The Complication

Countdown

The corridor was eerily silent.

Above, the lights flickered. The power fluctuations that had plagued the Yamato for the last day were still a problem. There had been no word from the Enterprise — and no way to know for sure if their message was even received.

Varley stopped. He gripped the shoulder of his Operations Chief.

The two men glanced overhead, waiting to see if the lights would stop.

"Are you sure about this?" Varley repeated.

He needed to know before he gave the order. And at this point, the Operations Chief was the last person Varley could trust on his ship.

His First Officer had been conspicuously absent most of the crisis. After wasting manpower on an exhaustive search, his body had been discovered in a secondary shuttlebay.

The working theory was that the First Officer had attempted to flee the ship when one of the power fluctuations left him trapped after the environmental systems failed.

Varley couldn't waste time wondering how or why a man he'd served with for years would suddenly make such a choice. He could have been a spy or simply frightened. He might have been cut off and trying to go for help.

The reason didn't matter.

First Officer Pennington was dead, and they would all join him soon enough.

"Are you sure Picard will-"

"He'll be here," Varley insisted.

The Operations Chief nodded in acknowledgement.

"Then, yes. I'm sure," he answered.

Donald Varley straightened his coffee-stained uniform. He cleared his throat and mentally prepared himself to give an order he had never expected.

Varley stepped through the arch.

He was greeted by a line of long faces.

"I know that what I'm asking of you is more than any of you signed on for," Varley acknowledged. "But you are our last, best hope to ensure something survives of the Yamato."

-X-

05:09 hours | USS Yamato

"Status update?" Varley prompted.

There was an audible pause. Everyone on the Bridge held their breath as they waited for a report from the team on deck 12.

Ship-wide communications were still down. Varley and his crew had rigged a clever workaround using short-range communicator toys from the school.

They had distributed the limited supply at strategic locations throughout the ship to use as a sort of 'telephone' line in passing messages.

Donald Varley sat back in the command chair and gently rapped his fingers on the arm rest.

Finally, the communicator clicked.

"The last group is aboard. We're sealing now."

The team was just waiting for Varley's order.

"Once you give the order, sir, I'll depressurise with the manual override," the Operations Chief advised.

Varley hesitated.

He briefly wondered if Ernest Shackelton felt much the same mix of trepidation and desperate fatalism as he prepared to launch his open-boat hail Mary after the loss of the Endurance.