Around him, chaos reigned. People were dead and dying. He knew this. But the first rule of triage was prioritizing the most urgent issues. Two of the bay’s human medics were attending to the incoming patients. They needed the Doctor, the ship’s CMO who was a hologram.
Often, the Doctor’s program was routed through his personal mobile emitter. It was the first thing Barclay had checked when he realized the Doctor wasn’t present. He had found it in the Doctor’s office, right next to his workstation, in a small container created specifically to protect it when it was not in use. Unfortunately, just before whatever the hell had caused the power loss, the Doctor’s program had been routed through the main emitters. The primary hologrid would have to be restored to bring the Doctor back online, and that required power—power that did not currently exist.
In the Doctor’s absence, the medics could make do a little longer. Without power to their diagnostic panels and medical tools, however, never mind functioning environmental systems, no one was going to live much longer.
Barclay waved his tricorder over the innards of the bay’s core sequencer for what felt like the hundredth time. It confirmed what he already knew: the power cells were fully charged. But the main circuits refused to switch from the dead primary systems to the backup modules.
“You’re going to have to force the relay integration manually,” a voice said over his shoulder.
Looking up and wiping away yet another annoying trickle from his eye, Barclay saw Harry Kim standing over him.
“That will take…” Barclay began.
“The rest of our lives,” Kim finished for him as he bent down and began methodically pulling relays from their sockets and manually adjusting their interfaces.
Working together for what felt like hours but was actually a little over five minutes, they managed to manually reset the power relays. They were rewarded for their efforts by spontaneous cheers when the medical bay’s lighting was suddenly restored to roughly fifty percent of normal.
More important, the Doctor appeared as if from the ether.
“What in the world…?” he began.
Kim wasted no time. “Where is your mobile emitter?”
“In my office,” the Doctor replied. “But I haven’t been wearing it unless—”
“Get it and put it on and don’t take it off again,” Kim ordered as Barclay immediately accessed the main hologrid and shut down all holograms other than the Doctor that had been running prior to the unanticipated shutdown. No reason to use an ounce of power that isn’t absolutely necessary, Barclay reasoned.
The Doctor seemed ready to protest but as his eyes flew over the scene before him, he simply nodded and rushed toward his private office, already overflowing with waiting patients.
“How long will those cells last?” Kim demanded.
Barclay did a little quick math in his head and his heart sank as he replied, “Thirty-six hours on the outside.”
“Better than nothing,” Kim said.
“I need a little help here,” the voice of Ranson Velth, Galen’s tactical and security chief, called.
You and everybody else on this ship, Barclay thought.
Slung over Velth’s shoulder was the lanky frame of Galen’s chief engineer, Cress Benoit. Velth managed to find a spot on the deck near the door where he lowered Benoit down and positioned him upright so that the Doctor could examine him. Barclay noted that the left side of Benoit’s face and torso was a mass of burns. Unconsciousness was probably a blessing for the young lieutenant.
As the Doctor began to run a medical tricorder over Benoit’s body and quickly called for a hypo of hyronalin, Barclay followed Kim to the door, where Velth was struggling to catch his breath.
“Did you come from main engineering?” Kim asked.
Velth nodded.
“Report,” Kim ordered.
Despite the fact that Kim wasn’t part of Galen’s chain of command—he was currently serving as Voyager’s chief of security and tactical officer—both Kim’s tone and demeanor seemed to have a steadying influence on Velth. They were the same rank and position on their respective ships, which technically gave Velth command over Kim, but in the heat of this moment no one with any sense was going to argue protocol.
“It’s not good,” Velth replied. “The warp core is cold. Primary and backup fusion reactors are down. Our dilithium and benamite crystals are dust. And the antimatter pods are empty.”
“So literally nothing is working right now?” Kim confirmed.
Velth nodded, grim. “I didn’t see any other survivors on my way. I found Lieutenant Bamps, one of my security officers… he didn’t make it.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Kim said earnestly. “But right now, we need to focus on those we can save.”
“Agreed,” Velth said.
Kim nodded and continued. “I don’t understand. Antimatter doesn’t vanish. It impacts normal matter and the result is instant immolation unless the reaction is processed through a stabilizing element.”
“Usually,” Velth agreed, glancing around the room. “This is the only area of the ship I’ve seen that has any power flowing to it.”
Barclay watched as Kim considered the issues, then said, “We’ll work on the backup systems first. Do you have any idea what the status is of the main computer?”
“It’ll take me at least half an hour to get to the bridge, a little less if I head for the computer core. I didn’t see any structural damage between here and engineering, but there are six decks worth of Jefferies tubes to navigate between here and the bridge,” Velth replied.
“There’s no time for that.” Turning to Barclay, Kim said, “Reg, Nancy is in the third room to the right back there. I need her.”
The Doctor was programmed to respond quickly and efficiently to emergency medical situations. It had once been his primary function. Years of continuous operation later, as well as significant expansion of his holomatrix and subroutines, both his program and range of responses to stimuli had become much more complex. As he moved swiftly from patient to patient, attempting to bring order to something well beyond chaos, one of his subroutines was busy calculating the effect on Galen’s
