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File #10 - "Pain"

"You killed innocent people!"

Commander Val'sha could feel her control slipping away as she saw the warbird engulfed in flames on the viewscreen of the Victorious. She had never felt like this before but something was breaking down the mental barriers that held her mind together.

Suddenly she was back there... an angry child, trying to find order in a sea of chaos.

She had seen death on this scale before but it had never affected her like this.

What was happening to her?

The body of the equine commanding officer slumped forward as she shook it, almost in an outrage, she could feel something that she had never encountered before so closely.

Was it rage... and fear?

She has observed these emotions within her before and was able to study them, examine the logic of them from an evolutionary perspective.

But this was different.

They threatened to overwhelm her.

She tried to breath and closed her eyes, her skin perspiring so that beads of sweat trickled down her face.

"You have stopped..." came a voice, seemingly from all around her. The same voice that she had originally heard on the bridge of the Warrior.

"Yes... I'm finding it..." she took in a deep breath and tried to recant the teachings of Surak in her head.

"Structure, Logic, Function, Control..." she recanted in her head. "Logic is the foundation of Function, Function is the essence of Control. I am in control... I am in control."

"...finding it difficult to focus..." she said finally after pausing a few moments to recant the line from her memory.

The voice was unsympathetic, unyielding and alien in its lack of compassion. "You are different from the others, I require time to master you."

Suddenly it made sense to her. She had been in close contact with many of the Victorious's computer systems, maybe this was the way that the entity spread to other lifeforms and initiated its takeover? Maybe the highly disciplined mind of a Vulcan was proving to be a more difficult challenge then that of a human or the other species that existed on the Victorious.

"Why would you need to "master" me?" asked Val'sha, keeping the same words about logic in her head, reciting them over and over in order to gain back a measure of her control. "You cannot repair yourself!"

"My avatar is decaying..." replied the alien voice, so distant and cold, referring to the dead equine slumped in the captain's chair. "You have a highly structured mind, one that would be less susceptible to decay over time."

Val'sha liked the prospect even less. She had a belief that this entity had taken an interest in her beyond just repairing the ship itself and this only seemed to confirm that hypothesis. "Does that happen to all the biological lifeforms that you inhabit?" she asked, still throwing every essence of herself into fighting the influence of this creature and retaining her sense of logic.

"Yes... I am incompatible with most carbon based lifeforms. However over time I learn more, I have no mastered the art of language and I will master you soon as well."

"But..." replied Val'sha. "If you do that... then... eh... " her concentration was starting to slip as she felt her mental barriers coming down, crumbling like an old wall that was erected long ago. "There will be nobody to repair the ship itself. It would be logical for you to cease affecting my behavior until I have repaired your systems."

There was no response from the creature for a few seconds until suddenly the creature relieved its assault. Val'sha felt the energy shoot down through her body like a lightning rod and pass back into the floor of the Victorious.

""Very well..." responded the entity.

Val'sha regained her discipline but the mental assault had been taxing. She knew that she had to continue repairs while still keeping a window open for the Warrior to hopefully come and save her.

If it had not become completely overrun itself...

She accessed the power grid and began to recalibrate the EPS manifolds, albeit at a slow pace. "Why are you doing this?" she asked.

"Restate your question?" asked the booming, disembodied voice in the gloom around the bridge itself.

"Why would you want to destroy innocent lifeforms like this?" she asked coldly and calmly, regaining much of her usual Vulcan attitude.

"Processing..." responded the voice, which had suddenly transitioned into something more akin to a computer then an actual living entity. She suspected that this lifeform transcended the boundaries between organic and inorganic life. She had not heard this entity respond like this before.

"Would you not destroy an ant's nest if they were breeding in your home?" responded the creature after a few seconds.

Val'sha thought about this. The creature was referring to the an Earth species that was a type of Hymenoptera, a large order of common insects. It was an interesting question, he had already referred to humanoid life as "parasites", so maybe it was as simple as "swatting flies" to this creature.

"Ants are not sentient creatures" Val'sha astutely observed. "Humanoids are sentient beings with cognitive understanding of their environment."

"Correction..." replied the entity. "Humanoid life operates on the basis of instinct. There is a high probability that human life would destroy us."

Val'sha walked over to the LCARS computer station at the back of the bridge. She had a theory in mind.

Maybe, just as how a child adopt the attitudes and learns from its parents as a primary source of information, then maybe this lifeform learns from the main computer and since the main computer of the Victorious was corrupted..?

She checked over the files. It was just as she suspected, all the files pertaining to the United Federation of Planets, or Federation ideology had been corrupted when the Victorious had collided with this species out in the middle of the Triangulum Galaxy.

She decided to try a different line of questioning.

"Victorious?" she enquired. "Do you remember you existence before you merged with this ship?"

There was silence, only followed by three words. "I am... Victorious".

It was as she suspected, the creature was incapable of understanding because it had only gained its sentience when it collided with the Victorious. Attacking and destroying the other vessels was an instinctive defense mechanism to protect itself from threats, in the same way that an animal would.

It was not until the creature had fully assimilated the knowledge from the computer banks of the ship that it inhabited that it gained sentience and unfortunately...

Just as a parent has a responsibility to guide the moral development of a young mind, so did the corruption of these computer files fail to guide this creature in its moral development.

---

"Are we ready to try this?" Nurse Onya breathed deep. She had always been fascinated with medicine, ever since she had discovered that many of her species had undergone genetic modification and gene splicing in order to be able to breath on different worlds.

Such had been the way since Benzar had joined the Federation.

The sickbay of the Warrior was small and cramped with only two biobeds with beautiful, sweeping views of the cosmos coming in through the two windows opposite it. It was a sweeping semi-circular collection of connecting rooms at the rear of the saucer section.

Doctor Rayne had always questioned the logic of having sickbay on the edge of the saucer section however space was at a premium on this ship and Captain Nicholson had to constantly remind him that "this was not a medical ship" and if he had wanted extensive medical facilities then he should have considered a posting on an Olympic Class hospital ship.

However Doctor Rayne did not like the idea of competing with other doctors. Nurse Onya was pretty convinced that he had only stayed on the Warrior because he got to be "king of his own castle".

Nurse Onya looked at her only assistant, a slightly scared looking blue uniformed Ensign who had only taken a medical extension course at Starfleet Academy. Medicine was not even her specialist field.

But they really did not need a Ethnobotanist right now.

Nurse Onya looked down at the body of Commander Shon Tempest, which had been eerily silent since it had caused all that damage to the ship early and killed Doctor Rayne in the process.

Nurse Onya would have to be considerably more careful then he had been.

Lying next to Commander Tempest was also the unconscious body of Chief Engineer Lazard who had been incapacitated since his incident in Engineering.

The nervous Ensign nodded, tapping a few buttons on the sickbay panels which erected a containment bay around the surgical area of the sickbay.

"Onya to Nicholson" Nurse Onya tapped her combadge.

"Nicholson here, go ahead..." a strong English accent came over the communications system.

"I am going to attempt to purge the neuro-electrical patterns from Commander Tempest. Is Meiru positioned outside sickbay?"

"Yes" replied the Captain. "She is standing by to manually employ bio-containment procedures and jettison the bay if there are any problems. Good luck Doctor..."

A short smile came across Onya's blue skinned face. She was not a doctor yet but hopefully if they all survived this... she would be. "Acknowledged, Onya out"

Onya began to program the Omicron Radiation array to flood the containment field. She knew that if this went wrong, the unique design of this ship would help to keep the crew safe. The Warrior was designed to be able to jettison specific sections of the rim of the saucer, in order to protect the rest of the ship or to preserve experimental data if the ship was destroyed.

These parts of the ship were designed to resemble ordinary debris and would only show up on certain Federation frequencies for recovery while enemy ships would believe it was just damaged debris.

It was an ingenious design but Onya knew that if they needed to do that, she would have less than ten seconds to escape before decompression.

"Alright, flood the containment field with Omicron Particles."

Nurse Onya had come across this treatment while looking into the logs of previous starships with hostile non-corporeal alien takeovers and had found an obscure account in the files of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D.

In 2368, three crew members of the Enterprise had been taken over by alien entities and held several crew members hostage in Ten Forward. These aliens originally claimed to be the long dead crew of the U.S.S. Essex but were actually condemned prisoners from a star system called Ux-mal. They were only stopped when Doctor Beverly Crusher had designed a containment field to trap the entities.

This containment field was composed of low level Omicron particles, so Nurse Onya had developed a more excessive dose in order to force both patients nervous system to essentially "reboot" and force out the alien signature.

"Ramping omicron radiation levels to maximum tolerance..." said the Ensign. Both Commander Tempest and Chief Lazard began to writhe in pain on the biobeds but their neurological readings were showing an increase in resistances.

"It's working, go to 110 of maximum tolerance" commanded Nurse Onya, proving herself to be every bit the "tough as nails" doctor that Doctor Rayne had been. She had learned well from him.

Suddenly, cyan electrical discharges began to shoot out of their bodies, channeling through them like they were mere circuitry, hitting the forcefield with such force that both woman jumped. It appeared to be dissipating and returning to safe levels as both bodies began to move less and less.

"Their response rate is good." smiled Nurse Onya. This had been the first major treatment plan that she had devised and she could only hope that wherever he was, that "mad old dog" Rayne was proud of her.

Commander Tempest sat up almost immediately, to the utter shock of both Nurse Onya and the assisting Ensign. He looked around as if he had been in a deep trance and was suddenly snapped back to reality.

"This is a Starfleet ship?" he asked, almost oblivious to the ordeal that he had been through. Chief Lazard was still unconscious and here was Commander Tempest, his yellow eyes scanning over the two woman, immediately awake and alert.

"Don't be so alarmed ladies" he said, in a polite and dignified manner as he got up and dusted himself off. "There was an alien presence in my nervous system, so I shut down my higher brain functions before it was able to access my brain. Do you know how many millions and billions bits of information is in here... timelines worth!"

"Eh... well try to take it easy" replied Nurse Onya who dropped the containment field and walked out to meet him.

"Oh nonsense, I'm known Gallifreyans who've been in worse conditions than this." He said, adjusting his uniform, using his paws to pull his shirt down. "Now, I must insist... what ship?"

"This is the U.S.S. Warrior" replied the younger Ensign.

"Ah... is it... new?" he asked expectantly. The younger Ensign nodded, wondering if he was always this eccentric.

"Well then... kindly get me your captain. I would like to speak with him about something. Oh and good job on that Omicron therapy... I should have thought of that myself..." he said, not really looking at either of two woman as he strolled into the next room to examine the consoles on the wall.

"But... how did he?" asked the Ensign confused.

Nurse Onya just shrugged...