SD 241212.22 Williams, Neyes, King & Malone "Derelict Investigation"

Posted on Sun Dec 23rd, 2012 @ 5:30am by Captain Landon Neyes & Lieutenant Commander Hayden Williams & 2nd Lieutenant Jasmine Garza

2,525 words; about a 13 minute read

Mission: Romulan Ale.. I mean Aide
Location: Derelict Romulan vessel

Hayden nodded to Lieutenant Cristoff to advance ahead of him. They advanced by leap frog with the others taking up the rear as they advanced toward the bridge. So far they handn't encountered anything that would indicate a trap of any kind.

There was however a large amount of debris and damage to the interior of the ship to match the exterior. Whomever attacked the ship clearly did not these people here. "You know, it doesn't seem likely that the colony could have repelled a ship this size, or any size for that matter." Hayden said out loud, not really to anyone.

"The other possibility is less appealing Sir." Cristoff replied.

Ashley was mostly silent as she watched her tricorder, "If the computer core is intact we might be able to get some information out of it. Assuming we can power it. I'm not seeing any sign of power flow."

"We should find out shortly. According to the map this is the bridge." Hayden said swinging his Phaser rifle behind him to try and force the door open. Once the door was open enough to enter, he tapped his comm. "Williams to King, we arrived at the bridge. What's your location?"

"Private......." Ellis called out to the private that held onto the map. Taking the tablet he quickly looked it over. "We're about 5 corridors from engineering."

Neyes was half-buried in his tricorder, and spent the rest of his time gawking at the holes and ruptured conduits littering the corridor. "This place looks like someone shot it up, and then came inside and finished the job with a photon mortar..." He brushed a few more tubes and wires out of his path as they made their way up to the Engineering entrance. "I'm detecting proton and plasma leakage in every power junction on this deck so far."

"No sign of the crew yet," he added, "how about you guys?"

Now on the pitch black bridge, Ashley moved her wrist light around looking at the consoles... and nearly tripped over the body of a dead Romulan.

"AH! Oh god!" she backed up quickly and looked down. The Romulan was on the floor, not because there was any gravity on the ship (there wasn't) but because he was impaled on a piece of metal coming out of the deck.

The Marines entered engineering using their TEDs they did a quick scan. But because everything was open to the vacuum of space the scans were useless. "Alright spread out......move carefully and thoroughly." But it took just seconds to find the bodies.

"Bloody hell!" One of the Marines said seeing the grotesqueness of all the bodies. "What the hell happened?" He asked.

"I don't know." Ellis said looking around, "King to Williams......are you picking up our feed from the TEDs?"

"Roger that. The bridge has them too. They look like they just died. Probably the vacuum. Some of these.. are military. What would military personnel be doing on a colony ship?"

Landon had been too busy looking over his readings to notice the floating, desiccated Romulan corpse directly in front of his face. Upon looking up from his tricorder Neyes immediately felt the rush of tension and fear before he inhaled sharply. He managed to resist his urge to jump back, rather than stare down the mummy. "Maybe Ellis was right. They could be smuggling some kind of military force out past their borders. Doesn't explain why they ended up like this, though." He walked over to the main Engineering controls, past Ellis and the others.

The warp core was intact, unlike much of Engineering. Its mirrored panels shone brightly, reflecting the lights from their wrist beacons. From what he could tell, it was simply dead and inactive. His tricorder wasn't going to provide much information other than that, unfortunately. He'd need to get something up and running to figure out exactly what happened.

"Malone, i'll need to coordinate with you up there on the bridge. I'll see if I can get some power running to you. Maybe you can get the internal sensors running enough to give us a complete status on the ship."

"Excuse me," Neyes said to a body as he pushed it off the control panel in front of him, he ignored it as it floated off, "I'm at the core controls now."

Ashley sucked it up and pointedly ignored the bodies as she moved to one of the consoles that appeared the least damaged, "Doesn't look good." she said aloud as she scanned it, "We might have to find the core and tap in directly."

Neyes pulled out a large cylindrical device from his pack. With a twist of the large dial at the top, the object came to life with lights and a low humming sound. "Already on it, I'll juice up the containment matrix with this power cell, and then jump-start the injectors. We'll probably get, at most, 10% output. Just enough to get what we need without blowing out the core and us along with it. I'll need about 15 minutes."

"Good, get to work on that, I'll see what I can find over here." Hayden said trying to interface his tricorder. To a Password HE found near the captain's chair, hoping it would she'd some light on what happened here.

"Oh and Malone if we could get some simple power down here we can start on downloading content off of the consoles. Most of them look like to be in perfect shape." Ellis said looking around, "oh and commander I guarantee you anything this was a troop carrier."

Neyes silently rolled his eyes. There were no guarantees with Romulans.

Ashley nodded to no one and started to connect things to the least damaged console on the bridge. She shunted some power from her portable unit to it which got it to light up. She checked the local memory buffer but found it empty. They would need to wait for the small bit of main power to start the computer core, even in some kind of low power diagnostic mode.

Her tricorder beeped as it updated scan information from the runabout. She had a quick look at quirked an eye brow, "Hate to disagree with you King, but I don't think this ship was supposed to be transporting troops. The runabout just finished the full scan and there is a giant cargo hold full of the types of equipment you would think a new colony would need. Most of it seems relatively intact too."

"So it's a colony ship, full of corpses and a handfull of military personnel," he shrugged as he brought an engineering console to life after a few flickers, "we could speculate all day."

After a few more minutes, Landon's make-shift powergrid seemed to be holding. His console hadn't exploded, and he'd been feverishly working on getting the core readings to stabilize before activating the matter-antimatter flow. The power conduits all across the ship were brutalized beyond recognition. It had taken him the better part of his time simply finding the correct nodes to plug into.

"Alright. Everyone get away from the walls and consoles. I'm going to charge the engineering power grid and reactivate containment in the warp core... I expect some explosions."

Ashley grabbed her kit and moved well away from any of the consoles on the bridge, in fast moving just beyond the bridge entrance.

The Marines did as they were told and took cover behind anything that was away from the walls.

Neyes squinted as he made some final adjustments, and then cringed a little as he pulled the discharge lever by the injectors. A flurry of sparks and ripping explosions popped along the ceilings and consoles, forcing the team to dive for cover. When the aftermath came, there was an eerily quiet hum of power and a faint glow of emergency lighting.

Neyes stood and pulled a chunk of debris off his helmet, "Success, I think," he pulled out his tricorder, "looks like we have containment up to 60 kilopascals. Should keep us in the lights. You can activate the antimatter flow to suit your needs on the bridge, Malone. I'm pretty sure I blew out the engineering controls for the reactants chamber down here."

Ashley peeked back into the bridge to see what kind of damage was done but was surprised to find only a couple flickering lights on random consoles, "Hmmm..."

She moved to scan them and sighed, "There's not enough power to the bridge to do anything. The conduits must have taken too much damage." she turned to Williams, "I'll have to go to the computer core and tap in directly."

Hayden nodded. "Staddi. Go with her." He said making his way to what he assumed would be the ready room. Perhaps the local library terminal will have enough power to access the ships log.

Ashley packed up her kit quickly and followed Staddi out to find the computer core.

The Marines than started exploring the rest of the ship leaving a fire team behind in engineering while the other fire team did the exploring. So far it was more of the same signs of battle and dead bodies.

Meanwhile, Hayden had at least managed to power the romulan equivalent of an LCARS terminal with a portable power supply meant to activate individual stations in emergencies. luckily there were some files in active memory that he could access. "Williams to King, I was able to access one of the captain's last logs. it looks like this ship was a colony ship, and companion to another that was likely belonging to the colony below. Both ships were attacked by a warbird as they entered this system. The log does not say if the ship was repelled or not. but i doubt that a warbird would allow such a ship, colony ship or not; to remain intact if they were able to prevent it. "

"What's the stardate on the log?" Ellis asked.

"Stardate 241204.23" Hyden replied.

"Commander that's roughly 5 months prior to the Romulan civil war. How much you want to bet that this could've been an opening move?" Ellis said.

Ashley and Staddi entered the core room, scanning the dark space with their lights. She was relieved to find no bodies here so she went straight to work, hooking her robust looking padd to the core and doing a straight download of everything she could find.

She tilted her head as she watched the flow, "Commander, I'm going to need to get this data back to the Vindicator to decode and reconstruct it."

"Understood. .. King has your team finished up in engineering?" Hayden asked over the comm.

Neyes' feet stuck out from an open panel in the wall as he poked and prodded at the Romulan engineering technology. A few things he scanned thoroughly, and others he went as far as to take bits and pieces for study later on. It was all fascinating stuff. He pushed his hand out from the panel so the marines could see, and hollered for their benefit, "I'm all done here. I don't think the ship will blow up before we leave."

It was the most concise report he could offer.

"This is Corporal Briggs King has left engineering leaving myself and three other Marines keeping an eye on the rest of the away team while he took the other Marines to explore the rest of the ship sir." Briggs said.

Ashley began to pack up her stuff and nodded to Staddi. They headed back out to meet up with Commander Williams to prepare to leave, "If there is time then I wouldn't mind having a more detailed look at the equipment in the cargo hold."

A slight thud sounded inside the access panel Landon had forced his way inside. He rubbed his head as he hurriedly emerged from the tubing and conduits, looking disheveled. "I'll meet you there, Malone." Landon signaled for the four marines to follow him. They seemed to follow, but Landon didn't wait for them to respond as he jetted out the entrance into the corridor.

Staddi nodded and tapped his command badge. "Staddi to Williams, we are on our way back, But Malone wants to swing by the cargo bay and get some scans before we beam out."

"Understood." Williams replied into his comm.

It didn't take too long to get to the cargo bay and the sight of it, even without much light made Ashley whistle. It was massive, nearly half the size of the ship itself, "Wow.. " she pulled out the tricorder and began to run scans.

Staddi followed behind Malone his phase rifle safely pointed at the deck But ready should he need it. "This is larger than any colony ship I have seen. It looks like it was converged from an old troops transport." He said noting the remnants of weld marks where military equipment was stripped and replaced with civilian equivalent.

"Well, so far it is all standard colony equipment. Big stuff for construction, power generators, replicators, you name it." Ashley said.

"Say all the stuff a colony in trouble would need to Grow?" Staddi replied. "Curious."

A loud churning of metal sounded from a nearby entrance as Neyes and the four marines forced open one of the other doors into the corridor. The helmsman threw his pack into the room and finished the door the rest of the way before taking a good look inside. "So in this massive storage compartment... are there any medical supplies we could use to help the colony?"

He stopped, thinking about the uncertain circumstances of the vessel, and their suspicions involving the Romulans' reasons for being in the system in the first place. "If that's what we want, of course."

Ashley made an uncertain motion with her hand, "Well, there are several large cargo containers. They might contain supplies, but most of this seems to be industrial level equipment." she turned to Neyes, "We can use the ship sensors to get a more detailed inventory and if the Captain is willing I guess we could move all this stuff."

There was a sudden shift in the decks beneath their feet. Without atmosphere whatever made it happen made no sound but Ashley's tricorder started to sound a brief alarm in her helmet, "I think we should go while we can, sir. The hull is not structurally sound and the runabout sensors just registered an impact. Debris probably."

"I think that is a good idea." Staddi said. he tapped his comm "Staddi to Williams, we are heading back. Malone thinks this heap is about to come apart."

Hayden was already nearly at the runabout with the rest of his team. "Copy that, we are almost at the hanger deck now."

Ashley nodded and made her way back to the runabout.

"Marines pack-up and make sure no squids are left behind." Ellis said nodding to his group to start making their way back to the runabout.

=/\=

Commander Hayden Williams
Chief Security /Tactical

Marine Captain Ellis King
2nd Division, 2nd Battalion, Alpha Company Commander

LtCmdr Landon Neyes
Chief Flight Control Officer

Lt Ashley Malone
Engineer

 

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