The only way out is through you - Part 1

Posted on Mon Jun 1, 2015 @ 7:20pm by Civilian 'Key Holder' Yolanthe Ibalin & Civilian 'Key Holder' Dorian Gabriel

3,862 words; about a 19 minute read

Mission: Eye of the Beholder
Location: Many decks beneath the promenade
Timeline: MD 03 - During the end of Emergence

::ON::

"...so I looked at him and said, 'do it for free? What do I look like, a BAJORAN!'" Elliot Bosh said boisterously as he, Rene Babeu, and Dorian Gabriel made their way through the darkened corridor. Ordinarily, such access would be restricted to civilians and most Starfleet personnel for various security, diplomatic, and procedural reasons. However, Dorian had managed to gain access to the area through fast-thinking, serendipity, and still having a few favors to cash in with various members of the station's Security department.

"So, please explain to me again why we are walking through a half-lit corridor junction that is at least 28 decks below the BOTTOM of the promenade?" Bosh said frustratedly as they passed by yet another junction panel that looked like the several dozen previous panels.

"Because Mr. Raddon is expecting a delivery of several important items. Since he would prefer to not deal with the typical bureaucracy of station customs and security, he figured that meeting with the cargo crew at a specified location and making the exchange would be easier and less of a hassle." Rene said in that regular and unflappable tone of his.

"Besides, it is mid-day on the promenade. Security is in the middle of a shift-change and the other citizens onbaord are in the middle of the lunch rush for various races. Everyone will be too busy or distracted to bother with travelling this far off the beaten path," Dorian chimed in as he continued to walk with the two other humans.

To be honest, neither he himself was quite sure what Mr. Raddon was expecting other than he was informed that it was something to do with the a deal that had been arranged with someone within one of the Alien Embassies. Dorian did not want more information, he figured the less he knew about the political goings-ons of the station Ambassadors, the better his life would be. So far, Dorian had done a fine job of remaining under the radar and not arousing the suspicions or attention of the station's current slave-masters. Having any direct dealings with Ambassadors would bring that to a short end.

"Besides, once we receive the package we'll identify them with these transporter beacons and have them transported to a secure Raddon Corps cargo bay." Dorian added. Another benefit that Dorian was able to confer to his new employer was the ability to transport small items around the station to his secure storage facility without arousing the station sensors. Of course such luxuries required that the items not be anything dangerous such as explosives or even bio-mimetic gel. Again, the need for discretion was paramount in Raddon's line of work.

"Right how could I forget, everything around here has to be extra hush-hush secret with Hilliard Braxton onboard from the Federation Council," Elliot responded. "Heaven forbid anything 'bad' happen while one of Mr. Raddon's buddies are onboard." He said sarcastically.



-----------


The red alert had been alarming, but the at the evacuation, she had called a line, and sent the strange little vulcan girl and her 'faery' captive away and herded the boys out to the evacuation points. But while she insisted that they had drop everything and go, she couldn't leave. The station, The Box was her attempt at starting again. She'd not had so much of a stitch of clothing that time. THis time she didn't care. If she was leaving, she wasn't leaving in just the clothes she stood up in. She wanted the memories. Not the trophy wall in The Box, they were shallow trophies of easy victories. She wanted the mementos of the life that she had shared with Klia, and with Tharek. And they were hundred of decks down in her quarters.

The whole station shuddered, and a huge section of promenade railing sheered away, crashing down into the Bajoran gardens below. The place was coming apart. THe main routes down would be bound to be sealed off, and she had to get down. The sensible thing would be to stay, but her sense seemed to have taken an extended vacation since Tharek left.

There was another way though, a way she normally wouldn't get to, but She doubted they'd be patrolled right now.. The restricted sections that offered secure, speedy travel between the embassies and Promenade and hangar bays. Tharek had showed her. They'd had a memorable knee trembler against a bulkead deep in those quiet passages.

For a moment the pale jade of her skin and hair gave way to a shade of cotton candy, unable to repress a dirty grin at the memory despite the danger. There was an access panel to the jeffries tubes near the Box, and she quickly pulled it open. From there she started the climb/slide down to the floors to the decks far below the promenade and the private turbo lifts that led even further down.

It took less than a minute to traverse over 20 decks, in a break neck slide that heated her hands until they burnt. The station heaved again, this time heaving like a dying arborsaur, throwing her from the ladder and she fell the last ten feet. She landed on her feet, and rolled until the momentum passed. There was another shake, and the infrastructure of the station seemed to scream, and the access panels to the quiet corridors she sought popped open. The green of her skin deepened, Maybe she shouldn't have listened to the urging of her sentimentality.

No, there were things she didn't want to leave behind. She'd lost everything once, and would rather die than begin from nothing a second time. She squared her shoulders, and climbed out into the corridor.

----

"Ssshhh......be quiet" Dorian said in that familiar authoritative tone of his. He didn't even look back at the other two humans with him, but instead just raised his hand indicating a "full stop". Without fail, the other two men withdrew their weapons and paused. After 30 seconds they immediately fell to one knee with their weapons aimed forward.

They had not heard the Red Alert Klaxons due to their current depth below authorization levels. However, they had felt the sudden shifting of the deck around them, immediately drawing their attention. They had begun to hurriedly move through the narrowing deck as the lightening system began to falter.

As they came around a coroner, Dorian was the first to hear what he believed to be the quickened pace of another individual. He knew that nobody else should have been down this far from the main arteries of the station. Dorian had learned a long time ago that it was better to act first and then ask questions rather than waiting for someone to act against him.

Keep his weapon at the low-ready, Dorian pivoted on his left foot and spun on his right shoulder against the corridor while bringing his weapon upward and towards the oncoming figure. "FREEZE!" He shouted, only to be met by the colored face of the promenade's barkeep.

Yolanthe froze, all the colours of the rainbow flashing through her body suddenly, and settled down on golden yellow when she saw what was going on. "Dorian?" Dorian bloody Gabriel was pointing a phaser of some sort at her. Nerve of the boy! "Get that out of my face and go and evacuate." She started to push past him, and stopped again when she realized he wasn't alone

"What the hell is she doing down he---" Rene began to say but was cut off as the station violently shifted again causing the corridor to buckle under the rapid strain. The last thing Dorian saw before darkness was the human being slammed into the floor with a scaffolding rapidly falling on top of him.

The lurching of the deck had thrown Yolanthe to the deck, smacking her head against the tiled floor and leaving his dizzy. She had tried to kept up when the bulkhead had split and a cross beam had crashed trough the low ceiling. One of Dorian's companions had gone under it. Then the lights had gone out. She swore under her breath.

In total darkness she worked her way towards where the human had been trapped. Her reaching fingers found hair, she followed it carefully to a face, and a neck. She felt feint breath on her palm, and when she reached round, a pulse, feint, but steady. Her other hand was feeling the extent of what he was pinned under. It was heavy. And there was no guarantee in the pitch black that it wasn't holding something vital shut and the poor boy underneath wouldn't bleed out the moment she tried to shift it, assuming she even could. "Dorian? Are you okay? Is everyone all right?"

Dorian felt the dripping of blood coming from his head well before his brain even recalled what had taken place. The corridor was blackened for the immediate 20 feet. It wasn't until his eyes began to focus on the end of the corridor as it merged with another hall to form a junction that Dorian was able to see any semblance of light.

He followed the small sliver of light down his portion of the hall towards his own body as he tried to stand up.

Something was holding him down.

He tried again to stand up, but he felt something hard and cold pinning him down. He felt around and realized that his leg was caught under a cross beam that had wedge itself against the wall and the floor. He heard the shallow breathing of a body next to him. He squinted his eyes and was able to make out the form of Rene as well as Yolanthe. It appeared as if she was speaking to Dorian; however, his hearing was still fading in and out due to the continuous ring within his ears.

"Dorian!" Yolanthe called again, not getting an answer. "Are you hurt? Are you awake. Talk to me!" She reached out, trying to figure out where she was, where Dorian would have been. The pitch back had eased to a thick gloom, but not enough light for her to see by.

Dorian was able to concentrate enough to understand the last part of her sentence. "I-I I'm stuck...." Dorian was able to finally gasp as he continued to move. As he was able to move just a small part of his leg he noticed the prone and unresponsive figure of Elliot. Dorian felt for a pulse, but he didn't have to feel for long to realize that the older man had not survived the collapsing corridor.

"RE...RENE!" Dorian shouted as the realization that they all could be trapped in this dark and crushed hallway began to sink into his head. "Rene, get up!" He shouted more forcefully despite his own leg still being trapped under the same beam that was holding down Elliot's body.Rene could only groan a barely audible response as he struggled to maintain consciousness near Yolanthe.

One of them at least was a live. Yolanthe's body turned blue, her mood lifted from knowing she wasn't alone. "He's trapped too." Dorian's voice came from her right, almost right next to her but she couldn't see him. "Hang on, I need some light. I can't see a bloody thing." She turned, feeling along the floor until she met a wall. There had to be an access section somewhere. Her fingers inched along until she found what she needed and they dug into the release switch. The panel popped off and a handful of baleful light spilled out from the rope of battery lights that was kept inside the bulkhead. There was no power in any of the conduits themselves, no so much as a flashing LED.

In the washed out light she could see how bad it was. Barely half a meter from where she crouched, the ceiling had given way completely, section of deckwork and spars had been pressed down from above, sealing the corridor to anything bigger than a Cardassian vole. She turned around, and saw the three men. They'd all been on one side of the corridor, and taken the brunt of its collapse. Dorian was the only one properly awake. Beyond them the corridor was open for twenty feet, but then just as blocked as the pinched end behind her.

The bokkai worked her way back to Dorian and saw what he had already seen, the last of the three wasn't going anywhere. The crossbeam that pinned Dorian to the floor had taken the man across the back of the skull, just a clip really, but enough to gouge out a lump of bone and blood pressure had done the rest.

The blue that had suffused her when she had heard Dorian's voice gave way to grey. But now was not the time. She concentrated on the spar over Dorian's lap. It had wedged, but not hard. She could get the leverage on it that Dorian couldn't, but it was still going to be heavy. Luckily for them it wasn't supporting anything else.

"Hows the rest of you?" She asked him. She had to know if he was going to be any help if she shifted the bar. He looked okay, as far as she could tell. Humans didn't change colour so she couldn't tell if there was much pain or not. He looked pretty much like he always did. Pissed off.

"AGGH.. . ..I'm...I'm still alive," Dorian replied through clenched teeth as he tried to move his immobilized leg that was pinned under the bar. Fortunately, the remainder of his body was able to move with increasing flexibility.

"Can you feel this?" She reached back and pinched the flesh of his calf, hard.

Dorian winced visibly. "I'm stuck under the bar....but I can still move the rest of my body." He said.

"Good." She looked along the length of the strut. It was going to be a royal bitch to move. The best place to do it from would be the other end, more leverage. It was going to have to go straight up too, at least to start with. If she tried to swing it sideways immediately who knows what damage she could do to his pelvis. She set her feet, and squatted down getting a good wide grip on the reinforcing bar. "Ready? Go!"

She heaved straight up, knees straightening, hips pushing up. For a moment nothing happened and then the bar inched up with a noise that made nails on a blackboard sound relaxing. When she'd got it to waist height, she shoved it forward, increasing the space Dorian could wriggle in. But when she tried to let go the damn thing would snap down. Through gritted teeth she pulled again. "Hurry it up Dorian."

He grabbed a hold of a fallen portion of a nearby wall and began to pull earnestly to extract himself from the fallen debris. It took several minutes, but he was able to get enough leverage to drag himself and lean against the wall. He bit down on his lower lip as the blood as well as pain began to flow through the remaining portions of his leg.

"NNNGGHH......" he groaned as he pounded his fist against the corridor floor. It took him several minutes to catch his breathe. He rolled to his knees and began to carry himself several feet until he was able to slowly climb up the wall to his feet.

"What the hell happened!?!" He shouted, his voice going hoarse.

Yolanthe dropped the bar with a grunt. "I'm going to feel that in the morning." She put her hands to her deltoids, rubbing at the sore muscles. "Gee Yolanthe, thank you for lifting forty kilos cold and helping me out despite the risk of serious injury. Aw shucks Dorian, it was nothing." She raised an eyebrow. "Didn't the men in your family ever teach you any manners?"

When he didn't reply She sighed. "There was a red alert, and then a little while after they sounded a general evacuation." She wasn't going to mention the alien/mythological creature. That just sounded too nuts. "It looks like they were clearing everyone out." She looked around at the corridor, and Rene and the third one, now dead. "Didn't you hear it?"

Dorian didn't respond to the Bokkai as he managed to make his way over to Rene's injured form and checked his pulse. He was able to breathe a slight sigh of relief as he felt the weak, but consistent pulse. It was bad enough to lose Elliot, but Dorian wasn't sure how he would explain to Raddon how everyone but himself had died.

It took several moments for Dorian to even realize that Yolanthe was speaking to him, let alone expecting a "Thank You" for her services.

"Hear what?" Dorian responded as he slouched up the wall and began to walk to one of the collapsed beams. "What's the status of the station?" He asked as he felt for some kind of opening.

"Were you paying attention?" She started to turn a mustard colour. Dorian bloody Gabriel was going to be a shit even buried under several floors worth of rubble. "I hope you never breed," she muttered under her breath. "One of you is more than enough." She dusted her hands and started again.

"The red alert. The evacuation?" she glared at his back and knelt down next to Rene. Now there was light she wanted a good look at him. "There are huge chunks of structure falling into the Promenade gardens. Security and the FMS are trying to round up all the civilians, and no one is telling us what the hell is going on. But if they're trying to evacuate, then you can be pretty sure its all going to shit and everyone's is real danger."

Rene was fuzzing in and out of consciousness. There was no sign of external bleeding. She put a hand onto the portion of abdomen she could reach. looking for swelling. Ruptured organs could take hours, days even to kill you. He didn't seemed to be wracked with pain though and so far no swelling. Her fingers pressed gently inching further towards the point where the ceiling prop covered him. No swelling, no swelling. No- oh. Oh shit.

There was definitely something swelling his belly, maybe even spinal damage if he wasn't in agony. The poor thing was going to die if they didn't get out of here and Gabriel was being a colossal. . . Well, what he was was an insult to male genitalia across the quadrant. She went from mustard to buttercup and turned to him

"Bleeding Ancestors, Dorian! What were you and your little friends doing down here in the first place?"

"Nothing that concerns you..." Dorian snapped back as he still felt along the wall finding somewhat of an opening. "So save your interrogation for one of your drunken patrons looking for a cheap Orion to feel on." He said annoyedly. Of course he wasn't going to explain to her what the three of them were attempting to do, nor how concerned he was with the status of the packages now that there was a major emergency taking place.

"The only thing that matters right now is getting out of here so we can get this man the medical attention he needs." Dorian said assertively as he managed to find a section that wasn't completely blocked with rubble.

"Finally you talk sense." Yolanthe got up and came over to where he was standing, dusting her hands. She looked at the section he was staring at, squinting slightly in the gloom. Then she looked at him. She had height on him, a good two inches. but he was broader in the beam and outweighed her by some ten kilos. "You know neither of us are going to fit through there as it stands. And if we start moving stuff we're going to risk bringing it down on top of us. You know that, right?

She was right...

Dorian hated to acknowledge such a fact, but it was too obvious to ignore. The pathway before them would lead directly to a Jefferies Tube junction that would allow them to climb several levels to a terminal junction used by repair crews. Unfortunately, trying to climb through this particular section of rubble would undoubtedly bring the remaining structure all around them.

"Fine..." he said as he turned and made his way along the wall while trying to feel for another direction.

"So, what about trying to call for help? Get your starfleet buddies to beam us out. Get your friend to sick bay." She felt around the edge of the corridor that he was staring at. she could see the path through, in her mind. But it involved shifting a couple of bits of rubble that looked a) heavy and b) liable to set off a collapse. "Because as sweet and charming as you are, Dorian, dying down here with you and your playdates is not something I want to do."

"We can't!" Dorian snapped at her, his voice rising as the words came out of his mouth. "How typical, once you can't gouge us for watered-down drinks, us Humans suddenly lose our value to an alien. . ." Dorian responded to the Bokkai.

"Besides, If comms were still working, don't you think I would've used it to call for assistance!?!" He asked rhetorically. The truth was that the comm units would not have worked in this particular section of the station even if there was not a devastating emergency taking place. It was one of the reason Mr. Raddon had advised them to travel this way to collect the delivery.

On top of all that, the last thing Dorian needed was to attract the attention of station security. He was sure that the new Federal Marshall had deciphered that his real name was not John Riley. Not to mention that the new security chief appeared to be much more competent than Rakka or Trellis had ever demonstrated.

"There's several connecting corridors, one of them has to be stable enough to move through." He said.

At Dorian's outburst, her jaw had dropped open. She knew Dorian didn't have a high opinion of aliens. She'd spotted him at enough of those pro-human shindigs that popped up on the promenade. But to accuse her of finding humans without value? She'd met petulant teenagers angry at the entire universe who had a more logical world view than this one. She shut her mouth, gritting her teeth at the necessity of having to put up with him. "Okay then. Lets get going. Your friend isn't going to get any healthier while we bicker."

She looked around. She only a a vague recollection of what went where. "I think one of those two leads to a VIP docking bay. We might be able to get a beam out from there. Take your pick."

TBC....


Dorian Gabriel
Former Defender of the Federation
Raddon Corp

Yolanthe Ibalin
Owner, The Box of Delights

 

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