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Caelian groaned as he hauled himself out of the black and into the pulsing red of consciousness. He had to blink a few times before his vision cleared. Sitting up brought a wave of revulsion that pulled from his toes, and he flopped onto his side to quell it. Was the ship rocking? Something damp clung to the back of his head, and probing fingers sent pain crackling along his skull. His palm glistened in the crimson flare of the emergency lights. Every sensation was agony, every thought a struggle. The last he remembered the world leapt forward in an actinic flash, movement without motion, before the world lunged to swallow him.

“Weir to Jackson,” he grunted, slapping his comm badge. It squelched angrily at him in reply. “Weir to Bridge.”

Comm systems must be down, he grumbled, hauling himself to his feet. All around him others were likewise picking themselves up or were being helped to their feet by luckier peers. The chief seemed unharmed; that was good. Dragging himself to a nearby console, he teased the controls to life and squinted at the readout. The Ark Angel appeared derelict but intact, operating at minimal power with every system overwhelmed. He couldn’t tell over the pounding in his ears, but Caelian swore they were no longer moving. That suited his stomach just fine.

They must have been bombarded with more energy than they’d prepared for. Caelian tried to sift through his memories of the sensor readings before they were flung wherever they’d ended up, but it was like sand in his fingers. Though hazed in emergency lights it appeared there was no lasting damage to the ship, no serious damage or compromised systems. That suited him just fine, since it could have gone to hell in the best of his projections. He would never admit it, but it had truly come down to luck in the end. He was just glad that the ship had been designed to handle power loads as it had. If they hadn’t directed the flow as they had or provided a measure of safety…

“L’Nel.”

The thought struck him to his core, sent a chill through his bones. Before he could stop himself, Caelian had scooped up his toolkit and was halfway into a jefferies tube. He shouted something he hoped was intelligible over his shoulder before he hauled the panel shut behind him, then began to crawl. Clanking, cursing, battering, and bleeding he scrambled through the dimly-lit corridors and access panels. He wasn’t even aware of what deck he was on or the junction he just passed. Caelian felt a desperate pull on his heart and he tumbled along after it.

An eternal instant later he was grasping desperately at the door to the mission module where the Vulcan and his team had set up the interlink. The hatch’s bulk protested, hissed a fraction open. He strained, pulled, and it gave another inch. Each breath seared his lungs, and his bones felt brittle enough to snap, but he grit his teeth and roared to the heavens until it gave. Gasping, Caelian wrenched himself through the gap, hoping that his friend was still alive.
—Caelian Weir, Engineer—

Weir entered the general purpose suite 1 to find it awash in flame with the fire suppression system offline, panels sparked and flared in the middle with the Vulcan bloodied but slumped over the console surrounded by high intensity flames. Thankfully like on all major decks emergency manual controls by an extinguisher were on hand.

Once Weir grabbed said extinguisher and got moving he was just in time to blow out the most pressing flame points to save his friend from more than cursory light burns.

GM CockRoach

A blast of heat nearly knocked him off his feet as he tumbled into the chamber. He threw up his arm reflexively to shield his face, squinted against the cloying smoke. Flames blistered along the decking, licked hungrily up the walls and along the consoles. Already a thick cloud of smoke roiled against the ceiling overhead like some malevolent force searching for escape. A gout of sparks leapt at him from a blown panel nearby, disgorging sizzling lengths of cable. Caelian batted them away, then turned to a nearby access port. The panel was uncomfortably hot but came free easily enough in his grasp. He retrieved the canister of fire suppressant within and pulled the safety pin, spraying a thick foam at his feet to dampen the zealous flames licking his boots.

“L’Nel!” he roared into the growling conflagration. “L’Nel, answer me!”

A mewling groan from deeper in the chamber caught his attention, and Caelian pressed forward slathering retardant foam along his path. A blackened figure emerged from the heart of the flames, crumpled over a console array not far from a fractured chair. Panic surged in his chest and Caelian rushed to his friend’s side. Soot darkend the Vulcan’s already tanned skin, and he could see trails of green ichor oozing from several wounds. Throwing one of the Vulcan’s arms across his shoulder, Caelian heaved the man to his feet and began to drag him back along the path he’d forged.

Smoke searing his lungs, Caelian forced a smile through a wracking cough. “Stay with me. I can’t fix this all by myself.”

A pained groan from the Vulcan could have meant anything, but it didn’t matter. It could have been the most scathing rebuke and Caelian would have been happy.

The whine of deck plating overhead urged him onward, and soon the two were back at the door. With a muttered apology, Caelian pushed the Vulcan unceremoniously through the gap before crawling after. He managed to get them both clear before a beam tumbled from the ceiling in a scream of tortured metal. Pulling another nearby panel open, Caelian hauled on the emergency lever and cranked the door shut once more.

L’Nel’s head lolled on his shoulders as he tried to rise. The engineer crab crawled over to the Vulcan and put a calming hand on his chest. “Lie still. I’ve got to seal off the module so the flames don’t spread, and you’re in no condition to help. It shouldn’t take long; we’ll get you to sickbay soon.”

“Did…” L’Nel’s voice was as blackened as his uniform. “Did we succeed?”

Caelian nodded, and it seemed to soothe the Vulcan. He hadn’t the heart to tell the other man that he didn’t know. As he hauled himself into an access hatch, Caelian wondered the very same. With the ship completely dead in space, and with no means of communication with anyone else, he really had no way of knowing. The thought that they’d just blown every relay on the ship just to go nowhere was sobering. But no, it had to have worked! Otherwise, all this had been a waste.

Once he’d ratcheted the adjacent bulkheads shut to contain the fire, Caelian returned to his friend. With luck, the fire would consume all the oxygen in the module and smother itself. If not? Well, they’d burn that bridge when they came to it. If nothing else, it would buy the repair teams time to restore the ship’s systems and hopefully get fire control back online.

“Let’s see how bad this is,” Caelian murmured as he knelt next to the Vulcan, taking L’Nel’s head gingerly in his hands. “Assuming, that is, I can remember my Starfleet field medical training.”

L’Nel managed to give him a pointed look. “Your bedside manner is not encouraging to that effect, Ensign.”

“No one asked you. Now hold still!”
—Caelian Weir, Engineer—

[OOC: Figured I’d move it away from the Engineering thread as to not cause a further split]