Ensign Imril - He Ain't Heavy, He's My Hologram
Chris Taylor
((Holodeck 3, Deck 222, DS224))
Lyara: Alright, you get the one with the swollen brain. I’ll get the one with collapsed lungs. Then internal being one of us can carry there.
She quickly moved to lift a patient for transport to the stretcher. The wrong patient. The collapsed lung patient.
Imril: We don’t have time for them all, and I don't have the-- Whoa!
The floor realigned itself again to the sound of yet another groaning rumble. Imril had to chase the stretcher down just to bring it back to the head wound patient. They moved the patient over, unavoidably putting more pressure against the suffocating patient’s ribs, while Lyara persisted in saving the third.
Lyara: We can save them all if we squeeze these two ::pointing to two patients:: just a little together. I’ll grab an extra medkit so we can treat them on the pod.
Lyara placed the patient onto the stretcher then ran to grab one of the medkits and swung it over shoulder.
Imril: So long as you know how to do whatever it is they need done.
Lyara: You push the stretcher, I'll carry him. There’s a lifepod not too far from here where we can treat them.
She hurried to get the patient with internal bleeding up and swung his arm around her shoulder.
Imril had to reset the antigrav controls for the weight of two before they could push the stretcher anywhere. They were almost certain that the time already lost piling everyone together would cost them the time needed to get to a pod. The faces of the two officers their Borged self had murdered on Frontier Day flashed in their mind. One of them could have made it to safety. Only one. Trying to save everybody had cost him his own life, too. It was ugly and unkind, but it was true.
But Lyara had taken that medkit like she knew what to do with it. And the sim wasn’t necessarily going to end once they got into a pod, IF they made it that far. So Imril ran. Shoving the overloaded stretcher out the Medbay door as fast as their legs would take them. Fortunately, their legs were in very good shape; they maintained their dance skills as a form of exercise. Less fortunately, the stretcher was not entirely without weight. With two aboard, it couldn't be. Imril was only slightly faster than Lyara, moving with her singular passenger.
Out the door they came. The corridor was a mess of smoke, red alert screens, and flickering emergency lighting. Automated light sequences on the walls, the sections of wall that still had working LCARs panels, told them which way to go to reach the nearest available pod. Imril turned leftward, and looked back to see how closely Lyara was following.
Lyara: Response
The corridor was deserted save for the three wounded and their would-be rescuers. So Imril stuck to its center, as far from the walls as they could get.
Imril: Keep clear of the walls, in case one of the panels --
A Red Alert screen exploded into a shower of light, showering the Bactrican with sparks that came close and hot enough that they could smell their hair singing.
Imril: -- does that!
The loss of that screen kicked off a cascade failure of the surrounding light panels. In ones and two, emergency lights started cutting out around the party. Quickly leaving them less than half of an already depleted number to navigate by. Aided by the headlight so the stretcher, and the upward glow of Imril’s padd, settled atop their share of the patients.
Lyara: Response
Imril had lost count of the time remaining before they came to the turn that would take everyone to the row of escape pod doors. The floor shook again, and something in the way that Imril’s foot came springing back up with less effort on their part didn’t ‘feel’ right. Nor did the sudden wobble in the stretcher, caused by it trying to reorient itself against an unexpected change in the environment. They skedaddled into the turn while they still had a floor to run against.
Imril: I think we’re losing gravity!
TAGS/TBC
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Ensign Imril
Engineering Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240110I12