Take Down
Posted on Sat May 9th, 2026 @ 3:36pm by Commodore S'thenosis Gorgox & Commander Jenna Ramthorne & Lieutenant Commander Bonnie "Bon-Bon" Durnell & Captain Rhenora Kaylen & Commander Savar cha'Salik hei-Surak Talek-sen-deen & Commander Dean House & Lieutenant Commander Thriss Kla'ren & Lieutenant Commander Aurora Vali & Lieutenant JG Jacob Rosen & Lieutenant JG Micheal Stevens & Lieutenant JG T'Lar & Lieutenant JG Olivia Voight
3,342 words; about a 17 minute read
Mission:
Beholder
Location: Prime Sunfire
“Victory is not the moment the enemy falls. It is the moment you decide the chaos no longer owns you.”
Nausicaan Raider Vessel
The deck plates of the raider vibrated in uneven pulses, a low, agitated hum that traveled up through feet and into bone. Consoles flickered in sickly bursts of light, then dimmed again as if something unseen pressed against the ship’s systems and refused to let go.
On the main display, the USS Sunfire hung in the field like wounded prey, her hull darkened, movement sluggish, drifting where the asteroids guided her. Around her, the hunt had slowed.
A Nausicaan First Lieutenant stood at the forward station, shoulders tight, teeth bared in restrained frustration as he monitored the failing transporter grid. His voice carried across the bridge, edged with urgency. “Transporters are unusable,” he growled, striking the console with the heel of his palm. “Interference is spreading. Recall windows are collapsing. If we leave them there, we lose warriors.”
A low murmur followed, not dissent, but agreement shaped by instinct.
The Captain remained still. He stood near the center of the bridge, broad frame outlined by the intermittent glow of failing systems, his gaze fixed on the drifting Federation vessel. One heavy hand rested against the back of a command chair, claws tapping once in slow, deliberate rhythm.
“We were not sent to hold,” he said at last, voice deep, controlled, carrying the weight of command without needing force. “We were tacked to break them. His eyes narrowed slightly as he studied the Sunfire, watching the flicker of her failing lights, the stagger in her motion. “And they are broken.”
The First Lieutenant stepped closer, tension rising in his posture. “Then we take what is owed,” he pressed. “Prisoners. Officers. Engineers. Their systems are exposed. Their ship is dying. We strip it while it still breathes.” A ripple of interest moved through the crew. That was the language they understood.
The Captain’s jaw flexed once as he considered it, his gaze drifting briefly to the damaged readouts, to the erratic pulse of their own failing systems. Something unseen had already begun to take hold here, something that gnawed at their control, their ability to move, to extract, to finish the kill cleanly. The hunt had shifted.
The Sunfire drifted on the display, wounded, dimming, caught in the slow crush of the field.
U.S.S. Sunfire
For a breathless span of time, the Sunfire existed in a kind of engineered silence. Power gone. Sound swallowed into something thin and distant as the last hum of her systems cut out completely. Loose debris lay where it had fallen. Smoke hung in slow, curling ribbons. Blood, tools, fragments of shattered panels all suspended together in a stillness that felt almost sacred in its pause.
U.S.S. Sunfire - Bridge
The bridge lights dimmed and fizzled out, followed by the reassuring hiss of life support and finally the artificial gravity. The Nausicans had stopped beaming in, and the bridge crew had gotten the upper hand for the time being. The abject lack of power she felt was a ploy from Engineering to retake control of the ship. She trusted her people to act in their interests without her direct order.
Jacob drifted to T'Lar, reaching into the pocket inside his duty jacket. A white handkerchief with hand stitched roses made from red and yellow fibers felt soft in his hand. He looked back to her face, covered in scrapes from her close combat just minutes ago. Sometimes the moments that surprise you were the simple in between moments.
"T'Lar." Jacob whispered, handing her his handkerchief. "You have some blood on your face."
In all of the chaos T'Lar had not noticed that she had been injured. She accepted the handkerchief, her fingers lingering, touching Jacob's hand tenderly ever so briefly.
"Thank you, Jacob. I... aaaaaahhh." she winced as the numbness of shock gave way to pain; gingerly wiping away the blood on her face. She floated close to him and whispered, voice trembling, "I thought I'd lost you when that bulkhead came down..."
T'Lar began to tremble as now that the danger was passed, the adrenaline of combat began to fade she was able to comprehend the full magnitude of what she'd just survived. She felt her stomach twist in knots, her meager breakfast threatening to make a reappearance held in place only by her iron Vulcan will. She knew from experience that she was going into a form of post traumatic shock. Ordering the Sunfire to fire on another ship was one thing, that was killing at a distance. This was the first time she had killed up close and personally. She could barely recall doing it, almost as if she were in a dis-associative fugue state at the time. The moment required action, and she had responded, instinctively and immediately. Now that it was over, the full terror of what had transpired rushed in upon her. She blinked several times trying to clear her head but with every blink she saw disruptor beams lancing about, Naussicaans bent on killing, and Jacob and the Captain pinned under the bulkhead.
"Jacob, I..." was all she could stammer.
"Hey hey hey." Jacob said quickly, grasping onto T'Lar's shoulders and staring into her eye intently. "Breathe with me T'Lar, Breathe." They floated together in the microgravity, Jacob reassured her as best as he could attempting to help bring her heart rate down, finding that doing so helped himself as well. "You were amazing T'Lar."
Jacob gingerly took back his handkerchief and began wiping her face gently. "Soon, Engineering is going to get the power back up. When that happens we're going to going to burn a hole in these pirate's ship so hot it'll be glowing until the heat death of the universe." He tucked a strand of her hair behind T'Lar's pointed ears. "Then maybe we'll get to finish that hike eh?" Jacob finished with a smile.
"Thank you, Jacob..." she said, taking his hand quietly, the psychic bond between them growing stronger by the second.
"I do hope when this is over that we will be able to resume our shore leave," she paused for effect with a raised eyebrow, "activities."
Rhenora reached for the light on her weapon, casting it's beam around the darkness and assessing the situation. All was quiet, in as much as they were no longer being attacked. Crew were beginning to find their feet - or were being treated from their peers for those with injuries. She tapped her comm badge - hoping that some comms system may still be operation.
"Engineering - ETA to power up?"
Thriss floated above the central engineering console in the main hall. After tapping a few buttons he spoke up over the static comm. "Roughly three minutes Captain."
"That is good news Chief" The Captain replied - breathing a sigh of relief. The cold had started to seep in, and the crew had anchored themselves when the gravity had failed along with life support. 3 minutes they could deal with.
"Hang in there everyone - we don't count the chickens yet" She cautioned to anyone who could hear.
"Indeed Captain. We are all still here to defend the ship and crew." Savar replied somewhere to Rhenora's right on the dimly lit bridge.
Bonnie caught herself on the edge of her console just as the gravity finally gave up entirely. The sudden weightlessness sent her drifting backward in an undignified half-spin, boots lifting over her head while the still-smoking disruptor slowly rotated beside her like it too had become emotionally exhausted by the day’s events.
“Oop... Okay, nope, not good,” she muttered under her breath, snagging a handhold onto the console before she floated directly into the overhead. The bridge around her had become a dim constellation of emergency strobes and drifting debris. Drops of blood hung suspended like dark red beads in the air. A loose PaDD turned lazily past Savar’s shoulder.
Bonnie held on for all she was worth with one hand on the console and the other on a tricorder, scanning actively for signs, any signs. “Nanite saturation still stable across the outer hull,” she reported quietly into the dark. “They’re not disengaging...”
She swallowed once, eyes fixed on the dead board in front of her as if staring hard enough might force the ship awake. “If this works,” Bonnie murmured, mostly to herself, “we are officially never telling Starfleet how we solved this.”
"If this works, we're naming it the Sunfire maneauver. Play dead and they go away" Rhenora had overheard and tried to lighten the mood just a tad. A few more minutes and the pesky energy suckers would run out of power and turn off.
Jenna floated near the dark Conn station, one hand hooked around the edge of the console to steady herself against the slow drift of zero gravity. Emergency light washed across her face in deep crimson bands, catching the streak of blood along her sleeve that she still had not noticed. Around her the bridge breathed in strained silence, every creak of stressed metal sounding louder now that the battle had passed.
Her eyes moved over the crew instead of the dead panels. Rhenora still issuing orders through darkness. Jacob close to T’Lar in the aftermath of violence neither of them would soon forget. Bonnie somewhere beyond the shadows trying to hold systems together through instinct and stubbornness alone. So many unfamiliar faces now mixed among the old ones she had once known by heartbeat and habit.
For the first time since returning to the Sunfire, Jenna felt the shape of what the ship had become without her. Not weaker. Just different. Outside the battered viewscreen, the asteroid field turned in silence around them like the slow grinding teeth of something ancient.
" Jenna, the instant you have enough juice - we need to be out of here. I don't want the Nausican's wanting to come back and have another crack" The Captain said as she wound a leg around the support of her command chair to remain in it. Her ribs ached angrily - but otherwise she was mostly unharmed.
Jenna nodded once, the motion small in the dim red glow. She understood the Captain’s intention without further explanation. The instant power returned, the Sunfire would leave the field behind and put distance between herself and the trap tightening around them. Part of her wanted something else entirely.
The wreckage on the bridge, the blood still drifting in slow crimson ribbons through the weightless air, the memory of Nausicaan hands on her crew all pulled at something old and dangerous inside her. The instinct for retribution sat sharp beneath her ribs, familiar as breath, inherited and cultivated over years she rarely allowed herself to revisit. Her direction was clear.
Near the rear quarter of the bridge, Commodore S’thenosis Gorgox remained anchored by one gloved hand against a recessed support strut, her posture still composed despite the absence of gravity around her. The elongated braided length of her hair had lifted into the air in a slow, drifting vertical arc behind her head, the carefully maintained coils beginning to loosen at their edges in ways she found quietly intolerable, though not a flicker of that irritation reached her expression.
Her stylus continued its measured movement across the illuminated surface of the PADD with unwavering precision while the bridge floated in fractured disarray around her, and though the Sunfire herself seemed suspended between collapse and recovery, S’thenosis carried on recording the conduct of command as calmly as though the loss of gravity were merely an administrative inconvenience rather than a crisis.
U.S.S. Sunfire - Engineering
Thriss looked at the time. Two and a half minutes until the power-up was ready. It was time for phase two. "I'm going to the computer core. Rynn, keep an eye on the power levels. If we reverse it too fast, we may short some of the essential systems first try," he said while the comm was still hot, since the bridge would also need to know this.
"Thriss, you do realize that with all of our systems down, it is extra dangerous, right. Without safeguards, you might find yourself extra conductive, no pun intended."
He shrugged, which looked kind of weird while in zero gravity. "Chief Engineer's prerogative. Besides, I'm not going to risk anyone on this. You have your orders," Thriss looked to his engineers before starting towards the computer core, which also had a mantel reset for the polarity.
"Thriss wait," Rynn called out before he left.
The Andorian turned around. Rynn grabbed his hand and squeezed it. "Be safe. I can't lose you."
He gave his friend a comforting smile. "You won't," he said as they released that small embrace. "Besides, it'll be a cold day in hell before you take my job," he teased as he floated off towards the core."
Rynn smiled before turning towards her duties. A few of the engineers gave a look. She shot them a glare, and they returned to their own jobs.
U.S.S. Sunfire - Below Decks
Lt Sarah Wilson finished securing patients to their biobeds, using palm beacons to provide light. They had tricorders, hypos, anything with an independent power source, but the ship itself was dead. Whether it was intentional or not she had no idea, but she would keep these people alive as long as she could.
"Olivia?" She called, looking or any of the other doctors. "Aurora?"
“I’m here!” Aurora responded as she squeezed through the partially open Sickbay doors. “Are you alright?”
"I'm fine, apart from floating and in the dark with a bunch of people trying to actively die on me" Sarah retorted as she moved around the room.
Pain arrived first. Sharp, deep, radiating through the base of Cathaur’s skull in slow pulses that made the darkness sway around her. She inhaled carefully, tasting dust, scorched metal, and stale air as awareness returned in fractured layers. The storage compartment was still sealed, lit only by the weak emergency strips bleeding red along the floor. For several seconds she remained still, eyes closed, cataloguing symptoms with clinical detachment. Mild concussion. Cervical strain. No major hemorrhaging. Unpleasant, but survivable.
Cathaur exhaled once through her nose and pushed herself upright against the wall, fingers briefly pressing into the side of her neck as another wave of pain rolled through her. “I dislike blunt trauma,” she murmured to no one in particular, voice rougher than usual. Beyond the door came the distant groan of the wounded ship, metal flexing, muffled impacts, the faint tremor of combat not yet finished. Sickbay would be overwhelmed. Which meant she was needed there. Then suddenly the floor dropped out below her, or rather the gravity of the floor.
Straightening carefully and adjusting her float, Cathaur keyed the manual override and slipped out into the dim corridor, one hand brushing the bulkhead for balance before she steadied. The ache remained, heavy behind her eyes, but her focus narrowed past it with practiced discipline. Pain was information. Information could wait. Patients could not.
Sarah continued working, busting out the old field kits for emergency supplies. Bandages, gauze, salves, oral pain relief and lightweight foil blankets designed to conserve heat. If this power outage continued, heat would be their primary concern. Injured patient's could not regulate nor had the energy to generate heat in their own bodies for survival. Sarah had been in situations like this before - when the Sunfire had crashed or when they'd been stranded on a planet without supplied. It was back to the fundamental basics of survival.
“I can help with that” Aurora smiled offering some assistance, checking on those who needed her support as she moved around Sickbay. “Are comms back up? Or are we still cut off?”
Cathaur floated through the open sickbay doors a moment later, hearing the question asked. "Comms are intermittent." She rubbed the back of her neck. "Anyone see Commander Baldric? She is injured and we were separated."
Cathaur steadied herself against the doorframe as another pulse of pain moved through the back of her skull, though her expression barely shifted. “She was ambulatory when I last observed her,” she continued, voice even despite the roughness underneath it. “Concussed. Disoriented. Still overly confident.”
Her eyes swept across the dimly lit Sickbay, taking inventory in practiced silence before she pushed gently off the bulkhead and floated further inside. “Environmental temperature is dropping,” she noted. She glanced briefly toward Sarah. “Also, I may require stitches once everyone else stops attempting to die.”
"Hit a bulkhead?' Sarah ran a quick scan on Cathaur's skull and hit her with an analgesic. " As for the Commander, nope, haven't seen her. She's injured? She'll have to get herself here, we don't have any extra hands at the moment," she replied, wiping the blood and checking the wound. "You need a dermal regenerator, but it'll have to wait. The bleeding has slowed."
U.S.S. Sunfire - Computer Core
Thriss floated into the computer core and immediately found the manual controls for the polarity reversal system. Unsure of how long it took him to float there, he tapped his badge.
"Rynn, I'm here, eta until we're ready to reverse the polarity?"
"We're ready now," She said over the comm.
"Noted," he closed the comm and opened another one. "Kla'ren to bridge, I'm ready when you guys are."
U.S.S. Sunfire - Bridge
Upside down had stopped meaning much about thirty seconds ago. One hand stayed wrapped around the station while the other hovered over the dormant controls, waiting for Engineering to give the word. Around the bridge, the crew signaled readiness where they could; some anchored to railings, others braced against shattered consoles under the dim pulse of emergency lights.
Bonnie swallowed once and keyed the comm. “Bridge is set,” she said, trying for confidence and landing somewhere in the neighborhood of stubborn sarcasm. “So... reverse it, shunt it back through the hull, and politely inform our microscopic little energy vampires that their lease has expired.” A nervous breath escaped her nose.
Then quieter, almost too soft for the channel to catch, she murmured a quick Irish blessing under her breath "Gum bi an rathad ag èirigh gus coinneachadh rinn" and tightened her grip on the console, waiting for the ship to either come back to life... or kick like an angry mule through the deck plating.
Nausicaan Raider Vessel
The Captain of the Raider straightened, turning slightly now to face the bridge, his presence filling the space as his decision settled. “We were promised disruption,” he continued, voice steady, certain. “We were promised an opening for greater prey.” A faint, dangerous edge entered his tone. “I see no greater prey here.”
The First Lieutenant started to speak, but hesitated, just for a moment. It was enough.
“Do we lose more to a dying ship?” he asked, low, almost thoughtful. “Lose them to failing transporters... to systems we do not control?”
The Captain’s hands curled once, then relaxed. “We have taken blood,” he said. “We have taken their strength.” A slight tilt of his head followed, almost dismissive. “The rest belongs to the void.”
The First Lieutenant lowered his gaze, acceptance replacing resistance.
“Recall the teams,” the Captain ordered.
A moment passed as the crew moved to comply, working through interference, forcing what windows they could open before they closed again. Transporter signatures flared in staggered bursts, pulling warriors back in uneven sequence as the systems struggled to obey.
Outside, the raider ships began to peel away from the crippled Sunfire, engines flaring to life as they slipped back toward the shadow of the outpost.
The hunt had ended with a predator choosing not to finish the kill.
TBC
RSS Feed