Crashing Cold

Posted on Sun Jun 5th, 2022 @ 3:25am by Ensign Noah Balsam

Mission: In the Aftermath
Location: Enceladus; Qamashli Ice Shelf, B.S.V. Jacques Cousteau; Eilat Ein Karem Triage Center
Timeline: Mission Day 3 at 0330

[Stardate 64970.72]
[Eleven Years Ago]
[Enceladus; Eilat Ein Karem Triage Center]

"Open your eyes, Noah, come on! Open your eyes!" There was frenetic breathing. Sobbing. Someone was saying over and over, He's so cold. Someone shouted stand back. Another person shouted for a cardiopulmonary stimulator and a thermal circulatory regulator.

Blue lips. Dark eyes, unfocused, kept rolling under frost-covered eyelids. Pale skin was stiff, snowy, cracked, and bleeding. He saw it all from above, in a daze. Loud beeping. The hover-gurney kept rolling in a whispering cloud of anti-gravitons. It passed over and over through what felt like the same corridor. Black wall panels flashed with a pulsing line of turquoise. "Code Blue Delta. Incoming Casualties. Code Blue Delta. Incoming Casualties. Doctor Fassbinder, H. Report to Muster Station Alpha Five. Doctor Fassbinder, H. Report to Muster Station Alpha-Five..."

"Noah, open your eyes. Focus. Focus on my stylus." The voice shifted. "I need a goddamn thermal regulator over here! This kid's at 25.4 C and falling!" Hovering. He still felt like he was hovering. There was a loud beep. A loud series of beeps.

"Cardiopulmonary arrest! We're losing him! Blood pressure is crashing!"

"Code Blue Delta. Incoming Casualties." Blue pulses bled into everything. "Code Blue Delta. Doctor Fassbinder H. Report to Muster Station Alpha-Five. Doctor Al-Rasheed, M. Report to Muster Station Alpha-Eight." Floating felt heavy. And dark. And so much cold.

"Negative pupil response!" It sounded torn and long. So cold. The world was shaking.

"Code Blue Delta. Incoming Casualties."

"Next batch inbound on medical transporter pad four. So far eighteen confirmed dead on arrival, six...."

[Stardate 64970.28]
[Approximately Four Hours Ago]
[Qamashli Ice Shelf; B.S.V. Jacques Cousteau]

"Noah. What are chaeta?"

The ten-year-old's arm jerked up in instinct before he dropped it down, a sheepishly broad grin spanning his apple-like face when he realized he'd been called on.

"Bristles, Ma'am," Noah stated.

"Specify," the Instructor said with a smile. She clutched a PADD to her bosom as she looked at her grouping of some forty ten- and eleven-year-olds. Her uniform was bright white with a metal sigil on her chest for the Bright Thinktank.

Noah looked at the sample of the life-form they were discussing. It looked like a long worm with strange, long spines coming out of its heavily armored, segmented body. It floated in a force field of Enceladan sea water, complete with a waft of sterile ammonia.

Noah pointed at the spines. "That Ma'am. They're sort of like feelers and legs. A monochaete has one set of bristles per segment. And a polychaete has-has more than one set for every segment."

The teacher nodded, pleased. "Ten points to the Blue Team." The gaggle of mostly boys- seven of them- started high fives. "Red team. For ten points, what is this species?"

A girl with gold-thread laced corn rows and lengthy shoulder braids stood as Noah began to lower with a vaguely jealous glower in the Red Team's direction. "It is an Ankyllonudibrancha Trimeilat-" She began as an oscillating shudder began to run the deck plates.

The cool white, cleanly medical lighting of the Jacques Cousteau flickered and then shifted to dark red. Alarms bonged. A crescendo of murmurs grew into panic around the kids.

"We have a seismic-tectonic oscillation of 7.7 magnitude inbound, bearing 065 mark 347, depth of twenty kilometers!" A man shouted. The tremor of the deck plates increased.

"Hold on everyone!" The professor with the PADD stated. The screaming and panic grew another octave.

"It's Dione! Gravimetric shear from the moon has increased fourteen percent..." A man said from his seated station near the wide viewing port.

"Damn, Seismic Monitoring Central said there was less than a 0.2% chance of a seismic event today!" Said a grizzly-looking Andorian. His antennae yawned and gulped toward the data on the screen. The lights flickered and snapped off. "Emergency lights! Shields up!"

"Everyone hold on to something! We have a mechanical failure in fusion pistons four and five!" The Jacques Cousteau shifted sharply at an angle. Noah toppled and felt the bite of a table corner jab into his cheek. His eye and jaw throbbed. He could taste blood from his nose. "We're going down. Brace for impact!" Shrieking. "Close the forward shutters! Computer, erect a level one containment field around Classrooms One and Two!"

Noah toppled again as he could feel the sensation of falling. In the screaming darkness, bodies began to topple over one another. There was a harsh jolt, Noah felt his head hit something and he felt woozy. The direction they were falling felt different. or maybe he was just spinning.

He gave a last gasp and then darkness and cold. So much cold it penetrated to the bone. Shivering. Darkness. Pain. Racing heart. Noah opened his eyes. Groggy. They'd stopped falling. He gulped. Dead, open eyes, lifeless between the flashes of red. Noah winced his eyes shut. "Warning. Life support failure. Thermal field collapse is imminent. Hull pressure climbing. Outer hull failure in two minutes."

Noah Balsam flailed to life in a thick, heaving gasp.

[Stardate 74530.21]
[Current Day]
[Junior Crew Quarters; Federation Starship Sojourner]

He felt twisted up and half-naked in his sheets, his core flexing him into sitting up. Long and spindly arms deployed behind him and bunched fingers in sheets. Or snow. No, sheets. Noah could feel his heart pounding against his breastbone. Bam-bam, bam-bam, bam-bam, bam-bam. At least 115 BPMs. It was pure darkness and that knot of fear tightened behind his guts. "Computer, illumination side lamp, ten percent." He gasped and panted, his chest falling and filling.

Cadets Log, Stardate 74530.21. I had my bad dream again...

Noah raked fingers through his sopping bangs and shivered. His skin felt clammy. "Computer increase the ambient temperature in zone one by ten degrees." He requested. The computer's do not disturb setting kept its response without a chirp and simply began to raise it. Noah put his hand on his bare chest and felt. He started grounding. Butt in sheets. Legs wrapped in sheets. Ventilation ducts. Air. Check. The ebb of the deckplates. Check. Noah pushed his weight and the center of his body into his bottom.

He side glanced at the sleeping form of his roommate. "Computer, turn the lights off..." He was again in darkness.

The dream that I almost die. Back home. Um. On the Ice Shelf.

For a few minutes, Noah drew his knees into himself and clasped them to his skinny chest. he steadied his breathing until he couldn't feel his heart battering itself against his knees. Then slowly he extricated his lanky, skinny legs from his sheets and pushed them against the wall. He dropped them onto the floor, flexed his nimble toes, and rubbed his eyes.

I only have it when I'm stressed. And Doctor Nezarian says... maybe when I feel alone.

Glancing up he cast his night-blind gaze toward the other side of the room. He'd never had great nighttime vision but it wasn't enough to warrant a corrective round of Retinax therapy. But he could sense her. She was there. Noah held his breath with a grimace and then pushed it out, up into his sticky bangs. Long slow, letting his spine deflate back into a stoop.

I feel kind of alone. Um. Right now.

Noah lifted himself up and tugged first on the basket and then on the leg hole of his turquoise and red-ribbed briefs. Fabric extricated from his cleft, Noah rubbed the pit of his eye socket as he walked toward the door. A field fizzled a flash of azure blue around him, a brief nimbus, as he passed. He'd erected a force field to protect his half of the room, for some modicum of safety. But in those steps toward the actual door, he felt a slight tension.

Still, he passed through the door and swayed his gangly shape toward the bathrooms. Once inside he sighed. The dream was fading into the Tenebrae of his mind: the memory always took a while longer. Staring at his tired-looking visage in the mirror, Noah tried to remember the last time he'd dreamt it. Antares...? Maybe before? He had tried hard to forget. The voyage to Antares? Maybe the first few days on the Sojourner when they were short-staffed and everything was falling apart.

Noah's coffee-colored eyes had diffused in thoughts. He refocused and frowned. Fingers pressed into his slender, vaguely triangle-shaped pec muscle at a small, raised pink dot left of his nipple. He poked it and it hurt. With a sigh, Noah lamented that acne was still an issue in the twenty-fourth century. Easily cured? Yes. Genetically screened out? Not unless one wants to spend one's life under constant monitoring under the Eugenics Laws.

Noah opened the mirror and took out a small conical device. Using his fingers to tighten and spread the skin of his chest muscle, Noah double-chinned down in vain to try and see the little zit. With a soft, medical warble he activated the dermal regenerator and began to pass it over the small dome in an arc. Over and back. Over and back. Over and back. The skin started to tingle and prickle. Noah straightened his mouth at the discomfort that passed from the dull annoyance of a zit, into something more like a light sunburn and then into something nominally fine. Clicking the device off, he looked at his chest. Only the fingerprints of pressure, turning pink on his sensitive skin, remained.

Noah sighed, opened the mirror, and closed it.

Irynya's avoiding me... my roommate thinks I'm soo weak that I don't-don't even deserve a name, and Kennedy is mad at me. I-I can only guess he didn't like that Irynya and I kissed in the Holodeck but... I-I don't even know where to start there. I feel...

Noah tucked his eagle-like nose under the dark tifts in his armpit and recoiled with a wince at the bridge of his nose. His sweat had taken on a pungent, stressed heaviness as his thought stumbled with dread at what bizarre jobs his superior's superior was going to see him do in some version of revenge-cum-toughening up. His eyebrows lifted. He issued another long sigh. "A few months and maybe if you get your commission you can escape..." But that stung with a double-edged reality. Less cruelty, but another cold start to making friends on who knew where. A lot of systems specialists started their commissions on lonely subspace relay stations and space telescopes.

Or worse he could end up on a listening post near the Breen border.

The haunting pang of being declined for enrollment at the University of Cendo-Prae-Catulla's artificial intelligence Masters Program uncoiled like a cold, smoldering serpent of hurt. Maybe Enceladus should leave the Federation. Maybe the Bynars and Catulla would too. The way the Federation treated Synthetic life was... an abomination. Punishing an entire group for the actions of some.

Noah fidgeted. He pushed all of that away to where it belonged and he refocused. "Computer, time?"

"The time is 0341 hours, 14 seconds." The computer stated. Somehow he'd guessed it was around 3:30 or 4 am. It'd always had a pretty good sense of time. But his brows lifted, lips pouting acceptance with a head bob when he felt a small nugget of vindication. That meant he had to be in Main Engineering in two hours, nineteen minutes. Too early for a shower yet if he took one now he could avoid entanglements. But going back to bed for an hour and a half? Why? He'd toss and turn.

Yet the weight of sleeplessness forced itself on him without consent and he yawned at himself in the mirror.

Throwing myself into work is hard too. Lieutenant Margarar is trying to make things worse so I give up. I miss the Computer Core. And the Holo-Lab.

Noah carried himself out of the bathroom and headed toward the couch. "Holo." He stated. "Tile display two left, one right." Before him, a streak of reflection appeared like a screen. "Increase opacity.... twuh-twenty percent." The system complied, shading the floating light panel like progressive sunglasses. "Top left... Noah Balsam's schedule, Stardate 74530.57. Lower left..." His brown gaze shifted to the rectangle. "Coursework. Display All. Right. Resume Blade Runner, time index 20:19." Noah sighed and stretched his stuck bug legs out onto the coffee table and under his holographic display. His eyes closed as he stared back at the eye on the screen.

Noah watched the Rachel character answer a question about nudie magazine. Noah had had to look up what a magazine even was back in those days... and they hadn't made it out much beyond the 2040s on Earth. Digital- and then static holographic- media had replaced them. Then dynamic holographics... and finally haptic-immersive systems with holograms, replicators, and force fields. And some clever usage of tractor technology.

Noah glanced at his coursework. Two flashed in red as overdue. Basic Piloting Certification. Noah winced at that. His attempts had been... mediocre. And with Irynya not speaking with him, and him keeping his distance to not make it any worse... who did he turn to? Noah, who had started to slouch into the comfort of the cushions, pushed more upright. Lieutenant Timmoz but...

Again Noah pushed a breath out of himself and ruffled at the sweaty, still-damp hair on the back of his neck.

"Memories, you're talking about memories," Harrison Ford's Deckard character stated. Noah snapped his eyes to the movie. He grazed back to the second requirement. "Security Officer Training Rotation." In other words, learn to use a phaser, and practice a rudimentary level of Starfleet Martial Arts enough that a typical Pakled won't kick your ass. And then learn the basics of Intruder Alert protocols."

But that was the Cadet learning experience. Dip your toes in different departments within Operations, as an Operations cadet. To Noah, it was all a formality. He was quite set on Systems Engineering. But required course credits were required course credits.. Noah framed his head with a bend of his arm and scratched the phantom itch of where he'd eliminated that spot of acne a few minutes ago. The pungent waft of his stress and heated sleep perturbed his nose.

Lieutenant Sovaan had started- but not finished- his phaser certification training back in the Alpha Quadrant, around the time they were landing on killer Klingon mining colonies. That meant he'd need to ask the new Security Chief for aid. Noah wondered if the Department Chair of Security, Starfleet Academy had even contacted the Lieutenant about him yet. How long until he had to?

How quickly did he want to get out of a Cadet uniform and into an Ensign's uniform, with a small number of new options? Again he panged. Again Noah pushed down.

I wish I was Doctor Who. I could fly anywhere without a certification... and I wouldn't need to kick ass. I could just... outthink. And I could save lives.

A vague epiphany, fleeting as it sparked and then diffused. Was it stress and loneliness that had caused his nightmare...

... Or had it been Omri? Lieutenant Zhaan's family member? Watching him die deeply bothered him. Noah had chewed at ideas of how to "fix it" until they'd been whisked back to Talbeethia under a tenuous connection. He'd been forced to abandon the whole idea...

Noah narrowed his eyes. The image of Omri's life draining out of him made Noah shudder and close his eyes. They clinched. Noah held his breath and only tersely let it go when his head started to swim. Doctor Who didn't have to worry about Prime Directives. And he- or she- could go back in time, through space, and save Omri.

But he was not Doctor Who. He was a Midshipman. In Starfleet. On a tiny ship kiloparsecs from a wormhole that could take him home. And he wasn't powerful. And he couldn't fix everything with a sonic screwdriver and some quips. That was all glorious fantasy.

Noah blinked and refocused on what was reality, not just an escape. His gaze shifted to the reality of his schedule. He read the first line. 0700 Hours. report to Starboard Bussard Ramscoop Monitoring Station. Clean and replace the carbon filters.

Noah's head lolled back with a grunt. He'd done the port side ramscoop's filters yesterday- for ten grueling hours- so of course, she'd assign him to the opposite. "Computer, close schedule," Noah mumbled.

I need to finish my coursework and get my commission. I think that means I need to ask Lieutenant Timmoz and the new Security Chief to help certify my coursework. Maybe I can focus on that for a while.

Noah closed his eyes with a pained expression, folding his skinny arms across his chest. "It's my ocean.... it's my ocean." He murmured to the air with no sound.

A Post By:

Midshipman Noah Balsam
Systems Specialist