You Say Life Is a Battlefield and You Say I Have to Fight - Part One

Posted on 26 Jul 2012 @ 4:01am by Captain Jonathan Holliday & EMH Mark X-C "Shirley" & Lieutenant Commander Pola Ni Dhuinn M.D. & Commander Andreus Kohl & Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Crewman Vera Lin (KIA) & Command Master Chief Markum Quinn

2,481 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Episode 01 - Project Sienna
Location: USS Galileo - Sickbay
Timeline: MD07 2245 hrs

[ON]

=^= All hands this is the Bridge, secure your stations and prepare to repel boarding parties, repeat, prepare to repel boarding parties! =^=

The voice of Galileo's XO came booming over the internal comm speakers. It seemed that the situation had gone from bad to worse, and now on top of everything it would be necessary to repel Klingons from within. Sickbay was strewn with wounded personnel, including the Chief Engineer who had only recently materialised in Sickbay...

Andreus Kohl backed away from the surgical biobed, all the colour draining from his face. His steps were awkward; he was stumbling backwards as if the Executive Officer's announcement had physically struck him in the chest. The notion of intruders on a starship overwhelmed him with raw emotion. A sense of violation. Galileo hadn't started to feel like home yet, and it wasn't as if Kohl's life had never been threatened before on away missions, but he wasn't sure if he would ever be prepared for violence in a Sickbay.

Looking down at Quinn who was still awaiting an answer, Pola felt the blood rush from her face. Forcing the man to lie back on the bed she realised stop the bleeding of the severed arm but it was all just a temporary fix until she could perform surgery, she needed to do something quick. "Markum...I have to put you into a stasis field...it'll cause you to go into an artificial coma, allowing us to keep you safe until we can operate. I can't operate on you right now, we have to get sickbay secured and this is the safest way I can secure you."

Quinn looked down to his missing arm, then back up. "Like hell you're putting me in a damn stasis field!" he sat up and swung his feet over the bed. A wave of dizziness hit him like a Gorn's fist. "Give me a sec, but don't you put me under Doc."

Grabbing Quinn as he moved, Pola pushed him back to lie along the biobed, "Markum look at yourself. You've lost your arm, your bleeding out and moving is only making it worse. You HAVE to stay on the biobed as your currently receiving a blood transfusion and radiation treatment. Be sensible for crying out loud!"

"Fine," answered Quinn, "but no stasis."

Biting the side of her lip, Pola studied Quinn intently for a moment before nodding her head. "Any sign of you disobeying orders Markum and I'll have you sedated immediately. You'll do no one any good if you kill yourself and have us worrying about your condition while securing sickbay."

Looking around her, Pola started to analyse the equipment around her. "Computer! Shut down sickbay now! Authorisation code Omega, Omega, Delta, Sierra, nine, one." Watching as the doors slide shut, locking them all in, the CMO swung back around, trying to see where her staff were located. "Lin and EMH...get the patients secured now. I want Dru and anyone not able to defend themselves in my office now and I want the office door secured with a bio-isolation forcefield. The field needs to be set up so as the only means of passing through is facing the injured, therefore no one can get in. Then I need you to set up the same bio-isolation field around the entrance doors to sickbay."

"A simple enough task. Come along now, let's get you all moved before the Klingons arrive." The EMH replied as he finished suturing a head wound to a young crewmember before helping them from the biobed and into the office. Although his program was not designed to be combative in nature, he was designed to follow orders and to do no harm - at least by securing the wounded behind a forcefield there would be no danger of further harm coming to them, at least for now.

Taking on the mannerisms of a crossing guard for a few moments, Nurse Vera Lin directed their walking wounded towards the Chief Medical Officer's office, around the corner from the ICU. She asked a pair of Crewman --who were about to be released from Sickbay before the intruder alert-- to carry Lieutenant JG McCarthy, and she moved the unconscious post-surgical patient onto an antigrav gurney. In quick order, she was pushing the gurney towards the office, behind the other patients.

As the last few crewmembers made their way into the relative safety of the CMO's office, the EMH returned to a nearby control panel and quickly tapped in a few commands, establishing the field with its traditional fizzle as it formed.

Moments earlier, Kohl had backed himself against a bulkhead, and he didn't know how to go any farther. The doors were locked after all. While Lin and the EMH had been corralling the patients, Pola approached Kohl.

"Kohl...." Looking around, Pola isolated that Kohl seemed to have cornered himself against a biobed and his face was completely white. Realising the nurse was completely petrified, she started towards him. As the only person currently armed with a phaser right now, aside from herself, she needed him. "Kohl...listen to me...I need you here with us, helping us...."

Ensign Kohl's training from Bactricia came back to him in a rush. The Federation had built a medical base camp on Bactricia to establish feeding programs and vaccination programs for the natives, who were occupied by the Tzenkethi. From time to time, Bactrician rebels or the Tzenkethi themselves brought violence to the base camp. During the past couple of hours on Galileo, since it became clear the red alert was because of aggressive Klingons, Kohl had been struggling to remember what he was supposed to do if Sickbay came under attack. His memory was foggy and distracted by his own emotional red alerts and the sheer volume of patients coming to him for help. But now, only now, when fear was gripping his guts like Scalosian stomach flu, now Kohl knew what to do. Kohl turned away from the biobed, and he ran around the corner towards the office and the medical labs.

Cut off mid-sentence, Pola watched as Kohl ran away and found herself swearing. "KOHL! GET BACK HERE!" Moving to run after the nurse, she realised she couldn't waste time trying to talk him around, she needed to continue to secure sickbay. Swinging back around, she found a fit crewman standing behind her, his arm in a sling but determination on his face. As she realised he wanted to help, she nodded her head briskly and spotted Lin having finished up with moving the disabled patients to her office, "Lin! Take this guy and show him how to use a replicator. I want all liquids you can think of which will allow people to blind or harm the enemy. Get them replicated into containers which can be given to as many people as possible. Get on it quick."

"Doctor?" said Vera, but the word got caught in her throat in a flush of confusion and some disgust. She started to step away, to lead the injured man to the replicator, but she turned back to the Chief Medical Officer. Determinedly, Vera asked, "To be clear, sir, you're ordering me to throw acid into the eyes of other beings?"

Listening to the words of his superior, the EMH felt his own ethical subroutines coming online and into play. Using a phaser to disable the enemy, or a hypospray was one option, but to use any other means would just be against their oaths as doctors.

"In addition - no Federation replicator can produce poisonous, dangerous or unstable compounds of any kind, not even with the Captain's orders...not to mention the ethical dilemma....we are doctors, not terrorists."

"Number one, we are medical practitioners, our primary responsibility is the safety of our patients, nothing less. You hear those noises in the corridor..." Even with the commotion in sickbay, phaser fire and Klingon battle cries could be heard in the distance. "You let one Klingon in here and he, or she, will massacre every single patient we have because they are weak, defenceless and the enemy. Do you both propose everyone sits on their hands and hopes for the best?"

"I propose we follow a course of action that limits the probability of injury to our own staff whilst maximising the effectiveness of our resistance at this time."

Nurse Lin nodded in agreement with what the EMH had said. As strongly as she agreed with him, she wasn't about to speak out against her department head again.

The EMH took a second to look around the room, before placing his hand on his chin and rubbing it in thought as the algorithms of his program began to calculate the most likely route to success against such violent organics.

"Klingon physiology is particularly susceptible to certain anaesthetics - anaesthezine or neurozine which can be delivered in a gaseous form...as an alternative solution we could attach canisters to the environmental controls in Sickbay, and flood the room with the gas when the doors are opened. That way we would be able to avoid direct combat."

Taking a moment to pick up a PADD and check exactly what stock they were currently carrying of the required compounds, the EMH returned to his train of thought.

"And of course as a hologram I am unaffected by such compounds and would be able to revive any medical staff that were caught in the discharge. Although I would recommend that all organic staff members remain within the confines of an isolation field around the surgical bay to prevent accidental exposure"

"Woah, wait one second. Can you isolate the environment in my office? We have patients in there too unstable to be put under. Secondly, even though you can resuscitate who you need, if this doesn't work how do you propose defending sickbay on your own? The easiest way is to enable everyone to defend themselves." Pola felt the frustration building inside as she closed her eyes and rubbed her thumb across her forehead.

"A simple multispectral containment field around areas that are to be excluded from exposure should suffice. If for some reason I am unsuccessful, which as a program with my level of brilliance is statistically unlikely, the forcefield should offer suitable protection until security officers can arrive."

The EMH had already run through the maths in his head. A group of doctors and nurses were unlikely to possess any substantial weapons training, in fact he calculated less than a 12% probability that any medical staff aboard Galileo would be able to engage a Klingon on equal terms. Add to this the 93% chance of an almost immediate disruptor attack from the invaders the moment they forced open the doors, and also the 75% chance that the Klingons would then resort to bladed weapons for further combat, and the recipe for success was somewhat muddled for the Starfleet contingent.

Shaking her head, Pola was still unconvinced, "We can safely assume that we are not the only department under attack. There is another area where the security officers will be dispatched to protect first and foremost." Pola offered no more information than that. Very few people on the ship were aware of the Sienna project and right now it was better kept that way in case something happened to them. "Any force field you create will come down as quickly as the one over the doors and bulkhead right now. Is there any way around that? Or could we strengthen the shields around the vulnerable if a couple of us stayed in the open?"

It was true that the EMH was never designed to be an engineer, but right now it seemed like a waste of his photonic breath to bother mentioning that little fact once more to his organic counterparts. Although great strides had been made towards adaptive holoprogramming, as it stood, his matrix simply did not cover that information.

"Field strength is directly proportional to power supplied so the short answer is no.....an engineer might be able to tell you otherwise but that's not my area of expertise. Ask me to perform brain surgery on a Ferengi and I am an expert, but this is outside my abilities"

"Ok. Do what you need to do to make this happen but, section off an area where myself and Kohl can be sectioned behind. Given we are armed with the phasers, as soon as the air is clear I want you to free us immediately so as we can help defend if this backfires. AND...I still want everyone armed with some sort of means." Pola was unwilling to not have a backup plan in place. If the EMH's plan backfired, she was not going to sit around and watch while things fell apart.

"Very well....they're your lives to throw away." Sighing, the EMH walked away from the conversation and headed back towards the main Sickbay console. He simply could not understand why an organic would willingly put themselves in danger when there was statistically a better option for everyone. Accessing environmental controls, the EMH quickly connected up the necessary cylinders of anaesthetic and placed them on standby to detect Klingon lifesigns. At least that way, in the worst case scenario and there was nobody left conscious to activate the program, it would run its own course.

Seeing a movement from the corner of her eye, Pola realised that Kohl had just re-entered the main room and was pushing one of their status units. Smiling slightly, she realised he seemed to have finally come to his senses and was helping whatever way he knew possible.

A bulky stasis unit lumbered into the ICU ahead of Kohl. The stasis unit looked like an over-sized coffin, perched on a pedestal at a forty-five degree angle. The bottom of the pedestal was an antigrav sled. With both hands, Kohl gripped the unit by its handle and pushed it ahead of him towards the entryway. If the Klingons were strong enough to bash through locked doors, Kohl barricaded the doors with the stasis unit, and magnetically locked it in place.

Spotting the EMH, Pola nodded her head towards the door, "Get a bio-isolation field set up around that door and the unit, hopefully it'll add to the strength of the unit being locked in place."

"I have already made the necessary adjustments. A level ten isolation field is in effect around the doorway and surrounding bulkheads."

[TBC]

Lt Cmdr Jonathan Holliday
Executive Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Pola Ni Dhuinn
Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo

EMH Mark-X (NPC'd by Holliday)
Emergency Medical Hologram
USS Galileo

Klingon NPC's
Played by Holliday

Crewman Vera Lin (NPC'd by Kohl)
Nurse
USS Galileo

Ensign Andreus Kohl
Nurse
USS Galileo

Chief Warrant Officer Markum Quinn
Chief Engineer
USS Galileo

RSS Feed