Final Respects

Posted on 03 Apr 2017 @ 3:12pm by Lieutenant Commander Camila Di Pasquale

1,138 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Shore Leave
Location: USS Black Hawk
Timeline: End Game Backpost

Lieutenant Camila Di Pasquale, former Chief of Security for the USS Black Hawk looked at the wreckage of the Akira class ship she had served on for months. The nacelles had been either destroyed during the battle or in entry before the crash on New Bajor and the entire ship looked like it had taken far more of a beating than it had.

That would be a neat trick Camila mused. Considering all the damage it took fighting the Chimera and Cochrane before being blown into an alternate universe where they had to fight the Karemma and confederation there. The Black Hawk wasn't even fully healed from those fights before it began its end run to Deep Space Eleven with several other Starfleet ships and a surprise force of Jem'Hadar ships and had taken the fatal blow.

She hadn't been on the ship when it had gone down. She and Lieutenant Corwin had been on Deep Space Eleven attempting to get a message out to everyone about the Consortium. Her team had made it, but Lieutenant Corwin had been taken out of action and her team had aborted the mission to get her medical help. Still, she wondered if things would have been different if she had been aboard and in charge of Security and Tactical. She had heard reports that the Black Hawk had given what it had taken and she had to commend Lieutenant Cooper for that when she saw her.

Now Camila approached the broken starship and felt moisture forming in her eyes. Her home was now a broken hulk in the Valley of Abnorath and would never fly among the stars again. She rubbed her eyes and checked her tricorder that held the deck listings on it and would give her warnings if the integrity of an area she was going to be walking on was too weak to support her.

She entered a gaping hole on deck four and stepped carefully around piles of jagged metal that could easily cut a limb off if she fell on them. She checked her tricorder and saw that the armory was just ahead, which was one of the places she had planned on stopping. Bertha should still be there and she had no plans to leave her .454 magnum and 30 mm grenade launcher behind.

It took a good twenty minutes of finding alternate ways to get there, but Camila finally forced the door open manually and looked inside. What was once an orderly, organized armory now looked as if it been looted by an angry child. There were broken phasers and parts laying around, the workstation lay at an odd angle where it had been torn loose during the crash and a number of drones used for target practice where scattered everywhere.

She shook her head and made her way to the special lockers where personal weapons were stored and was pleased to see that they were still intact. She tried to force them open with a bar that had formerly supported something, but when that didn't work, she found a micro cutting torch and began to cut it open around the edges. When she had it open, she went to get one of the belts that Cooper had suggested for Security, a backpack for away missions and began to load it up. Bertha was unharmed in the box she had stored it in and she carefully removed it and holstered the big gun before strapping it to her waist on the belt.

Camila saw more personal weapons, including the homemade disruptor that the former Chief Engineer had given her in trust and an act of faith, but only removed the power cell from it. A larger storage locker revealed a trove of ancient ballistic weapons that she remembered belonged to Lieutenant Corwin and she packed up the ones that would fit in the backpack, regretting that she couldn't get them all. Still, she grabbed the two big .50 caliber pistols that Joey had taken to Razmena and made a special place for them.

She shook her head to clear those thoughts and checked her tricorder as she made her way out of the armory. She couldn't take the turbolifts up to deck two, so she made her way back to the gash in the hull and left the backpack there with other personnel who were guarding the remains of the ship from looters, then made her way back in after getting another backpack, this one with a few straps to it.

It was an arduous climb up to deck two where the personal quarters for the senior officers were located. Three times, Camila had to go around obstacles in the Jeffries Tubes and find another way up, but she finally came out to the source of a disaster. A terrible rent had torn away several areas of the corridor, leaving exposed wiring that was thankly no longer active, blacked bits of metal and other things that she couldn't identify.

Finally, Camila came to her former quarters and manually opened the door, but hesitated before she went in. This was the place where she and Bast had last officially been a couple. The place where she had tried to make her home and had offered it to him as well. She shook her head and forced herself into the quarters and saw that it was in complete disarray.

It took twenty minutes but she managed to find one electric violin that survived the crash and the holoprogram stick that she had been using when Captain Geisler had promoted her in the holodeck after Del Rosario had been incarcerated and she became the Chief of Security. She remembered every detail about it and thanks to recording it live, she had the memories in perfect detail on the stick. She tucked it away in a pocket, collected a few other odds and ends and made her way out again.

If Bast wants anything, he can get it himself, she thought as she made her up up to the bridge. It was still battle scarred and would never change and she shook her head as she remembered the times she had served on it and almost died on it when the tricobalt device had blown the Romulan Valdor and three ships into the alternate universe.

She stood there for long minutes paying her final respects silently to the ship that had been her first space-faring home, then made her way out. Once she collected the backpack she had left with the other personnel, she went to the shuttle that she had waiting on her and headed for the station. From there, it was finding transports back to Earth to await orders for her next assignment.

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