Angels Of Death

Posted on Tue May 27th, 2025 @ 9:24pm by Lieutenant Commander Angel Blake & Master Warrant Officer Yerin Di'Ara
Edited on on Sat May 31st, 2025 @ 8:37pm

2,986 words; about a 15 minute read

Mission: Mission 9: When the Stars Went Silent
Location: Denver Sickbay
Timeline: 2 Days after the battle of Vulcan

Another summons to sickbay, but this time it wasn’t about her guys acting the fool. This was more urgent. As she was nearby and due to the urgency Angel decided to answer the call herself. Dodging in between officers in the corridors at speed with a gymnast’s dexterity she arrived quickly, before the backup team she had called had been able to get there.

Locating the source once inside wasn’t difficult. Everyone was looking in the same direction. Angel skirted around various officers, stopping as the problem came into view. A large and rather battered looking marine, his back against the wall had taken a nurse, his arm wrapped around to top of her chest, a laser scalpel pointed at her neck. He was a very solid six foot two and even with the poor conditions and limited rations Angel suspected he had endured, he was still not far shy of two hundred pounds. His eyes were wild and unseeing, although they flicked between the assembled with distressed confusion. One of the doctors was trying to explain to him where he was. He wasn’t buying it.

Angel looked sideways to the medic next to her.

“Got a hypospray?” She asked.

Yerin nodded as she held up the device already loaded with a vial of Neurozine. “Ten cc’s already loaded, ma’am. I just haven’t been able to get close, not with him holding Nurse Gest hostage. He’s a marine. He’s too hyper aware of his surroundings.”

After her short break meeting with Lacey, Yerin had gone back to work to fulfill her promise and check in on Lieutenant Ashley and the others. While she didn’t know them really well, they were familiar faces, and hers seemed to help those awake brighten up even a little.

She’d been busy seeing to the critical care patients in between emergency calls to sickbay when the latest one caught her off guard. Outbursts weren’t uncommon, considering that for quite a few, the scars they bore weren’t just skin deep. Many lost family, friends, the only home they knew for a long time. Five years on a ship was a long time and even if you were fully cognizant of the fact that being in Starfleet was a dangerous occupation where loss was to be expected, it still didn’t soften the blow for quite a few people.

Nerves were frayed, everyone was tense, and all it took was the wrong word, or an unexpected touch, and someone could snap.

Or in the case of their latest incident, even absolutely nothing.

Angel watched as the doctor tried to talk him down. She watched him get more and more confused and distressed. Somehow he knew he shouldn’t hurt the woman he held, but there was panic, fight or flight, trauma, tiredness and a host of other things adding to his confusion. Angel had seen both marines and security in a similar condition before on her many ground actions. Talking to him in soft tones wouldn’t help.

“Doc, he’s a marine, not a school teacher,” Angel shot, cutting her off mid-sentence. “You’re appealing to his conscious mind. His conscious mind is nowhere here. He needs an ally, not a mother.” The doctor looked at her, mildly incensed.

“If you wish to take over, Lieutenant, fee…” but she didn’t get to finish that sentence either.

“Watch and learn,” Angel moved out from the throng of people, standing front and centre before the marine, drawing herself to her full and not insignificant height of five feet ten.

“Marine! At-ten-HUH!”

As she had hoped, the marine stood bolt upright, all other concerns forgotten. The laser scalpel was discarded, as was the nurse who immediately bounded out of the way. Angel darted forward and took a wad full of his uniform with her hand and pulled. One boot went behind his knee and in a flash he was face first on the floor. Angel quickly recovered to hold him down with a knee on the small of his back, leaning to grasp his forearms. She had his right with her own, well under control due to the cybernetics, but the left was more of a problem. He started to move under her, starting to lift his back. She looked to Yerin.

“Now, do it!” She shouted.

She was already moving before the lady with the bionic arm could finish her sentence, rushing to close the distance before anything else happened. Fortunately for them, despite the noticeable size difference between them, the security chief was able to keep him pinned down long enough for Yerin to apply the hypospray to his neck and the carotid artery. One push of a button delivered 10cc’s of the powerful sedative that was also used for psychiatric patients. In no time at all, the medication took effect, and it was nighty night for the troubled marine. She pressed her fingers to his neck to check his pulse while her other hand held a tricorder to check his vitals. She sighed in relief to see that the sedation didn’t have any untoward side effects, at least none that she could see.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Yerin said to their hero with a smile. “Well take over from here.” At that she turned to the side and beckoned two junior nurses over. “Ormar, Zuksu. Take him to psych and report to the attending what happened. Then page the counselor on duty for a consult.”

“Yes, Ms. Di’Ara,” came the chorus in unison as the two worked quickly with Yerin to secure him to a gurney and whisked him away.

Seeing that the doctor was already taking care of Nurse Gest, and everyone else was cleaning up the aftermath of the outburst, the incident was all but over. “Thanks again for your quick assistance, ma’am. Glad you were able to respond when you did. I guess this wasn’t your first time encountering something like that.”

Angel regarded the warrant officer with no warmth in her expression whatsoever. The cloudiness in her cybernetic eye shifted as it focussed on the nurse’s neck, taking in her rank, and again as she looked back up, taking in the nurse’s pleasant smile. Angel hoped she wouldn’t be too ‘pleasant’. Angel hated pleasant.

“I wish it was,” she said, nodding slightly with wry resignation. “There was no intellect to appeal to there. The guy was acting on pure instinct, training, adrenaline, trauma and a fat dose of confusion. Just glad it was a marine, they have discipline, unlike some of my lot. That wouldn’t have worked on them. No thanks necessary though. It’s my job, Warrant Officer,” Angel observed coolly, an utterance that could be taken as chastisement by someone sensitive. “You were quick on the mark. Well done,” she added with an air of mild respect. She did have to help build morale after all.

“Thank you, ma’am,” the medic replied with a sigh. “Though sadly, not my first time either. I’m just glad that this time I didn’t need to fight the guy to knock him out like that one time.”

She couldn’t help but wince at the memory. That had been… rough.

Yerin hadn’t really spoken to her before this incident, there hadn’t really been any reason to. While she did work as a combat medic for security operations too, that was back on the Bellerophon. This was an entirely different ship, not her own. She’d seen her once or twice before, her distinct features were impossible to miss. Given her personality, she previously thought she was a former borg, not that she’d met anyone like that before, but apparently that wasn’t the case.

“The scary part is that… sometimes, you just can tell when they’re going to snap,” she related. “I wish we had more counselors aboard. They’re more shorthanded than we are.”

Angel pouted in thought.

“Needs time to get through that level of trauma,” she observed. “Time, a quiet and peaceful environment, effort, entertainment whether it's work or play, a lot of searching of the self, defining new norms, getting to know yourself again when you've changed beyond your own recognition.”

She sighed, looking over to where the marine was being stretchered away.

“We can't offer him that here, not now, not with everything going on.” She shook her head and her gaze fell back to Yerin.

“You really punch out a patient?” She asked, changing tack and looking slightly amused.

Yerin smiled wryly as she scratched her chin with a fingertip. “Well… not exactly. It was a few years ago, and one of the people we rescued had a psychotic break in the recovery ward. Beat one of the patients to a pulp, apparently because he resembled someone he hated. There were only two of us there at the time and we struggled to pull him back. Sent my colleague flying and he turned his anger on me.”

The memory had her touching her chin as she made a face. “He was bigger and stronger than me, and I didn’t have anything as a weapon. I kept trying to talk him down but he ended up… um… hurting me badly. So I responded in kind. I was scared, and I was worried that once I was out, he’d hurt the others.”

Cracked ribs, a dislocated jaw, a couple of knocked out teeth, facial trauma and a concussion was pretty bad but compared to what she did to get him to stop, she got off easy. But while she knew it was necessary, she really hated having to do that. If it were back home on Orlan, it never would have gotten to that point.

“Ever since then, I’m a lot quicker than most with the hypospray,” she said with a smirk. “But that was clever, getting him to react subconsciously like that. And that hold… pivot with an armlock for pain compliance while offsetting his leverage and center of balance to keep him down despite him being bigger than you. I guess you’re very used to having to do that, huh?”

The cyborg regarded Yerin with a chilly detachment. She certainly had guts, that much was obvious. She decided to give the woman a quick test. Angel was trying to work out who amongst the various departments had real mettle and who was a bit damp. The Captain checking herself out of sickbay in her state cemented her as being as hard as Angel’s right fist was. But she could do with a dependable medic to request for things, perhaps the former Mental-health… was she a nurse?... was it.

“I mean, yeah we’re supposed to subdue rather than remove threats when on board ship. What I’m used to though, Warrant Officer, is spotting incoming Jem’hadar, surprising them by reacting before they’re out of cloak and then snapping their necks and depositing their limp corpses in the most prominent position possible to put the fear of hell in the rest of them. You’d be surprised how the supposedly focussed group of Dominion fighting machines can pause for a moment when they see their First missing a chunk of neck or innards and bleeding all over the floor at the feet of a woman, even if she is power-assisted…”

Angel looked down to her right hand and flexed her fingers with a faint mechanical whine. And then she looked back up to Yerin to see how she’d react. Distaste? Keep looking. She hoped the Warrant Officer wouldn’t even blink. Certainly Angel would happily go back to that life if just to work out her Anger at what the Dominion had pulled at Vulcan.

Yerin smirked and then nodded at the story. “The caution of a predator that realizes they’re now the prey,” she related. “Sort of like when you realize you just entered a minefield.”

While the Orlanian nurse was generally cheerful and unfazed by most things, there was no love lost between her and the Dominion. “War is war, and I’ve already made my peace with how things are early on. But whenever I see the evidence of what those bastards like to do to the wounded and how they specifically target people like me whenever they identify us on the field, it makes me glad I trained as a combat medic and not just a nurse. There were more than a few times that I was glad I could let off some steam and return the favor. Made me discover a few things about them too.”

“If you stab them right here,” she said as she pointed to a couple of spots on her lower back and on the armpit. “You do it right, you can see them get noticeably slower and uncoordinated. Bonus points if you cut an artery. Apparently they’re major pressure points, enough to hurt even for someone with crazy high pain thresholds. And it persists, not just a one time thing. Even the White doesn’t blunt it completely. Must be like how it is for guys when they get kicked between the legs but much worse.”

Angel chuckled.

“Wouldn’t know about that uhh… what is your name anyway?”

“Oops, how rude of me,” said the nurse as she made a playful rapping motion with her knuckles at the top of her head before extending said hand by way of introduction then wondered if her bionic hand would crush hers in a handshake. “Pleasure to meet you, ma’am. I’m Yerin Di’Ara. I’m a critical care nurse, but I’m also a combat medic.”

“Heh, rude, as if. Angel Blake.” Angel reached out with her left to shake the medic’s hand. “You don’t want me to shake your hand with the other one, trust me.”

She chuckled and quickly swapped hands to shake with her left. “Yeah, I definitely believe you.”

“Combat medic huh,” Angel went on. “Well that explains a lot. I’ll be asking for you for my missions, if that’s okay by you. You wanna remf it up instead that’s fine, but I suspect you don’t. Not with history and knowledge like yours. I’ll want people who know exactly where to stick one of those motherfuckers. Y’know that back thing… that makes sense, I think i might have punched one there once, couldn’t work out why he started staggering after that. Fucker didn’t last long enough for it to be important. White can’t stim them out of a missing head. Y’know, you might think that watching the life drift from their eyes is the best part, but nah. It’s the look of surprise just before you crush their C3 and C4 into dust. Or cave their lungs in with their own ribs…”

Angel looked almost satisfied saying this. She was definitely giving sociopath and realising this after a few moments dialled it back a bit.

“Sorry. They call me Crusher for a reason. Not my favourite but i’ll take it.”

Yerin laughed at that. “They called me the Angel of Death on the Bellerophon. Wasn’t my favorite either so I can relate. And don’t worry, I’m more than happy to share killing tips and my insights on Jem Hadar physiology whenever you’re game. I mean I’ve tried out many ways on how to actually make the White work against them, especially if you want to leave them alive longer than what Starfleet considers… um… ‘humane’. Funny since neither I nor they are humans, and human history has been far more violent than most.”

“And I’d happily be your medic if you need to, ma’am but… uh, I must confess, I’m not actually a member of this ship,” she revealed. “I’m one of the survivors from the USS Bellerophon.’.

Angel shook her head with an amused smirk.

“Angel of Death,” she commented with some compersion. “Using my first name in vain huh… shocking behaviour… well i dare say you will be a member of this crew before long. All departments are taking stock of what resources they have aboard, assigned here or otherwise. I was ordering marines around to places until Gus got his pants in a bunch. We’re working with what we have. Which isn’t much. Speaking of, I should go. A tactical officer’s work is never done. Who needs sleep anyway?”

Angel clapped Yerin on the upper-arm with some jocular affection, fortunately using her left. Unknown to Yerin this was a sign of great regard. The Security Chief couldn’t always be authentically herself and appreciated Yerin for the opportunity. She turned and started to head for the exit. “Nice to meet you, Angel,” she called back to the nurse, without turning around.

The change in the other woman had been fascinating to Yerin, starting off as subtle at first, until it was like she was an entirely different person. She might not have known her for long, or even all that well, but she’d been around security types, marines, and mercenaries to know that many of them tend to hide their real selves both as a force of habit and as a defense mechanism. And to see her reveal herself to her this way felt… nice, like she was being accepted in a different way.

“Well if you ever find yourself having trouble with sleep, come find me,” Yerin offered at the retreating figure. “I have a few ways to help deal with that. Nice to meet you too!”

 

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