Title

Epilogue

Anna Hess was having a bad day.

It had started with her shampoo being empty when she had staggered into the shower at 0630; she was generally not a morning person, and at this time of the day, the fact that she had forgotten to get a new shampoo bottle from Crew Supplies was enough to make her cranky. Usually, she would have gotten over it by the time she reported for duty, but not today. On seeing her colleagues' faces when she entered Engineering, she knew immediately that she wasn't the only one having a bad day. There were days in Engineering when everything went wrong - people dropping their tools on each others' toes, computer glitches, equipment malfunctioning for no apparent reason - days when you had the impression that a malevolent spirit had jinxed the entire department. The Engineering crowd used to called them Disaster Days. On Disaster Day, if you could end your shift without any burns or scratches to add to your collection, you let out a breath of relief. On Disaster Day, unless you were feeling suicidal, you did not crawl into a narrow Jefferies Tube to take care of any maintenance repairs. And, most important, on Disaster Day, you did not bother Commander Tucker about anything, unless there was really no other way.

As Anna made her way to the back of the room, she could hear muffled cursing, and knew immediately where to find her superior officer. Climbing up a ladder to the second level, she glimpsed two blueclad legs sticking out from under the Stabilizer Surveillance console, surrounded by a heap of tools and equipment. And unless Ensign Hardy had perfected his impression of their Chief (which, on Disaster Day, would be a dangerous thing to do), the drawled swears coming from under the console indicated that the legs belonged to none other than Commander Charles Tucker himself.

"Chief?" Anna asked, keeping her voice down so she wouldn't startle him. "You okay down there?"

The legs moved, and a second later Commander Tucker emerged, red-faced and with a sooty smear across his left cheek.

"No, I'm bloody not okay. This friggin' thing was checked and overhauled only two weeks ago, so I'd really like to know how the hell there can be a complete system failure!"

Anna quickly bit down on the smile that had emerged at the word "bloody". She wasn't the only one who had noticed that Commander Tucker would use the occasional British expletive, and now that she knew why, she had a hard time hiding a smile whenever it happened. Like the rest of the Engineering staff, she thought that their Chief and Lieutenant Reed made a cute couple, and seeing them holding hands on movie night always made her smile. As one of Tucker's good friends, she could see that the quiet, reticent Englishman was about the best thing that had ever happened to Trip.

Returning her attention to the problem at hand, Anna knelt down beside the Commander and peered under the console. The plating that covered the underside had been removed, and she saw immediately that the problem was not a burnt-out circuit (which would have been her first guess, given the fact that today was obviously Disaster Day). Apparently, Trip had been thinking along the same lines.

"Do you think it might be the distributor unit?"

The Commander's face darkened. "That's what I thought. No wonder the damn thing's givin' us trouble today, of all times."

The power distributor, a separate unit that provided the stabilizers with the necessary energy to keep them working at all times, was a delicate piece of equipment, and it would take hours to reconfigure the settings if a malfunction had occurred.

Wearily, Trip ran a hand across the nape of his neck. "Well, I guess you'd better switch on the surrogate so I can check the goddamn thing."

Anna nodded, already on her way to the control panel on the wall. "Hang on a second, Chief."

Switching off the blinking "system failure" sign, she diverted the power flux to the substitute distributor unit. She waited for the beep that would declare the process completed, but it never came. Frowning, she tried again. For a second or two, the monitor in front of her went blank, and Anna was about to initiate a complete restart when suddenly a shrill alarm went off to her right.

"Fucking shit! Chief! It's overloading!"

The Commander was already at her side, his eyes widening when he saw the red warning sign that had appeared on all screens in Engineering:

Power breach in sections 3-A, 3-B, 4-A. Prepare for system breakdown.

"It's the residual energy from the distributor," he said, frantically recalibrating the console in order to cut off the power flux that appeared to be running wild. "It's been diverted to random systems. We've gotta..."

He never finished his sentence. Next to the red warning, another sign appeared, accompanied by the computer voice, which sounded strangely indifferent inmidst the chaos:

"Energy collapse in ten minutes. All personnel evacuate endangered areas. Energy collapse in 9.95 minutes. All personnel..."

"There's no one down there, is there?" Anna shouted, trying to make herself heard over the din. Sections 3 and 4 were deep in the bowels of the ship, largely empty gangways that gave access to non-essential systems and finally led to a small, locked storage area where spare parts and additional weapon supplies were kept. Hardly anyone ever went down there, and if they sealed off the area, the collapse and following explosion wouldn't do too much damage. She hoped.

"I can't scan the areas, the energy flux is too strong!" the Commander called back. As always during a crisis, he worked at twice his usual speed as he tried to find a way to prevent the impending breakdown. "The comm connection's not workin' either. We'll have to-"

He broke off, and for a second, Anna believed he was going to faint. Under the sooty smears, his face had turned ashen, and he stared at the console in front of him as if it had suddenly erupted in flames.

In a few steps, she was at his side and grabbed his arm. "Chief? Are you okay? Do you-"

"Malcolm's down there," he whispered, more to himself than to her.

At first, she thought she had misheard him. "What?"

Her voice seemed to startle him into action. He shook her hand off and broke into a run, calling out over his shoulder:

"I've gotta get him out! If I'm not back in seven minutes, seal off both sections!"

He opened an access door that led to the next Jefferies tube.

"Chief, how do you know-"

"That's an order, Lieutenant!" The door banged shut behind him, and Anna turned to the console the Commander had been working on. Forcing her fingers to stop shaking, she initiated a scan of sections three and four, and stopped short when the computer informed her that the power flux was impeding the sensors. It was like the Commander had said - the scanners didn't work. There was no way to know if there was anyone down there.

So how could he-

Anna cut off the thought. Right now, there was no time; if there was anything she could do to stop what was going to happen down there, she couldn't afford to lose even one more second.

The next five minutes, carefully counted down by the ship's computer, turned out to be the longest in her life. While she grimly worked her way through systems that refused to cooperate in any way, she listened to the electronic voice as it announced that the energy collapse would take place in six minutes... four minutes... two minutes. If Lieutenant Reed was really down there, and if he and Trip didn't make it out in time... she tried to quench the thought before her mind could show her in vivid detail what would happen to two men caught in the center of the explosion. It was not going to happen. It was-

"Lieutenant!" Crewman Rozkvet's voice drowned out the computer's announcement that there were 1.07 minutes left until the explosion. "The scanners are back online!"

Her hands still up to the wrists in circuits, Anna risked a glance at the scan display. The sensors weren't back to full working power, but she could see the two yellow life signs approaching the Section 3 exit.

So the Lieutenant was really there. But how the hell-

"Energy collapse in 0.38 minutes."

"Lieutenant..." Katarina Rozkvet bit her lip. "We need to-"

"Wait!" Anna stared at the two moving lifesigns as if looking away would slow them down or make them disappear altogether.

Come on, Chief, come on!

Two meters to the exit. Energy collapse in 0.12 minutes.

"Lieutenant!"

"Now!"

Rozkvet's fingers came close to lightspeed as she entered the combination to seal off the bulkheads leading to Sections 3 and 4. Anna closed her eyes when a beep announced that the process was completed.

"All hands brace for impact!"

The explosion rocked the ship, but less so than she had expected. A small bump in the road, as Trip would have called it. The thought was suddenly the funniest thing that had occurred to her in a long time, and Anna started to giggle, drawing strange looks from her crewmates. But she couldn't help it. Still giggling, she indicated the scan display.

"Are they-?"

Katarina Rozkvet smiled. "They made it out, Anna. They're okay."

Anna closed her eyes. "Damage report?"

"Power on D-deck is partly down, seems that the explosion wrecked a few systems there. Corridors 3 and 4-A are severely damaged... no casualties."

Anna opened her eyes again and answered Katarina's smile. To her relief, the giggling had stopped.

"Thank you, Crewman."

Anna took a deep breath and walked over to the comm to rescue Ensign deSoto, who was trying to explain to a worried Captain what the hell they were doing to his ship. Right now, she had places to go, things to do...

... but I'd really like an explanation for what just happened.

She wasn't going to ask, however. She had a feeling that the answer might leave her with even more questions, and in this case, the best thing might be to believe in a lucky streak in the middle of Disaster Day. Engineers were superstitious, after all.

"Trip..."

Malcolm felt the metal grating of the catwalk pressing into his chest, and tried to shift his weight, which was difficult as he was sandwiched between Trip and the floor. The engineer seemed unwilling to move or loosen his iron grip, and when Malcolm turned his head, he saw that Trip's eyes were tightly closed. His whole body seemed to vibrate with tension, as it had when he had shoved Malcolm out of the bulkhead and dived after him to cover him with his body as the corridor exploded behind them. Of course, the bulkhead had protected them from the flying metal fragments, had even kept off most of the shockwave, but Trip didn't seem to care. His fingers were still digging painfully into Malcolm's shoulders as if he wanted to make sure that Malcolm was really there, alive and safe.

Malcolm stirred again.

"Love?"

"What?" The word came out as a whisper.

"Let me up?"

"Wha- oh. Yeah."

The fingers bruising his shoulders loosened their grip, slowly, as if they weren't quite sure whether they could let go yet. Trip rolled off him, and Malcolm struggled to a sitting position. His heart was racing in his chest as if he had run a marathon.

"Are you all right, Trip?"

Trip managed a weak nod. "Yeah. I'm fine."

"That's my line, you know."

It wasn't the wittiest thing to say, Malcolm had to admit, but Trip laughed all the same. A moment later, Malcolm found himself pulled into a tight hug. Trip's arms were still shaking, and his voice sounded rough as he whispered next to his ear:

"Don't you ever, ever scare me like that again. Ever. Hear me?"

Malcolm wrapped his own arms around his partner, holding him close. His own heart was slowly returning to a normal pace, and after a while, he could feel some of the tension in Trip's body drain away. Gently, he laid a hand on Trip's hair and tilted the other man's head back so he could look at him.

"How did you know I was down here? I don't think you could have scanned me, if the system was about to overload."

Trip only looked back at him, and after a while, Malcolm nodded.

"You're right, I don't really have to ask."

They both smiled.

"Nice to know it's not all gone, isn't it?" Malcolm asked quietly.

"Yeah," Trip said. "Kinda weird, but there you are. It was like an alarm went off in my head, and..." He shook his head. "It's difficult to explain. For a moment, I saw what you were seein', and... I recognized the corridor. I was terrified I wasn't gonna make it down here in time."

Malcolm brushed a strand of hair off Trip's forehead.

"You saved my life," he said. "I guess that makes you my knight in shining armor."

Trip blushed. "You're not exactly your typical damsel in distress. And you would've done the same thing for me." In an obvious attempt at changing the subject, he glanced back at the closed bulkhead. "What the hell were you doin' in there, anyway?"

"Going through our supplies of phase pistol cells. I've been trying forever to get across to the Captain that we don't have enough to arm the entire crew in case of an emergency, but he doesn't seem to think it's important. I thought maybe if I presented him with an actual number on a screen, he might reconsider."

Trip stared. "So you went all the way down here and almost got yourself blown up because you wanted to count phase pistols?"

Malcolm felt his face grow warm. "Well, I would call it an inventory, but basically, yes."

Trip shook his head. "I swear, Malcolm, one day that obsession of yours-"

"It's not an obsession, it's diligence."

"-one day that diligence of yours is gonna be the death of me."

Malcolm smiled and pulled him close. "I hope not. I'm not planning on getting rid of you any time soon, you know."

Trip grinned. "Thanks... I think. Same here."

"Good." Malcolm stood up, trying to ignore the various aches where his body had hit the floor, and held out a hand. "Want to go tell the Captain how we wrecked his ship this time?"

Trip grabbed the offered hand and pulled himself to his feet. "Wasn't us. And I don't think there's too much damage."

Malcolm smiled. "I know. But he might get suspicious, you know... for some reason everybody seems to think that I've got a strange love for explosions..."

Trip laughed and held on to Malcolm's hand as they went down the catwalk.

Several light-years away, a small being who could look like a fox if it wanted to smiled at the moss-green sky of its homeworld, turned around, and disappeared.

The End

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