Don't Rock the Boat. Pt1

Posted on Sat Apr 27th, 2024 @ 8:52am by Captain Velasaria Azumé & Ensign Natsumi Nogura & Petty Officer, 1st Class Keala Kekoa

2,177 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Mission 1: A Million Miles Away
Location: USS Amaterasu
Timeline: MD01 1430hrs

The ship groaned unnaturally as the crew scrambled to their feet, the formerly well lit bridge was now shrouded in ominous emergency red. Those few consoles with functional displays flashed warnings, their blue green interfaces flickering with the fluctuating power. Even with that lighting it was hard to see more than a couple of feet beyond ones own hands. Most of the bridge crew were junior officers, night watch personnel dipping their toes in the real world for the first time.

Senior staff had been on the way but now any who still lived were cutoff. Normally the crew would have a Captain to rally around, the rock of the ship, the steady anchor in a storm…

But not the Amaterasu, as the scared souls looked around for that reassurance they all saw him. Captain Jimenez, one of Starfleet's best, a man who reputation rivaled Kirk or Pike, a man who was often seen as larger than life, sat slumped in his chair, a piece of bulkhead protruding from his Chest. Those same eyes, horrified by the state of their Captain, fell to the much less inspiring, much less liked First Officer…

"Transferring command of the ship to myself: Authorization Mayhew-Phi-Alpha-Phi-Omega-0-1." Commander Roscoe Mayhew, first officer and now acting captain of the Amaterasu, was inputting his codes into the command terminal. Once the computer beeped its acceptance, Mayhew turned to the bridge. "Jimenez is dead. There's no sugar-coating it. If we don't want to join him, then do exactly as I say. Don't think, don't argue, just act!" He looked toward the main screen with eyes narrowed. "Now open a fucking channel to the Klingon ship."

No one moved for the barest second. And then everyone moved. A junior officer with the lapel pips of a helmsman moved to the comms panel, holding their left arm against their chest awkwardly as they operated the unfamiliar console. Like the ship, wounded but willing.

"Channels open Commander," he said after a moment before wincing. "Captian. Channels open, Captain."

As the helm officer went about filling in for Coms a young Ensign had made their way back to tactical. Shed scanned for signs of another ship but had come up empty. Opening her mouth to give this information to the XO she quickly closed her mouth again afraid to step in it.

"This is acting Captain Roscoe Mayhew of the USS Amaterasu." He fixed the screen with a hard stare even though it didn't display anything. Let the Klingons see the lack of fear in his eyes. "I know you're out there, sniping from the dark. We're still here and I got just one thing to say: Hutlh Qapla’ yInlIj QIp quvHa’ Hegh SoH vIneH!" Your stupid life is without success I wish you a dishonorable death.

Mayhew cut his hand across his neck to signal an end to the transmission.

When the channel closed, Mayhew sprang into action. He started with Science and Tactical. "I want redundant tactical sweeps every picosecond! Cut power to long-range scopes and reroute if needed. We don't need those bastards' profile, just a warning."

"Aye sir." Natalie tried to shake the hesitancy in her voice. Following the Helm officers example she resumed her station, sparing a glance at the turbolift, hoping at that moment the Chief or one of her deputies would come through the door and rescue her from the ever mounting pressure of manning Tactical in a crisis.

"Nothing on the sensor sir, just dead space and residual photonic radiation from whatever hit us."

"Keep scanning." Mayhew chewed the inside of his cheek. Alligators like to let their prey rot for before devouring it. These Klingons were no better.

Moving over to helm, he said, "Full stop but don't get comfy. Engage evasive maneuvers the instant that ship decloaks, got it?"

Flipping out his communicator, Mayhew said, "Bridge to Engineering. We're coming to full stop but we need those engines hot for what comes next! Cut power to shields, do whatever it takes."

Mayhew closed his communicator before anyone in Engineering could respond, then looked around the bridge. "And I want every last man in the shuttle bay getting those shuttles rigged to blow!"

"Sir?" The word have left Natalie's mouth almost before she realized and at the that point she just committed. Why would they want to rig their shuttles to blow wouldn't it make more sense to get their weapons online?

"If you want to battle a Bird-of-Prey toe-to-toe with your ass in the end, you can do it when you're in command," Mayhew said. "Now do as I said. Be ready to eject those shuttles on my mark."

=/\=

Down in Engineering, Jenni burst into the room and was not at all surprised by what she found. At least two of the workstations had exploded, as well as the port EPS tap. What had surprised her was the amount of chaos in the room. Two engineers stood over the pool table with handheld communicators open and earpieces in their lobes. At least some communications were working.

"Where's the Chief?" Jenni shouted, brushing past the pool table and approaching a Bolian who was scanning the offline warp core with a tricorder.

The Bolian turned to see who was talking to him. "You're it, Lieutenant."

She interrupted the petty officer's damage report, stammering, "What do you mean, Liman? Did Commander Qagit head out for a repair?" Qagit had been with the ship for a year and had been closely tied to the transwarp technology that the class had been designed around. She wouldn't have put it past him to handle a sensitive emergency repair on his own.

Petty Officer Liman pointed downward. Jenni's eyes followed and found Commander Qagit, eyes wide open and lifeless with a piece of shrapnel above his eyes. She frowned. Jenni had wanted an engine room of her own. This just wasn't the way she wanted it to happen.

After muttering a string of expletives, she moved to the pool table to make a quick survey of the status reports. "All right. We've got at least one hull breach along this deck, and emergency systems are down. Auxiliary power, shields, and engines. Those are the top priorities until we hear different from the bridge. Let's get to it."

"Aye ma'am." A chorus of mostly confident Engineers replied as they went about their tasks. Most I rernal systems appeared to be down, what consoles were functioning showed maive damage to the forward hull of the Engineering Section. The ship was also on emergency power and drifting ever closer to the Klingon Border. All in all it was what some in Starfleet called a Tuesday.

"Lieutenant, you better get over here!" One of the Damage control techs, Petty Officer Kekoa called from down the reactor shaft.

Jenni stepped away from the pool table and approached the railing around the warp core. The person who called was just one level below her. The reactor blocked her view, but what she saw was alarming enough. Qagit would have been pissed, were he alive, but the fear of his reprisal pushed Jenni to rush down the ladder to inspect the damage for herself.

"Constrictor coils are damaged," the acting chief engineer announced, declaring the obvious at the sight of the column that had snapped and fallen on the warp core. "And the seal's been breached. We can't have antimatter floating around out here unless we want the entire belly of the ship to disintegrate."

Jenni flipped open her communicator. "Engineering to bridge. The warp core has suffered severe damage. It's going to take an hour to patch. Warp drive and main power won't be available until then."

The signal buzzed violently, the communicator almost sounding like it was arguing back with the young engineer. Looking up from where he stops next to the busted constrictor coils the towering damage control tech shrugged his shoulders. "Doesn't sound like it went through. Comms have been spotty above deck seventeen. Couple of the officers were working on it but, we haven't heard from the bridge in awhile."

Jenni considered the ramifications of this information. She knew the ship had lost its Chief Engineer, but she hadn't considered anything that may have happened in the saucer. If comms were down, at least portable comms, she had no way to communicate the potential hazard should someone up there decide to warp out. That was assuming there was someone on the bridge at all.

"Come over here," she told the damage control tech. Jenni led the way to the opposite wall and yanked off the hatch cover. Concealed within were several critical modules and circuit pathways. Jenni began to rip away connections to a large central unit. It took only a moment to sever these connections, but there were still backdoors into the unit's hardware. She grabbed one of the handles and instructed the tech to pull. "We're pulling out the control matrix," she explained. "We can hardware a temporary control console beside the reaction chamber, but at least the helm won't blow us up."

"Sounds like a blast." The Kekoka said as he reached in with a large hand, grabbing a fistful of optronic data cables and yanking them from the control unit. "It might be a good idea to disable the backup control node as well, so it doesn't try to bypass your bypass." His grin was wide and eager, the Petty Officer waiting for permission to pull out the large node with his bare hands.

"Pull!" ordered Jenni, suddenly very aware of how petite she seemed beside the Petty Officer. Moments later, the control unit was resting, undamaged, beside its housing. "Grab Crewman sh'Paveress over there," she said, nodding in the direction of the nearby Andorian shen, "and take care of that backup. I need to find out if this is any worse than we've seen so far."

"Yes ma'am!" He replied with a wide grin, placing the control node down on a nearby console, the optronic cables resembling a mess of limp tentacles. "Pavers!" He called excitedly. "C'mon we're gonna go yank the backup warp control matrix, and bring one of those old Tee-Seventeens, I bet the yard engineers never meant for us to be taking out the unit without their help." DC bag already slug over his mighty shoulder Kekoa was half way to the door while the Andorian grabbed equipment.

Jenni scaled the nearby ladder back up to the main level. "How are we doing on auxiliary power?" she asked an ensign at the table.

The ensign shrugged before pointing at one of the readouts. "Internal sensors for the engineering hull are starting to come back online. The Aux Generator checks out from what I can see, but we're not getting telemetry for it yet. Lieutenat Oszekun and their DC team is thirty seconds out."

"Great," Jenni muttered. She could tell from the sensors that there had been several breaches along that deck, which clearly had slowed down damage control response. "And shields aren't going to be helpful until we have power of some kind. See if we can direct a DC team to that deck and set up some portable forcefields. We need to get some real movement there."

"DC teams are on the move ma'am, most though are focused on hull breaches or getting Engines back online!" One of the Junior officers called out as they tapped desperately away at the main DC console, trying to get updates on the myriad of red emergency indicators flashing across their screen.

"The engines aren't going to be any good without power," Jenni remarked, moving to another console as she realized she was sweating inside the heavy utility suit. "Can someone check the environmental controls? It's getting a little warm in..."

Jenni paused, quickly reflecting on the damage so far. Warp core containment had been breached, communications were down, hull breaches everywhere. The power transfer conduit had to be damaged as well. She spotted an open damage control kit and rummaged around inside of it to find a tricoder. As soon as she activated it, she was able to confirm her suspicions.

"We need to drop the door!" she called out to her team. "There's radiation flooding in from the PTC. Let's get everyone out of there and into proper radiation gear."

"RAD LEAK, RAD LEAK!"

Jenni, already in a radiation suit from her trek to engineering, directed the engineers away from the rear portion of engineering. The door slowly lowered into place, carefully sealing most of the radiation behind the bulkhead. She sighed before returning to a console. What a day this had been so far, and there was no sign of it stopping.

Beside her, an open communicator squawked, "Oszekun to Engineering. We've arrived at the auxiliary generator. Damage appears to be superficial. We'll have power in five minutes."

Jenni picked up the communicator and said, "Oszekun, Matthews. I know you're doing your best, but five minutes isn't good enough. Get me something here to engineering in three minutes."

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