Confined to Sickbay

Posted on 24 Oct 2026 @ 3:31pm by Story Teller & Commander Madelina Barnes & Commander Camila Di Pasquale & Lieutenant Ranul Frex & Lieutenant T’Mari Rael & Lieutenant Lucas Abrams M.D. & Lieutenant JG Daniella Blake & Lieutenant JG Harleigh Kane

2,682 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Acceleration
Location: Sickbay
Timeline: February 8, 2391 || 2130 hours

T’Mari had spent a little time simply making her rounds reassuring others, and offering some comfort to those who needed it. She paused massaging her temples, her headache was getting worse rather than better, and she was finding her senses more sensitive than ever. She wasn’t sure what it meant, but she didn’t like it.

Maddy leaned back slightly from the illuminated console, her eyes burning slightly as the final lines of the comprehensive report on the Tiburon’s recent operations in the nebula finished compiling.

A heavy, lingering fatigue began to settle over her bones, accompanied by a subtle, uncomfortable warmth that made the fabric of her uniform feel suddenly restrictive. Frowning through her sudden exhaustion, she reached up to tug reflexively at the collar of her uniform, trying to ease the tightness before shaking off the distraction. Taking a steadying breath, she forced her tired eyes back to the primary display screen, forcing her focus back onto the information of the Tiburon's active logs.

Dani stepped into main sickbay, her boots clicking softly against the deck as she returned from checking on the status of the ward's current patients. The sterile, quiet hum of the biobeds provided a brief backdrop to her thoughts as she paused to look over the individuals currently held in quarantine within the department.

A lingering sense of unease settled over her. She couldn't help but wonder if anyone from their own crew—those who hadn't even been part of the initial away team—might soon end up walking through those very doors needing treatment for something they didn't yet understand.

Lucas let out a quiet breath, glancing down at his uniform. He certainly hadn't expected to be called in for duty under circumstances quite like this. Yet, standing in the thick of it, he knew that his oath to the Federation and his duty as a doctor meant he would be there regardless of what personal toll it might take.

A brief, grounding thought of Aurilia crossed his mind, and he felt a sharp wave of gratitude that she wasn't currently on the ship to have to deal with this crisis. Shifting his focus back to the immediate emergency, he looked over toward Dani and T'Mari.

"How are our patients holding up?" he asked, keeping his voice steady.

Dani glanced up from the diagnostic readout, her expression focused. "Their vitals are currently stable and being monitored closely," she answered.

The large man looked to the counselor. "Are you picking up anything, Lieutenant?"

T’Mari looked towards Lucas. “Just about everything.” She sighed and massaged her temples. “Sorry I’m tired, and I’ve had a headache for a while now.”

Camila paced back and forth, pausing to give orders over her combadge as she tried to wrap her Security orientated mind around a Medical problem. She couldn't fight what she couldn't see and this was far worse than anything the ship and crew had encountered. The Dolmoquor had been bad, but this was far worse. The enemy was already present and the attack had already commenced without a shot being fired. How could she deal with that?

Ensign Jerkins lay strapped to a biobed in Sickbay aboard the USS Black Hawk The ship's logs said his crewmates had begun changing within hours of entering the phenomenon—some developing unmistakable animal characteristics, others undergoing bizarre cellular transformations until their bodies became luminous energy, while several simply walked into the transporter room and somehow beamed themselves directly into open space. Jerkins had been unconscious when the Black Hawk recovered him. Now, beneath the sterile lights of Sickbay, his eyes snapped open. He tried to sit up, but a violent shudder passed through his body.

His senses had suddenly become impossibly sharp. He could hear the quiet pulse of the biobed, the ventilation system, even the footsteps of someone moving three corridors away. His heart began pounding. A strange pressure spread across his face and down his spine. He looked at his hands and froze. The fine hairs covering his knuckles were lengthening, darkening, and becoming coarse. His fingernails thickened into small, curved points. "Doctor..." Jerkins whispered. "Something's happening."

The medical readout on the biobed chirped rapidly as the readings began changing faster than the computer could classify them. Then his jaw clenched involuntarily, and a deep ache spread through his teeth. Jerkins gasped as his canine teeth began pushing painfully against his gums.

A chill ran down T’Mari’s spine as she spun around as her senses picked up on what was happening. Her headache momentarily forgotten as her eyes widened at the sight taking place not far from where she was. There wasn’t much she could do except move away hoping the biobed restraints were going to hold whatever Jenkins was turning into. “Computer! Erect a level one containment field around biobed one.”

Harleigh had been monitoring the biobed's readings when the sudden spike in activity caught her attention. She turned toward Jerkins just as the first visible changes began. The look on her face moved from clinical focus to concern as she watched the hair along his hands darken and lengthen.

"Okay..." she murmured, stepping closer to the biobed and bringing her tricorder up. "That's new."

Then the containment field snapped into place. "Jerkins, I need you to stay as still as you can for me. I know that's easier said than done right now. But we're going to figure out what's happening," she said, her voice calm and reassuring despite what she was seeing. 

The tricorder chirped again, and Harleigh's eyebrows rose as another cluster of readings changed. "Doctor, we've got rapid cellular changes throughout the body," she called out. "It's not localized. Whatever's happening, it's affecting multiple systems simultaneously."

Lucas didn’t hesitate, calling for the computer to lower the containment field to allow him access. At Harleigh's words, he rushed toward the biobed, his medical training taking over in an instant. He began to physically check the rapid, alarming shifts in the crewman's anatomy. The changes were already palpable—muscle mass shifting under tightening skin, bone structure altering beneath his fingers, and a dangerous, primal heat radiating from the man's body.

A few feet away, Maddy approached cautiously, stopping short as a visible shiver ran down her spine. Her eyes locked onto the man struggling on the biobed. Deep down, a terrifying realization gripped her: her own transformation into something entirely unknown was likely to start at any given second. But looking at Jerkins now, the truth was stark and unmistakable—he wasn't just changing; he was turning into a predator.

Stepping closer to the edge of the bed, Maddy looked toward the others with grim urgency. "If something isn't done right now, we’re all going to end up becoming the prey, just like the bridge crew aboard the Tiburon."

The large man snapped his head up at her words, his gaze darting from Maddy back to the thrashing, mutating form of Jerkins. Finally, his eyes landed on Harleigh. "Administer twenty ccs of melorazine , Nurse Kane," Lucas ordered, his voice cutting through the tension with absolute clinical resolve. "His mutation is going to continue to happen whether he’s conscious or not, and at least this way we can keep him contained while we figure out how to treat him."

“Are you sure that’ll work?” T’Mari added from where she stood. “If his body is mutating that fast it may have no effect on his metabolism.”

As T’Mari voiced her concern from across the room, questioning whether a hyper-accelerated metabolism would simply burn through the drug, Lucas didn't look up from his work. He reached out to manually override the biobed's injector port to ensure a direct, immediate delivery.

"It will work," Lucas assured her, his tone steady and clinical despite the tension in the room. "The compound we're using doesn't rely on standard hepatic processing to take effect. It's engineered to act directly on the central nervous system, dampening nerve communications and slowing brain activity at a cellular level regardless of how fast his metabolism is trying to reconfigure itself."

Dani didn’t waste a second. As Lucas spoke, she rushed across the room toward the medical supply locker, pulling a standard-issue hypospray from the rack. With practiced precision, she snapped open a fresh ampule of melorazine, loading the heavy sedative into the device with a sharp click.

Spinning on her heel, she hurried over to the biobed and handed the primed hypospray directly to Harleigh. "Here," the petite nurse said. "It's primed and ready to go."

Harleigh accepted the hypo spray from Dani with a nod. "Thanks," she said and stepped in beside the biobed. She pressed it against Jerkins' neck and depressed the trigger. It hissed as the melorazine entered his system. "Twenty ccs, administered," she reported, immediately bringing her tricorder back up to monitor the response.

Her eyes moved rapidly across the readings. "Come on..." she murmured under her breath.

"Chi cazzo!" Camila uttered as she watched the young Ensign's body convulse and his skin moving like something was rearranging what was under it. She pulled her phaser out and pushed the setting up to three. "If that doesn't work, this will."

T’Mari’s skin was crawling, her senses were more sensitive than she’d ever known them to be as she watched what was happening to Jerkins, a strong threat reaction was triggering a change for her, and only time would tell how soon that would reveal itself.

She watched the numbers for another moment before looking toward Lucas. "His neural activity is still elevated. And I'm only seeing a slight change."

Harleigh kept the tricorder trained on Jerkins, her expression tense as she watched the transformation continue. "Whatever's happening to him, the sedative isn't stopping it. But it might be buying us a little time."

Lucas frowned, his brows furrowing deep as Harleigh reported the minimal effect of the melorazine. The sight of Camila drawing her phaser didn't shock him; in fact, as he watched the terrifying shifts beneath Jerkins' skin, a grim realization settled over him. Perhaps Camila's drastic idea might ultimately be what was necessary if they couldn't get the situation under control.

"The virus, or whatever this anomaly is, has taken full control of him now," Lucas said, raising his voice slightly so everyone in the crowded sickbay could hear. "In no time, we're going to be dealing with something extremely dangerous."

He hated the thought of overloading a patient's system with heavy chemical intervention, but the safety of everyone in the room—and potentially the ship—had to come first. Weighing the heavy burden of his medical oath, Lucas looked across the room toward Camila and gave her a firm, decisive nod. If stunning him unconscious became the only line of defense, he would deal with the medical and emotional fallout later.

Camila swallowed and swung the phaser towards the young Ensign that was transforming in front of their eyes and pressed the firing stud. One second of setting three was more than enough to render the young man immobile and she gave a shuddering breath before she holstered the phaser again.

"I truly hope that I don't have to do that to more of them," she said as she looked towards the Trill, Vulcan and Andorian crew members they had beamed over from the Tiburon.

Dani frowned as the hum of the phaser faded, watching the young Ensign's body finally grow still under the force of the energy discharge. A knot of unease tightened in her chest; she didn’t necessarily agree with resorting to a weapon in sickbay, but given the overwhelming need to keep everyone safe—including Jerkins himself—it was a grim, necessary evil. Not to mention, having him unconscious would at least make managing his volatile physiology a bit safer while they searched for answers.

As soon as the man's convulsions ceased, Lucas didn't waste a second. He stepped right up to the containment field, motioning for the medical access port to open as he readied his tricorder and medical tools. With Jerkins finally still, they would be able to pull proper, unobstructed scans of the cellular mutations sweeping through his body, which the large man sent directly to the lab where Harvey, Kennedy and Daynah were working.

Hearing Camila's tense remark about the other quarantined crew members, Lucas glanced up from his tricorder display, his expression grim. "I truly hope we won't have to resort to that again either, Commander," Lucas replied, his voice heavy with the weight of the situation. He tapped a quick sequence into the biobed console to log the baseline data. "Right now, though, I have no idea what we're actually up against—except for the clock ticking down on all of us."

Maddy staggered forward as a sharp, blinding wave of pain surged through her midsection, knocking the breath from her lungs. Instinctively, she reached out, her fingers going around T’Mari’s arm to steady herself.

Deep down, a cold dread settled over her: she knew her own mutation into something entirely unknown was likely to start any second now. But even as the agonizing transformation threatened to rip away her control, a fierce resolve flared in her chest. She wasn't going to surrender to it easily—she planned to fight it off for every last second she had left.

Camila looked over as Commander Weisz staggered and wondered if the Executive Officer were affected, and how long before she would start showing signs as well. Despite all her planning, she hadn't prepared for this. She frowned as the noise in Sickbay seemed to intensify a bit, but it seemed entirely out of proportion to what was going on.

Lucas kept his eyes on the biobed readouts until Jerkins' vitals settled into a steady, albeit altered, rhythm. Once he was certain the Ensign was out of trouble, he turned his attention directly to Maddy, noticing the white-knuckled grip she had on the counselors uniform. "Commander," Lucas said, stepping closer with a look of concern. "Are you okay?"

Maddy swallowed hard, forcing her breathing to even out as the initial surge of pain receded into a dull, thrumming ache. She gave a tight nod and slowly released her hold on T'Mari's, taking a small step back to stand under her own power. "I'm sorry, Lieutenant Rael," Maddy murmured, her voice slightly strained as she offered an apologetic look. "I didn't mean to grab you like that."

Nearby, the biobed display flickered. It was a brief moment, something easily concealed by the blink of an eye.

T’Mari offered Maddy a concerned look. “That’s okay Commander, you can hold on as much as you need.”

Lucas was so focused on Maddy's pale face and strained posture that he missed the quiet, momentary flicker of the nearby biobed screen entirely. "Commander, let's get you onto a biobed," he urged, his voice filled with gentle but firm authority as he began to step toward her with his medical tricorder at the ready. "We need to get a full scan of your current cellular baseline before—"

Maddy shook her head quickly, holding up a hand to stop him in his tracks. "I'm fine, Doctor Abrams," she insisted, forcing her voice to stay steady despite the dull ache throbbing behind her eyes. "I'm not sitting this out on a bed while we're in the middle of a crisis. I can still function, and I want to help where I can."

"Can people stop talking so loud?" Camila asked as she flinched when Maddy responded to the Doctor, and the Doctor's booming voice seemed to come from the depths of his massive chest.

Camila's request was soon granted, but not in the way she would have imagined. The lights in sickbay suddenly cut out, and the floor gave way underneath everyone's feet. Glass broke, sparks flew.

Everything had come to a stop.

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