Left in the Dark

Posted on Sun May 1st, 2022 @ 7:22am by Leiddem Kea (*) & Delaney O'Callaghan

Mission: Mission 15: Adrift
Location: Security Offices
Timeline: MD 01
3921 words - 7.8 OF Standard Post Measure

It was insane how quickly a week could pass sometimes. Most of the time, this wasn't something Delaney complained about because the flipside was, there were times when a week could drag and, whilst she'd come to appreciate life aboard the Mary Rose with a fondness that allowed for forgiveness, it didn't always make it easy to fill in downtime. Lack of holodeck access was a main contributor to cabin fever, and the limited sporting facilities also meant that she often had to improvise the route of her morning jog. These things she had adjusted to, however, and had ultimately relished the opportunity to invent new ways to keep herself entertained. Making friends, initiating hijinks, unravelling Betazoids...

The last week had flown though.

This was mostly due to the increased requirements for security reports, and the paperwork that came with it, and the fact that she was often the only one daft enough to pull double-shifts because she sucked at sleeping anyway. As convenient as a malfunctioning lift had been in her case, the repeated interruptions to the power grid had started to wear thin. They were now into the second day of no replicators, since the entire network had been taken offline whilst Engineering tried to figure out why they could no longer be trusted not to return beef soup. Temperature controls had sporadically made it either a bit too chilly or kind of on the hot side, and then there had been the black-outs. None of them had lasted long, some of them had even been intentional, but Delaney didn't operate so well in the dark and trying to sleep without music playing had only lead to no sleep. She was operating on coffee and impatience.

Nearly a week.

It was a good thing there'd been enough to keep them all busy because trying to find any time with Leiddem when they were already short-staffed and he was insistent on involving himself personally with every slightly-risky situation had been almost impossible. Not that Delaney had any desire to monopolise; she was perfectly capable of finding other company. It just wasn't his company and after so many days, these constant barriers to any kind of conversation they might have needed to have was starting to test her patience.

Her eyes tracked him across the room. From her Operations post, Delaney typically dedicated most of her time to the armoury and its constant need for procedural management, but they were fielding more communication from all departments now and she'd been dealing with Medical's reports for the past hour or so. Leiddem, by the look of it, was on his way out again. Delaney huffed out a sigh and refocused on what she was doing. Taps of her fingertips redirected messages, filed those already dealt with, and flagged any that needed checking before they could go any further. A lot of Operations worked seemed menial but Laney had always enjoyed the structure of it, the methodical nature of streamlining multiple inputs into one cohesive system. Anyone who knew her well enough to have a reading on her personality found it astounding that the woman thrived so much on this kind of worked but Delaney didn't need her work life to be a constant source of adrenaline. It was nice to have something consistent and efficient and stable...

Her console flickered once and then stopped responding.

"What the..."

There was no easy way to account for what happened next. As far as Delaney could tell, the entire office simply plunged into darkness, and that would have been alarming enough had it not been immediately followed by the sensation of hitting a brick wall. It flung her forward, caught the edge of the console against her stomach, but also gave her something to grab onto as the sound of things hitting the floor, and people shouting, filled the pitch blackness with panic. Delaney winced in pain, gasping as the impact knocked the wind from her, and remained clutching at her console as the room settled once again. The sensation was familiar at least, Delaney had fallen out of enough trees in her lifetime to be practically an expert at riding out her body's protests to sudden impact. Eventually, she straightened, pushed fingers against her lower abdomen to make sure there was nothing worse than a bruise, and then attempted to look out into the gloom. Somewhere to the left, the sound of another security officer groaning prompted her to move, but immediate disorientation left her fumbling. Of course it would be bloody dark. She hated the dark.

The Betazoid in question was just as confused and frustrated as he wanted to have a conversation with her and discuss what had happened into the turbo lift but there just seemed to be no way to make it happen. The warning of something was about to happen was the sudden silence that descended before the ship lurched and plunged into darkness. Leiddem did not like the sensation of hitting the floor at all nor the darkness that came with it. It took him a few long moments to realise that he was in fact awake and fully aware of what was going on and not unconscious as the darkness tried to convince him. He rolled onto his back and then sat up, disoriented. “Everyone okay?” He demanded quickly.

His voice cutting through the darkness gave Delaney pause, a single point of anxiety relieved at least to know that her top personal priority was not halfway across the space in need of assistance. She fumbled and groped for the stricken colleague nearest to her, offering a hand to help them up, and for once was one of the quieter voices in the room as various responses to Leiddem's query created a tapestry of sudden noise that Delaney didn't feel like trying to compete with. Instead, she focused on the practical.

Part of the emergency response initiatives that the Security department had spent the last day or two putting in place was the restocking and updating of the security lockers to ensure the equipment was freshly maintained, service tags updated, and reallocation was finalised. Delaney knew exactly what was in each of them because she'd spent hours on specifically reassigning assets that had either been in storage or spread out across the ship. With a stretch of her arm, she felt around until several steps brought her back to her console and, from there, Delaney attempted to get her bearings. The lockers were located in several key areas but the ones that specifically interested her right now were the four she knew to be somewhere along the wall to her right. Moving away from the console was daunting, there was a space to bridge that would be very easy to lose herself in, but there was little point in having stubbornness as one of your defining personality traits if you let personal weakness get the better of you in a crisis. Delaney didn't navigate well in the dark; there was only one way to rectify that.

In the time it took her to slowly inch her way forward, Delaney was aware of several voices calling for assistance. Some of their colleagues reported unresponsiveness in others as the casualty list mounted as a verbal recount. In her determination to concentrate, Delaney had forgotten her own silence. Urgency hastened her pace, her heart pounding at the anticipation of some sort of obstacle, but eventually her fingers brushed against the bulkhead and some quick mental calculations took her slightly to the left until her hand found the reassuring bulk of the first locker. It took her a moment to find the manual release, a moment longer of straining before it actually relented, and then swung open to the clatter of equipment hanging on the inside of the door. Recollection saw Delaney grope immediately upwards, feeling around until her hand closed around the familiar reassurance of one of the flashlights she'd personally tested the day before. Aiming it to the ground, she switched it on.

The effect was immediate and turned most heads in her direction immediately. The attention didn't daunt the redhead, who was already gathering the locker's second flashlight and its medkit.

The clatter of equipment was not easy to pin down as the man did not know where he was in the Security offices. "Ow... dude." He muttered as he felt someone walk into him and mutter an apology. "Benji..." Leiddem gripped his shoulder as he waited for someone to do something useful to help them. "Ah, there you are," Leiddem said having looked in the wrong direction to see where she was. The darkness had not scared him after the occupation of Betazoid as a child. That darkness had been piercing and lonely, he knew that people were close here.

"What happened?" He finally wondered not at all sure what had happened but it had never happened before. The ship's lighting was not coming on and all the consoles around them seemed dead.

With one working light, it took no time to unlock the remaining three lockers and distribute the flashlights and medkits. Further rummaging in the final one brought out one of the handful of tricorders the Department had on-site. This in hand, and carrying her flashlight in the other and a spare under her arm, Delaney made her way over to Leiddem whilst others tended to the wounded. Beams of light danced around the space, several already rigged to hang independently, and so by the time she reached the Betazoid, Laney's keenly alert expression was easily visible, if not somewhat cast in shadows. She handed him the torch and tricorder. "That felt like more than another blackout."

"Definitely more than a blackout." He stretched out his mind to Jeassaho feeling her not far away. She was okay but distracted which meant Engineering were dealing with someone. He pulled back and focused. "Benji... help everyone here and get those who need support to sickbay." He instructed the Andorian who had bumped into him and was already moving in the shadows lit room to help what was easily a broken wrist in the Engineer who had been fixing the log console. "Whatever it was we need to find out what is happening and get certain areas secured." He was thinking of the areas of the ship not known to most people.

"Well, I sent a message out yesterday with all the locations of the lockers we just checked and restocked, along with a suggestion to keep a flashlight handy and how to operate the fire extinguishers I spent the entire afternoon testing and tagging." Delaney arched an eyebrow. "Now I guess we see who actually reads my messages. We should probably head out, right?" she added, gesturing with her flashlight beam towards the main doors as her eyes connected with his and locked.

"I read it. So hopefully other people did as well." He said in a positive voice. It was not much but he had read it but it was not needed now as he had a torch already but he hoped a few people at the very least read it. It would save a lot of time for them now. He offered a smile to her and a gentle touch of his hand before he moved in front of her to start the process of getting to the bridge and finding out what was going on. "

Under different circumstances, there would have been ample room for a jab about the lack of pictures and whether or not he'd managed to understand what he'd read without them, but questioning Leiddem's intelligence, even as a stereotypical joke that didn't actually reflect her opinion of him, had lost some of its appeal. More to the point, Delaney couldn't dedicate the attention to the quip that it required, having paused a moment to shine her light around the huddled figures working on casualties before turning to follow the Betazoid out.

The persistent darkness beyond the main security doors was no different to what they'd left behind. Without the flashlights, no single point of illumination assisted, which heralded failure of the backup systems and emergency power reserves with them. Delaney was no engineering expert but she knew enough about ships to understand that total power failure impacted atmospheric controls and hull integrity and a veritable boatload of systems whose primary focus was to provide conditions compatible with life. Forget not being able to see; it was suddenly far more concerning that they may not be able to breathe.

Through the pitch black, guided by her narrow beam of light, Delaney reached out a hand to settle against the small of Leiddem's back briefly, to grab his attention. "Hey." She moved up to match pace with him. "We need to dispatch someone to head to Medical." As was a habit amongst a lot of the department, the default authority had already swung towards the ex-marine, and though Delaney liked to rib him for it when circumstances were better, she had no qualms in admitting right now that she understood why. It was a gentle request, quiet encouragement to do what he did best and manage the emergency before he rushed off to appease his own sense of duty.

“Benji will once he is able to move people. I’m not wasting people when we have no one spare and have semi injured people.” Leiddem said shooting a look back at the man who would do what he needed and knew what the process was. It was the one reason he was leaving a command hub. “Come on.” He encouraged back as he slowed his pace for a moment to allow her to catch up.

The silence of the ship was deafening to him but he ignored it, keeping his hearing on the boots next to him and the way the torch beams bounced off the bulkheads throwing his home into gloom. It was almost like a horror film but the Betazoid refused to be a staring role in it.

Ironic. Keenly aware than the situation was tense enough for an endless stream of consciousness conversation to be more of an irritant than an effective distraction, Delaney kept her inner-monologue to herself for the time being. An entire week and it takes outright catastrophe for us to get five minutes alone. It wasn't the time for it, though, and whilst that was an impressive improvement on her teenage self's sense of control, Delaney wasn't without the frustration that came with it. The fact that they were negotiating such total darkness only added to the adrenaline spike, since their flashlights did very little to curb the sense of being followed by a void of absolute disorientation. Delaney kept her eyes focused ahead, hyper-focused on every detail that allowed her to keep a mental track of where they were in relation to where they'd just been. It helped her maintain composure and move quickly, but likewise left her somewhat unprepared for the confrontation of muted banging as they rounded another junction and had to pause to account for the noise.

Delaney swung her flashlight's beam upwards, tracking it along the ceiling to reflect the light and fill the space as Leiddem had instructed once, during one of their many drifted conversations about marine training and survival tactics. Half the time, Delaney lost track of how they arrived at the conversations they did, it had always just seemed that they talked until something stopped them without the invariable awkwardness that occurred when people ran out of things to say. It had never happened to them, not that she could recall. It made the silence now, interspersed with the repetitious thudding, harder somehow. She tracked the light until it settled near the probable source of the noise; a pair of closed doors. Leiddem was already halfway there.

"Hang on," she called through the bulkhead, unsure if her voice would even carry without the assistance of the communication system. Angling her light so that the Betazoid could wrestle the manual release to cooperate, Delaney closed her fist and banged several times on the door to let whoever was stuck inside know that help was coming.

Leiddem glanced at the woman beside him and opened his mouth to say something to her when the banging started. That would only be one thing as there was nothing on that deck that could repeatedly make that sound nor as out of rhythm. If it had been a bit of machinery it would be repeated at the same pace. "Stand back," Leiddem instructed the woman as he pushed the manual control first forwards and then backwards to release the door. He watched as the door creaked open enough for himself to get his fingers through and then more and more of himself as the door ground open.

The billow of smoke that greeted them first was followed by the prompt realisation that there was a faint glow to the room beyond that was exceptionally out of place, and Delaney's immediate cough reflex simply mimicked the hacking of the pair of security officers that stumbled into the corridor. Her reflexes were nothing on Leiddem's, who pushed forward before the redhead had even a chance to reorient herself now that the smoke was obscuring vision even with the flashlights, but she followed him several steps later, her forearm pressed against her mouth and nose. Several frantic scans with her flashlight allowed Delaney to pinpoint the fire extinguisher, which was closer to the Betazoid than her. "Over there!"

Ducking down as Leiddem dealt with the smouldering ruins of the terminal, Delaney peered through the mess to check the floor for any other casualties. A question called out to the two in the corridor gave her a target to search for, and she squinted through the sting of burning eyes to search frantically.

The extinguisher was a small powerful device that put out the terminal in moments stopping the creation of any more toxic smoke. "Use your feet to search, the smoke is thick." He said reminding her of the way to search a room as he reached out telepathically to see if he could find anyone but no one conscious. He moved forward using the consoles as guides until his foot hit something soft. "Here." He called already leaning down to haul them up.

Despite not being prone to panic, Delaney took a moment to control the impulse to breathe too deeply and squeezed her eyes shut to grant a moment's reprieve from the disorientation. On so many levels, her perception issues in compromised light were not a personal choice and certainly didn't represent a defeatist surrender of any desire to deal with the situation even though it confused her. In fact, she loathed its presence as a weakness, a chink in her armour that left her susceptible and rendered her more of a hindrance than a help. Squinting open her eyes again revealed only a swirl of smoke, interspersed with the wobble of Leiddem's light as he dragged the unconscious officer towards the door, and Delaney winced, closing her eyes abruptly again.

Lead with your feet.

By now, the urge to cough was hard to fight, though the extinguisher had at least negated the steady rise of particulates in the air. Putting her head all the way down, Delaney turned towards where she thought the door was and lead with a hand stretched out in front of her whilst her feet sought out a pathway that allowed her to retrace her footsteps.

It took a few long seconds from Leiddem grabbing out the officer for him to give up waiting for Delaney and went back inside to get her out. He wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her out into the fresh air and winced at the burning feeling in his lungs. "Breathe." He instructed as the two that they had let out initially started to check on the unconscious one with the first aid kits they had.

One day, she'd punch him in the arm for the dizziness his momentum caused, and then would likely have to whack him again for jibes about making her swoon. For now, Delaney submitted to the guidance out of sheer necessity and regained control over her own impetus the moment they were clear of the worst of the residual smoke. "I'm fine," she strained, vocal chords restricted from the incessant tickle. In further defiance of her body's attempts to render her a liability, the redhead promptly moved to crouch beside their stricken colleague and shone her flashlight at his face in search of an obvious head wound. "We need to get him back to the main office for proper triage."

Looking upwards, blue eyes still stinging, Delaney regarded Leiddem for a moment, the trajectory of her thoughts likely very similar to his, and then quietly said, "I can get them back." Through the dark. On her own. The two who were upright would be some assistance but even just following the corridor didn't present so much a risk of getting lost as it did of her falling over herself because her equilibrium decided to take a literal nosedive. It couldn't be helped, though; someone had to get through to the Bridge. Stubbornness, and a tenacity for punching through adversity rather than trying to hide it, added strength to her insistence and Delaney added, "We'll be fine, you keep going."

“You better be fine.” The Betazoid instructed with a smile and a squeeze of her shoulders as she moved away to help the stricken despite the two already there. The man hated to admit that she was right when she more than likely was. “You are right.” Leiddem was reluctant to just leave them but they had safety in number and he was more than capable of looking after himself.

It cost Delaney more than she had any capacity to admit in the moment to just agree, let alone suggest, that the Betazoid continue the trek to the Bridge on his own. Every fibre of her being screamed at her that it was a terrible idea, that letting him wander an obviously-damaged ship without backup was a risk that flew in the face of all common sense, but certain sensibilities had rubbed off during the course of their friendship. Leiddem's passion for serving others, that fact that it was blatantly obvious that she cared about what he cared about, and the fundamental morality of rendering aid to those in need, gave no room for personal preference. Staring at him through the back-lit haze, Delaney wore her emotional struggle openly, her expression never particularly difficult to read, and then relented as she gently nodded her head. "Of course I am."

A feeble attempt at a grin was all she could send him off with, other than the last-minute shout into the gloom of, "If you fall in a hole, you owe me dinner for a week!" Then, armed only with the reassurance that it was Leiddem and he had spent more time memorising the layout of this ship than anyone else in the department, (and he'd read her message; there was hope yet!), Delaney turned her attention to the two walking-wounded and instructed, "Okay, help me get him up."