Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.

Life. What is it all about? All my training in Starfleet… all that effort, and it can be ripped away in seconds. I’ve know some of these people for the best part of ten years… Gone… almost all of the. I log into the tactical station, relieving Ensign Pressley. To my right, Lt. Mason’s fingers dance gracefully over the controls. She initiates maneveuring thrusters, manually – a complex ballet of calculations, instinct and determination, evident in her face. The lights dim. The bridge is flushed in red. Maybe they do that so you can’t see the blood so well when it comes. It all happens so fast. A maelstrom of blue light flashes across the viewscreen, followed by a violent shudder. “Shields at 18 percent. We can’t take another hit like this” I hear someone cry out. I see the blue line on the viewscreen, heading inescapably towards us. A blinding flash. Fragments of Lt. Mason’s console overload. I see a fragment of glass lodge between her skull and her head jerks backward and then forward, her body lifeless like a ragdoll. The main viewscreen, now just a hole in the wall. The air is being forced out of me as i feel the vacuum of space suck the life out of me. I’m floating out into space. There is no sound. The silence as I drift uncontrollably into the dead of space belies the carnage I see around me. I can see the captain screaming, but I cannot hear her. Debris circles around me. My body begins to freeze as ice permeates my bones. Suddenly I feel a force push back on me, followed by tiny glimmers of white light. I thought it was the light at the end of the tunnel, but it was just the emergency forcefield activating. The sound is coming back now, the bridge is re-pressurising. I feel lightheaded and dizzy, I look up and see the Captain drop to the floor as the gravity generators recalibrate.

Lt Aethan Eckhart – USS Enterprise NCC 1701-G

“I’ve asked at the personnel department time and time again if they could please move me to some less exposed quarters on the other side of the station. Gazing out into open space through a giant window is kinda nauseating to say the least,  especially when you take into the account that Starbase 49 makes a full revolution on its axis ever 19 minutes due to its proximity to the gravometric distortions we’ve been researching.  To me it looks as if all the stars are moving the wrong way… Am I making sense here?”

Lt Susanna Kellerman, USS Lawson

“Part of my daily routine involves disabling the magnetic constrictors, so I can run a level three diagnostic on the secondary EPS couplings, which keeps the flow of plasma to all five warp nacelles nice and steady. It takes quite a bit of concentration to get the job done sometimes. I remember back in Norway when I was a child, my father would tell me about the days when he was a cadet in Starfleet, most ships only had two nacelles. Imagine that! I’ve recalibrated these things so many times I can always tell when adjustments need to be done. My ears have become so sensitive I can hear a 0.18 phase variance in a warp field through the bulkheads… No joke.”

- Ensign Lars Nystrom, USS Citadel.