System Shock

Posted on Sat Sep 6th, 2025 @ 3:40pm by Ensign Charlotte Dawes & Lieutenant Alexandra Blackstone & Lieutenant JG Aziza Diouri

3,004 words; about a 15 minute read

Mission: Peril at the Unification Accords
Location: Sickbay
Timeline: MD01 - 0345

The medical team laboured over Aziza for hours; the surgery taking longer than Alex had expected at first appraisal of the woman’s injuries. She herself had had to step away several times to breathe and take a break from work and none of her colleagues were working any less hard. Aziza’s body had thrown a wrench in the works every time they thought that they were close to being able to close and everybody was showing the wear and the exhaustion. Alex’ eyes were glued to the clock on the wall with its digital display ticking down the seconds. The surgical bay felt claustrophobic as she let her mind wandering for a moment with the clock as it continued to run and after a minute the sounds of Kasper and Jezra declaring her stable enough for Alex to finish up pulled her from her reverie. The numbers slid back into focus and she swore internally. Damnit; stay focused Alex

Slowly she gave a nod to her colleagues and stepped forward, freshly scrubbed after her most recent break and meeting both of their gazes over the open body cavity between them and took a breath as adrenaline surged in here again. “Go ahead and scrub out; I should be able to finish from here. Thank you both.” Their only acknowledgement was a curt nod as they set instruments down and stepped away. Alex slid her gaze to Charlotte who was also stepping back from a break that she hadn’t wanted to take. “How are you feeling, Nurse Dawes? Ready to finish this?”

"Yes, Doctor. More than ready," Charlotte responded as she snapped to attention alert and ready to go. Charlotte thrived on the adrenaline of emergency procedures. She adjusted well when she needed to work long hours unexpectedly, her brain somehow managing to stay sharp. She would crash eventually, but almost never until after the work is done.

"Where do you need me?" She asked, eager to put her mind and body back to work.

“Let’s lighten sedation; this part is the tricky part. We’ll need her input as we reconnect and reroute nerves.” Alex nodded; she was weary but her own dedication to the job kept her sharp. It was a matter half of willpower and half of self-training if she were honest. She used the back of one of the tools to key the sequence that would rotate the biobed to a 45 degree with Aziza’s back facing her. She nodded to Charlotte and began to count in her head. One… Two…

Light hit Aziza's eyes like a hammer, and the sterile smell of Sickbay raked at her senses. Her back screamed, but the pain was a dialect she had learned to parse. One sharp inhale at a time, she felt the biobed shifting beneath her, feeling gravity teasing at her spine.

"Breathe," she whispered to herself, and then louder, because silence always had a way of making fear grow. Her hands twitched, fingers curling and uncurling as if recalling old rhythms they shouldn't know anymore. There was a sudden shock as Aziza realized she could not feel anything below her waist.

"You are doing great," Charlotte said firmly, though softly to Aziza. "You've got this."

Alex eyed the vitals displayed on the wall screen behind Aziza and held her breath as her patients heart rate spiked, watching it closely until it began to settle. She walked around the biobed and knelt, careful not to break the sterility of herself. She seemed to balance almost from sheer force of will for a moment as she refrained from touching anything. “According to our scans the computer identifies you as Crewman Aziza Diouri; is that correct? Just a nod will work if you can’t speak yet.”

Her throat was raw, desert-dry, as though she'd swallowed a fistful of gravel and sand. The word was stuck somewhere in there, refusing to climb out of her mouth. She stared at Alex--this stranger with steady hands and a tired face--and something hot flared in her chest.

Not crewman. Never crewman.

Her lips parted, her tongue tripping like it didn't quite remember how to move. The sound scraped out, a croak more than a voice.

"Lieutenant."

She forced it again, weaker, but still defiant. "Lieutenant."

“Lieutenant then; seems our database retrieval was fragmented. You can clearly hear me. Save your voice as much as you can.” She met Aziza’s gaze, watching the womans pupils dilate from the pain even as much as she was under heavy anesthesia. “You were found in the wreckage of the U.S.S. Dalton crushed under what I suspect was one of the struts for the warp core. Your spine was shattered below the waist. I am one of the surgeons that has been working to bring you back from the edge.” She waited for a minute to allow Aziza to grasp what she had said. She glanced to the Vitals and to Charlotte as she waited and then her steely gaze met Aziza’s eyes again. “I am going to finish your surgery but I need you awake for this section so that we can judge the integrity of the nerves as I connect them. I have every intention to get you back on your feet.”

Spine. Shattered. Edge. Aziza's chest rose shallow, caught halfway between fight and surrender. She tried to swallow but her throat was all paper.

A tear slipped from the corner of her eye before she could stop it. It burned its way down her temple, vanishing into the padding beneath her head. She hated it, hated the weakness of it, but fear had its own kind of gravity.

Through the fog she tried to cling to something--anything--and a face appeared in her memory. Hard ridlges, red scales that caught the light like old stone. Eyes that had looked at her with... not pity. Duty? Care? It was all a blur except for that reptilian face. He sang to her. The image lingered and it stuck itself in her throat like the online lifeline left.

Her lips cracked apart, her tongue heavy. She forced the sound up, a ghost of a word:

"Rep... tile."

“That would be Xalanth; our chief of security who found you down there. It is largely his doing that you were able to be pulled out. You are in the best hands you can be here on the Astrea. Hold onto that fire in your belly; you are going to come through this and get out the other side.”

Alex turned her head to look at Charlotte. “Miss Dawes, how are her sedation levels looking? Do you think she’ll have enough to feel and provide feedback yet?”

"She should be able to, Doctor," Charlotte responded. "We are showing appropriate neural responses, though we are seeing indications that she experiencing some pain."

Alex nodded to Charlotte as she listened to the reply and then shifted on the balls of her feet. “Okay, Lieutenant. I am going to go back to work. I am going to be asking you questions as I work. Are you ready?”

Ready? Not for this. Aziza knew her throat was dust, her body fire and stone. But she blinked once, slow and deliberate, and hoped they would understand.

Her back was a live wire, every nerve sparking, her body a complex map of fault lines that might split open if she breathed too deep. She wanted to laugh bitterly at the absurdity of it all--that she, Aziza Diouri, who had once steered starships through gravity wells and solar flares, was no reduced to blinking and croaking single words like a half-drowned sea bird.

She clenched her jaw, then forced her lips to move. A scrape of a whisper: "Do it."

“Okay, Miss Dawes, come here so you can monitor her expressions and hear her. Notify me the moment she feels anything outside of an occasional electric shock as I work. I don’t want to permanently paralyze her trying to fix the remainder of the damage.” Alex stood; walking back around and taking her position in front of Aziza’s back.

"Understood," Charlotte replied as she took her position. she touched Aziza gently on the back of her hand. "You're going to be alright. "The doctor is taking care of you. I'll be right here."

As soon as Charlotte was in position and ready Alex picked up the new laser scalpel; leaving her newly sterilized analogue one where it lay on the tray. She brought it into the cavity and cleared her first cuts around the bundle of nerves that normally ran through the spinal column. They were frayed and broken in several places and she would have to remove lengths of them to replace it with new lengths grown from Aziza’s own stem cells. It took only a moment for her well practiced hands to isolate the first section needing removal and then she set the laser scalpel aside; picking up the analogue fifteen blade and placing it against the nerve. She took a quick breath and then applied the pressure to cut the section; removing it in seconds and moving to the next. She glanced at the clock. 21 hours… fifteen minutes tops.

Aziza's chest rose and fell in shallow, jagged waves. Every movement of the table beneath her sent a shiver down her spine, an echo of pain that stretched beyond the edges of her body. The smell of scorched nerves and antiseptic burned at her nostrils, and she forced herself to breathe through it, though each inhale tasted like iron.

Her hands twitched again, useless against the demands of her own body, but alive with the memory of things they used to do--switching levers, punching thrusters, correcting course in the middle chaos. She tried to recall the sensation, and for a moment it was almost there, a ghostly pulse, a reminder that she had once been fast and precise and in control.

Pain spiked as Alex cut the next section, and her back screamed with that recognition. Her eyes squeezed shut, and she let a small whimper escape. She imagined the face of the reptile named Xalanth. Something about it steadied her, some tether to a universe beyond the pain of her broken body.

Alex heard the intake of breath, calling out. “Hold in there Aziza; I’ve got the damaged section free, just need to remove and replace it.” She pulled the scalpel free of the cavity and shifted a medical replicator into place over Aziza’s back. It only took her a few moments to get it set up and she pressed the initialize button, glancing to the clock as the replicator scanned the section that had been cut free, dematerializing it. 6 minutes. She placed a hypospray canister into the device that was loaded with stem cells sampled by her colleagues earlier and rocked back on her heels as the replicator spun up and began to create new lengths of nerves one by one. She addressed Charlotte. “Almost done, Miss Dawes; once I have everything reconnected can you close?”

"Yes, Doctor," Charlotte spoke softly but firmly.

Aziza tried to drag air into her lungs, but it came in ragged scraps. She tried to focus on the leftover sensation of Charlotte's anchoring touch. She clenched her teeth, jaw aching, and tried to whisper something to calm herself: Ssaḥa, ssaḥa… (Breathe, breathe...)

Alex counted the seconds as the replicator worked, pushing it aside the moment that it completed its cycle and she dove back in; taking a specialized regenerator in hand as her eyes found the clock again. 3 minutes 30 seconds; work fast. She set to work with a determined look plastering her face beneath her mask. Her surroundings blurred to her as she focused down on the work, her mind acutely aware of the dwindling time. Minutes that felt like hours vanished. She lifted her hands free and breathed her first full breath since starting. 3 seconds; that was close.

Alex stepped back; lifting the hypospray that sat on the surgical tray with a hand that shook somewhat with adrenaline and stress. “Administering 10 units of Inaprovaline to aid in the recovery. That’s it for me; at least for now. Go ahead and finish closing.”

Charlotte cast a glance at Dr. Blackstone before stepping into position. Nurse Reynolds stepped forward and passed the auto-suture to Charlotte, then began prepping the dermal regenerators.

The fire came first. It wasn't a steady flame, but a sudden, merciless surge--as if someone had poured molten metal through the hollow of her spine. Aziza's jaw locked tight, her teeth grinding.

The new nerves were alive. Almost too alive. They shrieked at her brain in confusion, newborn wires shooting signals without sense.

Her vision swam. The lights in the surgical suite smeared into a river of blinding white. She thought she might disappear into the brightness, and perhaps she should let herself...

Her lips moved again. Words dragging over dry sand.

"Burning..." she rasped, eyes trying to focus on Charlotte. "Fire."

"Breathe with me, Lieutenant," Charlotte said keeping her voice calm and steady. "Erin, see if we have some ice for her lips."

Charlotte continued working as she called out, "Dr. Blackstone, are we able to give her something for the pain?" Charlotte asked. "She's giving us feedback about burning, and fire."

Nurse Reynolds in the meantime had taken a cube of ice between her fingers and held it front of Aziza's face. The slim brunette gave Aziza a sympathetic look as she offered the small token. "We'll try to get you something more soon," she promised as she lightly pressed the ice against Aziza's lips.

Aziza's lips parted around it, her tongue moving sluggishly as if it had forgotten how to work. Water pooled, then slid down her throat in slow relief.

“Yes; 5 units of morphenolog for the pain and 2 micro-units of vasokin to help with blood flow and reduce inflammation, be extra careful with the dose of Vasokin.” Alex watched the nurses as they closed, stretching her lower back a few steps away. “Do you have both of those on hand?”

"Of course, Doctor," Charlotte replied, quickly placing the auto-suture aside. It was almost time to start the tissue regenerative process, but that could wait while the patient needed relief from her pain.

She opened the slim drawer that held the vials of likely medications needed for the various procedures that the medical team would need. She took out the morphenolog first and placed it into an empty hypospray, the vials making a satisfying click when it locked into place.

Charlotte reached a long arm alongside where Nurse Reynolds was trying to soothe Aziza by melting a bit of ice into her mouth and pressed the hypospray to her neck.

"You should feel a little relief pretty quickly, and it will slowly work to hopefully relieve more of the worst of it, especially after the second medication that I will give you in a minute starts working," Charlotte told her. "This is morphenolog for the pain."

The relief was slow, washing over her in strange and uneven waves. It wasn't like flipping a switch, but more like creeping along in the nerves, coating the agonized wires in a dulling embrace. The fire in her back did not disappear, not entirely. But the edges softened and the peaks smoothed enough that she could breathe almost normally.

Her eyelids drooped a fraction, exhaustion taking her almost completely, but he mind clung to the present.

"Better..." she croaked.

Patience, Aziza. Sabr…

Somehow, the words carried her a little farther than the fire inside her ever could.

"You're doing great, Lieutenant," Charlotte stated encouragingly, like she was gently coaching someone to a finish line. She pulled the hypospray back and watched Aziza for a brief moment before turning to swap out the vials for the vasokin. She double checked the dose.

Two micro-units.

Charlotte cleared an area on Aziza's bicep for the next injection. "Okay, you shouldn't feel much at all with this one, just a little pressure."

"Looks good so far. I am going to go scrub out; you've got it from here. I'll meet her again in recovery. Thank you both Nurse Dawes; Nurse Reynolds. Good work." Alex turned and headed to the scrub room; stripping out of her surgical gown and gloves. She leaned against the sink for a moment before finishing the process of scrubbing out and as she shook her hands to remove excess water she had to stifle a yawn.

The vasokin slid into her and she could feel its effects almost immediately. The pain, the weight, the fear--it all seemed to evaporate like rain into soft earth.

For a moment, Aziza thought she might float up and away into the ceiling's sterile lights. Despite the sudden peace, she still felt a twinge of panic--nothing below her waist had any sensation. Just... nothing.

Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth, but she formed the word anyway, for herself more than for the women leaning over her:

"Sabr..."

Her eyelids sank, heavy hardwood shutters on a broken house. The brightness began to fade, the faces of Dawes and Reynolds melting into the dimming light, voices receding like they were moving down a long tunnel.

---

Lieutenant Alexandra Blackstone
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Astrea


Lieutenant J.G. Aziza Diouri
Flight Control OfficerUSS Dalton

Ensign Charlotte Dawes
Nurse
USS Astrea

 

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