FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

File #7

The Warrior had been helplessly trapped within the thermal layer of methane for almost three hours and Chief Muraco was still no closer to solving the problem. The captain had been taken to sickbay with a severe head wound and Commander Tempest had chosen to be perfectly honest with the crew regarding his condition.

"Doctor Tao informs me that there is a good chance that the captain may not survive..."

These words provoked a feeling of shock in the rest of the crew, which lamented the halls of the ship, even while Doctor Tao worked feverishly in sickbay to perform a cranial decompression on Captain Greyfell without the medical simplicity that he had become accustomed to.

Doctor Tao had not performed a manual operation in a triage situation for years, not since he had been a Starfleet Medical student. He needed time and silence as he had loudly protested before starting the operation.

Commander Tempest had agreed with him so all the other patients were moved to an emergency triage facility in the Mess Hall. Leaving the ship's chief and most senior surgeon alone with both a single nurse and a patient.

The destruction of the Warrior's power grid had only complicated the operation further, meaning that the doctor was unable to rely on the surgical technology of the twenty fourth century. Now he truly felt the test of what it meant to be a doctor.

Literally holding the captain's life in his hands.

All the rest of the crew could do was sit and wait, trying to help each other with various repairs that the Warrior needed.

The ship was dying, just like her Captain. Would they share the same fate?

Chief Muraco had been through almost every power relay on the ship. Engineering was almost a complete mess, with scattered conduits and charred bits of bulkheads laying all amongst the floor. He sat in the middle of huge room, which was usually bustling with fellow engineers, the soothing, gentle hum of the warp core behind him.

"Hey Muraco... I've replaced that anodyne relays on deck..." Yusa entered the room, crawling through the access port to the jefferies tube at the far side of main engineering. He immediately noticed Muraco, who was slumped on the floor, a huge hulking mass, clutching a piece of damage conduit. It was clear to him that something was not right with the usually chirpy Chief Engineer.

"What's the matter?" he asked, wading through the mess on the floor of damage conduits and debris. The room was dark, even the warp core was not emitting the same brilliant ray of light that it usually would on aSovereign Class starship, the pride of the fleet.

Muraco did not answer at first. What was the point? How exactly was he about to explain this? He just stared down, clutching the broken piece of conduit as if it had been the love of his life. His emotions, although half obscured by darkness were covered all over his face.

"Its... my fault..." he said quietly.

Yusa seemed puzzled for a moment. He had just spent the last hour rattling through the bowels of the ship and quite honestly, he was not sure how he could react to this. Emotional moments were not something he was graced to understand or much that he knew what to do with. He felt more embarrassed than anything else. He could only muster up an obvious and somewhat emotionally detached response. "What is?"

All of a sudden, Muraco catapulted the damaged conduit across the floor as it skidded to a halt on the far side of the room. "All this" he said, returning down from his outburst of frustration. "Because of me, we might all die... hell... the captain may already be dead... I dunno..."

"I fail to see how any of this is directly related to you..." replied Yusa coldly, again unsure what to say but he was sure that this was not exactly a way to calm him down. Surely this was a job better suited to Counselor Mewsin then himself.

Muraco picked himself up off the floor, his body towering over Yusa. One arm was all that was needed to crush the science officer if he wanted to. "Don't you see!?" he exclaimed, giving Yusa a solemn glare that seemed to emphasise his inner turmoil. "If I had rerouted the compromised power systems properly... I could... I could have..."

"Please... don't cry"

Yusa grimaced at the thought of a huge creature like Muraco breaking down in tears in front of him. How exactly was he supposed to deal with that himself? Despite what most of the crew believed, he did have feelings and he was feeling exactly the same way. Maybe he could have done his job better or anticipated the Romulans in the system.

The sound of footsteps echoed through the room as Muraco walked to one of the walls, trying to hold back his tears, not wanting to show that weakness to the rest of the crew. His fist smacked into the wall pillar which caused it to vibrate and somehow, the outburst caused him to feel just a tiny bit better.

Had his overconfidence in his own ability caused this disaster?

It was then that he felt a paw on his back, soothing him as he continued to wallow in his own sorrow, shocking him. Yusa had never offered any sort of comfort before. Why now? They were not exactly friends, he had never really spent time with him outside of working on the bridge, so why was he choosing to comfort him.

"Listen..." said Yusa, holding his paw to Muraco's well defined back. "Yes, you could have done something differently. Everyone can say that about every decision they make but none of us are capable of knowing the future. We just have to do our best each time... You need to hold it together, the crew are counting on you to get the ship fixed."

It was not an immediate remedy for how Muraco was feeling but it did help. He thought about it, his mind going back to his time on the Republic. He had grown so much since then, learning to accept his role while under the control of Victorious and it was at that time that he had decided he was never going to let anyone harm his crew... his family again.

The crew had been through so much through the years, been in worse situations than this and still survived. All he could do is hope for the best and do the job that so many people had relied on and trusted him for.

"Thank you, Yusa..." he replied, looking back at him, grinning through his sharp teeth.

"You can thank me by helping me calibrate these relays..." Yusa gave a short smile before allowing himself to return to his usual collected state. He knew what Muraco was going through and he knew how constantly living in the past could be very destructive in the now.

A mistake that had cost the lives of his own people.

His people had been a powerful, highly advanced civilisation from the distant Talon star system. They had chosen to keep to their own world, fearing their technological secrets would be coveted by other spacefaring civilisations.

Ironically, it was their own arrogance that had destroyed them and turned their people in refugees as their experiments with the Omega Particle caused an explosion that had destroyed their entire world.

On that day, Yusa had lost his home, his family and everyone he ever cared about but he was also lucky enough to be one of the only of his race aboard interstellar merchant vessels when it happened. In that way, he was saved.

The legacy of his people, lived on, inside him.