Thorn and his security team of five were nearing the hospital. Thorn could see that the terrorist soldiers were already inside the hospital. He stopped the others for a moment. He could see the interior of the hospital. “Thorn to Jenovia,” he said. “Can you give me visual feed?”
“Yes, Lieutenant Commander,” she replied. “Just hold on.”
He could see all ten terrorists running through the halls of the hospital. Many of them were firing their phasers at security guards and hospital personnel, but overall, they appeared inexperienced and disorganized. Besides their own phasers, they brought little else.
“Everyone get through around the back and meet up with Jenovia and the others. I can take care of this myself,” he said to his team.
Thorn got up and moved quickly through the entrance that the terrorists had entered. He was nearing an entrance where roughly half of the terrorists were, pointing their phasers at the security guards. Thorn rolled a small round spherical object from his belt into the center of the room. It caught the attention of the terrorists and it made a series of quick flashes. They seemed momentarily stunned, but what they saw afterwards caught them by surprise even more. The small sphere began to ‘leak’ blackness that quickly started spreading all over the room. It began spreading over their bodies like a black ink, and they squirmed as they tried to make sense of what was happening. They began to panic. In desperation, they tried scratching it off, but with no avail. That was because there was nothing there; it was an illusion. Blackness soon covered the entire room. They were all now paralyzed with fear. It was really just a stun grenade, but one specially made by Thorn, with a twist of Breen cruelty.
Thorn walked across the room, lit normally from his point of view, unaffected by his own weapon. He saw their frozen, paralyzed bodies standing there in awkward body positions, twitching in fear and their pupils dilated and cloudy from the weapon’s effects. This was a joke, Thorn thought to himself. He began to follow the path that the others had walked. These individuals will eventually fall unconscious as the effects culminate into a full panic attack, and they find themselves unable to breathe.
“Frank to Morie,” one of the communication said, “Come in.” Nothing. “Damn it, guys, quit wasting time. We’ve secured most of the floor here. Do you guys copy?”
Thorn grabbed the communicator and tried using it to triangulate the position of the other members of the group.
“Guys, we have a problem. Looks like something happened to the others. Everyone stand guard,” he said to someone else over the communicator.
Thorn came across a hallway that separated him and the rest of the group. But it was guarded by three of the terrorists, two on one end and one on the other. He couldn’t get near the entrance of the hall because they faced outwardly. There was no other way around; he would have to confront them.
The lone guard stood there quietly. He heard a whisper behind him. Already jittery, he jumped and turned around with his phaser pointed. All he saw were the backs of the other two guards all of the way down on the other end of the hall. Suddenly, he felt his arms locked from behind and another set of arms reaching around his neck, grabbing him in a headlock. He saw quick flashes come from the hands and immediately he was out. He collapsed in Thorn’s arms, unconscious.
The two terrorists on the other end of the hallway quickly turned around from the noise, and fired their phasers at Thorn. But Thorn saw this coming; he put his left arm in front of himself and before the phaser fire could touch him it dissipated through miniature crystalline-shield that erected from his forearm. Thorn then instantaneously raised his right hand, and what could only be described as ‘metallic-tubes’ snaked out from his artificial forearm, and connected in his hand to form his phaser. Almost as quickly as Thorn had raised his arm, the phaser had fired two simultaneous shots at the terrorists and both fell instantly to the ground. The phaser snaked back into his arm.
Thorn was now moving closer to Jenovia’s location. He only had to move around a few more corners, and he was there. No more terrorists in the vicinity.
“Lieutenant!” Jenovia cried. “I’m glad you were able to find us.”
“It was not a problem. The terrorists were untrained.”
“Even so, you could have gotten hurt. I couldn’t believe you took them by yourself.”
“I appreciate the concern. But they were no threat to me.”
“I’m glad.”
“Did they ever get near any of you?”
“Not yet…at the moment they’re more interested in taking out the security guards and securing the hospital. I was told by the medical administrator that typically they barge into this hospital for medical supplies.”
“We will need to secure the storage room as well them. The hospital should not allow them to take what they want,” Thorn said, looking straight at the medical administrator.
“It is their habit to let them take the supplies,” Jenovia told him.
“That’s unacceptable,” he said icily.
“Thorn, the administrator tells me that they may be ordinary citizens who have nowhere else to go to get help.”
“Then they should devise a better system to let the people have them,” Thorn said, with his cold robotic voice. “By allowing this behavior to continue, people are going to get hurt.” It was hard to argue with that point.
“How many of them did you take out?”
“Ten.”
Jenovia couldn’t help but be impressed, but then again, she wouldn’t expect anything less from a Breen officer. “That means there are about five more of them. Where do you suppose they are?”
“My scans are telling me that they’re scattered. Two of them are looking at their unconscious colleagues, and three of them are shooting down the other security guards. They’re trying to establish a foothold in the hospital, but they’re disorganized.”
“You should be able to control the situation then? Everyone here is scared…”
Thorn noticed something disturbing by the hospital entrance. There was a large movement of red dots on his tricorder coming from the left wing of the hospital. It looked like at least twenty more of them. According to his readings, they also brought Type III phaser rifles. They began flooding through the entrance of the hospital. “Maybe not,” Thorn said. “They’ve brought reinforcements.”
