THE SOUND OF MADNESS
He had always known it could happen to him, but not so soon. It was rare-extremely so, but certainly anything was possible. Somehow, some way, an extreme case of Bendii Syndrome had come upon him, so suddenly that it was tearing apart his sanity.
The red glow cast by the emergency back-up light-panels flared his anger. Sirens wailed and screamed, dragging him further into his madness. The rush of bodies as they scrambled about the bridge caused him to tremble with the urge to lash out at them as he was jostled about. The shouts of his crewmates and the frantic reports of life-support, engine, and power failures, and hull breaches seemed far away, as if at the end of a tunnel.
And he couldn’t seem to focus on his terminal.
His breath came out in ragged bursts, and every conscious and unconscious movement seemed so taxing and arduous. He was a Vulcan, for God’s sake! His crewmates looked at him as a pillar of strength and calm, cool reason. But, if they stopped to truly look at him, they wouldn’t recognize the trembling, sweating mass of raw nerve that sat hunched over the science terminal.
He so desperately wanted to go down to Deck 9 and fling himself out the hole that ate away at the Neverland’s hull and let the vacuum of space drag him where it pleased.
But, no. No! Now was not the time for such thoughts! They were illogical.
With all the strength he could muster, he steadied himself. The Klingon warbird that mercilessly spat fire on them would not wait for him to collect himself. His crewmates couldn’t wait for him to drag himself back from the brink of insanity. He had to do something.
And then everything clicked into place.
“Suroth,” someone shouted after him as the turbolift doors shut. But, he wasn’t about to go back. It he did, he would lose all the resolve he had scrapped together. A gibbering, hysterical Vulcan was not what they needed. “Hangar bay,” he said, his voice sounding scared and shaking with the madness that ached to get into his mind. It was the voice of a stranger.
He exited the turbolift, striding through the crowd of bodies that tidal waved past him. Suroth didn’t notice them though. He couldn’t hear their shouts. The only sound that reached his ears was an insistent ringing. The only thing he could see was the Neverland’s shuttles.
His heart pounded in his side.
Suroth fired up the engine of the shuttle. Nearby crew members hastily cleared the way. He couldn’t see what he was doing. But he knew.
He pressed the engines for all they had, and then some.
The last thing he saw was the Neverland shuddering with the strain of supporting herself. Then the shuttle collided with the blindsided warbird that frantically tried to fire on it, and they both blossomed into flowers of fire and debris, space pulling it every which way.
Space stood silent as the crew of the Neverland watched the remains drift.
