Joint Duty Log - LtCmdr Dahe'el, Lt Waterhouse & Lt Zola - "How Red Were The Skies"

Posted on Sun Jul 20th, 2014 @ 3:25pm by Commander Amelia Waterhouse

1,304 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: In the Dark

Amelia quietly observed as the bridge was a buzz with activity. Zola had deployed her probes, little big sound probes the Ferengi woman had called them, and they were already spreading out into a search grid across the planet. Data was rolling in, but nothing concrete yet. A second wave had been deployed and a third was waiting for their turn.

Watching the bridge officers, and particularly the Cardassian who was currently in command of this majestic vessel, Amelia found herself fascinated. She hadn't spent much time on the bridge of any ship, and what time she had spent as chief of security on the USS Griffin, it'd been during a crisis with plenty of occupy her. Now she was left to quietly watch everyone work, and follow the data that poured in from the tiny probes and the modified sensors.

"Rotate frequencies every few seconds," Almar called out as the ship began to buck and shake from the atmospheric pressures on the hull, the engines whined and caused warning lights to go off all over the bridge, "Correlate results with medical."

"Yes sir," came acknowledgment of the order. Amelia glanced up to see who'd said it, but the pressures on the ship were such she was having a difficult time keeping focused on any one thing. The lights and noises to inform them of what was going wrong with the ship created a cacophony, something almost musical about it, Amelia mused silently to herself.

Down in the cybernetics lab, Zola watched the incoming data from the probes. She'd had to create a mesh network across the probes to ensure the data would travel reliability through the interference, and she was pleased to see the mesh network was holding up. There had been a couple of momentary false positives, but when the data was double checked it didn't line up. Then something came up, and when verified, it looked like a match.

"Zola to Dahe'el," she said, hitting her combadge.

"Dahe'el here, do you have something Lieutenant?" the Cardassian replied, tilting his head to the side slightly.

"Do you see what I see?" She highlighted the sound reading, sending the coordinates up to the Cadassian's display on the bridge. "That looks like a match for Commander Ivanova."

"Have you been able to verify it?" Almar replied, sitting forward in anticipation as he looked over the information.

"Twice. Matches up within the tolerance sickbay specified," Zola explained.

"Excellent work, keep on trying to find the rest of our people," the Cardassian responded before looking down to the helm console, "Helm, get us as close to the location as you can, precision flying at its best."

"Yes, sir," Zola returned, reaching up to tap her combadge to close the channel. As her console beeped at her, she paused. There was a match for Captain Landon too. "I haven't verified yet, but it looks like the Captain is with her. Running verification now."

Amelia watched from her ring-side seat as helm guided the Vindicator towards Rochelle Ivanova's position. The willowy red-head was glad to hear that the Commander was alive, she had to be alive for Zola's little probes to work after all.

"Ops, can you get a lock on them?" Almar asked, turning to look over his shoulder at the officer in question.

A shake of the head was the worst news the Cardassian could have received, "No sir, not a clean one, it seems... like they're on the move, I can't detect a comm-badge either, which means I have to try and get a full bio-lock, we need to be closer."

Zola heard the interactions on the bridge through the still open com channel, and she patched into the sensors, seeing if she could do anything to help with the bio-lock. With moving targets, it was more difficult to get a lock, and the interference would cause problems too. In the background, the analysis had finished on the interference and Zola had completely forgotten starting it in the rush to make the little big sound probes. There was a pattern to the shifting interference. Zola fed the information for the pattern into the sensors systems.

"It seems like they're in the mountain range, take us in Helm, as close as possible, direct emergency power to the thrusters," Almar called out, they were nearly in his grasp, so close but still so far away.

"Sir, there was a pattern to the interference. I just fed the information into the sensors. Should help with the bio-lock when we get close enough," Zola informed Almar.

Amelia couldn't help but feel for the helm officer. If it'd been her mother at the controls, she would have been thriving at the challenge, but this crewman just seemed nervous. No pressure, just the command staff at risk and the whole ship, right? Despite the nervousness, his hands moved across the console like second nature as he stammered out his acknowledgment of the Cardassian's orders.

"I have a partial lock!" the Operations office called out as she managed to isolate one of the lifesigns, "But it's moving and appears to be fading quickly! I think it's Commander Ivanova, she might be dying!"

"Pull up her medical file, patch it into the transporter buffers and combine with the partial lock, it should give enough information to get a full biosign lock." the Cardassian called out as his grip tightened on the arm of the chair, indentations beginning to form where his fingers held on.

Amelia wanted to say something, wanted to do something to help, but this wasn't the sort of thing she was normally involved in. She'd get beamed in places to pin combadges on people, to infiltrate buildings, set up pattern boosters... but there wasn't enough time to get her down there to do anything useful. So she listened and watched, worrying for the fiery commander. She worried for the captain too, but he was just a name to her, a cute picture in his starfleet personnel file.

Zola pushed new deployment programming to the little big sound probes, causing them to swarm in on the location of the commander and the captain. There was a trail of them between the swarm and the ship to keep the mesh network connected, but most of them were doing everything they could to triangulate on the command team's location and feed that information back to Vindicator's sensors. Even if they were only picking up sound data, it gave the sensors better information on where to direct their focus.

"Transport her to sickbay as soon as you get a lock," Almar ordered as he looked over to the ops station, "Any luck on getting a lock on the Captain?"

The operations officer considering the data pouring in from the Ferengi's probes, and focused the sensors where the probes had targeted the Captain's heart beat, fading like the commander's, and she got a partial lock.

"Almost have it, sir," she told him. Like she'd been directed with Ivanova, she pulled the Captain's medical file and fed it into the pattern buffer. Both looked to have a solid enough lock now they could transport. She engaged the transporters, and the computer filled her screen with data. Usually transporting was something that didn't require any worry, so routine. This time it wasn't. The transporter fought to rematerialize them, but just when she was about to let out her breath because she couldn't hold it any longer, the computer chirped confirmation of a successful transport.

"They're in sickbay now," she confirmed. A collective breath was released around the bridge, and down in the cybernetics lab by the Ferengi listening in via combadge.

=/\= END LOG =/\=

Lieutenant Commander Almar Dahe'el
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Vindicator

Lieutenant Amelia Waterhouse
Infiltration Specialist
USS Vindicator

Lieutenant Zola
Engineering Officer
USS Vindicator

 

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