Below Decks

Posted on Mon Sep 21st, 2026 @ 5:15pm by Ensign Sok’i T’Luz

1,605 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: Season 1 Episode 2: The Garden at the Edge of Night
Location: Deck 27 - Storage Compartment 4-C
Timeline: Garden at the Edge of Night

There were few things quite as effective at reminding a newly commissioned Starfleet officer of her place in the organizational hierarchy as inventory.

Storage inventory, specifically.

T’Luz had been assigned to Storage Compartment 4-C to reconcile its contents against the ship’s manifest. It was tedious if not difficult work, although after the first hour she had begun to wonder why this particular aspect of Starfleet service had been so conspicuously absent from Academy recruitment materials.

She was attempting to determine why twelve vascular-regeneration cartridges had been placed in a container labeled sterile field dressings when she first noticed the vibration beneath her feet.

It was subtle enough that she might have dismissed it as some normal function of Genesis she had yet to become familiar
with, had one of the containers on the shelving not begun a slow migration toward the edge.

T’Luz watched it for a moment. That probably wasn’t normal. She reached out to stop it. Then Genesis lurched violently. The container struck the deck. T’Luz joined it shortly thereafter.

The lights disappeared, along with what sounded like half the contents of the storage compartment. For several seconds there was only darkness, crashing equipment and a rather impressive collection of profanity from somewhere to her left.
Something metallic struck the deck nearby. Someone swore again.

T’Luz remained where she had landed until she was reasonably certain the ship had finished trying to throw her into something.

“What the hell happened?”

“We appear to have stopped,” she answered, feeling around in the darkness for her tricorder.

Several people began speaking at once.

“If you are injured, say so. Otherwise remain where you are until we have light.”

The compartment went considerably quieter.

Her fingers eventually found the tricorder beneath something that felt suspiciously like the vascular-regeneration cartridges she had been holding less than a minute ago. She flipped it open and used the pale light from the display to get her bearings.

The emergency lighting had failed to activate. That concerned her considerably more than the darkness.

There were six other people in the compartment. In the limited illumination she could make out at least two obvious injuries. One had opened a respectable laceration across his forehead during their abrupt departure from warp, while another was cradling a wrist already beginning to swell. Neither appeared immediately life-threatening.

The doors were not responding. Communications worked only intermittently, and the environmental monitor had apparently decided emergency power was sufficient reason to not continue doing its job.

Good enough. She’d worked with less.

T’Luz moved to the bleeding crewman first. There was certainly no shortage of medical supplies, considering a fair portion of them were now scattered across the deck. She found what she needed, dressed the wound, checked the injured wrist and immobilized it well enough for the moment.

Then she took stock of what had survived the sudden rearrangement of the compartment. As it happened, they were surrounded by exactly the sort of things one might want during what was rapidly beginning to resemble a shipwide emergency.

Medical supplies. Portable lighting. Emergency power cells. Environmental equipment. Two antigrav units, one of which had landed upside down but appeared otherwise functional.

How convenient.

Someone behind her asked what they were supposed to do. Mild panic coloring their tone. That is never a good sign.

“Anyone uninjured, find the portable lamps. Medical supplies go onto the antigrav. Leave anything damaged where it is.
We need the power cells counted and separated by charge.”

There was no discussion about who was in charge. T’Luz certainly had not announced herself as being in charge, and she saw little point in establishing a formal command structure while sitting in the dark surrounded by the former contents of several storage racks and a handful of other fresh graduates of the academy.

There were things that needed doing. There were people available to do them. This was familiar.
People generally responded well to being given something useful to do during an emergency. Panic thrived on uncertainty. A task gave that uncertainty somewhere to go.

It was one of the first lessons she had learned in emergency medicine, although she doubted anyone had ever phrased it quite that way. If six people were standing around watching her work, she did not have six spectators. She had six potential sets of hands.

T’Luz tapped her combadge.

“Ensign T’Luz to-”

Static answered her.

Then part of someone’s transmission broke through, too distorted to make out before disappearing again. She tried once more and got several voices attempting to use the communications system at the same time.

Not particularly useful. It did, however, confirm something had gone wrong well beyond Storage Compartment 4-C.
The doors were another matter. The manual release gave them several centimeters, after which the doors apparently considered their contribution sufficient.

T’Luz disagreed. She wedged her hands into the opening, adjusted her footing and pulled. Another ensign took the other side of the door and put their whole body into pulling. Eventually the doors could be persuaded apart far enough to reveal the corridor beyond.

It was only marginally more functional than the storage compartment.

Emergency lighting flickered intermittently along the bulkheads, bathing portions of the corridor in red before surrendering them to darkness again. People moved through the passageway carrying hand lamps. Somewhere farther down an alarm complained without anyone apparently having the time to pay attention to it.

More unsettling was the ship itself. Genesis sounded wrong.

The familiar hum beneath everything was diminished to absence, and T’Luz did not need to be an engineer to understand that a starship suddenly becoming quieter was unlikely to be encouraging.

Her combadge crackled again. This time enough fragments made it through to begin forming a picture.
Medical needed supplies and assistance with casualties. Engineering was dealing with power and propulsion. Environmental systems were affected. Turbolifts were unreliable, if they were functioning at all.

People were injured across multiple decks. Nobody seemed to have enough personnel. T’Luz looked back into Storage Compartment 4-C.

Well.

At least they had picked a convenient place to be trapped. After some fumbling, she dubiously retrieved a PADD in the dark.

The scale was considerably larger than anything she had dealt with aboard a medical shuttle, but emergencies had a certain consistency to them.

There was always too much happening and never enough resources. Someone always needed something you did not have. Best practice was to treat the situation like a mass casualty event. Incident command had to be established. So,
T’Luz began with what she knew.

Medical supplies could be made available to Sickbay. Charged power cells could go wherever Engineering requested them. The environmental equipment could stay exactly where it was until the right personnel knew where it would actually do some good.

There was little sense in solving one problem by losing the equipment required for the next one.
People were a resource too.

Anyone with medical training could be useful with casualties. Those capable of carrying equipment could become remarkably valuable when the turbolifts had apparently decided they no longer wished to participate in Starfleet operations. Anyone who knew the ship better than she did, and at the moment that was probably most of the crew, could help find alternate routes between decks.

T’Luz could not repair a warp core. She could not restore the power grid. She did not know what had caused Genesis to drop out of warp and, at the moment, knowing would not change the problems immediately in front of her.
She did know how to organize an emergency. So she did.

T’Luz was not entirely certain when Storage Compartment 4-C stopped being the problem and the rest of the deck became one. There was no conscious decision involved.

One request led to another. Something needed in one place was available somewhere else. A new report changed which problem needed attention first. Every time she finished with one task, another presented itself, and frequently the solution was already nearby waiting to be applied.

For the next 96.43 minutes, T’Luz found herself moved along the corridors in this manner.
Some crises were medical. Some involved moving equipment. Some simply required figuring out how to get resources from one place to another when the most convenient method of doing so had ceased functioning.

Increasingly, however, she found herself standing with a PADD in hand, attempting to reconcile requests from departments that all required the same limited people, equipment and power at precisely the same time.

At some point she realized she was moving less equipment herself. Not because there was less to move. Every time she put the PADD down, three more problems seemed to appear. So she kept the PADD. She had long since passed off her med kit.

It was strangely familiar.

T’Luz had spent much of her adult life responding to emergencies from the back of a medical shuttle. There was always a patient, limited resources and considerably more that needed doing than there were people available to do it.
She had joined Starfleet expecting her second career to be different.

Yet here she was, standing in a corridor bathed in familiar emergency red light, PADD in one hand and tricorder in the other, attempting to organize chaos into something useful.

The irony did not escape her. Perhaps the difference was largely one of scale. T’Luz found that oddly reassuring.
Storage Compartment 4-C, however, would have to wait to have its inventory cataloged. Tactical acquisition was rapidly changing its contents.

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