Pressure
Posted on Sun Jan 19th, 2025 @ 4:46am by Lieutenant Didrea Zade & Darius Wulfe & Senior Chief Petty Officer Mason Malone
Mission:
Pandora's Box
Location: Wreckage
Timeline: MD5 - after 'Fate's Folly'
1837 words - 3.7 OF Standard Post Measure
An abrupt need for air jolted Zade back to some state of consciousness, her mouth open in a gasp. Immediately, she started coughing, each attempt to clear her throat of dust sending stabbing pain through her chest. Her mouth and throat felt like sandpaper. Each breath she tried to take in was shallow. She couldn’t get enough air, so her reflexes continued to make her cough harder and sputter for breath, without success. The air was suffocating her.
Her ears were ringing. Dust covered everything. What happened? Where was she? Where was her helmet? Blinking through the haze, she spotted it laying on the ground, damaged, and for a fleeting second wondered if she removed it or if the debris knocked it off. The thought slipped away as immense pressure against her ribs demanded her attention. She tried to move, only to grimace in pain as she quickly realized it was a mistake to even try. Each time she shifted, whatever was on top of her seemed to further compress against her. She stopped moving so she could gasp for air she knew she couldn’t get. There was debris all around her. Her surroundings blurred and shifted as her eyes darted around, the resulting vertigo twisting her insides with nauseating force. For a moment, just a moment, she closed her eyes to try and tame her churning stomach.
Zade weakly shook her head as she came back to consciousness, unaware that she had even passed out. What happened? Her thoughts were jumbled. Why did her head hurt? Reaching up, she winced when she touched a sensitive spot on her head, and pulled her gloved hand back to see blood. Pain. It wouldn’t stop. Another coughing attack enveloped her, and she gasped for air. Suffocating. She was suffocating. Why couldn’t she breathe?? She shifted to try and get more air. The already confined space around her tightened. There was no escape.
I'm going to die here.
The thought echoed in her mind. Each injury pulsed with her racing heart. She pushed against the debris, hoping something, anything, would give. Her breath quickened with her panic. No, she needed to focus. Zade closed her eyes and tried to even out her breathing, finding the limits of how much air she could take in with shaking breaths before her body protested. Minutes passed before she felt herself regain control of her emotions, and eventually her thoughts.
She needed help. She needed to survive. Getting out herself wasn't an option, so she needed to get someone's attention. A faint beeping pulled Zade's attention, and she slowly lifted her arm to identify the source. Barely hanging on to the damaged suit was a set of controls on her forearm. Several seconds passed where she stared blankly at the controls, her muddled brain trying to recall how it worked and what the blinking light meant. She tapped the button to signal comms, but nothing happened, even after a couple more tries. At least the beacon was working. A fear that the SOS wasn’t enough tempted her to try and get out on her own again, pushing vainly against the debris before her own pain stopped her. Straining for breath, Zade resigned to the fact that she would have to wait for help. What else could she do? Someone would find her. Someone had to.
Her thoughts started to drift as her eyes fluttered closed, her body rudely reminding her that she needed to conserve her energy.
Someone would find her…
Mason had been thrown back by the force of the explosion and he had heard something crack as he landed flat on his back. His vision had gone black for at least a few seconds but he didn't know how long exactly he'd been out. Throwing his destroyed helmet aside, he ran forward. "Zade!" He called, "Iska!" He coughed a few times against the dust that was still coming down, his palm light casting eerie shadows as he turned it on.
His keen hearing picked up a groan, and he steered towards it. "Zade!" He called as he finally found his half buried chief, picking up and throwing aside any debris he could. He knew he had to tread carefully, because as she was pinned, any relief of pressure could mean instant death. "How bad is it...can I..." He paused, frantic eyes searching her face. "I need to get you out. Where's Iska?"
The distorted voice made Zade sluggishly open her eyes. Did she fall asleep? Someone was with her now, someone she felt like she should recognize but the name was as hazy as the dust in the air. It took a few seconds of focused concentration for her to understand his words. "Iska... I don't..." she rasped, before trying to cough, her expression scrunching in pain. The gritty film that coated her throat made it hard to talk, so she shook her head to hopefully convey that she didn't know.
Twisting slightly, Zade put a hand against a larger piece of debris that was on top of her, as if that would keep it from continuing to press down on her. It was coming back to her now, this was Mason, he was there to help. He asked her a question... right? "Something's broken... I don't... don't know what," she hoarsely explained between shallow breaths. "A lot... of pressure... I can't take a... a full breath..."
Kazik groaned as he came to. He hadn't expected the explosion to catch him as well, it should have been far enough away from him. A pain in his arm sharp enough to churn his stomach made him grimace. His eyes went wide when he assessed the damage, finding his arm without... well, the rest of it. The trigger... did it explode in his hand?? The pool of blood where he had been laying looked larger than it should have been, and he quietly cussed out Varem while searching for something he could use to stop the bleeding. I will make him regret that, he thought, taking some fabric and tying it tightly around his arm to control the bleeding.
Standing, Kazik swayed as the blood loss hit him. He gave his head a shake before he looked around, holding his injured arm close to his chest. His eyes landed on the rubble pile, seeing the woman partially buried and one of her accomplices next to her. This was probably the only moment to escape. Grabbing his weapon off the floor, he broke into a stumbling run, trying to avoid tripping over the debris.
It took effort to focus on Mason, to keep herself alert. A flicker of movement caught Zade's gaze, and she looked past Mason to see someone running off, stumbling over the debris. "Stop..." she tried to call out, but it was more like a ragged whisper. Out of habit, or perhaps even instinct, she tried to get up to pursue, and was instantly met with excruciating pain that made her stop and clamp her eyes shut. Her hands clenched the debris around her tightly. Why did it feel like her body was being ripped apart?? It took a couple seconds for her to remember to breathe again, her shallow gasp almost sounding more like a quiet sob.
At her barely audible call, Mason turned his head. "Don't move," he whispered, clearly torn between staying at her side and following their enemy. But, with the Pandora protocol in effect, it gave him no choice to begin with. "I'm sorry," he whispered, briefly touching her arm before getting up. Phaser in hand, he went in pursuit of their enemy.
"Stop!" He called out, his better physical condition allowing him to catch up with the injured alien. "I will fire," he added, leveling his phaser at the man while thumbing it to heavy stun. Putting deed to his words without waiting for a response, he pressed down on the trigger.
The voice behind Kazik made him turn his head to see the one officer in pursuit. He ducked behind some debris, the phaser fire sending sparks when it hit some twisted metal instead of his body. Panting, he fumbled with his weapon before poking it around the debris to fire off a few blind shots. He just needed to get to the extraction point... he was too close to give up now! After a couple more shots, Kazik pushed himself off the debris to continue running.
Mason cursed under his breath as some of the wildly fired shots went very close by, one grazing his cheek and leaving a nasty burn. "Now I've had enough," he muttered as he tried to avoid the next salvo and one clipped him in his left shoulder. He shifted his phaser to his right hand and took aim at the running figure. It took a few but finally one of the shots struck its target. Shaking his head, Mason continued to run towards his target, fully intending on taking him into custody.
Due to the combination of unstable footing and a rather unforgiving energy beam to the back, Kazik quickly collapsed, his weapon clunking against some nearby debris. A few seconds passed in hushed anticipation, then the hum of a transporter beam accompanied the sparkle of green light that began to cover the fallen raider.
There was no way to halt a transport in progress, and the raider was too far away for him to try and just pull him away. Mason watched in disgust as the transport completed. Remembering Zade, he rushed back to her side. "He got away," he reported, "we really should call the Ship now, we need to get you to sickbay." He tapped his combadge. "Malone to Athena, medical emergency, beam us straight to sickbay."
"Copy that. Stand by to transport."
Zade lulled back into consciousness when she heard his voice again. His words stumbled over themselves in a confusing way to her ears. A slow series of heavy blinks indicated that she was fighting to stay awake. In the few seconds before the transport, she looked for him and reached out to him, finding his arm and weakly grabbing it. She sought an anchor, something to focus on, something to help ignore the pain.
In those few seconds, though she would never openly admit it, she was scared to be alone.
Mason nodded in silent understanding as he lifted his other arm and grasped her hand within his. "Now's a good time Athena," he called out, "hurry!"
The blinding blue light that suddenly surrounded Zade made her shut her eyes. It was so bright, she could see it through her eyelids. The hum that accompanied it was deafening. It only compounded onto her already overloaded and confused senses. It needed to stop... it needed to stop! Eventually, it did, but it wasn't just the sound that disappeared -- it was everything. Pain. Noise. Light. Everything faded... faded...
