Things Will Get Better
Posted on August 4th, 2009 by Ryan Carter

Ensign Catherine Meyers got the job of repairing isolinear microcontrollers because a long history of doll craft and needlework gave her the hands and nerves of a surgeon. Men tended to loose the little silica-etched microcontrollers and spent hours on all fours pawing at the carpet like dogs trying to sniff out places to mark. All she had to do was flash her scanner and study the residual glow – if the glow came back solid the internal connections were still valid and the chip was good to go. “Finished,” she said squeeze her fingers between the packed isolinear rods and attaching the controller back into its port. She flipped on the generator and the circuit glowed blue. “Good as new.”

Edward slid down the ladder tube just in time to examine her handiwork. “You’re a life saver, Cat.”

“It’s easy work.”

Edward splayed out his fingers. “I’ve got big ole’ stupid fingers.”

“Are you saying I have girly hands?” She clasped her hand over his and pressed her palm to his. Edward shot a glance around the room before he squeezed her hand back.

“You want big man hands like mine?”

She ran her thumb up against his index finger. The skin had become sandpaper from years of hard labor. “You’ve got hands like my dad.”

“What’d he do for a living?”

“Starship constr—”

The ship rumbled and bucked. A concussive blast split her away from Edward and threw her into the wall behind her. The afterquake jerked her about; machinery sparked and arced electricity. Sheets of glass and plastic rained over Catherine. She protected herself with her hands but drew them away from her shrapnel meshed hair leaving threads of blood dripping down her fingers. She called Edward’s name but could not hear her own voice. She called louder and louder just to reaffirm the presence of herself. Maybe the throw had been so strong it ripped her soul right out of her body. Maybe that flatlining ring in her ear was her own death.

As she regained her bearings, her vision cleared but the world hazed up. A dense fog belched forth from a burst coolant pipe, evaporated as it struck the floor and created a miasma ballooning out from underneath. She clapped her hands over her nose and drew a deep breath. Breath too much of that, and you’re dead. The mist leaked out of the coolant pipes and made her comrades look like blurry shadows. An insane shadow puppet show surrounded her. The paper thin bodies danced and the only soundtrack comprised of cries of horror, sorrow, and the klaxon keeping beat to the macabre stage production. “Edward!” She punched through the wall of silence blocking her ears.

Flashes of light rained into the room. New puppets appeared and turned upon the ones already dancing about in the mist. Cries of agony. Phaser shots. Disruptor bolts sparked across the room. Where were they coming from? Everywhere. Catherine backed away, but into what? She touched a wall, a body, and the cool exterior of a toolcase. Starfleet standard issue. She slid down the wall, little jagged bits poked and tore at her sleeves as she felt around for a good place to sit and hugged the toolcase to her body.

In front of her two silhouettes danced to and fro like dolls in a mechanical clock. The the tango ended with a man, a Starfleet officer, hitting the deck. His eyes, unmoving and startled, found Catherine and seemed to say to her, “Run, Ensign, run while your still alive.” The Klingon emerged from the mist with his batleth raised over his head like a pair of horns. He bore his teeth at her and cried in a tongue that made him sound possessed by the devil. The red strobe lights flickered and the dense haze completed the picture for her. She had entered the ninth circle of Hell. Screwing herself further into the wall she hoped it would be enough to avoid the Klingon’s upraised batleth. “Help! Help me! Someone!”

Edward scooped her up and tossed her aside. She watched the struggle between the Klingon and Edward. The batleth stuck out of his back and Edward looked like the angel of death throwing lighting from his fingertips while his bladed wing flapped behind him. “Catherine, run!” More Klingons arrived and cut him down before her eyes.

“Ensign Meyers! Can you hear me?”

The voice cracked and strained as her name was spoken, but the incantation snapped her too. She stared at the ghost of herself in the computer terminal.

“Catherine! Goddammit, if security–”

“Lieutenant!” Catherine said. “I’m sorry, I…” She fluttered her fingers over the console keys playing it like an intricate piano and hitting all the wrong notes with jerky finger movements. The conduit map zoomed in and out to the wrong places. “Ohh!” She slapped her hands together and slammed them on the console. “Focus, stupid.” She took a few deep breaths and typed the instructions she wanted. “You got the last of them. All the relays are functioning. The shields will hold.”

“Good work,” Ryan said.

She took it as a sign to relax and pressed back into her chair. The charred smell reminded her of summer barbeques at her parent’s house. The very thought of it quickened her gag reflex. She jerked herself up, stumbled her way over corpses and found a trash bin. Finished, she dropped against the wall of Percy’s office and shed tears.

“Catherine? Where are you?”

She gazed at the main engineering console and caught Ryan looking around at the bodies. She wanted to stay quiet and let him pass her by – sitting here she looked just like another red shirt, but Ryan saw through her ruse and knelt down beside her. He glanced in the trash pail. “How come there’s always whole kernels of corn in vomit?”

She rubbed away the tears in her eyes and cracked a smile. She hid it with her bloody hand.

“I think they’re beyond minding.”

She rolled her head to the side thinking of corn kernels but they popped and mushroomed back to Edward and those last moments she saw him alive. She knew where his body was, but she never wanted to go back there. She balled her hand into a fist pretending to grasp his stupid fingers again.

“Edward’s dead,” she said. “I, I couldn’t do anything. I’m a coward. I’m the worst kind of coward.”

“Hey, look, during the whole Sankoh thing, I was doing maintenance in the JT. I wasn’t going to go out there and die. Hell, no. I was chicken shit.”

“You saved the ship. You were a hero!”

He gripped her shoulders with both his hands. “Catherine, look at me.” Ryan looked like a mosaic pattern through her tear stained eyes. “What’re you supposed to remember when the shit hits the fan?”

Catherine sniffled and let her eyes wander. “My training.”

“That’s all I did. I’m not Rambo. I’m a computer hacker. I did what I could, and that’s all.”

“I couldn’t even do that.”

Catherine cried. Ryan threw his arms around her. She sniffled and wailed into his shoulder and he didn’t once say anything until she was done, and only then did he stand her up and guided her out of engineering and to the crew’s quarters. She squeezed his hand. “Can we go somewhere else?”

“Yeah, come on.” Catherine let him pull her along. She felt like a dog, but didn’t want to act like a higher species of lifeform. He lead her to holodeck one and he began to pry the doors open. The doors didn’t budge, but Ryan continued to pull at them. Catherine found a metal bar lying in the hallway, and she wedged it into the door. They pulled against the lever; the door squealed and parted. Ryan fit himself between the doors and pushed them open with his back to one side and his foot against the other. Inside, exposed holoemitting diodes disrupted the pristine black and orange gridded surface of the holodeck.

“I’ll get a tool case,” Carter said. “Too bad you didn’t bring yours. You could even thunk me over the head again.” He disappeared around the corner before she could form a retort. Remember your training, she thought to herself and set to work pulling the broke diodes out of the wall and examining them. “This is what I know,” she told herself. “I can fix things with my girly fingers.” She examined the diode and with her slender fingers she poked and prodded them until she was certain she had managed to repair the one in her hand. The diode lit up as she reinserted it and she went on to the next one. Carter returned and together they set to work fixing the holodeck.

When they had finished, Carter stood by the Arch and the wide open doors leading into the ship. “Computer, make me a sandwich.” A warble from the computer seemed to imply that it wouldn’t.

“Sudo, make me a sandwich,” Catherine said cracking a wide smile.

Ryan grinned. “Oh hey, my Redwood Shores program.” Around them the holodeck materialized into a hill overlooking a highway running west to east. Far in the distance a bridge roped two sides of the land together and sparkling water passed underneath it. The sky was mostly blue with patches of the holodeck smeared into it. It was an odd sensation to be in another place, but also know that the holodeck surrounded her.

“Where are we?” she asked.

He gave her an incredulous look. “Did you go to Starfleet Academy?” Ryan pointed up the hill at a restaurant with the sign “Vans” in front of it. “They make the best Monte Cristo. That’s the 101. All the way back there is San Francisco.”

“I hung out in the city and as soon as I got transporter privileges I went back to Chicago.”

“That’s the problem with transporters, nobody ever looks around anymore.”

“You grew up here?”

“My parents work in the valley. I used to play around here. There’s a great bike path up around these hills, but I get the feeling the holodeck won’t let us go up there.” He smacked the wall behind the Arch and the hologrid pixelated.

“My dad was a chief petty officer. I remember he’d come back with geodes and knick-knacks from distant worlds. He told me of his adventures. It wasn’t anything glorious; he worked in engineering and occasionally he set foot on a new planet. That’s why I joined. He was so proud when I graduated the Academy. I did something he couldn’t do.”

“How long did he serve?”

“He lost a leg during the Dominion War. He was in an engineering attachment to Betazed. Starfleet gave him an honorable discharge and he went home to build starships. Do you think he’d be upset if I resigned my commission?”

Ryan found himself a patch of grass and laid down. “It’s much warmer in the sun,” he said.

Catherine joined him, laying down next to him. The shade felt chilly and windy but being in the grass was like being covered in a warm blanket. She could no longer keep her eyes open.

“Look, I’m sorry about Edward,” Ryan said. “I’m so sorry that this was your first journey into space, but things will get better, Catherine. Trust me. It gets better.”

The words lulled her to sleep. In her dreams, the nightmare unfolded before her once again, but Ryan’s words and his presence made her unafraid.