Barion Incident

Barion cleaning was meant to be as simple as blasting barnacles. In fact it was a starship's equivalent. Enterprise had made it painful for herself as she'd knocked off her protective eye wear as she struggled against the terrorists stealing her Trilithium waste. Her eyes burned under the intensity of the beam. Closing them did little to alleviate the problem.

"Captain!" She cried. "Captain you have to get out!"

"Working on it!" He replied, climbing past the supports in 10 Forward as the Barion Sweep entered the room.

She snarled in frustration, slamming her side into the nearest dock support strut. The blow was hard enough to draw blood and she wailed as her open wound baked in the Barion beam. It was more intense than average, as her large number of warp hours resulted in a higher build up of Barion particles hence the higher intensity of the beam to remove them all. The more she struggled, the more wounds she sustained and the more the beam burned.

By the grace of the Ancients, the beam was shut down. When Picard got a look at his ship, he was astonished.

"Enterprise, you're a mess!" He cried.

Despite her pain, the starship still tried to keep her sense of humor. "Yeah, tell me something I don't know." She chuckled.

"As far as I can tell, Enterprise. Your intelligence is slightly superior to mine. Therefore, it would be impossible to..."

"Data, shut up!" She groaned.

The android dipped his head. "Yes ma'am."

Enterprise did look awful though. For her efforts to protect her captain, she had 2 broken ribs, a damaged nacelle, and fried eyes. The latter would take the longest time to heal as it would be some time before her normal vision returned. She was lucky not to have been permanently blinded.

"Your ribs broke when you knocked Kelsi off balance, allowing me to remove the stabilizer from the Trilithium. I know you did it on purpose, you didn't have to." Picard said.

"If you weren't going to make it, then neither was she." Enterprise rasped back.

"It could've cost you far more than a few ribs. A few meters to the left and that support beam would've pierced your core. You'd be dead before your full weight fell against it."

"Aye, but it didn't now did it." She chuckled. "I may be a ship of the unexpected but one other thing I did inherit was luck."

"On that, we agree." Picard stroked the nearest bulkhead in a manner that could only be described as affection.

"Thank you." He murmured to her.

"Anything, for my captain..." Her voice faded as she was given a sedative.

Picard's fingers traced gently down the bulkhead, touch light as a feather. Here, alone in the corridor, he could whisper the words no one else could hear, not even their recipient.

"Sleep well,  mi amour ."