STF

Mason and Paris - Taking a Break

Posted Jan. 25, 2020, 3:26 a.m. by Commander Mason Black (Executive Officer) (David Shotton)

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Paris Carisi (Armorer/Physicist) in Mason and Paris - Taking a Break

Posted by Lieutenant Commander Paris Carisi (Armorer/Physicist) in Mason and Paris - Taking a Break
Snip

The giant beetle wandered off on the opposite direction from where they stood, and Mason let go of Paris’ legs and stood, pulling her to her feet beside him. “Okay we are out, now we just have to figure out where we are. We can’t be too far from the colony.” He had barely finished talking when a loud explosion sounded above and behind them, loud enough that the two of them could feel it as they stood and the goo they were in rippled violently. Turning around, Mason noticed now the thick black plume of smoke coming from the top of the ancient volcano, and the large flaming rocks that were now falling from the top and landing on the slopes above them with a spatter. The rumbling in the ground had grown now, and began to shake violently as sharp Earthquakes began to make it hard for the two of them to stand. “Paris!” Mason called out, grabbing her hand.

“We need to move, again. I don’t think this place likes us!” Wading through the goop, he pulled Paris with him. “This planet is supposed to be stable!” He almost yelled angrily. “The Terraforming is supposed to be a success, and there are supposed to be no active faults in this section of the crust, what the hell is going on?”

Cmdr Black, XO

Paris had a hard time keeping up with Mason for many reasons. The main one was his stride. On a normal day it was just past comfortable for her to keep up with him. With the threat of bodily harm imminent and Mason really jacked off over the failed colony cover-up, Mason’s stride was strained for him to cover more ground making Paris essentially be dragged behind him. If he hadn’t been holding her hand, he would have left her behind within a few steps. Yet Mason’s grip never lessened. Closing her fingers around his hand even tighter, Paris fought to keep up with his pace. “Mason I can’t keep up. We need to get out of this goop,” she stated the obvious.

“Don’t think about it, just run!” He barked at her and held her hand tighter. He couldn’t slow down, not with a volcano doing it’s thing close to them and earthquakes starting to become a problem.

Since she could not give up Paris did keep up until the goop thinned enough for the couple to exit to dry land.

Lt. Commander Paris Carisi.

Which was only for a moment, before a roaring whistle made Mason look up and slide to a halt. Not waiting longer than a breath, he turned and rugby tackled Paris back prone into the goop again, the both of them landing with a splat as a huge rock of steaming molten magma landed a dozen meters in front of where they had been standing, spraying superheated rock everywhere and exploding with a force that made their re-entry to the goo a soundless event.

“Stopped.  Why have we stah,” Paris replied in a slightly tinny quality through her hazmat suit.  Her sentence was abruptly ended by Mason coming at her like he was on the All-Blacks and she a team from Australia with the ball.    The impact knocked the air from her lungs but Mason kept his hand around her waist so that her body did not take the full brunt of the impact as it went backward.   The goo also acted like a safety pillow softening the impact of the hardpan under it.

Surfacing like some kind of swamp monster, Mason stood and pulled Paris to her feet once again and wiped her visor down. “Are you alright? I had to get us out of the way, look.” He turned and indicated the mountainside. All around them, was like a prehistoric apocalypse of falling molten rock, ash and fire. The ground shook constantly now as the gods seemed to stir and do battle far below them.

“Mason, can I pick the next time we try to get a weekender in,” Paris let out a small laugh knowing this wasn’t the XO’s fault.  

“Baby we have to keep moving, the heat and gases won’t hurt us in these suits, but we can be squashed and burned just as easily as any of those bugs. Something is wrong here, the colony should never have been built on a fault line or near an active volcano, the colonization corporation can’t have missed it, their access tubes led right down to the underground caverns where the proof was waiting to be seen, their goons even tried to stop us snooping around. I know you are tired, but run with me, okay. I’m not leaving you here, and if we see any more fire boulders coming, we shoot them with our phasers like we did at target practice on the ship, remember?”

“God you know exactly what to say to entice a woman baby,” she flirted back slightly.   If there was one good thing about their situation it was that they were at least alone and not having to act like the officers they were.

Taking her hand once more, he began to lead Paris around the side of the volcano. “We have to get back to the Colony, I have a really bad feeling that they need our help, whatever that might mean.”

Cmdr Black, XO

For the next hour, Paris and Mason made their way across the surface of the planet heading for the colony.   The lava shoots were extensive, like a labyrinth moving them so far from where they started.  “God how much farther is it,” Paris used Mason’s hand as leverage to help hoist herself up next to him on a rock.  The hard part was done the second they crested the ridge.  If the map was correct, the colony would be below them and it was a straight trip down.

Lt. Commander Paris Carisi  security

“Not much further,” Mason said and put his hand around Paris’ waist as much to steady himself as her. “But this damn volcano is making everything look the same. At least the rocks have stopped falling from the sky now, and the suits stopped the gases being a problem but damn it’s hot.” It was true that the volcano seemed to have quietened down over the last hour, but that didn’t mean the danger was over. Despite how much he had tried, Mason hadn’t been able to raise the colony on his comm-badge not any ships that might have been overhead.

“Can we take off the helmets?  I am feeling like a cooked turkey,” Paris said huffing behind him.  No matter how hot the temperature was outside, the air canisters were not only recirculating fresh but hot air.  Being so far from the acrid sulfur fumes the environmental gauges were reading it was safe but before she yanked off her mask creating more problems, Paris wanted to give Mason a heads up.

They walked for what seemed like forever but it only got worse once the trek stopped being flat hardpan and shifted to rocky outcroppings.  Every step had to be watched to avoid twisted ankles or worse.  Falling here with no communication systems would send them back to the dark ages of the twenty-first century.   Exploring places like this was still fun but there were safety precautions that were lacking at the moment making this trip anything but adventurous.  It was also strenuous.  Paris was in top physical shape but that did not mean she didn’t have to work twice as hard as Mason in some sections.  His legs were longer meaning things he could step up onto, Paris at times had to almost crawl up.  Luckily for her, her fiancee was always the gentlemen.  When the ledges were going to take him pulling up his own body weight, he boosted her lessening Paris’ exertion.  This allowed her to continue without needing more breaks than Black.   When the span was too far for her to step up, he offered a hand to lift her partway.    While this made things easier for her, it also increased Mason’s exertion more than if he was traveling by himself.  Once they got back to the colony, showered, and changed, Paris knew they both were going to curl up in the sheets and sleep for about eight hours.  Once rested, they would move to more pleasurable activities.  This was the thought that kept Paris going: not the heat or promise of a cold drink of water.  It was the promise that within a few hours she and Mason would be clean, in climate control, and hopefully engaging in the weekender they had wanted.

Climbing up and pulling himself over a ledge, Mason turned and reached back down to help Paris up. “This is it, I can see one of the towers from here.” He told her, but he hadn’t voiced his confusion that he could only see one tower, there were more in the colony of the same height.
“One tower,” she grunted taking his hand and moving to the ledge he was kneeling on to reach down to her.   “The whole place was towers.”    

Pulling her up beside him, he rolled to one side and pushed himself to his feet. “Oh no,” he said and reached out a hand to help Paris up, he wasn’t watching where his hand was going through as he looked down towards the colony. “Baby, we have a little problem.”

“Do not tell me that we went on the wrong side of the volcano or so help me God May,” Paris moaned getting to her feet.  The site before her stole the words from her lips.  She could do nothing but look out at the landscape that had irrevocably been altered.  
Stretched out below them was a scene of devastation that only a natural disaster could create. The colony had been built over a wide space but it had often been built upwards, Mason and Paris both knew now that the ground underneath the colony was hollow, an enormous cavern that was he home for a huge underground wildlife and geothermically active thanks to the volcano that had somehow been noted as dormant with no geological activity by the company that had colonized it.

That cavern had collapsed in many places with the result that many of the habitation towers had collapsed and sunken into the ground, the rocks being thrown from the volcano had landed amongst the buildings and many were on fire and the forms of people lying on the ground indicated that heat, gases or the rocks hadn’t been kind to the colony. Steam clouds burst from the ground in many places and Mason noted that desperately few people were trying to fight the fires or drag people away from the buildings.  “It’s gone,” Mason said looking at the scene below them. “They aren’t rebuilding that, my god how the hell can they let that happen?” He looked at Paris and checked the suits oxygen levels. “We have to help, then we have to find that bastard in a suit.”

Cmdr Black, XO

Paris did not have words.  She only nodded feeling numb inside.   The death and destruction before her was life-changing.  Learning about tragedy or participating in the sanitary conditions of a holodeck did not match was was about to occur around her.  People had spent years debating how the realism of a holodeck made one experience catastrophic events.  This was true.  Individuals could be made to smell the acrid air, hear the cries and moans of people dying, see the broken and charred bodies, feel the environmental impacts on their own skin forcing those experiencing it to take long showers to scrub the sensation away.  The difference was it was just a poof a smoke and mirrors.    Individuals purported mental issues ensuing after such exercises but it was just fake.  Deep inside it was just 1’s and 0’s that were hurt and injured.  Real-life was drastically different as Paris and Mason were experiencing now.  Ordering the computer to end the program was not possible.  The 1’s and 0’s were digitized images of men and women but real men and women with names like John, Jane, Mary, and Samuel.    These people would not spring back up in another program about skiing or pottery making but be forever dead appearing only in the memories of those that loved them. 
Never in her career had Paris faced such horrific conditions.   Moving amongst the rubble she tried to stay close to Mason’s side.   She was a Starfleet officer.  These were Federation citizens yet in this moment, Paris was only worried about her future with him.   The ground continued to shake at times beneath her feet.  The one geologist that appeared to have survived the accident assured those rescuing people they ground was solid.   That the shimmers and shakes were only aftershocks.   Paris had to believe him to save those that needed help but it did not mean she wasn’t ready to put her faith one hundred percent on this fact.   
Two hours later, she slumped down on a rock next to Mason who was directing the rescue efforts from the command center they established in the shell of a building that remained intact.   Opening the bottle of water that had been handed to her, Paris gulped it down looking at Mason.   She had long since ditched the cumbersome environmental suit.   Her uniform underneath was torn in places from being snagged on bits of jagged metal and glass.   A black smudge, probably from soot, covered the left side of her face in a pattern showing where she had wiped her brow at some point.   Sweat marks dotted her uniform from the heat of the destruction and the climate of the planet.  “How are you holding up,” she asked.   The condition of his uniform showed Mason had not just stood around giving orders but was in the thick of things to surveying the area, pulling people from the rubble, and doing God knows what else to make the situation better for those involved. 

“Im fine,” Mason answered, although his voice sounded tired and the undercurrent of anger that had been under his words when they found the colony in this state, was gone to be replaced by a sound of frustration. “The emergency first aid site is safe and stable, unless that volcano decides to go again and spray rocks everywhere. The shuttles the colony had are destroyed so we can’t evacuate to a safer place, and one is unaccounted for. So is the suit.” Mason’s voice was bitter, he clearly knew that the company man had taken the shuttle at the first sign of the disaster.

“Most of the colony is gone, there isn’t much we can do when one of these habitation towers collapses.” He turned to her and wiped a smudge of soot from her cheek, or he tried to at least. All he really was able to do was smudge it further but he tried to smile slightly, before the dust and heat made him break into a cough.

“You need to drink something,” she passed her bottle of water to him.   “Have you contacted the Azzy?   When are they due to arrive,” she asked brushing a lock of damp hair from her brow.

Paris Carisi

Taking the water, he didn’t answer for a few moments while he poured a measure into his mouth and handed the bottle back to her, then swallowed and wiped his lips with his sleeve. The sleeve was torn from wrist to elbow and a scratch was visible where the tear fell aside. The area around them was filled with rubble and dust, and both Mason and Paris had more than enough scratches between them they could compare later. “They are on their way, but still a day away. They are too small though to evacuate the survivors, the next ship is another 5 days away. It looks like we are going to be here for a while but, I’m going to use the Azzy’s transporters to move us all to a stable location. Enough about me, how about you. You look tired, teach us for skipping the function and doing an all nighter in the pipes and caves huh.” His humor was weak, he knew full well that likely that was the only thing that had saved their lives. The tower where they had been quartered, with the suits thugs tied up in their bathroom, had collapsed and little was left in the twisted metal from the flames and fumes that had consumed it.

“We found another survivor!” A man shouted from a building not far away, waving towards the command center. With all the damage, local communications were down and Mason had ordered focus be spent on getting the satellite links going so they could call for help, thus most ground communication was being done by runner. Coming to his feet, he looked back and noted the lack of people available for the call. “That’s us, at least we are still finding people, it’s been hours.”

“It’s a young girl, she’s trapped under beams,” the man called, and Mason tapped the phaser at his belt. “Lucky we bought our multi tools.” When Paris was beside him he began to jog in the direction of the call, it took only moments to reach the man, who then led them through a maze of twisted beams, rubble and the occasional body that they hadn’t yet been able to move in the hunt for survivors. Coming to a pile of scarp metal and siding that looked like any and every other collapsed building around them, they came to a stop. A man and a woman were standing outside a small hole in the rubble that they had been able to clear by hand, but the lack of tools prevented them going further, that they had found her at all was only because one of the rare tricorders that were in working order was in their hands.

“She’s in here, about 15 meters in. There’s a gap in the rubble and she’s trapped between them,” a man told them, he looked in the same condition as Paris and Mason and just as tired.

“Good work,” Mason told him, and slapped him on the shoulder. “We can cut through to her, but you need to watch the beams in case something gives way.” He looked at Paris and drew his Phaser, pressing the buttons to select the power he wanted. His face was tense, if he cut a beam that was bearing weight, he might not end up rescuing the young girl at all. Blinking to clear his eyes and his thoughts from the tiredness he felt, he drew a deep breath and looked at Paris. He had been busy rescuing people, sure, but he had spent most of the time directing the rescues. Paris had been doing exactly this for hours and he could only imagine the toll it had taken on her, some of the people he had rescued hadn’t made it, but up until now it was just a numbness he had felt doing his job.

Cmdr Black, XO


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