The city sirens - the planet-wide sirens - had been shrieking for close to an hour. The cube had managed to take out the planetary shield, and Severin pushed his wife under the table with him just before the flash. They had made it, somehow, to the spaceport, where people were boarding ships and taking off, hoping to be able to outrun whatever the hell that thing was. Resistance is futile, the cube had told them, and the smoke and ash from their bombs was proof of that.
Severin was waiting in line to board one of the ships, with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder - it didn't have much, only what he needed to survive, and a few personal affects. He saw his youngest son, Medri, getting onto another ship with his own wife and husband and their young children, Severin's grandchildren. Medri was their only child to have remained on El-Auria, with the rest of Severin and Sarenya's children having left the nest and gone exploring the galaxy a long time ago. Their eyes locked and Medri gave a small wave just before the loading dock went up. Severin then looked back at his wife, General Sarenya Nasir. They had been married for just over four hundred years; Sarenya was one of the highest-ranking military officers of El-Auria.
"Come with me," Severin pleaded. He reached out to stroke her face, twine a lock of her long auburn hair around his fingers.
She shook her head. "I have to go to the orbital cannons. It'll buy you all some time. There's a vessel there at the base, I'll get on it as soon as I launch the strike." She leaned in and gave him a quick kiss, squeezing him tight. "I love you. I'll see you soon."
"I love you," Severin choked out through his tears.
Sarenya took his hands, holding them for a moment, their fingers brushing as they slowly let go. Severin felt the urge to start after her, to physically drag her onto the ship - later on he would reflect on this being a manifestation of the El-Aurian prescience, and that he should have listened to it; he would blame himself for not acting on it for the rest of his days. Severin was being pushed forward now, shoved along closer to the loading dock where people were boarding. He continued to watch his wife run towards their speeder bike, and then she hopped on it, flying the short distance to the military base.
The ground shook again - the cube was firing on them, some distance away or they'd all be dead, but close enough for them to feel the impact.
There was a commotion in the queue - a silver-haired man was pushing forward, ahead of others, screaming, "Where is my wife? My wife was supposed to meet me here!"
The man pushed past Severin, and before he could get to the front of the queue, a tall woman with short silver-blonde hair - much taller than him, or most of them - put her hands on his shoulders, stopping him, and said, "You can't cut ahead of everyone else."
"I need to see if my wife is here," the man panted.
"Doctor Soran," said a short, dark-skinned man behind the tall woman, "I saw your wife just a few moments ago. She's aboard that vessel." He pointed to the ship that Medri had boarded, which was now beginning its launch sequence.
Soran broke down sobbing. The woman nudged him back. When he got to where Severin was standing, Severin didn't feel like pushing him all the way to the back of the line. He reached in his pocket for a handkerchief and simply passed it over, without words. He patted Soran's shoulder, trying to be reassuring, though he didn't feel reassurance himself.
"It will be all right," Severin said.
Soran looked him in the eyes and said, "It will never be all right."
Severin didn't like space flight - he'd only left the planet twice in his lifetime, usually getting spacesick at takeoff and landing. He was so keyed up from the attack and the mad rush to the spaceport that the g-force rush of takeoff barely registered with him, and he didn't hide his eyes this time, looking out the window near where he was seated.
The cube was continuing to fire. It locked a tractor beam on their ship, and Medri's ship, and Severin watched as torpedos launched from El-Auria's surface - the orbital cannon - and immediately disengaged the tractor beam. Severin heard the bridge crew talking; they were preparing to go to warp.
Come on, Sarre. Get your ass out of there.
The cube fired on Medri's ship in retaliation - the ship closest to them. Severin's jaw dropped as he watched the ship explode; he felt as if his intestines and heart had switched places. The voices in the bridge now sounded like meaningless garble.
The orbital cannons fired at the cube again, giving everything they had, a full spread. It didn't even make a dent, and Severin watched helplessly as the cube returned a full spread... the planet itself exploding now.
Warning klaxons screamed, with shields up, preparing for impact of planetary debris. "We have to get out of here fucking now," the bridge commander yelled.
"We need another minute," a voice from engineering yelled back.
"We don't have another minute." The bridge commander motioned to the navigator. "Engage."
Just as they jumped to warp, the cube fired on them.
_
They had only gotten grazed by the cube's phasers, but it was just enough to start to cause a widespread array of problems and necessitate jumping out of warp four hours later.
The bridge crew talked about where to go now. They decided, initially, to try to seek refuge with El-Auria's few allies, but a quick jaunt to the nearest solar system found a graveyard... at least one planet taken out, the other inhabited planets not registering any life signs.
A meeting was held, where the bridge commander asked the opinion of the refugees about further course of action. However, this came off less like asking for opinion and more like telling them what to do - the bridge crew seemed to feel it was best to continue to visit the other solar systems of their allies and see if there was someone, anyone.
Most of the refugees disagreed, having a bad feeling about it after what they'd seen. Soran spoke, visibly agitated. "We need to get as far away from here as we possibly can," he said. "Far away from... that."
Severin nodded in agreement with Soran. "Even if we're lucky enough to find a place where the Borg didn't attack them... it's only a matter of time before they do. We need to go in the opposite direction."
The bridge commander disagreed. "We're going to the Selandrin system."
Severin quietly pulled out his phaser and shot the bridge commander - not enough to be lethal, just enough to drop him. He was haunted by it, looking at his hand in disbelief, but if I'd listened to my instinct, Sarenya would still be alive. I am saving everyone aboard this ship.
He stood; Soran stood next to him, aiming a blaster rifle at anyone in the crew who would dissent.
"We're getting the hell out of here," Severin said.
_
The ship had taken enough damage from the Borg cube that they didn't get very far, having to park on an asteroid as repairs were made. Supplies began to run out over the following weeks, and Severin had to help instate a ration system and a form of martial law.
When Severin found that two survivors - young, able-bodied men, without a family to feed - had killed an elderly woman for her rations, he ejected them into space, publicly. "Anyone who looks away gets their eyes shot out," he warned. "You will look at this, and let it be an example to you, of what will happen if you think this is a good idea. Live together, die alone."
I am doing what I have to do, so we all survive.
_
The ship was repaired enough to keep moving, but never what it once was. They eventually made contact with Debrovia - a world the El-Aurians had traded with but never allied with - which was far enough away for Severin to deem they were safe for now, not necessarily for good. They stopped there to try to re-stock supplies, and take a rest after their ordeal.
But they didn't stay long. They were settled into a refugee camp, and then they began disappearing. First one, then two, then five. Severin had it investigated and it became clear some sort of trafficking was going on, the Debrovians selling them into slavery. When a large group of slavers came for the rest of them, they fought back, hard enough that on their way out they took a slaver's ship.
They roamed for a time after that, stopping here, stopping there, the weaponry of the ship and now armed on their persons making their host worlds think twice about treating them with anything but courtesy. But they were also not truly welcome, and most of the El-Aurians decided to keep moving on, save the odd one who decided they were tired of moving around and would take what they could get, electing to stay behind on a world.
One of the strange new worlds they visited had a few El-Aurians on it, who had been there for awhile for other reasons. One of them, a woman named Guinan, had been married to Severin's eldest son Tegan for a time; she had compassion on the refugees - indeed, Severin was the closest thing to family Guinan had, now, and vice versa - and she joined them. Guinan told them they should go to Earth, a place where she had been a long time ago. Severin had no reason not to believe her, so Earth it was.
2293
On their way to Earth, the top-of-the-line ex-slaving ship began to break down - they had been on it for close to two decades now. There was talk of what they should do. They were within range of two other ships, and the decision was made to put out a distress call.
The SS Lakul and SS Robert Fox replied to the distress signal. The El-Aurian survivors were beamed aboard their ships, continuing towards Earth. On the way there, they were trapped in the Nexus.
Within the Nexus, Severin was reunited with Sarenya, and Medri, and his grandchildren. When he was ripped apart from the Nexus, finding himself on another ship, he panicked, even trying to attack the strangers, pleading to be brought back to the Nexus. He was sedated. A man with a heavy accent told him: "Ve vill bring you to Earth, don't vorry."
"What the hell does 'vorry' mean," Severin muttered before he went under.
_
Severin's first year on Earth had been hell - focusing on survival for himself and what remained of his people had been his concern for the last three decades. But now that he was safe on Earth - now that he had experienced the Nexus, that brief reunion with the woman he loved, the child they'd made in love, their grandchildren - he felt increasingly despondent. He had been in a mental hospital in San Francisco initially, on a suicide watch.
One of the El-Aurian survivors, a woman named Delia, was far worse off than he was, and one day, she took a wing of the hospital hostage, attacking multiple patients and staff. Severin had been a doctor on El-Auria, and his old medical instincts kicked into action, taking a medkit from the wall, working on treating the wounded, keeping them alive as best as he could. When the crisis was over, Severin was commended, and when he talked to one of the counselors about it, who had been trying to get him to find some sort of meaning in his new life, he said he had a moment of clarity. He was discharged two weeks later, on a work program, to start working at a clinic in San Francisco.
After he'd been working as a doctor at the clinic for six months, a Starfleet recruiter came by, offering him a job. Severin agreed to meet him at a coffee shop.
"I'm going to be really honest with you," Severin told him. "I was in a mental hospital when I first got here, hospitalized for suicidal depression, after what I'd been through."
The recruiter, Captain Edwin Alvarez, just smiled at him. "I already know that, my friend. We don't recruit people without running background checks."
Severin folded his arms.
Alvarez went on. "I'm here because I heard about the hostage crisis at the hospital, and how you helped save lives that day even when all hell was breaking loose, you kept calm, got things done. I talked to your counselor and she told me you helped keep your people alive for the last three decades, after your homeworld was destroyed. These are the kind of skills Starfleet needs. We would ask that because of your psych history, you have weekly counseling sessions and submit to an eval every four years or so. But I also know you are very old, and your time of trouble was an anomaly in many years of a healthy, well-adjusted life, so other than that? If you're not a danger to yourself or others now, I see no reason why you shouldn't come fly with us."
"It's tempting," Severin said. Though he'd developed a fondness for humans, Earth cuisines, and Earth's historical pop culture, he didn't quite feel at home on Earth - he didn't really feel at home anywhere, anymore.
"Think about it." Alvarez got up, and handed him a business card, that contained a chip that was a direct link to the comm console in his office. "Get in touch."
Three weeks later, Severin entered Starfleet Academy.
2366
Severin graduated Starfleet Academy in 2297 and was assigned to the USS Callahan. He spent forty years aboard the Callahan before being transferred to the Excalibur in 2337, and then he was assigned to the Melbourne as chief medical officer in 2360.
He had been chief medical officer of the Melbourne for six years when Lieutenant Commander Yan Dooku arrived on his ship.
Since he'd joined Starfleet over sixty years ago, Severin had the policy of adopting his crew members as friends and family - his people were listeners, and something about him made crewmen feel at ease around him, confiding in him, and Severin found making connections with others to be therapeutic. Dooku was the first officer Severin had ever met who didn't warm up to him right away, made more interesting by the fact that he was Betazoid, a race of telepaths and empaths, so surely Dooku knew Severin had good intentions. But Dooku had been first in his class at Starfleet Academy, came from the El Dorado with a glowing recommendation by Captain Gloria Ramirez, wanted to command his own starship someday, and in the meantime took his job as operations management officer very seriously - much too seriously, Severin thought, who thought he needed to lighten up and make a friend, and thus frequently invited Dooku to have a drink with him or come to crew poker night with him. He was always rebuffed. Dooku kept to himself, and the crew began calling him "the Iceman" behind his back, though Severin knew that you couldn't really keep those things from a Betazoid; Dooku definitely knew what was being said about him, and it just made him even frostier.
After four months, Severin wrote befriending the young lieutenant commander off as a lost cause. And then, the unthinkable happened.
On stardate 44002.3, a Borg cube headed for the Sol system. Admiral Hanson and Starfleet Command had assembled a fleet of forty starships to intercept and engage the cube before it got there; Admiral Hanson assumed command of the USS Bellerophon, Saratoga, Melbourne, Virago and Powhattan. Hanson began familiarization with forces present, and spent the next five hours strategizing with all present senior officers.
In the Wolf system, Locutus hailed the assembled fleet.
Resistance is futile. You will disarm your weapons and escort us to Sector 001. If you attempt to intervene, we will destroy you.
The Melbourne made a valiant attempt at attacking the cube, but took heavy damage, enough that the captain ordered the crew to abandon ship.
For an instant, when he was in the escape pod, watching the explosions as starship after starship was destroyed - watching escape pods destroyed - his mind went back to that day on El-Auria, remembering the sacrifice Sarenya had made, giving the Borg enough of a distraction to let a few ships get away. He had tried, once, back in San Francisco, to talk about that day, and it had been dismissed as nonsense - of course it had, the Borg cube sounded like something out of an insane hallucination. He'd had a bad feeling about taking a stand against them, here and now, and had privately voiced concerns to Hanson himself, mentioning the destruction of his homeworld, but Hanson thought the Borg would fall with a fleet of forty attacking them. Of course, they did not.
The old feeling of hopelessness returned, a yearning to just die here in his pod, to go to the Summerland where Sarenya was at peace, and would be waiting for him.
But as Severin thought of Sarenya, he knew she would want him to fight - to make a stand for others, as she had made a stand for him. She had died so he would live, and craving death felt like an insult to her memory, the sacrifice she had made. He reached for the wedding ring he kept on a small chain around his neck - normally Starfleet personnel were not allowed jewelry, but he'd managed to finagle the authorization for this.
Gripping it tight, silently weeping, he felt something brush his forehead, even though there was nobody else in the tiny escape pod with him. A deep, familiar voice spoke into his mind.
If we make it out of here, you can buy me that drink.