Star Trek Discovery: Battle Damage

Battle Damage

Keyla Detmer's hands went to the holographic touchpad of the Discovery helm controls the moment the ship came out of sporespace (the technology being so new that no one had come up with a better term to describe the netherworld they inhabited when they used the spore drive, and Keyla secretly worried no one would before the name stuck), and promptly tugged at the reins of the great ship's helm control. The new drive was still something she was getting used to, since the usually indicators of re-entering normal space were absent when the spore drive was engaged. There was none of the slight feeling (illusory, the velocity-physicists insisted, but nonetheless seemingly experienced by all ship drivers) of a jolting deceleration, a skylight shudder as the ship became ruled by normal physics once again. No, with the DASH drive, whatever incredible, universe-defying dramatics made the ship go remained stubbornly outside the experience of the regular crew, and the trip was marked by little more than a change in the view out the window. As a result, Keyla had to perch over the controls, waiting for the split second when she could regain control of the ship, and in wartime, life or death could be decided by a split-second, as Captain Lorca had held forth after many a dissatisfying battle drill.

The whole process was incredibly stressful. It would be worse if Keyla's brain worked normally. She had often wondered, in her first days aboard the Discovery, why she'd been transferred to the most secret and possibly important ship in the fleet-she, a broken toy who'd taken orders from and shared oxygen with the most notorious criminal Starfleet had ever produced. Now she knew. The External Cranial Bypass Unit ("we're working on a better acronym," the Starfleet Medical technician assured her), did not simply hold her skull together and bestow upon her a perpetual punk-rock aesthetic, it also passed information back and forth between her frontal lobes and the processing centers deeper in the brain at a speed much faster than would occur naturally-even before the blast of a Klingon torpedo-shaped and intensified by its journey through a restrictive EPS conduit-transfigured a ten-centimeter patch of hull alloy into a razor-spray of shrapnel and punched it through the side of her head, laying waste to (and the neuro-technicians were specific about this) 37.68% of her brain.

And so, Keyla v2.0 could process information just a micro-second faster than the Classic Keyla, and when it came to moments like this, that was a distinct advantage. She spun the ship on its X-axis before its image could even coalesce on the view screens and retinas of the Klingon warriors stuffed into the confined bridges of the two D-5-class ships, which were currently pounding a poorly-shielded hydroponic installation embedded in the rocky skin of nickel/iron asteroid, then dipped the primary hull just a few degrees on its Z-axis-enough to give Ensign Rhys an edge in calculating a firing solution.

"Targets acquired!" Rhys announced in the perpetually-peripatetic tone he took whenever they faced combat-both real or simulated. You're welcome, Keyla thought.

"Fire!" Lorca's voiced cracked like a whip, and Discovery shuddered slightly as the ship focused a hellacious amount of energy at the old warships. The lead ship-grizzled and patched from countless engagements in parts of the galaxy as-yet unseen by humans-caught the worst of it, and its shields collapsed almost immediately. Whatever luck had carried the old warhorse this far gave out as its spun on its X-axis and swirled into a fiery nebula. The second ship-newer, less distinguishable-took a shot to its port nacelle and stumbled like a snakebit horse.

"Torpedoes, full spread. Fire!"

Keyla felt the satisfying thump of the projectile launchers firing run through the deckplates a second before they flared on the viewscreen. "Torpedoes running hot, straight, and normal," Rhys reported.

"Bring us to one-seven by thirteen, helm," Lorca ordered, and Keyla's hands input the coordinates with the speed and proficiency that came from a career spent entirely behind the helm console of a starship. Discovery glided on her flightpath, nimbly evading the surviving Klingon's barrage of disruptor-cannon fire. A moment later, the viewscreen went white.