The Last Voyage of the Sakura. Part 7

Posted on 08 May 2018 @ 4:50pm by Ensign Miraj Derani

1,276 words; about a 6 minute read

Day Twenty Four
(MD 128)

When Borgon woke up, he looked a wreck. Like he’d seen a thousand vengeful ghosts. I told him what the EMH told me. He didn’t pour scorn on it this time. Just asked how to survive it. I don’t know. I don’t know.

“We have to find it. And kill it.” He decided.

“If we can generate some ELF, we could maybe distract it. Maybe it will eat that instead.”

“I don’t fancy hanging around, given that we look like food to it.” Borgon says. “We could use it as a lure though. Maybe tempt it into engineering and let it get blasted by the warp core.”

“It would kind of stop us getting home too,” I pointed out.

“We could reinitialize the nuclear reactor on the Norfolk Island. Nuclear radiation is all VHF and better. And Norfolk Island is disposable. We just have to lure the thing across.”

Borgon rigged up something that would transmit an ELF. Then we shot up with more anti-radiation meds, and got into some EVA suits Borgon had tricked out to be more like rad-suits, and walked on to Norfolk Island.

Everything was as we left it. Still the sense of an empty shell, a ghost ship. My flesh wanted to crawl of my bones and hide in a corner, it felt so creepy. We went down to the engine room, and Borgon switched the ELF machine on. It didn’t look to me like it was doing much. Couldn’t hear anything, or see anything, or feel anything. Then it was waiting.

Waiting for this thing we couldn’t see.

Waiting for the Visophage

Whilst we waited, I helped Borgon begin the re-initialising of the generator, which I was glad Borgon was able to do, not just because it took forever. Pumps had to be primed, rods had to be loaded into canisters, and put into their cradles ready to be dropped into position. Every time something blinked, or clinked, or moved, we jumped.

Then the little light on the ELF generator went out. Borgon went over to it and poked it. “Battery’s dead,” he announced. “Didn’t think it would go out that fast. I’ll go back get a fresh one.”

“Don’t leave me here,” I said. I didn’t want to be in that ship on my own. It was totally creepy.

He gave me a look through the suit that clearly said he thought I was being a baby. This was probably the safest spot on either ship. But I didn’t want to be alone. Trouble finds me. “Alright,” he says. “Come on then.”

We beamed back, wanting the speed of it, from one silent ship to another. And instantly I knew something was wrong. Most of the lights were out. The emergency lights were up, leaving a long red line of light along the corridors. Worst of all, I had no sense of Sakura at all.

The trip from the transporter pad to engineering was slow, and long in the suits. We entered engineering, when Borgon said something I didn’t hear, so I said, “Sorry, what?”

“We’re not alone.” He said, raising a finger to the visor of his suit. “There’s voices over there.” He pointed to an empty corner of the engine room.

“There’s no one there,” I told him.

He waved me to silence, listening intently. “They’re speaking Bolian.”

He kept listening, to nothing that was there, ‘You’re hallucinating. Like the EMH said.” I said.

He blanched. Or just got paler blue. “They can’t know that!” He hissed. “No-one knows that. I didn’t tell anyone!”

That’s never a good thing to hear when you’re alone with a hallucinating man, on a ship in the middle of nowhere, with no way to call for help.

“You can’t say that!” he shouted. “It's not true! It was an accident! Leave me alone!”

I grabbed his arm. “The batteries!” I shouted. I had to give him something to focus on. “They’re not real. Find the batteries!”

He turned on me then. Grabbed the front of my rad suit and shoved me hard, and I ended up on my arse on the deck. “This didn’t happen! You don’t tell anyone, or I’ll do the same to you!”

“Okay.” I held my hands up. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking into the Engine room again. His eyes were so round I could see the whites on all sides and they were bulging out his face like they were straining to get out of his head.

I shouted his name, but it didn’t have any effect. He didn’t hear me or pay any attention to me, just gripped the ELF transmitter tighter, breathing hard inside his suit. Then he started screaming.

They were horrible. Long, wild screams of pure terror. Loud enough that I could hear them through the suit, followed a fraction of a second later by through the suit speakers themselves, a macabre little echo. I grabbed at him, trying to snap him out of it. He shrieked, and shoved me again, lashing out with the ELF transmitter, and cracked me on the head with it. It shattered, and I went down, head swimming.

Borgon went stiff, still screaming. Screaming with every muscle. Screaming with every gram of oxygen in his lungs. He was rooted to the spot, eyes so bulged out I thought they might burst.

And then it stopped. Like a switch flicking. And he dropped. He twitched for a second, and I knew he was dead. I waited a few moments more. I know I shouldn’t have, know I should have tried to help him, but I just couldn’t move myself. My head was spinning and my vision was blurring. I couldn’t see anything else in there with us. Except the Visophage must have been, and I was too yellow-bellied to move.

I crawled over to him, bracing for what I thought I might see. Like Captain O’Keefe his face was contorted inhumanly. Like, O’Keefe, his jaw was at a wrong angle, he must have screamed so much he ripped the tendons, and his tongue was swollen up. His eyes were still bulged out. Death from heart failure. Scared to death.

I’ve left him in engineering. I’m all alone on this ship now. I’ve got no idea what to do, except hold fast to the plan. So I’m about to go back and try and fire up the reactor. We were almost there, it should just be flip a switch. The ELF machine is broken, so I’m just going to have to hope it comes to me. When it does I just have to hope I can hold on long enough to restart it. It should just be flip a switch.

Then I’m going to set it to overload, and hope I can beam back to Sakura without bringing the Visophage back with me, and detach quickly, before I’m blown to Davy Jones.

So I’ve set the quarantine beacon, and the emergency beacon. I hope their power holds. I’m going to broadcast these logs too, I don’t know if they’ll get anywhere, but I have to try.

This is Ensign Miraj Derani, of the USS Sakura. May you have fair winds and a following sea, for here our ways divide.

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