Fight or Flight

Posted on 17 Sep 2013 @ 10:54am by Commander Norvi Stace

657 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: Episode 04 - Exodus
Location: USS Venture
Timeline: MD 01

ON:

The evacuation siren echoed throughout Stace's quarters and she startled herself out of sleep. She wasn't a particularly deep sleeper but she had failed to rouse when the red alert claxon had first sounded. In that moment of realisation, when her green eyes began to focus on her bathroom door, it clicked into her memory that she had incorporated the first warning sounds into her dreams as she stirred.

She jumped out of bed in her slip and ran barefoot to the corridor outside, pushing aside a chair from her table in haste and confusion. The beige of the corridor beyond looked almost peach-like in the red, pulsating hue. Grabbing a yellow undershirted-clad crewman, she bellowed: "Report!" a little louder than she anticipated.

The young woman gripped Norvi's arm as a look of utter horror lined her alabaster features. Time, for Stace, then seemed to slow as the woman's mouth formed the forsaken words: "the Borg!".

A feeling of complete loss and sickness welled up in the lieutenant's belly as she let the crewman's arm go in shock and watched her scurry away down the corridor and around a junction, several other officers and civilians following suit in her wake. The Symbiont inside of her hollowed stomach almost seemed to leap and turn in dismay and pain as surfacing memories closed in on her con-joined mind. Enlisting back in Starfleet after being joined, Stace knew that the enemy that had crippled her previous host; had laid his life to misery and ill-health and cause him to ultimately forgo his commission and his command, would peak in on her horizon once again. The Borg were too formidable to ever completely be banished. Too robust. They would always be on the periphery of her caution, and the Federation's. A ghost-like threat that haunted her waking dreams. But despite her mental preparation in confronting a former bully (a former menace), she hadn't quite banked on the feeling she would garner the day it were to actually happen. She was left feeling utterly and completely sick to her stomach and thoroughly unprepared.

She was now faced with a split decision: Did she stay and fight? Try to assess the situation and fight back against a storm-like enemy as she did on the Tennyson or hot-tail it to an escape pod and try to salvage her life; to help salvage others? She was wracked with a deja-vu moment she had hoped she would never experience again. Her both lives seemed to flash in her mind's eye in a nano-second. And she began to sweat.

She swallowed hard and ran.

---

The overwhelming situation seemed to shut Stace down. Her eyes began to buckle underneath their own weight as her escape pod floated in space adrift. She remained on the Venture until the very last moment she could and blew the pod out when no one else was left on her deck alive... or still individual. As the door closed and the valves released their pressure in order to catapult it out into space, the glowing red lasers of approaching Borg were the last things she saw down the darkened corridor.

The chaos of the Galileo's cargo bay was what she woke up to next, a hypospray injection administered to her by one of the triage nurses.

"Calm down, Lieutenant," the blurred, faceless woman said as Stace tried to automatically rise from the camp bed she awoke in. "You're on the Galileo. You're safe."

The pain in her head seemed to travel down through her spots to her feet, a dull ache that shot through her entire body. She leant over the side and then vomited. "How long?" Norvi asked. "What happened?"

The nurse smiled warmly and patted the Trill's head whilst another came to dispose of her deposit. "That'll all be explained to you in due course. You need to rest."

OFF:

 

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