Guardian. When they had assigned her to Admiran's case, her superiors had assured her that the Excalibur was one of Starfleet's best ships. They assured her she would be safe. This wasn't safe. Yet she refused to give into hysteria. She was a Guardian--in fact, she was the only representative of the Guardians in the entire Gamma Quadrant. She had to uphold a standard of composure.

 

That lasted for all of five seconds.

 

"You can't leave me here! What if there are intruders on board? What if they come to your quarters and find me?!"

 

"Then they find you," said Tandaris. "But if there are intruders, then they could find you no matter where you're hiding. And you can't come to engineering with me."

 

"Why not? You think I'll be in the way?"

 

"No." Yes. "Look, there are no intruders here right now. There are no plasma fires. You're safe here. I can't guarantee the same situation in engineering--it could be a blazing inferno. But there's only one way for me to find out, and I must find out. It's my job."

 

The Guardian reached out and touched Tandaris' arm. "I'm not going to be left alone. Either you take me with you, or you aren't going anywhere."

 

"You drive a hard bargain." Tandaris sighed. "All right, you can come with me. But you're going to have to pull your weight."

 

"Anything. Just tell me what to do. I've never . . . never been on an adventure like this before."

 

Typical Guardians. They hadn't changed in two centuries. "You don't get out of the caves much, do you?"

 

"This was my first trip to the surface since my initiation. I-I should have gone sooner, but I . . . well, I liked it down there. It was calm. Safe." Not like this.

 

Tandaris felt her hand on his arm and suppressed another sigh. He tried to make himself sound reassuring. "Look, this could be nothing. Or at least, nothing too dangerous. It could be a malfunctioning power conduit--maybe only our section is affected. We're going to be fine."

 

"If you say so."

 

"I say so. Now we need to get going. I wish I knew where my emergency kit was in the mess. It was under the couch, but where it is now . . ." Every minute that passed only increased Tandaris' agitation with how he had decided to unleash his anger. Ordinarily, his quarters were the epitome of organization. He could have found everything he needed in the dark. Now he would have to set off for engineering, unequipped. . . .

 

The Guardian's voice interrupted his momentary flirtation with self-pity. "This emergency kit, is it a rectangular red box?"

 

"Yeah, it's--wait, you can see it? You can see in the dark?" Despite the sporadic emergency lighting, Tandaris' eyes still hadn't adjusted to the dimness, and the most he could distinguish were vague, blurred shadows and colours.

 

"Not in the dark per se. But there's enough light for me to see by. I've lived in a cave my entire adult life, Tandaris," she rebuked him. "I've navigated my way through darker places than this." He felt her release his arm and heard her gingerly crawl across his quarters. There was a scraping sound, and then she was back by his side. She opened the kit. "So you made this up for an emergency, huh? Let's see--wow."

 

Within the simple Faraday cage of the metal container lay a phaser, a tricorder, an emergency flashlight, a day's worth of emergency rations, a small medpak, a combination hyperspanner/phase inverter, and a beaten paperback novel. Tandaris grabbed everything but the novel and the rations, strapping the phaser, tricorder, and hyperinverter to his belt and the flashlight to his wrist. He handed the medpak to the Guardian. "Carry this. We might need it."

 

"I don't get a phaser?" the Guardian pouted.

 

Tandaris decided to ignore that remark. "Let's go. There's an access hatch five metres down the corridor. It leads to a Jeffries tube junction; from there we can proceed directly down to engineering. Stay close, and if you see anything strange, don't be afraid to point it out."

 

"You'll be the first to know."

 

Together, they left Tandaris' quarters and quickly walked down the corridor. They encountered no one else, something that didn't surprise Tandaris--his quarters were in a relatively quiet section of the ship, with a few other senior officers and some of the guest quarters nearby. Most of the people who lived nearby were already on duty.

 

They reached the access hatch. After opening it and climbing through, Tandaris motioned for the Guardian to close it behind her before crawling along the tube toward the nearby junction. Behind him, the Guardian said, "Now this is familiar. Just like crawling through tunnels back home."

 

"Is that what you did for fun?"

 

"What, you think we didn't have fun? I'll have you know, Tandaris Admiran, that life as a Guardian is very fulfilling."

 

Tandaris nodded. "Uh-huh. If all the fun in your life has consisted of tending to symbiont pools and crawling through cave tunnels, then you're in for a few surprises." They reached the junction.

 

The Guardian looked down and gasped. "Surprises like that?"

 

Tandaris looked down--and immediately wished he hadn't. In the dim light of his wrist flashlight, he caught a glimpse of something utterly alien. Iridescent colours shimmered on fragile, diaphanous wings pressed against a lithe, muscled back. The creature crouched on four grotesquely bent legs, each one terminating in a sickly curving talon. It sensed the light source and peered upward with too many eyes, and Tandaris gulped as he saw that its mouth consisted of tandem pincers.

 

"Yes," he replied in a low whisper, conscious of his suddenly elevated heartbeat. "Exactly like that."