Under Pressure
Posted on August 20th, 2014 by Jorvan Tav

Chief Medical Officer’s Log, Stardate 70618.1 (ST:E 11408.14)
The first of the casualties from Space Station Telthis are on their way to Atlantis, and to my care. Meanwhile, Ensign Deki, Lieutenant Herthe and Ensign Kru have been stabilized, though I am now preparing Ensign Kru for surgery due to the effects of the decompression sickness. I expect the operation to take approximately one hour.
I expect further decompression sickness cases along with the usual mission injuries as we return our crewmembers and bring victims of the Telthis sinking aboard Atlantis.
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Chief Medical Officer’s Log, Stardate 70618.4 (ST:E 11408.14)
I have completed surgery on Ensign Kru. It took longer than I expected, two hours instead of one. However, we have completely removed all signs of decompression sickness. As a precaution, I have moved him into a decompression chamber for the next two hours to make sure there are no more air bubbles in his body that we need to address. After release, he will be required to stay in his quarters for a two-day recovery.
Ensign Deki and Lieutenant Hearthe have been released to return to their quarters as well for the next twenty-eight hours. During their time in Sickbay, there were no complications, and they will both be able to return to duty after 28 hours.
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Tav sat in his chair a moment, taking in the feeling of sanctuary he always had in his office. Just a window away was the rest of Sickbay, where nurses and aides quickly scurried to get Sickbay ready for what was to come. Somehow, it seemed there was a tension in the air, as there was when they faced patients with compression and decompression issues. As far as medicine had come in the thousands of years since dentists had first started working to improve peoples’ health during the Roman Empire on Earth or the Deklar Dynasty on Trill; despite the fact that diseases today were no big deal that decades ago would have been sure death sentences… injury and illness due to compression and decompression were always hazy.
And Tav knew that, with a station falling into a star, there were sure to be more patients injured by decompression.
It was interesting; while most humanoids lived their lives around one atmosphere and were comfortable and happy to stay at such air pressures, there were always those who wanted to see and experience, or profit from, what would be found in places inhospitable to humanoids. Tav couldn’t think of a place more deadly than in the Corona or photosphere of a star.
And the Telthis mining operation had chosen just such a place to do business. Now, he was afraid, it would have some not-so-nice effects for their business… and their lives.
Tav shook his head to himself, before standing up and heading out to check on the progress in Sickbay cleaning up for the next round of patients, the first of whom were just now on their ascent from the station to Atlantis in those “crush cans”.
Crush cans. Wow. Jorvan had had a great interest in submersible vehicles on different planets with oceans. His favorite had been the Bajorans who had created something very similar to these crush cans, able to sink into their oceans tens of thousands of meters over a millennia ago. Many species had built these vessels for exploration and combat, but the Bajorans had built them for a reason that many other worlds had passed up: Transport. By transporting things that needed to be kept cool more than five hundred meters below the surface of the water, the Bajorans had discovered that they didn’t need to refrigerate entire transports, and they had decided that this more than made up economically for the added time it took to transport these things. Earth had used submarines mostly for combat and somewhat for exploration in the early years, with that trend reversing in their 21st century. On many worlds in the Federation, it had been submersible vehicles that had paved the way to space-faring vehicles.
But these crush cans took it to a whole new level. Not only were they falling into depths and pressures so much greater than those of the deepest oceans on any planet, but they also had to deal with the intense heat of entering a star. Essentially, the Telthis had designed a vehicle to be placed a pressure cooker that had been turned up to ten times its highest setting, and keep a person inside from cooking. It was truly amazing. And they did it by allowing their vehicles to be crushed.
Tav rechecked his monitor and saw that the next group of evacuees would be arriving in a couple minutes. He headed out into Sickbay to make sure it would be ready in time.