Camp Sunrise: Orders and Oaths
Posted on 20 Mar 2023 @ 6:11am by Major Porter Wallace
Edited on on 27 Mar 2023 @ 2:10pm
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Korix, Camp Sunrise
Timeline: MD 08: Mid Afternoon (after One Way Ticket Home)
2611 words - 5.2 OF Standard Post Measure
Wallace sat back on his heels, threw the makeshift shovel to the side, wiped the sweat off his brow with the back of his arm, and took a few deep breaths. From here on the high dune he could take in the entire shanty town. Although he’d lived here for a long time, loved and grieved, played and worked, and slept and dreamed, it didn’t feel like a home and he was glad to see the end of it whatever may come.
Sprigs of green grass poked up through sand like the last hairs on a bald man’s head. The only landmarks that made this dune different from the others around it was a dark, burned patch of sand marring its golden top and a semi-circle of large seashells on its western slope overlooking the shanty town. And now, of course, the hole.
When he’d dug this before, nine years ago, it’d taken him fifteen minutes. After multiple breaks He’d been up here nearly an hour before he finally clunked the shovel on top of the ration box. Before he could even yank it out of the three-foot hole, he needed another rest and more water. Fishing for a canteen, he sucked down the last drops of water from a battered canteen.
The thought of trudging down the hill to get more, only to then trudge back up motivated him to finish the task. He reached into the hole and pulled the two-foot by two-foot gray box onto the sand. Brushing away loose granules, he paused to stare at the Starfleet logo printed on the top. “Emergency Ration Pack” was stenciled in a circle around the comet, but those had been consumed long ago. Instead this simple box held the last moments of the USS Sunrise.
“Top, we’re just missing Jimoh, yes?”
A powerful shudder went through the USS Sunrise, nearly tossing Wallace off his feet, but he was able to brace himself with one arm against the bulkhead. PFC Patel was not so lucky skidding across the deck and into the cage surrounding the weapons lockers. First Sergeant Bolivar ‘Top’ Titus immediately rushed to her side.
Short and blocky, Titus had ancestry from every continent on Earth and a few that weren’t. He’d just helped Patel to his feet when a violent rocking tossed both of them back down into a heap.
“Jesus, Brahma, and assorted devas! We can’t take this kind of beating! This ship going to shake itself apart. We’re lucky the artificial grav hasn’t gone,” Titus swore.
“Status, Sir?” Lieutenant Ditya Koirala came bounding into the Marine armory.
Wallace shoved his body armor over his head, “Defense positions Delta. Prepare for boarders. Ray and T’Orla have already taken teams out to positions one and two. I want you to take Patel and - ”
The door opened and the last Marine came careening into the armory. “Sorry, Sir,” Lance Corporal Paul Doolen said as he rushed in.
“Don’t apologize, get your gear on!” Wallace shouted. “Ditya, only Jimoh is missing. If he shows before you’re geared up, great. If not, take Patel and Top and meet the security team that should be at position three. I’ll head to position four with - ”
A trill pipe - the bosun’s whistle - came through the comms system. Commander Sajal Khan, the Sunrise’s captain, had required the crew to learn a number of calls so that she could quickly issue orders without needing to speak. She simply could tap a button on her controls in the Captain’s chair and a series of tremulous notes would flood the ship. Wallace had grown to appreciate the system, but he didn’t particularly care for this one: all non-essential personnel prepare to abandon ship.
Marines didn’t particularly like to think of themselves as non-essential. Unless they were being boarded, however, there was very little for them to do in a ship-to-ship battle except hang on and pray. Immediately, everyone in the armory switched into a different mode dropping any combat gear that hadn’t been strapped on and heading into the storage room next door for the survival equipment.
Doolen was still struggling to get his body armor on over his head, the last out of the armory. Wallace bellowed, “Forget it! Grab a survival kit. Koirala, take Patel and Doolen head to the starboard escape pods. Help load the pods. Go! Top, with me!”
Wallace rushed from the room and into organized chaos. Engineering and operations crew - the only other personnel on Deck 7 besides the Marines limped or scurried as best they could toward the starboard pods.
He and Titus, however, moved against the flow and toward the portside escape pods. The passage of time in a crisis acts oddly, moving in short bursts of speed or a long, slow progression. Wallace wouldn’t have been able to say whether it had taken them thirty seconds or thirty minutes to reach their destination.
Steamrunner-class ships didn’t have life decks, but rather short t-shaped corridors every forty meters or so that led to a row of escape pods. The one Wallace and Titus entered was packed with people queuing for a seat. Even with gruff orders to stand aside, it was like trying to move through a thick forest.
“Major!” Jimoh gently shoved an engineer out of the way to give Wallace and Titus a way through, “Lieutenant Ferron was here a moment ago. She said that the automatic release for the – ”
The ship lurched violently and a sickening boom echoed through the deck. The corridor was so packed, however, that there was no room to fall. Everyone simply bounced off each other.
After the shaking stopped, Jimoh picked up where he left off, “She said that the automatic release for the pods has been damaged. The backup, too. She said we have to release the pods manually. She went to take care of Pods 25-29 and told me to take Pods 30-34.”
Manual releases required someone to stay behind. Even if Jimoh hadn’t recently proposed to his long-time girlfriend, who lived on Ceti II, or Wallace had been a lowly private with little responsibility, he would have made the same decision. Since his family had died in the opening salvos of the Dominion War, he’d been courting death like a lover. That she’d come for him was a relief.
He shoved Jimoh into Pod 34 telling him, “I’ll do the release. Get strapped in.”
He popped the access panel off the nearby bulkhead: the manual release, a bright red handle shaped like a ‘u,’ there to be pulled. Next to it a port for the bright yellow device that recorded the last twenty minutes of orders on the Bridge. Wallace’s father had a keen interest in airplanes; he would’ve called it a ‘black box.’ One of many on a starship. If the order to abandon ship was given, someone would remove the drive, climb into the last pod, and be shot away into space.
Climbing into a pod in this case, was easier said than done. Each pod held ten people, meaning one hundred people could escape from the pods in this corridor, but the one he was standing next to had only three seats left and there were more people streaming toward it than it could possibly hold. “Tell these people to get to the starboard pods!” Wallace barked. “Starboard pods, goddamnit!”
“They can’t,” Titus shouted back, pushing his way through the flood of bodies. “They’re telling me that we took a hit. Starboard pods are gone.”
A thought of Koirala, Patel, and Dolen danced across his mind, but Wallace firmly shoved all thoughts of them away. No time. “Then everyone not assigned here should make for the shuttle bays. There’s barely any room - ”
“Khan to Wallace,” his communicator blurted, interrupting him. After he gave the affirmative response, Commander Khan ordered in a strangely calm and unhurried voice, “Are you near any escape pods?”
“Commander, I’m on Deck 7 loading pods and then will lead other to the shutt – ”
“There won’t be time,” she cut him off, “Doctor Wei and Matt Winetrout are dead and the rest of the senior staff is on the Bridge. Get in a pod and take care of the survivors wherever you end up.That’s an order. We’ll hold them at bay as long as we can. It’s been a pleasure, Major. Good luck. Khan out.”
Less than a second later, a klaxon punctuated her order, as did her voice ringing out over comm system, “Abandon ship! Abandon ship!”
“Top, one more seat in this one,” Wallace said as if he hadn’t just been ordered to go. Titus didn’t move. “Titus, now!”
“Sir, you were ordered!”
“This isn’t up for debate! Get in – ”
Wallace slumped to his knees, his nose bleeding profusely. Dazed, he thought for a moment that the ship had somehow exploded and left this corridor intact. It wasn’t until the shoulder straps were on him and Titus was leaving the pod that he realized what had happened.
“It was the only way,” Titus told him gently. He removed a PADD from his belt and shoved it into Wallace’s hands, followed quickly by the data recorder. “Letters and the recorder, Major. Tell Helene that I was thinking of her at the end and that no matter what, I’ll be with her always.”
“You tell her! Top!” Wallace struggled with the straps, “Titus! You tell her!”
The hatch slammed shut. Wallace saw Titus salute through the porthole. A second later, the Major was slammed into his restraints as the pod exploded from the dying Sunrise.
Wallace finished brushing the sand from the emergency ration container and then popped the lid. It came off with a sigh and he smiled, pleased. He hadn’t been sure all those years ago whether it would automatically again after they’d removed the rations or not. Tossing the lid to the side, he reached in and pulled out the yellow data recorder, an emergency med pack, and two PADDs. The first PADD was the 2390 edition of the Starfleet Marine Corps manual he’d found in the escape pod of all places. The second were the letters Titus had thrown to him. While the Pyrryx had taken everything from them - phasers, comm badges,any other technology - he’d managed to hide this precious cargo.
He opened the med pack, about the size of a deck of cards, to check on its cargo. The only thing inside were two bright yellow adrenaline pills. During the Dominion War, these had been standard issue. They could push a person beyond their normal breaking point, if only for a few minutes. He’d been shocked to find these two stashed in a survival kit on the escape pod: Starfleet had stopped giving them out just a year or two after the fighting ended. Luck or fate, Wallace had buried the precious commodity just in case the day came he needed to fight his way off this rock. Considering the state of his body, it had been a good idea.
He repacked the box and stuck it under his arm. It took him two attempts to push himself off his knees and onto his feet. For a minute, he stood silently staring at the burned patch. Over the years, the heat of forty-odd fires had melted some of the sand into tiny globs of glass. This was where they’d cremated all of their shipmates. They buried their ashes on the slope overlooking the shanty-town.
Visiting the tiny graveyard was easy: it was on the way back down. He paused, there, too. It was the final time, after all, and he wanted to remember each face.
The seashells were the size of a basketball. They’d rarely seen the animals who lived in them, the Korinn said they were deep sea creatures, but the shells washed up on the shore regularly. One of the survivors, Amos Gimbal, was a woodcarver and applying his skills to the shells wasn’t much of a stretch. He’d made art at first. As people died he also began to carve tombstones. After Amos’s death some of his proteges took over. As they died off one by one, the carvings’ beauty diminished until only rough chiseling remained. Wallace had done Laura Winetrout’s himself and he was certain he was the only one who could read it.
He stooped down and picked up the closest shell. It was one of the last done by someone who knew what they were doing. Maybe even Amos’s last one, Wallace couldn't remember. A series of beautifully engraved Bajoran symbols floated around the name Dedran Cubo. He was hard to forget: the only one of them not from the Sunrise.
“Commander Khan,” he said to the air. “I’ve made a decision about something and I hope you’ll be fine with it. You ordered me to take care of our people. That I survived and most didn’t, I can’t explain. If I could’ve sucked the disease out of their bodies and made their wounds mine, I would have. I did my best. Sorry about that.
“I'm not going to dwell on it though. I spent the better part of twenty years angry at everyone and everything. Angry at Elizabeth for dying. Angry at the ship’s crew who couldn’t get my daughter to safety. Angry at the Borg and Dominion for attacking us. Angry at everyone in Starfleet for moving on after the war. Angry at people for just being happy. It was the guilt of surviving, I suppose, but I let the guilt and anger win. I ended up wasting so many years of my life.
“The real kicker, the real irony of the last nine years is that I’ve been miserable on this diseased rock. Every day was a struggle. I’ve been sad. Depressed. Hurt. But I think I’m better for it. I stopped wasting my life and started living it. Found family here. Let myself love and be loved. And I do love Ibis more than I can say. And against all odds I love those two kids, too. Now we have a real chance to get back home. When we do, I just don’t have any more time to give to anger and guilt. To you Commander, and all of you,” he said looking at the shells, “I did my best for everyone. Whether it was enough, well, I hope it was. That’s something you’ll need to tell me whenever we meet next, although I pray that's not anytime soon.”
Wallace put Dedran Cubo’s shell back on the sand and rose. “However, I make this oath. I’ll get Ibis, Olivia and Ikemba home. I’ll get news of you and the others back to your families. And you won’t be forgotten.”
As the final words floated through the barrier that separates the worlds of living and dead, Wallace executed the first formal salute he’d made in nine years. Back straight. Feet together. Arm at a perfect 45-degree angle. Fingers extended. Thumb tucked in. Light touch to the brow.
