He was attempting to stabilize an ensign who was bleeding internally when Lieutenant Kim was suddenly at his side.
“Doc, I need your help,” Kim said.
“Are you about to suffer a massive hemorrhage in your intestinal lining leading to sepsis?” the Doctor asked.
“No.”
“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to wait.”
“I can’t,” Kim said evenly. “I need you to turn this patient over to one of the medics and come with me,” he added.
A dozen curt responses occurred to the Doctor, but he ignored all of them. He had no idea what had brought the ship to its current state. The last thing he remembered was standing in a fully functional medical bay discussing minor system upgrades with Reg before everything around him had shifted to a hellscape of wounded and dying people. It was an unusual occurrence but not without precedent. His program had not shut down without warning in a long time, but it did happen. Because he only experienced and stored data accumulated while he was functioning, he had no awareness of how long it had taken for the ship’s circumstances to so radically change.
More important, there was something in Kim’s voice that brooked no refusal. Signaling to the nearest medic and offering a set of quick instructions, he followed Kim just outside the open door of the medical bay, where Lieutenants Velth, Conlon, and Barclay now stood waiting for him.
Kim seemed to be the undisputed leader of the small group and was addressing Velth and Conlon. “Both of you need to get back to main engineering. Don’t stop to help anyone on your way. Your job is to restore emergency power as quickly as possible, prioritizing environmental and computer systems.”
Kim turned to the Doctor. “Reg has managed to shunt a little emergency power to the bridge’s holoemitters. I need you to transfer yourself there and assess the situation.”
The request made sense. Without turbolifts or transporters, it would take precious time that was clearly nonexistent for any other officer to perform this function.
“Understood,” the Doctor said, and initiated the transfer.
Less than a second later, the Doctor materialized on the bridge of the Galen.
The ambient darkness wasn’t a problem. His visual subroutines adjusted automatically to the absence of light, rendering the bridge in monochromatic values that allowed him enhanced differentiation. He studied the scene before him and as he did so, his previous calculations of survivability declined further.
There was no power present in any of the bridge computer systems. The main viewscreen was dark, so it was impossible to tell where the ship was or if they were still anywhere near the rest of the fleet. The temperature was nine point four degrees Celsius. Oxygen levels were thirty percent below nominal. Two of the bridge crew members, Ensigns Michael Drur and Lynne Selah, who handled operations and science respectively, were conscious and responded almost immediately to his appearance.
“Doctor, we need help here,” Drur shouted, beckoning him to the small well between the captain’s chair and the flight control panels.
The Doctor almost tripped on the prone body of Ensign Lawry, Galen’s pilot, who had been thrown several meters from his station. By what, the Doctor had no idea. Drur and Selah were kneeling over the body of their captain, Commander Clarissa Glenn. A quick scan indicated that she had suffered head trauma. A long gash running over her scalp would probably have bled out already were it not for the near freezing temperature. The Doctor assumed that there would be cranial swelling to go along with the external damage.
“I need you to get her to sickbay as soon as possible,” the Doctor advised.
“Do we have turbolifts?” Selah asked.
“No. You’ll have to carry her. Do what you can to keep her head stable on the way.”
“Aye, sir,” Drur responded as if this request were not just this side of impossible.
“I’ll send someone for Lawry as soon as I can,” the Doctor promised before transferring back to sickbay.
Lieutenant Velth was moving throughout the wounded, offering encouragement and requesting reports from those who were able about the status of the ship in their previous duty assignments. Lieutenant Kim was focused, for the moment, on a young woman with tight ginger braids running down her back who had apparently been in the mess hall when disaster struck.
“The ship just changed its shape,” she was saying as the Doctor approached. “One minute it was a sphere, and the next it elongated and started flashing these blinding lights.”
“White light?” Kim asked.
“All along the spectrum,” she replied. “I thought I should get back to engineering but then this wave of something hit me and the next thing I knew…”
“It’s okay, Ensign…”
“Unhai,” she added helpfully.
“What was your duty assignment?” Kim asked.
“I’m a slipstream specialist,” she replied. “Not that it’s much use now, I guess.”
“I want you to work with Ensign Finley collecting emergency supplies.”
“Sir, without power…”
“We are going to restore power to all critical systems,” Kim assured her.
“Aye, sir,” she said, probably feeling more doubt than she was showing.
As she hurried to follow Kim’s orders, the Doctor took her place.
“How bad is it?” Kim asked.
“There is no power to any of the bridge systems,” the Doctor said. “Commander Glenn is seriously injured. If she survives transit here, I’ll have a better sense of whether or not I’ll be able to help her. Our pilot is also unconscious. Someone needs to bring him here on the off chance we’re going anywhere any time soon.”
Kim accepted this stoically. He seemed determined not to allow the obvious hopelessness of their current predicament to even enter his thoughts. This wasn’t surprising. Seven years in the Delta Quadrant the first time around had taught all of Voyager’s senior officers that long odds were business as usual and panic was never an option.
Finally Kim said, “For now, we’re going to consider sickbay our center of operations. We have limited power, enough to
