'Down Among the Dead Men'?

Posted on 15 Aug 2023 @ 6:29pm by Lieutenant Raviran Dattek-Winters

556 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: Outbreak
Location: Planetside
Timeline: MD : 03 - virus spreading fast

ON:
Ravi had requested for the Head Nurse to accompany her to the Planet as she was a little concerned at being the only 'modern day' medic here amongst the Antocians. She couldn't have blamed them in the least if they had thought about the coincidence that the Cygnus had arrived and ten days later, there was a pandemic, wiping out thousands of their people with little or no explanation as to what it was or how it arrived.

The first data from their tests revealed that this was viral. The second testing they did told them it was something the Antiocians seemed almost as one, to have never developed antibodies to. So it was new.

Paul Harriss was confiding in Ravi that this was highly suspicious, especially since, testing their own systems, the two of them DID have evidence of antibodies. Plenty of them.

Ravi was equally taken by those details and so called coincidences.

She got onto the Comm and tried to contact Captain Bane to let him know, but then she wondered about that and decided instead to speak first to her own boss and go up the c of c in the proper way, no matter how important this seemed to be. Elodin could and would deal with it best, she knew that.

He would test the data and results she and Harriss were sending up and IF they were right, he would go to the CO himself. It was the right way to deal with it.

Ravi was the kind of person who had always been about keeping to the order of things. Life always seemed to go wrong or at least to disappoint if a person skipped the process and the Chain of Command was everything in Starfleet.

She wondered why she had even considered going straight to Bane. This whole mission had her rattled. IF they were right this was genocide. It was unthinkable. Her Hippocratic Oath rattled around in her head ceaselessly until she was beginning to be unable to look the Antiocians in the eyes.

Thank the Prophets she had the sense to bring someone of the Medical crew with her, she would almost certainly have lost it if she had no-one of her own kind and time to talk to. It was probable that this had happened to other "first contact" species.... it was in all the literature that humans had laid down centuries ago.... "War of the Worlds" was a classic on the reading lists of all the Academy's students libraries.

With that novel however, it had been the invading/incoming species that had fallen foul of local germs. Perhaps the same...............OH!!!

Oh PROPHETS...... it was staring them in the face!! Viral..... deadly to new victims...... Influenza?

She raced to Harriss and asked him to start new tests with that new idea in mind. "All human carried 'flu/pneumonia/bronchitis/strep.... definitely Streptococus.......all the varieties of that.... even try Sepsis.... everything we all carry around.........colds..... coughs... PROPHETS!!"

=^= Winters to Elodin =^= Ravi flicked her comm badge again, having stopped herself just in time from trying the CO earlier.

~The whole epicentre of life has to follow the CoC..... remember that, you idiot! ~ she berated herself.

~Elodin has the pips to tell you that. He carries the rank therefore the burden of decisions.~


TBC

 

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