Episode 51: "Drained"

Drained. That's how McMillan felt right now. It was ironic, since less than an hour ago it'd been the USS Gibraltar that was drained. Of power. Now that problem was solved, but at a terrible, terrible cost.

McMillan was sure he did the right thing, when following those Klingon ships. They needed answers, and the Klingon ships of the House of Kar'Tog had them. The Gibraltar crew – now fugitives, wanted by both Starfleet and the Klingon empire for a crime they were sure they didn't commit – needed to know what other revenge plans that Klingon House had. The best way of doing that, was by finding out where exactly these ships were going to, and what they were doing there.

Unfortunately, those ships were about as fast as the Gibraltar was. The only way to close in on them, was by going through an asteroid field. As before, McMillan was sure this was the only way. They needed to clear their names, their reputation. . . they needed to be exonerated. It was that simple.

But it wasn't. Within moments of entering the asteroid field, power started to be drained from the ship at an alarming rate. They came to a dead stop, and power was failing all over the ship. It was a trap, that much was obvious. No wonder the Klingons avoided the asteroid field. . .

There was no time to worry about this: they needed to do something before the Gibraltar would be without power at all. In one last attempt to find out what was going on, the crew found the source of this power dampening field: an abandoned ship in the middle of the asteroid field. It was too far away to get there by shuttle – and it would have its power drained too – so McMillan decided to beam over there. Once again, even as he stood at the transporterplatform, he was sure that this was the right decision.

Once they materialised on the abandoned ship though, the crew found out that it wasn't all that abandoned. There might not have been lifesigns, but the ship's automatic defence systems were still active. Luckily security was along to defend the other officers. This, McMillan knew, hadn't been the toughest challenge this crew had faced. They would succeed in their mission.

 

And for a while, it seemed as if they would. Even when automated robots started firing at the crew while they were in the dampening field generator room, McMillan never doubted that what they were doing was the right thing. That they would succeed. Pretty soon, he knew, they would have destroyed the generator, and they'd be able to beam back to the Gibraltar.

A large explosion shattered those dreams. The generator was destroyed alright, but the explosion had been an accident: an uncontrolled explosion as a result of automated defence mechanisms. It blew the crew off of their feet. There were some minor injuries, but one major one: Admiral Delacroix, the admiral who had been a 'guest' of the Gibraltar crew until they could prove their innocence, lay unmoving on the ground.

It was at that moment, when the single flat-line beep of the tricorder filled the halls, that McMillan's resolve started wavering. Admiral Delacroix was dead. Back on board the Gibraltar, it was confirmed: the Admiral, one of Starfleet's finest, had died in the explosion which had brought the Gibraltar's power back.

 

McMillan now stared out of the window, into space, as the torpedo with the Admiral's body in it was fired from the torpedobay. A burial in space, just like the Admiral would have wanted it. This was a sad day, that was for sure. A dark day. A day which would always be remembered as the day Admiral Delacroix gave his life in a mission he didn't want to be on, for a crew of fugitives.

McMillan sighed, and shook his head. The Admiral's death, he swore, would not be in vain. Where before he had been driven by the desire to right the wrongs that had been done upon his crew and himself, now his priorities changed. He would find out what was going on, so that Delacroix would not have died needlessly. His death would have a meaning.

If only they could find the Klingons now. . . or any other lead for that matter. . .