Medical Malpractice
Posted on 31 Jan 2021 @ 1:51pm by Major Minka Mazur, MD (*) & Commander Calliope Zahn
Mission:
M1 - Emergence
Location: Infirmary
Timeline: Concurrent to A Trap, Sprung
3391 words - 6.8 OF Standard Post Measure
Coffee. That’s what she wanted more than anything else in the world. A tall, dark, strong cup of triple-caf dark roast coffee. Just the smell of it was intoxicating and she was caught between wanting to follow Staff Sergeant Bailey as she walked away from the replicator, just sniffing at the air to savor it and wanting to slap the cup out of her hand for daring to replicate something so savory that she knew Minka couldn’t have. Sure, she could have replicated a variant of it without the caffeine that she couldn’t have but what was the point?
Minka just grumbled to herself that she was ready for this pregnancy to be over and finished her round of the overnight patients in the Infirmary. Being that they were not even close to fully staffed, that amounted to three patients. There was Ensign Vikkleman, who’d had an acute case of appendicitis the night before and was just there for observation. Petty Officer Nguyen who’d come in near to midnight with a mild case of Goralt’s Syndrome, a Trill version dysentery that was easily overcome but needed medical oversight. Rounding out their overnight trio was Crewman Sho’ha who had broken her left arm early this morning. Generally that wasn’t a long-term observation type of thing, but seeing as she was a Selkie, she required a bit more refined care. Thankfully, Minka didn’t sleep that great anymore, so being in the Infirmary at three am to deal with the emergency was no big deal. She doubted Ptolemy even knew she’d gone.
Things had stabilized over the last few days since the 5th Medical had arrived to supplement her limited Starfleet medical personnel. Lorne and Wells actually worked pretty well together, which she supposed wasn’t that surprising. Wells knew her stuff and so did Lorne and both of them were far more outgoing and social creatures than she was. In fact, she wouldn’t have been surprised if there were some after-hours connections going on. They seemed closer that seemed reasonable. Regardless of that though, with her former colleagues there they had managed to stabilize the Infirmary. They’d gotten a resupply of the critical components they needed and aside from a few specialized items she’d requested from Medical, they were full stocked and functional. From what she understood of things, they were the only section that was.
Captain Finn had come down to visit with Minka the day before and since then had spent an inordinate amount of time here in the Infirmary. Something was off about that, but she couldn’t see that the Captain was lurking here to have a word with anyone other than herself. Generally random officers only lurked when they were trying to make a personal connection with someone, but it was almost like he was here hiding. As if no one would look for him in the Infirmary. She had quite enjoyed the thought of him hiding here because whoever he was avoiding wouldn’t want to be around her. There was something soothing about people being intimidated by her.
The infirmary was one of the only sections of the ship that had its own power source. It wasn’t enough to power all the medical sections but it was significant enough to run their scanners and other emergency medical equipment so that no one was every without medical care unless it was an extreme situation. But with the stations power at least in a minimal status, they were able to draw their base needs from the power grid. It was standard protocol. Main power from the station, emergency power from their own systems, just in case.
“Everything looks like its proceeding just fine, Sho’ha,” Minka said as she finished reading the Crewman’s chart. “Should be able to send you back to your quarters around midday,” she offered as gently as she could manage.
Sho’ha shrugged, “I sleep better here than in my quarters anyway. Crewman Tavish snores like a bear.”
Minka chuckled, “I’ll pull the screen then.”
Mazur left Sho’ha, now isolated behind a curtain so she could try to sleep and made her way to the Nurse’s stations to drop her data PaDD and make a final check with them before heading to her own office. She set the device down and Gates looked up.
“Anything?” She asked.
Minka shook her head, “Quiet morn-,” she started, interrupted by the overhead lights flicking off suddenly. A moment later, the emergency power for the Infirmary kicked over and they came back on, albeit dimmer and fewer of them. She growled with frustration, “It would have been nice if Engineering warned us first,” she complained.
“Typical Starfleet,” Gates agreed. “I can send Private Illervan to Engineering to get an update if you wa-,” she replied, her own statement interrupted by a thudding shudder that rippled through the deck plating.
Gates perked up and Minka was suddenly alert. A second thud rippled through the station. Minka cried out immediately, “EVA SUITS NOW!!!” She roared, “MARINES, BATTLE-STATIONS! BATTLE-STATIONS! ”
The entirety of the Marine crew ran for their kits, stored out of the way in the storage room or the in the isolation suites that weren’t being used. The Starfleet crew ran to their emergency action stations which was where Minka went and for the first time actually let Lorne help her do something rather than stand on her own pride in wanting to do it herself, pregnant or not. As she pulled her EVA suit on she was glad of two things. One, that she hadn’t sacrificed her Marine variant for the standard Starfleet version and two, that she’d had the damn thing fitted for her only three days previous. Lorne got her sealed up and then she quickly helped him seal up as well.
Minka half trotted into the main infirmary to see Sho’ha, Nguyen and Vikkleman being taken from their bio beds and hurried to an isolation suite where they would be put into an emergency EVA suit. The MP’s at the door were in position at the lift doors as Minka came hurrying over.
“Anything from Finn? Do we know what’s going on?” She asked them.
“Nothing from Finn, Major,” the Corporal replied. “Main comms are down,” he said, tapping the badge on his chest and getting the familiar dead chirp that meant that there was no connection.
“Get on the short-wave and find out,” she ordered him, “In the meantime, mag-boots engaged, everyone. If the stations decompressing, we’re not loosing anyone,” she ordered. She hit the button on her wrist to engage them and heard the familiar click as they made the connection, echoed in stereo throughout the deck.
More thuds were rippling through the station now, most of which seemed to be distant from their location but coming closer. Several sounded loudly overhead, possibly the next deck up. Minka shook her head and looked around, uncertain as to what was going on. In the Infirmary, every one of her Marines was suited up and ready with their Starfleet counterparts. The stark contrast in their EVA suits on display, as was the fact that the Marines had their weapons at the ready. The Starfleet crew was just prepared for the vacuum. Her fear was that something catastrophic was happening and they were suffering some kind of hull breach because of it. Explosive decompression would send them all flying out the breach. That’s the last thing that they needed.
The Corporal was turned away from the lift doors, trying to connect with Captain Finn on the Marine short-wave emergency band while Minka paced by him, her rifle bouncing awkwardly against her belly as she walked. The suits weren’t meant for someone as robust as she was at the moment and the locking mechanism couldn’t make a solid connection because of the bulge. Whereas the other Marines had their rifles locked down across their fronts, hers jangled. Anyone else might be embarrassed, but Minka was just irate that she had to be in it at all.
Frustrated, Minka marched to the end of the corridor about fifty yards away to look out of the viewport. She wasn’t sure what she was going to be able to see of anything, but if the decks were exploding she might be able see some debris, or something. She went up to the glass and craned her head to look up, but didn’t see anything. A flash of something to the right drew her attention and she turned that way just as one of the stations fighters streaked past. A second craft was hot on its heels, firing pulses of red light rapidly, a third fighter flashing in behind it. The illumination from the fighters was enough for her to see the strange looking craft heading towards the station on a collision course. She knew what the thud was now, looking briefly past the fighters she saw the large forms of the vessels that had been in the docking bay engaging a fleet of newcomers.
Minka turned on the spot, running back towards the Sergeant and Corporal and temporarily turning off her boots so she could move faster, “BREACHING PODS!” She cried out loudly, “WE’RE UNDER ATTACK!!” She boomed as she closed the distance, “Seal the lift doors! Get everyone into the main infirmary, now, now, now!!” She boomed, hurrying to the Infirmary itself.
No one missed that. Between the comm link between everyone and the fact that she’d cried out at the top of her lungs, everyone was in motion. The Marines were hurrying to get the three isolation patients back into the main infirmary and Minka directed them to get behind the Nurses station. Corporal Thompkins and Sergeant Fallabor, the MP’s had sealed the lift doors by frying the control panel and hurried back into the main doors of the Infirmary.
“Gates, Thompkins, flip the bio beds on their sides, facing the main door. Wells, arm the Starfleet personnel. Fallabor. Fire teams of three to each bio-bed. No more than one Starfleet with each group,” she barked in order.
The lot of them went quickly into action, hastily detaching the bio-bed’s from the wall and dropping them on their sides to serve as mini bunkers facing the door, the only entrance into the Infirmary. Fallabor oversaw the placement of the rest of the Marines, leaving a spot for himself and Thompkins in the front. Using the manual controls, he drew the main doors closed but for a two foot gap; just enough that a man had to move carefully sideways to get through, then fused the manual release so that it stayed that way. They’d be forced to blow it up if they wanted it to be open.
Minka redirected a couple of the bio beds to face the side doors of the Infirmary, just in case they breached through bulkheads and didn’t come in through the main corridor, forming little squares of stacked bio-bed and supply crates to try and protect them in case they were flanked out. All of this in a matter of minutes while the station thudded around them. They forced those doors close to only a small gap as well, and were in the process of fusing the second one when their deck shuddered. The air around them shuddered as it was sucked out of the room through whatever breach had just hit their deck. Minka hurried to the Nurse’s station and ducked behind the counter with Wells. Nguyen, Sho’ha and Vikkleman were behind a bio bed a little farther back, blocked in by some storage crates.
“…nn to …. azur… com… ajor,” Minka’s wrist come crackled.
“Infirmary deck is breached,” she shouted back into the comm, “Will hold,” she barked, turning her attention up to the doors. She wasn’t sure which way they had breached.
A plasma grenade thudded to the deck from the doorway on the left side, threading the gap and bouncing off the deck. Corporal T’Ven twisted away from his bio bed, picked it up and threw it back through the gap as casually as if he were tossing a weed from his garden. It got through the gap and detonated less than a foot away, before it even hit the deck. A few screams of pain answered the explosion. Minka smirked cruelly.
Somewhere on the other side there was a blood curdling battlecry and the gap between the doors erupted in lances of crimson energy as the group charged forward. A Nausicaan warrior tried to force himself through the gap and was shot dead by the two Marines at that door. A Klingon followed, and a pair of Remans, all clogging up the doorway now with their corpses. The lances of light continued to fire through for a few moments and then finally stopped. Everything went deathly silent.
There was a low thrum that resonated through the very decks and bulkheads into the bones of all the waiting Federation forces inside the room; the thrum under-girded the rhythmic grinding of advancing gears with a counter beat of mag-lock steps gripping and releasing in steady series and pieced with a high whine characteristic of an over tuned power module. Four articulating armored limbs pierced the gap simultaneously and fanned massive mechanized grips into the jarred door at force, crimping the metal back into the frame while the frame itself screeched a protest and popped free of the bulkhead in its grasp. The Automated Robotic Goliath advanced on the room with the door and sheered wall panels as makeshift-shield, and into the greater opening it created poured the enemy forces, wantonly leveling fire.
They were decked out in various levels and types of armor, a veritable fashion show of pirate and renegade outfitting. Some could practically be classified as barbarian, while others came to the show in riot gear and were wrapped in a protective shell of energy shielding. Clearly this boarding party had a bring-your-own-battle-gear kind of arrangement. One particularly cool figure cut a dark outline beside the cover of her robotic goliath: A Romulan who bore no rank or insignia on her armor. She surveyed the meager preparations— beds upturned as cover, crates hastily shifted. "Don't kill them all." She told her compatriots. "We came for hostages, after all."
Everyone's heads were down. The four by the side door had run for cover behind other bio-beds the minute the massive robot appeared, scattering quickly to give it room to move and not crush them in the process. T'Ven leapt over the nurses station and tucked down against it next to Minka, looking back around over the side as it came through at the Romulan following them. She leaned in towards T'Ven and grabbed one of the grenades off his armor. She stood up and chucked the grenade at the big beast of a robot and cried out, "OPEN FIRE!" ducking back down just as a trio of phaser blasts headed back her way. One nicked the top left shoulder of her armor and reflected up into the ceiling.
The room erupted into weapons fire from every bio-bed bunker. The Marines propping their rifles against the upturned medical devices, laying down thick pulses of phaser fire while their Starfleet counterparts used smaller palm or hand phasers, adding long lances of orange fire into the mix. Without cover the enemy had no choice but to turn back or shelter behind the big beats of a robot which itself was drawing the most significant fire. Enough that even with its makeshift shields, it wasn't able to advance much farther than the door.
Identifying the grenade, the Goliath took a step over it and performed a mechanical squat to take the blast directly with its under-armor plate. It sat on it. The concussive effect lifted it slightly and then the fumes of charred armor became a fog enhancing the phaser fire exchange. Standing again, bottom slightly worse for the wear, it re-calibrated on it's armored animatronic legs, it's actuators compensating for a broken stabilizer. Struck repeatedly from all the flanking fire on either side of the wall it toted, it stumbled, calculated where the most lasers lanced from, then rotated the wall segment at a blade angle and threw it at force along the right side array of bio beds like nothing so much as a massive frisbee.
With the break in the fire from that angle, the attack force took it's opportunity to rush in.
The forces charged in and the Marines in that section, all of whom had ducked behind their cover to avoid the hit, looked up to see a surge of enemies overrunning their position. Sergeant Fallabor and his team had been sent sliding back along the deck by the massive segment of door that had slammed against the front of their makeshift bunker. He recovered as best he could, while Petty Officer Pemmon skittered backwards on his butt, is phaser abandoned and his face white as a sheet. Fallabor got to his own feet and all but threw Pemmon over the nearest remaining barricade by the back of his EVA suit. Turning back, both he and Private Eimer were being overrun by the boarding party. They were too close for rifle fire.
Behind them, the rest of the Marines were holding fire as best as they could, but Fallabor and Eimer weren’t the only one’s isolated. A Klingon charged at him, the Romulan woman behind him crying out victoriously. Fallabor spun his rifle around his body on the strap and drew his k-bar, sidestepping the disruptor the Klingon tried to point at him. The close quarters was just as much a problem for him as it was Fallabor. Parrying the weapon, he slashed up with the k-bar, slashing his EVA suit open at the neck and then stabbing him down on the shoulder. As the Klingon fell, another Marine somewhere else in the formation shot the Klingon down for good.
There were at least eight Marines without a bunker now, and two Starfleet trying to hurry back to another place of strength while the eight of them fought their way forward. On the other side, the other portion of the boarding party was attacking Major Mazur’s position behind the Nurse’s desk. She had six Marines, not including herself and behind her behind the crates with her overnight patients, she had two more. She held them all in check as the boarding party advanced, waiting until they were feet away from their position to pop up in force and lay down fire. Several dropped quickly. Minka ordered them to advance, and the six Marines went around or leapt over the nurse’s station, charging the attackers now fully engaged on their rear flank and clearly unprepared for their numbers.
The boarders were dropping rapidly. The Romulan woman, despite her expected odds in the beginning, was starting to see the turn and trying to pull her warriors back but Minka’s flank had cut them off from that reality. All they could do was try to get to the wreckage of the huge robot and try to use it for cover. Her chance to do that was lost, the Marines without a bunker in front of them had put the remaining boarders into a slow retreat while Major Mazur’s six had cut down the rear unit. They had nowhere left to go.
Minka sat up on the nurses station and swung her legs around, hopping down carefully on the other side as her Marines put their weapons on the remaining boarder and their Romulan leader. “Don’t kill them,” Minka ordered, “We’ll need prisoner’s, after all,” she smirked wickedly.
The Romulan spat a Rhihanzu swear at the petite human. Was she mistaken or was the diminutive defending combatant also pregnant? Defeated for now, the Romulan chucked her rifle down beside her broken robot, more in frustration than any true resignation. Medical was a side mission. Most of the forces were engaged above them. "It isn't over." She promised Minka with a sneer.
