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Main Sim [Engineering]: Seeking Prometheus

Posted Dec. 1, 2021, 10:46 p.m. by Captain Rende Asam (Captain) (Jennifer Ward)

Posted by Lieutenant Markus Woods (Chief Science Officer) in Main Sim [Engineering]: Seeking Prometheus

Posted by Ensign Caelian Weir (Engineering Officer) in Main Sim [Engineering]: Seeking Prometheus

Posted by Lieutenant Markus Woods (Chief Science Officer) in Main Sim [Engineering]: Seeking Prometheus
Posted by… suppressed (3) by the Post Ghost! 👻

—SNIP—

=/\=Rende to Woods and Asam. I want those things trapped and I want it 10 minutes ago. Where are you with it?=/\=

Rende, CO

A voice popped up in engineering behind Caelin out of sight. =^=Engineering to bridge, this is O’Larria. No idea where the Chief is but I think I can use the ship security fields to section up the halls. Then perhaps use an energy sweep to sweep down the halls and push the entities towards containment areas on each deck. But that’s only if they are floating about and not actually ‘in’ a wall or jeffries tube, somewhere. Haven’t figured that one out, yet.=^= She bit her lip wondering if the idea was gonna work. They would have to find a few of the orbs and make sure the energy walls were enough to deter and stop them.

Kristi
Engineer

They didn’t know where Eldorin was? There was no way Eldorin wasn’t on top of this situation. That wasn’t like him. Not. At. All. =/\=Thank you En. Get started on that, but we need a solid way to catch and contain these things. Keep me apprised. Rende Out.=/\=

Caelian turned at the call across the comm, then back once he realized it had been handled. He squinted at the scan of the massive alien ship, face pensive and eyes scanning along every corridor and junction. Whomever had designed it had been some kind of genius; the behemoth had taken quite the beating in all her time in space, but she was still pushing along. He silently hoped he’d get the chance to study her up-close and at-length. Maybe there was something they could learn from the alien technology. After all, wasn’t that the point?

“So she was meant to be a colony ship,” he murmured thoughtfully.

Brown pointed to the ship’s drive section. “It looks like there’s a leak in their warp core. The radiation is probably what’s been obscuring our sensors. Probably want to get that under control as a priority.”

Caelian nodded, swiping his hand across the monitor to move the image to the next section of the ship. “Looks like she’s got a tough candy center amongst all that delicious cargo space,” he chuckled, indicating the cooler, sealed interior. He frowned then, tapping in a few commands to pull up a zoom and a thermal overlay.

The other ensign whistled, pointed at several sections along a run of bulkheads leading from the stasis chamber towards the midline of the ship. “Wonder what hit her to make those.”

“Could be a few things, I suppose,” Caelian shrugged. “Could have been a discharge or overload when their warp core started leaking. Some kind of cosmic anomaly like a subspace filament, or a stellar burst. Either way, we’ll take a look once we get her back under tow and cleared of radiation. I think I can tweak the sensor’s filters, get a better look at her. Might take an hour or so. Wonder what the chief would think?”

Brown shrugged. “I think he got called away, or maybe he’s grabbing some lunch. Not much else we can do til they lift the containment but sit tight and tinker with our toys.”

Caelian could only nod, but something niggled at him about the dorsal section. If it weren’t so deep into the ship, I’d almost think it was a directed energy discharge. Lots of them.
—Caelian Weir, Engineer—

Rende, CO

A few minutes later, another ensign jogged up to them with a smirk on her face. “We found the chief!”

Caelian blinked at Ensign Brown before turning his attention toward the newcomer. The young woman had her hands clasped behind her back, rocking on her heels and almost vibrating with the urge to blurt out her thoughts. Only her puffed cheeks and her impish grin kept that impulse in-check. Rolling his eyes, Caelian raised his eyebrows expectantly at her. When she didn’t respond to his non-verbal query, he sighed.

“And?” he groused. “Where is he? The captain’s breathing down our neck about these energy pulses, and no one seems to know what to do!”

The woman leaned forward, tucked her hands between her knees, and whispered in a conspiratorial voice, “He’s in the jefferies tube! Apparently the panel he was working on malfunctioned and sealed the bulkheads.”

Brown blinked. “That’s not funny! Is he okay?”

“Oh, he’s fine,” she huffed, fanning his protest aside with a hand. “Said so himself! Assuming, that is, I… understood his accent. Now, you two have fun. I’m off to tell the rest of the team.”

And with that, the ensign scampered off leaving Weir and Brown staring bewildered at each other. Brown grumbled and stared back down at the large central monitor between them and the alien ship displayed there. Suddenly, the panel flashed and a new display appeared. Data began to flow like a cascade down the side, many of the indicators flashing an angry red or sullen amber.

“Uh oh.”

Caelian frowned. “What do you mean, ‘uh oh’?”

“I mean,” Brown growled, gesturing to the display, “that the chief isn’t the only one with problems. We’re getting reports of failures all over the ship! Deck Eleven just lost artificial gravity; Deck Fifteen is reporting an increase in gravity. The transporters are down. Replicators on Decks Three through Thirteen are only serving gagh; the rest are locked out to Starfleet field rations. The environmental controls on Decks Twenty-Five and Twenty-Six are screwy. It’s… it’s chaos!”

Markus stepped off the turbolift. It was a short hop to Main Engineering from there.

Hands flying across the console, Caelian pulled up the ship’s diagnostics and frowned at the systems flashing their panic at him. “It… looks like there was an EPS overload in one of the gelpack junctions. Must have happened when the bridge ordered the switch-over to auxiliary systems. Check the maintenance log for me, yeah?”

“It looks like Ensign Fairweather was supposed to be monitoring that junction,” Brown noted. “Computer shows him in Sickbay. Maybe something happened?”

Caelian could only nod. “All right, well, let’s get repair teams dispatched to those areas. Coordinate with the duty officer, try to focus putting members who live on those decks out first. That way, they can at least go home when they’re done assessing the problems. The rest will just have to bunk up, I guess. Once we know what we’re dealing with, we’ll notify the captain. Maybe by then, the chief will have gotten himself loose.”

Silence greeted him as he continued to pour over the information coming in from across the ship. What was going on? Finally he looked up, found Brown starting at him with a wistful expression.

“What?”

Brown coughed a laugh, then shook his head apologetically. “Maybe you weren’t blowing smoke after all.”
—Caelian Weir, Engineer—

The doors hissed open as a science officer with lieutenants pips made their way in, casting his gaze about. “Lieutenant Woods,” he said, making the introductions, in case nobody had read his file or gotten to know who he was a little in the last year or so he’d been aboard. Which, with a thousand people aboard, most just stuck tot heir own ‘tribe’ of around 150-ish people. So not unexpected. “I’m engineering certified. Captain Rende is a bit concerned about things down here.” While Rende hadn’t said it directly, it was implied, and if their computer went down, then the major functions of the ship ground to a halt. Getting them taken care of was mission-critical.

“What’s our situation with the main computer?” The computer was an isolinear core but the almost five hundred gel packs around the ship could be vulnerable, and compromised as well.

Lt Woods, CSO/aXO

“The computer is fine, if a bit slow,” Caelian replied, looking up from his workstation. Somehow he managed to look both anxious and relieved at Woods’ uniform. “We’re on auxiliary systems now, which means we don’t have the processing power that we’re used to. Nothing she can’t handle, sir, just going to take her a bit longer than normal to chew on your problems and spit out an answer.”

Brown coughed, stepping around the engineer. “Speaking if problems, please tell us you have the data about these—what did the captain say, lights?—things that we’re supposed to contain. We had a bit of a problem during the system switch-over and the chief’s, uh, indisposed—”

“Behind a bulkhead,” Caelian muttered.

“—at the moment, so we’re kind of flying blind here, sir.” Ensign Brown picked up a PaDD and tapped furiously for a moment before offering it to Woods. “One of our techs ran afoul of an angry gelpack and it gave him a nasty nip before cascading into several nearby systems. He’s down in Sickbay. Here is a list of the disruptions, sir.”

“We’ve already put out some repair teams to try to get things under wraps, but as we haven’t put eyes on any of the malfunctioning systems there’s no estimate on when they’ll be back up.” Caelian scrubbed a hand through his hair, frowning. “Thankfully, there’s nothing really worrisome on that list. Just a lot of inconveniences that we’ll have to work around. Think they’ll lift the containment protocols soon, sir? Those are going to hamper things.”

Brown offered a playful smirk. “Unless you like gagh. Or Starfleet field rations in zero-gee.”
—Caelian Weir, Engineer—

“Let’s evacuate all non-essential personnel from the high gravity areas. It might not seem like much but prolonged time in that much gravity can start to break down the body,” Markus said. “A small medical team goes with them to scan and clear. Anybody that’s showing abnormalities I want triaged and quarantined until we can clear them. As much as for them as for everybody else unaffected.”

“I have one of my computer science specialists on the way to come check out the gelpack systems. See if we can’t get those sorted out since the isolinear systems are fine.”

He could feel the distress up in Sickbay. It had spiked in intensity, and he could feel a mixture of grief and anguish, a sense of duty. Determination. The doctor, he could almost see her face, that he’d ran into on the shuttle bay. Something happened to her. But she was physical still with them. But she mourned. Did they lose a crew member? He couldn’t worry about that just this moment. There were other matters to deal with.

Moving to one of the displays he began pulling up the interlinked feeds from the labs and sickbay, checking on the computer’s analysis and searches he’d set in motion. “Lets see if I can get us some more light,” he said to the engineers. And then a new feed began relaying from sickbay, showing the various scans that Fayth was pulling up, including her own. The comparative analysis showed the elevated and similar patterns, as well as Kohr being down for the count. He wasn’t a neurologist, or even a medical doctor, but he grasped the basics of biology and neurology. He had to for his field. Especially where thought and observation interacted with the realities of quantum mechanics.

Forgetting where he was for a moment he simply seemed to stare a hole in the displays. Anyone who saw his face would see his eyes rapidly moving back and forth, seeing things that others weren’t. Like imagining or seeing equations around him, doing complicated math in his head. Mentally he examined the information they had, the puzzle pieces. They had lots of data points. Collating data until they had enough. There was enough clay now to build bricks, to start building a foundation of understanding.

A troubled expression crossed his face, and he began to grow more grave. Pulling out a stylus he grabbed a large display PADD and began writing on it, by hand, mind mapping the information at hand into clusters, all surrounding the concept of the derelict, Hab’rabi, the lights, the odd behaviors, the malfuncitons, all of it.

=^=Woods to Captain Rende.=^=

Lt Woods, CSO/aXO

With only a slight pause the captain’s voice came back over the comms. =/\=Rende here Lt. Go ahead.=/\=

Rende, CO


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