Posted by Captain Rende Asam (Captain) in Main Sim [Engineering]: Seeking Prometheus

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

Posted by Captain Rende Asam (Captain) in Main Sim [Engineering]: Seeking Prometheus
Posted by… suppressed (6) by the Post Ghost! 👻

—SNIP—

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.”

Ensign Brown nodded and moved off, leaving Caelian to the central display and the image of the alien ship. The young engineer paused his study long enough to check in on the damage control teams—all working to repair the malfunctions as best they could—before poking at the console in thought.

“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

The amount of information gathered by the Viking and her crew, as well as the data dump offered by the alien ship, amounted to an incredible amount of data that even the computer was having a problem organizing into succinct chunks for Woods to process. While his Starfleet training would allow him to paint a picture in his mind, the strokes were quite broad and somewhat subjective. Perhaps it was a task that would ultimately require a meshing of experienced minds, a blending of fields. The biggest problem that Woods would face would be that of the malfunctions: even the computer agreed that the plight of their systems was a result of an accident, an unfortunate incident that resulted in the loss of control across several systems. It occurred to him that a closer inspection might be in order—visiting the scene of the crime, as it were.

The present theory involving both the strange lights and the crew’s odd behavior wobbled precariously between influence and possession. The computer seemed almost pleased to inform Woods that information was still coming in from, and being processed by, Sickbay. The fact that not one, but two motes emerged from Commander Kohr’s body intrigued him, and the snapshot scan of the first mote Lieutenant Fayth managed to capture tugged at his attention. The pattern seemed hauntingly familiar somehow, but with the barrage of information and sensation coupled with the task at hand he couldn’t pluck the answer from the air.

The information on Hab’rabi was almost infuriatingly unhelpful: by all accounts he was a humanoid in perfect health—despite having been shot repeatedly by a phaser at close range, of course—and who possessed strength and stamina in measures that would make a Klingon jealous, as well as psychic abilities on par with a well-trained Betazoid. His brain scans were inconclusive by virtue of their very nature, a Gordian knot of impulses and pathways that gave Woods’ logical mind fits were he to attempt to trace them!

The alien ship was perhaps the least vexing piece of the puzzle, but only because of the limited information currently available to the Viking. Due to a leak in the ship’s warp core, radiation obscured the attempts at a detailed scan of the derelict. The crew had a general idea of the vessel’s interior—making it safe for excursions via transporter at the very least—but nothing concrete beyond that. Given the account of its travels offered by Hab’rabi before his unfortunate run-in with Ensign Sacco, the vessel fared admirably across an impossible gulf of space; she bears both hull and internal damage that could be attributed to the wear and tear of travel long-term in deep space. The way Ensign Weir is focused on her layout, however, niggles at Woods like a splinter in his thoughts.

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

Rende, CO

=^=I’ve got an update for you, but I need to have a word in person if at all possible for part of it, Captain.=^= Screen to screen might be good enough, but this would be better in person and might take some time to relay. His tone was a mixture of tension, some relief, and other things that didn’t quite translate over voice comms. =^=I’m having the high gravity areas of the ship evacuated of all non-essential personnel for now. High gravity doesn’t seem like much, but it can rack up injuries quick. Especially if people had more than twenty percent their body weight on them to begin with.=^= Carrying heavy stuff, a heavy pack or tool kit, things like that.

=^=Isolinear systems are fine. Gelpacks are still having issues, but I have one of our computer specialists on the way to get a handle on that and see if we can’t get that sorted quickly. The rest… should be in person, ma’am.=^=

Lt Woods, CSO/aXO

=/\=I will be there as quickly as I can get through the check points.=/\=

It took about 15 minutes longer than normal for Rende to take a lift from deck 25 up to main engineering. She suffered through the checks just like everyone else. Especially because it was her. Kohr was right of course when he said the risk to her was high and the amount of damage she could cause. But he was out of the count now, so here she was. She approached the group, spotted Woods and walked over. “Alright Lt. let’s talk.”

Rende, CO

[OOC: I tried to hit the highlights, but if I missed any particular subject let me know. It was a lot to cover and I didn’t want to overwhelm.]
—Jas—