Lower Decks

Posted on Tue Oct 28th, 2025 @ 4:56pm by Avalon [ADMIN NPC] & Petty Officer 1st Class Kara DeSotto

Mission: Season 6: Episode 6: Conglomerate
Location: Various
Timeline: MD1 - 16h00 Onwards
1678 words - 3.4 OF Standard Post Measure

=Crewman Lira Hovan – Operations / Jefferies Tubes=

The smell of ozone clung to everything. Lira crouched inside the Jefferies tube, her shoulders brushing hot metal as she guided a power cable through the narrow crawlspace. The conduit had melted during the breach, and she’d been ordered to reroute power to Deck 10. Every spark made her flinch, even though she told herself the danger had passed.
Her gloves were torn at the fingertips. Her palms were raw. Somewhere beneath her, she could still hear the distant thrum of repair crews — voices echoing in half-dark corridors where the lights hadn’t come back yet.

When she finally finished the splice, she sat back on her heels and exhaled, the sound shaky and uneven. She could still see Patel’s hand reaching for hers before the hound dragged him through the breach — the moment frozen, haunting.

“Keep moving,” she whispered to herself, pressing her forehead against the metal. “Keep breathing. Keep them alive.”

The hum of restored power flowed through the conduit, a low vibration beneath her hands. It was the only comfort she had left.

=Petty Officer 2nd Class Jalen Cross – Engineering / Damage Control=

Jalen’s reflection stared back at him in the cracked surface of a plasma conduit — soot-blackened face, wild eyes rimmed with fatigue. He hadn’t slept since the attack. The nacelle scaffolding was a graveyard of broken panels and shattered composites, but he and his team were still working, still patching, still holding the ship together.

He adjusted the welding torch, sparks dancing in the dark. The sound of metal sealing was almost soothing, like rain on a tin roof. He tried not to think about the screams that had filled these corridors yesterday. He tried not to think about the smell.
When the plasma leak finally stabilized, he slumped against the wall, too exhausted to celebrate. “You held together, old girl,” he muttered, looking up toward the ceiling as though the ship could hear him. “You always do.”

For a long moment, he just sat there listening to the soft hum of the warp core far below — steady, alive. Then he pushed himself up and went to help the next team. The work never stopped.

= Ensign Thala zh’Renn – Medical Division (Junior Nurse)=

Sickbay looked more like a triage tent than a Starfleet facility. Every biobed was occupied, the floor lined with stretchers. Thala’s uniform sleeves were stiff with dried blood — none of it hers.

She moved from one patient to the next, dermal regenerator in hand, antennae drooping with fatigue. The young crewman on the bed blinked up at her weakly. “Am I gonna make it?” he whispered.
“Yes,” she lied softly, pressing the regenerator against the wound on his neck. “You’re safe now.”

Doctor Sthilg’s gravelly voice carried over the chaos. “Take a break, Ensign!”

Thala shook her head without looking up. “If I stop, I’ll start thinking,” she said quietly. And thinking was the last thing she could afford.

Hours later, when the rush finally slowed, she found herself cleaning a dermal unit that no longer worked. Her hands were shaking, but she didn’t notice. Somewhere deep inside, she promised every name on the casualty list that their pain hadn’t been for nothing.

=Crewman Apprentice Marta Velin – Environmental Services=

Marta had never known silence to be this loud. Her mop bucket sloshed as she moved slowly down Deck 15, past the scorched bulkheads and the stains that no sterilizer could fully erase.

Her job wasn’t glamorous. Most people didn’t even notice the cleaning crews. But now, with so much death behind every door, she felt like she was the last line between despair and order. If she could make the ship shine again — even a little — maybe it would mean they’d survived.

She paused beside a section of wall gouged deep by claws. Someone had scrawled initials beside it — JP + KL – survived.

Marta traced the letters with her gloved hand and smiled faintly.

Then she wrung out the mop and kept going. The corridor needed to look like home again, and home didn’t look like this.

=Security Crewman Devon Price – Security Division=

The corridor outside the Deck 8 airlock was quiet now — too quiet. Devon sat on a crate, his helmet balanced on his knee and his rifle across his lap. The weld marks on the sealed hatch glowed dull orange where the repair team had finished sealing it off.

He could still see the faces of the hounds in his dreams. Their jaws, the sound of the claws against duranium — too fast, too strong. He’d fired until his weapon overheated, and even then it hadn’t felt like enough.

Chief Holv had ordered him to rest. He couldn’t. Every instinct screamed that if he left his post, something would crawl through again.

He looked down at the weapon in his hands and whispered to the dead beyond the bulkhead. “You’re safe now. I’ll stay right here.”

The deck vibrated faintly beneath his boots — the living heartbeat of the Elysium. That rhythm was all that kept him sane.

=Petty Officer 3rd Class K’Trin – Engineering (Maintenance Crew)=

“Of course they hit my bay,” K’Trin muttered, tightening a plasma torch against the new hull brace in Cargo Bay 3. The Tellarite’s thick fingers worked with surprising precision despite the fatigue in his muscles.

Around him, the repair crew moved in silence. Humans, an Orion, a Trill — no one had the energy left to argue, and that silence unnerved him more than anything. Tellarites lived for debate; silence felt like mourning.

He paused and looked at the hull where the pod had drilled through. The patchwork plating gleamed silver against the darker duranium, ugly but functional. “Not bad for a bunch of amateurs,” he grunted.

A few tired chuckles answered him. It was the first sound of laughter since the attack, rough but real. For the first time in days, K’Trin felt a flicker of pride. They might be battered, but they were still here.

=Crewman Rix Tal – Communications / Sensor Maintenance=

The comms lab was dim except for the glow of consoles and the faint pulse of static on every channel. Rix adjusted the modulation array again, fingers flying across the panel. The Galtonian interference had scrambled half the sensor data, and the rest of it was corrupted beyond recognition.

He’d been alone for hours — just him, the static, and the ghosts in the circuits. Every so often, a burst of sound would come through — a scream, a garbled command, an echo of the battle still caught in subspace.

When he finally re-established a partial link, the first voice that broke through wasn’t Federation. It was a Galtonian transmission — snarling syllables he couldn’t translate. His stomach turned.

He muted the feed, stared at the waveform for a long time, then whispered, “You’re still out there, huh? Well… so are we.”

He saved the cleaned channel and sent the report to the bridge. The war for survival had become one of signal and silence now — and he was determined to make sure their voices were the ones that lasted.

=Yeoman Kara DeSoto – Administrative Office (Captain’s Yeoman)=

The captain’s ready room was quiet, save for the soft chime of Kara’s console as she typed. Casualty reports, requisition lists, repair summaries — endless forms to catalogue the aftermath of horror.

She scrolled through the latest list of confirmed dead. Thirty names. With more to come for sure. She’d known half of them by face, a few by coffee order. She’d joked with one of them about shore leave three days ago.

Her eyes burned, but she couldn’t stop typing. The Commodore needed the reports; the departments needed closure. Every name she entered into the system was an act of remembrance. Or maybe an act of defiance.

When she paused, her reflection stared back from the console’s darkened edge. Pale, exhausted, haunted. For one heartbeat, she considered typing her own name — because she didn’t feel alive anymore. But then the comms chimed, and she straightened her shoulders. The living had work to do.

=Counselor’s Aide Fin Dorran – Psychology Intern=

Fin sat cross-legged on the floor across from a trembling engineer. The counselor’s office had overflowed hours ago, and now they were improvising — therapy in the corridor, meditation in the mess hall, grief everywhere.

The engineer’s hands shook. “I saw them eat him,” he whispered, eyes darting to the sealed bulkhead as if expecting it to burst open again.

Fin swallowed hard. He’d seen it too. His empathic senses buzzed with fear, grief, and guilt. It was almost too much to bear.

“You’re safe now,” Fin said quietly. “It’s over.”

The words tasted like lies, but he said them anyway. Sometimes, hope had to be spoken aloud before it could exist.

When the engineer finally began to breathe evenly, Fin leaned back against the wall and exhaled. He’d come aboard as an intern. After this, he felt a hundred years older.

=Boatswain’s Mate Vira Tenn – Flight Deck Crew / Shuttle Bay=

The flight deck still smelled like burnt metal and smoke. Vira crouched beneath Shuttle Hawk-Two, reconnecting the fuel line that had snapped when the pod exploded inside the bay. Her hands moved automatically — wrench, sealant, torque — even as her thoughts drifted.

She’d watched the bay doors rupture, seen two of her friends vanish into vacuum before the emergency fields kicked in. She could still hear the sound, the silence that followed.
Now, as she ran her hand along the shuttle’s scarred hull, she whispered, “You made it through.” She wasn’t sure if she meant the shuttle or herself.

She hummed softly — a Bajoran resistance song her father used to sing. The melody echoed through the quiet hangar, low and mournful. It wasn’t for the dead. It was for the living, the ones still standing amid the wreckage, rebuilding piece by piece.

OFF