JP [Act 2 Prologue]: Administrator Soldu tr’Kharis, Lead Scientist Joakim Aduko, Scientist Rurat'dari - Don’t Open the Bottle!
Teayl Thorn
((Station Administrators Quarters, Habitat Dome, Moon Sigma, Gas Giant A, Ross 580 System))
Soldu tr’Kharis, formerly a Decurion of the Romulan Imperial Navy, now a glorified research base babysitter in a barely charted backwater system, stood before the holo-reflection in his quarters and watched himself slowly falling apart.
He began every day the same way. By repairing himself.
The dermal regenerator hummed softly in his hand. The lesions along his jaw had been green and weeping that morning. The device knitted the wounds together obediently, but it no longer truly healed them. The skin it coaxed into place looked wrong—too smooth, too pale, faintly translucent. When he tilted his head, he could almost see the shadow of muscle and bone sliding beneath. He’d have tried a beard to hide the damage, but the follicles refused to grow.
His left eye was clouding again. He blinked, the world lagged, and his depth perception wavered. Distance became a matter of interpretation rather than certainty. It made corridors seem narrower. It made people feel closer than they should be.
oO Weakness is unacceptable. Oo
His father’s voice, sharp as a whip, whispered from the back of his mind—the ghost of a long-dead Romulan who would have turned in his grave to see what had become of their once-radiant Star Empire. Its majesty burned to cinders. Its people scattered to the edges of the quadrant, vagrants living on scraps and borrowed mercy.
The Lid did not tolerate weakness any more than his father had.
At least his second-in-command was as solid as he’d had the fortune to serve with and the scientific brains to handle the project’s scientists. Always watched his back. A friend, as much as a Romulan and an Orion, could be.
oO That charming son of an Orion slave girl Oo Soldu thought with sourly amusement.
He adjusted his collar to hide the worst of the long-term cellular damage and set the regenerator aside. Most of them were like this now. Medications slowed the sickness. The precautions delayed it. Nothing he had access to truly stopped it.
They called the station “The Lid” because that was what it had become.
Not a station. Not a home. Not a place any living katra would willingly inhabit. It was a cap, sealed over a bottle that should never have been created—let alone opened. But they had opened it. Under threat of annexation, under the cold legal blade of the Sheliak and the threat of the Tholians' guns, the research station, once a Romulan Free State facility, had bent the knee to their new masters’ orders as the Lattice Alliance put them back to work for a new purpose.
Soldu leaned over the sink and spat. Blue-green blood mixed with his saliva before the recycler swallowed it. He rinsed his mouth, smoothed the front of his station uniform. Just another day at the gates of Erebus.
He was halfway through a routine inspection of Operations when the alarm sounded. The bad alarm, the worst alarm. The radiation levels on his personal indicator spiked.
Lifting his communicator to his chin, Soldu barked into it as he shifted his body into a run.
tr’Kharis: =/\= Aduko, Rurat'dari, get to the transporter. I need you at the reactor now! =/\=
((Senior Staff Office 12 - Assigned to Research Lead Joakim Aduko, Administration Annex, Moon Sigma, Gas Giant A, Ross 580 System))
Research Lead Joakim Aduko had developed a game to make evening recordkeeping a little more fun.
Every time a research log showed forward progress, and would therefore be of interest to his superiors, he marked it as such and took a swig from a bottle of synthehol liquor. Progress at this research station was both something celebratory and something concerning. The synthehol helped with both of those sentiments.
Every time he reviewed a medical report detailing a member of their staff falling ill, exhibiting something like radiation sickness or worse, he would clear the synthehol from his system with its antidote tincture. He would then file the medical report away in his personal data repository. It would not be sent up the ladder.
Their new research sponsors had informed him directly, bypassing Administrator Soldu tr’Kharis, that these medical reports were superfluous. They explained in no uncertain terms that when science this groundbreaking, this powerful was explored properly, some casualties were expected. The result was worth the price.
Aduko had been extremely sober, as of late.
He would document both result and price. He would let no record disappear into the void when The Lid inevitably blew its top.
((Scientist's Quarters, Habitat Dome, Moon Sigma))
Rurat'dari stared at the reflection of herself in the mirror, the newly adjusted uniform, the new hem, the job she finally got the chance to truly be herself in since she was caught trying the crime of self-expression near the end of the war. The Jem'Hadar were supposed to be perfect soldiers.
It didn’t particularly matter that her required drugs were acquired through illegal means, right? She couldn't get them from the Lattice Alliance folk, they were the wrong species for it.
In the thirty years since the war ended, she’d been floating. From job to job, with the hostile history of her species being a constant echo in her employers’ minds.
She’d developed a liking of the sciences in the first few years after the war, and after some reaching out to research places, she finally found herself a job. A stable, constant one, at that. One where she could test and have them yield results.
Especially projects as fascinating as this. The one that she was working on with Aduko.
Rurat'dari wasn’t sure what it was needed for, but she wouldn't ask questions.
She was unquestionably committed to where she was. They wouldn't let her down, not after all she did for them.
((Reactor Dome “The Lid”, Moon Sigma, Ross 580 System))
The reactor’s controls flared from amber to screaming red.
Warnings blared across the station—too late.
A partial containment failure tore from the device, a spear of energy punching up from the pit, through the dome, and into the sky. Soldu had watched it happen on the station monitors in frozen horror as three levels of base personnel died in seventeen seconds, their organic cells cooked as the emission sheared through decks and bulkheads alike.
All the accelerated testing and ignored safety protocols flashed through his mind, and he cursed their Lattice Alliance owners. Always demanding results at a faster and more dangerous rate. If they didn’t comply, if they didn’t give results…they would be replaced by a new batch of forced hirelings. He had tried to keep them all safe, but they had fallen behind on the results, been forced to push the safeties.
By the time he’d transferred power to containment fields and transported to The Lid, Aduko and Rurat'dari were already there, fighting a losing battle to regain containment.
The Administrator joined them on the heavily shielded, reinforced control platform just as another tremor shook the structure. He gripped the rail as the deck shuddered. A vast, open pit yawned before them, drilled deep into the moon’s crust. The reactor sat at the bottom of the well, half-shrouded in a containment field, thick power cables spilling into the shaft like writhing metallic vines.
tr’Kharis: ::Snapping:: Report!
Aduko: ::Gritting his teeth.:: It’s past critical. ::Frantically working at the controls of the coolant distribution system, his tone of voice was unusually muted.:: Containment is failing. A lash spike of double the magnitude we’ve witnessed before just…took out…
He couldn’t finish that sentence. Rurat'dari snapped to attention before speaking. She had to be honest.
Rurat'dari: Sencha radiation beyond safe levels, Sir.
For a moment, Soldu’s vision doubled. The platform lurched. His arms whindmilled. He was falling—into the reactor, into the light—
Aduko had shoved himself away from the console with enough force that he knocked it off its mooring. He landed on his stomach and caught Soldu at his elbow, their wrists interlocking, and he pulled the man back to the platform, muscles working with a strength that came more from his Orion lineage than practice. The Administrator caught the rail and straightened slowly, feeling sweat soak into his collar.
tr’Kharis: ::gasping:: What is containment at?
Aduko: ::He returned to the console. It wobbled left and right now, but still displayed the obvious.:: Coolant is…overheating.
Rurat'dari: It's failing, Sir.
tr’Kharis: ::harsh, almost feral snarl:: Get out. Get them all out. Evacuate to the Hab. Now!
Aduko immediately keyed open the evacuation protocol and triggered the alarm with precision. He’d been sending this command in his dreams, lately. It was strangely cathartic to finally announce The Lid’s failure.
Rurat'dari sprinted behind the others to safety, reluctantly leaving the project unfinished. Alarms still howling behind them, leaving the wounded reactor to its slow and rageful collapse.
[JP / TBC]
===============================
Soldu tr’Kharis (he/him)
Station Administrator
The Lid
As simmed by
Writer for Lt. JG T'Fearne
Security Officer
USS Ronin - NCC-34523
R240107T14
&
Joakim Aduko
2IC & Head Scientist
The Lid
As simmed by
Lieutenant J.G. Tess Evinrude
Operations Officer
USS Ronin
R240111TE1
&
Rurat'dari
Scientist
The Lid
As Simmed By
Lieutenant JG Renaie Shortrith, MD
Acting Chief Medical Officer
USS Ronin
A240204RS3