Pocket Fluff and Pork Rind

[Tachyon 0]

“Pocket Fluff and Pork Rind”

Stardate 0508.04

Ensign Tandaris Admiran

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As Tandaris dug through the wreckage that was—past tense being appropriate in this case—his quarters, several thoughts occurred to him, the order of which were not really important.

 

1. Not a single object in his quarters had retained its original position. To that end, even the bed had shifted several centimetres to the left via melting into the bulkhead. The emergency lights hung out of the wall at odd angles, their functioning only a fevered dream of a madman, necessitating the use of wrist lamps to dig through the wreckage on the floor. Oh, and the entire room—if you could call the box that lacked two walls and a ceiling a room—smelt of pork rind.

 

b. Nearly every useful object in his quarters had been reduced to the category of “waste” or “slag.” The only items that had remotely survived the destruction turned out to be:

• Several photos, data blocs, and personal effects Tandaris had not unpacked from storage yet.
  
• Some thing that his aunt had given him. He did not know what it was but feared it was too important to really give away.
  
• Miscellaneous pocket fluff that adhered to all three items above as well as the inside of Tandaris’ charred uniform pockets.
  

3. His quarters actually were not as damaged compared to other sections of the ship. On an absolute scale, where no damage was 1 and collapse of the space-time continuum was 10, his quarters rated a solid 5. But on a relative scale, his quarters would barely make a 1. Other sections had endured explosive decompression, EPS ruptures, loud arguments by injured crew members, or a combination of all three and more. In some parts of the ship, it was a miracle the bulkheads were even holding together.

 

These thoughts and others surfaced while Tandaris gathered what remained of his personal belongings. He sighed audibly, both in regret at the destruction of his possessions and at the destruction of a beautiful ship he had barely known. The situation may be salvageable, but he wondered how much salvaging the situation really mattered. Would cleaning up this mess be worth the time, or would Starfleet just split them up and reassign them to other vessels?

 

“Shiny,” remarked Tandaris thoughtfully as he glanced as the splinters of a mirror. Shattered into thousands of fragments, the glare from his wrist lamp bounced off to make pinpricks of light on collapsed ceiling plates overhead. Tandaris stooped and bent over to get a better look at an object sandwiched between his melted bed and a piece of bulkhead.

 

It appeared to be an Umb. Well, not a Umb, rather, the Umb. If not totally indestructible, the stuffed animal was at least very durable. It had endured the destruction and ruin of Tandaris’ quarters, escaping nearly unscathed with just some minor scorch marks. Tandaris plucked the creature from where it lay, and then sat down on a relatively clear spot of the floor.

 

It was silent, and dark. It seemed that his days were increasingly like this, silent and dark wastelands of dreary existence. Morale was understandably at a low point, along with Tandaris’ hopes for a nice career in Starfleet. Right now, he wanted to get out of this place look behind at it as only a vaguely unpleasant memory.

 

Yet there was a certain sympathetic melancholy that could not be replicated elsewhere. The ship had been through the memory with them, and could understand their sorrow as much as they understood hers. Tandaris glanced at the twisted metal.

 

What about the away team, he wondered. They had not heard anything after launching the shuttle, had no clue if the team was still undiscovered or even alive. All they really had, at this point, was an option: to choose to hope for the best possible outcome, or to be realistic and imagine the most likely. Both options had faults, but sometimes it was best to just walk a line between them.

 

Debris crunched under his foot as Tandaris left his quarters for what could be the last time. He paced down the corridor, detouring around the area that was open to space, shielded from the rest of the deck by an emergency forcefield. Then he would leave Excalibur, and with it, hopes, memories, and unexplored futures.