The Beginnings of Downfall

"Seven minutes to warp core breach."

"Make a hole!" Virkov yelled, sprinting down the corridor towards main engineering. No member of the crew of the U.S.S. Normandie had seen her compose herself in such a panicked manner, and they flung themselves to the wall to let her run past.

She was running the calculations mentally. There wasn't enough time if this couldn't be maintained. Her crew was well trained. A full-scale evacuation would take three minutes. Even if the breach could be maintained, it wasn't worth the risk of killing her crew due to indecision.

"Virkov to Bridge. Launch the log buoy, sound General Order 13. Launch all escape pods. Have the shuttles, fighters, and runabouts begin beamout of personnel in areas too far to reach the pods."

"Acknowledged. Bridge out."

She heard the klaxons begin to ring as she made it to main engineering. Lieutenant Commander Olson, her chief engineer was hunched over a console as his crewmen and junior officers began making haste out of the department, towards the lifeboats further down the corridor.

"Olson! Olson!" she shouted, cupping her hands to her mouth. He didn't respond. She darted over to him, and clapped him on the shoulder.

"We need to go, now!" she yelled. He seemed to have just then noticed the alarms ringing, and her shouting at him. He gathered his personal equipment, and made his way out of the compartment. Grabbing the PADD he left behind, Virkov followed him. She flicked through it quickly, knowing Olson was the kind of officer who would throw all of the data onto the PADD so he could diagnose what had happened after. There was a known defect in this type of Matter/Antimater Reactor Assembly, and she knew he'd want this later, so he could go through the data to ascertain if he could have seen this coming.

"Bridge to Virkov. Evacuation complete Sir. We've got a shuttle waiting for you and Commander Olson in Shuttlebay Two. Bridge crew is evacuating via lifepod."

"Acknowleded Bridge. Set autopilot to full impulse to clear as much room between the pods and the ship before it goes as possible. Get off the Normandie while you still can. Virkov out!"

...something wasn't right. She had "grown up" in Starship Operations. She knew what a core breach looked like, mathematically. This wasn't a core breach, this was something else. Someone had triggered this. She didn't have much time left, and they'd cleaned their tracks impeccably well. She began moving from file to file, finding the log of access points, command passwords. Everything had been routed away from, and back to Olson's office in main engineering. The inter-mix ratio was off by tens of percentage points, the couplings had been purposely weakened, and the ejection mechanism had been overridden. It was sabotage, clear as day.

"Two minutes to warp core breach. All hands abandon ship."

Olson.

She rounded the corner into the shuttlebay to see him bent over the controls, opening the bay doors. There was one shuttle left.

"Captain, let's go!"

He'd purposefully overloaded the core, and hidden his tracks to make it look like an accident. She tried to wrap her head around this, to quickly figure out what his possible motivation could be. But psychology was not her strong point. She looked up at him, a blank expression on her face. The bay doors were gliding open, the forcefield shimmering to keep the atmosphere inside.

For the last 11 years, she had eaten, drank, slept, breathed, and bled the Normandie. Through the Dominion war, she had never lost a single crew member. This ship had been her home away from home, her protector, her solid and stalwart champion for more than a decade. Now, one solitary act of sabotage was going to take it from her. This was unacceptable.

But there was no time to argue, no time to think. Only to react. She quickly pulled her hand phaser from her hip holster. Leveling at him, she began walking towards him. He looked back, a wide-eyed incredulous look on his face.

"Sir, what are you doing?"

"I don't want to hear why you did it. I don't care. Move aside," she ordered. He did, and she stepped into the shuttle.

"Captain, I..."

Before he could finish his sentence, she fired the phaser. She had forgot to remove the stun setting, but it didn't matter. She sat down into the seat of the shuttle, and maneuvered it deftly out of the bay, punching it to full impulse to clear herself from the breach. Only then did she allow herself to cry.

~*~

"Status, Commander?" she asked her first officer over the communications relay.

"Uh...it looks like we lost four lifepods. They didn't make it clear in time, Sir. Everyone else besides Commander Olson is accounted for."

"Commander Olson stayed aboard to try to contain the breach. Was the log buoy retrieved?"

"Yes Sir."

"Note the loss of Normandie at 0930 hours on today's Stardate. Check in with the rest of the crew, and get the lifepods in gaggle mode. The Farragut is two hours out, and we need to conserve resources. Virkov out."