Captain Addison MacKenzie - Giving Voice to the Voiceless
Addison MacKenzie
(( Main Hospital –
Residential Level, Earth Spacedock ))
In the immediate aftermath of the assault on Earth and the Spacedock, Starfleet’s
commanding officers who survived the Borg incursion and Changeling infiltration
were offered tours of the badly damaged facility. Large sections of the base
were completely destroyed or rendered uninhabitable, the station had been
closed to non-essential personnel, and the civilian population had been
evacuated. Search and rescue teams had been deployed, locating only a handful
of the station’s massive population who were still alive. Those who hadn’t managed
to escape were presumed lost and now, days later, the operation had turned to search
and retrieval.
With things on the Artemis in Genkos’s capable hands, Addison
volunteered to help what remained of the station’s medical officers in treating
those who needed immediate medical attention. Fortunately, the station’s hospital
section remained relatively unscathed. Their job had been to stabilize the
patients as best they could, then to discharge them to one of the other nearby
starships whose medical staff would likely be better equipped to give them the
continuing care they likely needed.
Now, after what had seemed like years, but was only days, the situation had
turned to accounting for the dead.
Addison MacKenzie was a surgeon, not a coroner. Her job was – and always had
been – the living, not the dead. Now, her role shifted as she was tasked with
using her medical training to determine someone’s cause of death…
…and to attribute an identity to a corpse.
A surgeon’s job is always difficult. No matter how easy or complicated a
particular surgery might be, there always exists the possibility, no matter how
improbable, that at the end of the procedure, a patient will live, their family
will be happy, and they will be able to move on with their life without
consequence. In death, there was a desolate lack of any such assurance.
Instead, her job was to use clues left behind to determine how someone died, collect
a tissue sample, compare it against the Federation database to try to attribute
an identity to a body and, if possible, contact any possible family and inform
them of the news.
And move on to the next.
The job wasn’t inherently hard – in many of the cases, determining a cause of death
was the easiest part. The Borg, even in their new state of modified
assimilation, left a path of eerily familiar destruction in their wake. Now
that their goal was no longer the assimilation of lifeforms, but rather the elimination
of life itself, it became very easy to see the tactics used:
Close range phaser blast.
Severed spinal cord.
Massive blood loss.
Asphyxiation or decompression.
Each case was depressingly similar to the one before it – so much so that the
process had become routine – but it was the conversation afterward that took its
toll on the commanding officer of the Artemis.
For days on end, the procedure had been the same: work a 16- or 18-hour shift,
go home, eat something, get whatever rest you could, and show up to do it again
the next day. For Addison, rest meant the opportunity to get off the station
and back to the Artemis – getting to sleep in her own bed and check in
on the ship helped offer a sense of normalcy to a routine that was anything but
normal.
Today, clad in dark red surgical scrubs, she tried to recall how many corpses
she’d worked with throughout the first ten hours of this shift. 25? 30? It was
hard to think of them in terms of numbers – each of them had a face, an
identity, a life that was cut short and, in many instances, brutally terminated.
After the first day, she’d quickly learned that she couldn’t waste valuable
brain power on trying to remember all their names – the best tactic was to compartmentalize
any information that gave life to the lifeless and stick to the clinical task
at hand.
Having completed the number of patients assigned to her for the day – the number
had decreased dramatically despite the excellent recovery efforts of the search
teams, a sign that they were likely approaching the end of their work – Addison
removed the gloves from her scrubs, discarded them, and rubbed her face with
the back of her hand. She took a deep breath in through her nose and closed her
eyes, nearly falling asleep as she stood there, but forced herself to blink her
eyes open.
The day’s hardest work lie ahead.
Addison retreated into one of the nearby medical offices, whose previous occupant
now joined one of the long lists of the station’s deceased, and practically
collapsed into the chair behind the desk. She remained crumpled in the chair for
several minutes, simply breathing slowly through her nose, as she stared at a
blank computer screen. Sitting there, she briefly entertained the thought that
if she stared at the screen long enough, it would jump to life and complete the
task at hand on her behalf.
Alas, it wasn’t that easy.
It never was.
She took one last, long breath through her nose, sent energy into her abdomen,
and forced herself to sit straight up on the edge of the chair. Looking down on
the PADD next to the display, she brought up the first record – an eighteen-year-old
engineer technician who’d been newly assigned to the station and was only three
weeks into his tour – and the contact information for his next of kin: his
mother. She pursed her lips, closed her eyes, and shook her head briefly.
Mothers were the hardest.
She took one last deep breath through her nose and activated the display.
MacKenzie: Computer, open a channel…
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Captain Addison MacKenzie, M.D., Ph.D., FASFS
Commanding Officer
USS Artemis-A
Captains Council Member at Large
V239601AM0