A Night in a Morgue

Posted on Tue May 16th, 2023 @ 10:45pm by Christine Graham

860 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Good Will Tour: Mountain Home [Part Two]
Location: Downed shuttle McCall
Timeline: MD26: 0300 hours

With the immediate problem at the captain’s cabin, Christine was able to split her intentions between two places. She was partially in the cabin, but now primarily focused here, on the downed fighter.

She moved through the shuttle, making a forensic investigation of the four corpses. It wasn’t a pleasant experience, but it needed doing and as the only officer who could do this, she needed to do it. She decided it wasn’t a pleasant task, in fact, it was downright creepy if you think about it too long. She shook her head, the emotional subroutines needed to make her bedside manner exceptional also gave her the willies in a situation like this.

Back to work to distract those routines. Crewman Bell and Chief Jepell had been first to die at the shuttle’s pilot and co-pilot seats. Their injuries were consistent with impact injuries. Christine was obtaining a close inspection of a closed cranial fracture on the Bajoran pilot, Jepell. She was following the fracture pattern when she heard the first scrape. A sound, she thought, against the outside of the fighter.

“Probably just the weather blowing ice sheets against the shuttle,” she said to herself. This side of the mountain stopped the worst of the weather from spilling onto Mountain Home and it was harsh. She finished the autopsy on Chief Jepell before moving to Crewman Bell. Christine felt badly for this young woman, barely out of NCO schooling, Savannah Bell had just drawn a bad lot to be aboard the fighter.

Just as Chief Jepell had sustained, Crewman Bell’s autopsy read similarly. Bell had impact injuries, but she had died before the fighter had even crashed. Based on the 3-D rendering of her skull, she had sustained a full force explosion of the co-pilot’s LCARS interface. The damnable things were being replaced with holographic interfaces to avoid such injuries, but not in the fighters. The pilots maintained the tactile interfaces weren’t the same and didn’t respond as fast.

The sound of skittering across the hull indicated that hail had begun. It was bad enough working in a darkened husk of metal alone without the intrusion of the weather. It had the strangest sound for hail though. Sometimes right on top, sometimes from either side. Christine had no way to see outside the hull, it had crashed upside down, so all the windows were buried in dark snow. If she opened the ventral access, the weather would consume the fighter and make it impossible to salvage.

Moving aft, she knew Ensign Hanover and Engineer Grelk’s bodies were. Both of them had survived the initial crash, but appeared to have died afterward. Christine was in the middle of looking for signs of hypothermia on the duo, when the fighter shifted violently. If she could have projected outside, that would have been of use, but as she was, she had no way to know if the shift was natural.

She prepared herself for another shift of the fighter. Chances were, it was sliding down the mountainside, but to her surprise, it move forward and up the mountainside. The fighter groaned as it was pulled now by someone - assuming Starfleet was trying to tractor lock onto the fighter - or something since she couldn’t find an attach point in another vessel.

A freezing gust of cold air let her know the shuttle had been wrenched open, likely during the crash, and now she had a point to discover what was pulling the shuttle up the mountainside, but she needn’t bother as the small, white monsters crawled into the fighter. Each one growled and hissed at her, sending her presence as photons and forcefields. One or two even slung a thick, fibrous webbing at her as their multifaceted eyes locked on.

At the cracked area, even larger white legs seemed to probe the craft for further weaknesses. Large, black against their white fur, piercing teeth found the source of her irritable presence and began to work at the holoprojectors. She took readings as long as she could until she was forced to reintegrate into the portion where the captain, the counselor and their passenger still slept quietly.

“I know where I’m not wanted,” she whispered to herself. To her, the cabin felt cool. She closed their vent a little and added wood to the fire bin in the main cabin before walking quietly the the rear bedroom and adding a few small logs there.

Not that she needed sleep, and ninety five percent of her program was now fully directed to her patients, but Christine crawled into one of the bunks above Counselor Rena and used the other five percent to begin an analysis of their indigenous arachnoid problem. They seemed quite angry little beasts and her mind filled with dread.

She began a full analysis on Hanover and Grelk, both of who had survived the crash. Were they still alive when she was just forced to abandon them to the arachnids? She wouldn’t know what she would do if they had been…

 

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