Charge of the Light Brigade (pt 1)

Posted on 09 Dec 2024 @ 9:24pm by Captain Bane Plase & Lieutenant Commander Stovek & Ensign Emilie D'Astous

2,303 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Stranded
Location: Bridge

USS Cygnus

Walking the corridors made her feel like she was on a ghost ship. The corpses and the debris scattered all over the decks cast long shadows, and the weakening structural integrity field made the ship's entrails groan under the strain.

Émilie and Flint had split up a while back. She'd finished her tour of the emergency shelters, and he'd stayed behind to help take care of the injured. The head count she was bringing back to the Captain was not encouraging.

Auxiliary power had just returned. She turned at an intersection in the corridor, and made her way toward the center of the saucer section, toward the main turbolift. She didn't relish the thought of climbing the seventeen decks up to the Bridge, but if auxiliary power had returned, maybe the lifts were working?

The doors parted at her approach, revealing a darkened turbolift car. She got aboard. Without the main computer, of course there was no voice interface. She started to inspect the control panel by the door, when the lights came on in the car, suddenly blinding her with their brightness. She almost yelled out in a combination of surprise and exhilaration, but refrained herself. What was there to be exhilarated about when over half your crew had horribly perished?

The control panel lit up - dim and unsteady, the display blinking on and off, but enough for her to see a deck listing. She pressed the listing for the Bridge, and breathed a silent prayer to the turbolift gods when the doors hissed shut and the car started moving.

It rose by a few decks before the computer beeped in protest. She felt it come to a stop before moving sideways. It stopped and chirped again, and started moving back upwards, before stopping again to move sideways.

She stopped counting at ten, the number of times the lift car changed direction. No doubt it was having to adjust it's path to go around obstacles, or hull breaches, or... She stopped her train of thoughts there, not wanting to explore any alternatives.

After a few minutes, the car came to a stop, and the doors opened. She walked out onto the Bridge, and stopped. From the lift doors, everything almost seemed normal. She couldn't see the wreckage littering the deck, and the aft consoles hid the damage and the bloodstains on the deck from her view. But as she took another step forward, everything was revealed to her.

Captain Bane was alone on the Bridge, looking around like a lost puppy, going from console to console, tapping uselessly on each in turn.

"Captain," she called out, afraid to startle him.

The Captain looked over to the familiar voice and smiled. "Emilie, you're fine. Thank the Prophets."

Having spent nearly an hour under the watchful bluish glow of a dermal regeneration suite, Stovek had badgered the medical staff into allowing him to leave against medical advice. With only partial auxiliary power, crawling through Jeffries tubes has been challenging. And the fact that the regenerating nerves in his hands were quite sensitive was not helpful either. Nevertheless, the Vulcan soldiered onward. Between deck three and four, the lights had come on completely; that indicated that the mains were back online, at least for the moment. Stovek quickened his pace and exited the crawl space at the aft portion of the bridge.

“Captain,” he said. He sounded weak, tired. “Ensign. I am relieved to see you.”

The Captain was incredibly relieved, and glad to see another familiar face. "I am beyond thrilled both of you are here," he said to Stovek, and again to Emilie. "Do either of you have anything to report, or shall we get right into it?" He was itching to get to work, but wanted to make sure they were able to share any information they had before they started swinging in the dark.

"I went to every emergency shelter I could find," she said, repeating the orders the Captain had given her - so long ago, it seemed. "I counted..." She took a deep breath, and struggled to say the final number. "I counted two hundred and sixty survivors, Captain."

The Captain nodded. "You did outstanding work, Ensign. I am going to put you in for a commendation when we get back to Deep Space Nine. We got our internal sensors back on. You should be able to use them there," he said, pointing at the functioning Science Station I, "to get a reading of where everyone is now. He then looked to Stovek expectantly. He did not have to wait for a response.

“Probably nothing you don’t already know,” said Stovek dryly. He took a few steps toward the Ops console. “I am curious as to our sensor capabilities.”

"Oh," Bane began. He told them both of the limited external sensors, finding the pod and the nacelle drifting away, the remnants of the freighter that exploded, which had gotten them into this position, and reiterated the internal sensors working perfectly, thanks probably to the administrations of Lieutenant Ahmad. "Maybe you can see something I cannot. I'm an Engineer by training. Sensors were never my thing," Bane admitted. He looked to Ensign D'Astous and smiled at her, hoping the humor was infectious.

- - - - - - - - -
USS Goddard

Erik Larsen drummed his fingers on the left arm of his chair. Something about this potential situation with the Cygnus was not sitting right with him, not at all. He repeatedly asked if they could go any faster; each time he was told they were pushing the engines as hard as possible. Their Chief Engineer had managed to squeeze out a little more power, boosting the small Reliant class vessel to an impressive warp factor 9.95.

“Sir,” said Lieutenant JG Ross from the Ops console. “I have something.”

Larsen sprang from his seat and walked to the Ops station. “What have you got?”

“Detecting significant debris near the Cygnus’s last known location,” said Ross, her delicate fingers moving over the control panel in a smooth and fluid motion. “But it is not consistent with the size of a Nebula class starship. There’s too much. And…there is an unidentified vessel on a course to intercept the debris field. Its transponder is scrambled, but the profile suggests a Pakled salvage vessel.”

“Time to intercept?”

“For them? Eight minutes. For us? Ten minutes.”

“All medical personnel prepare for incoming casualties. Repeat, all medical personnel prepare for casualties.” That was an order Erik did not want to give, but he would be damned if he was going to let further harm come to his friends. “Yellow alert.”


------------
Pakled salvage hauler Kogar

Cherbegrod looked at both Garipog and Vernabob. "Take us out of fast speed, drop us right next to that ship. I want to take it in tow and go back to fast speed as fast as possible," he ordered. He had been watching the look-forward scanners for the last ten minutes. Other than a large garbage field surrounding what he was for sure was a derelict Starfleet vessel, there was nothing around. "I bet they killed each other, and we get the spoils," he said, greedily rubbing his hands together like a common Katarian garden fly.

Vernabob looked at his screen, where the green and red dots were still bumping into each other, which made them go fast. He knew that when he pushed the yellow button, the dots would stop moving, and they would come out of streaking speed and back to normal. He had to time it perfectly so they would be as close as possible to the other ship, the one that was broken. But he could do it. He was smart.

"Ready," he said.

The commander of the Salvage Hauler then looked to his weapons guy. "Our weapons are on, and strong? I do not want another instance like we had nine circles ago," he alluded.

“Weapons are ready,” said Garipog with a slow nod. He was not a scientist, but the estimated mass of this vessel was nearly 3 and a half milion units. If the Kogar was able to take her in tow, they could only go Factor Two at the very most. Plus, there was a blip on the sensor array.

“Somebody else is approaching,” he said. “Opposite direction, speed of Factor Twelve.”

Cerhbegrod snorted. "That is impossible. Do you have goop on you viewer again, Garipog? Nothing goes that fast. Not even light," he said, smartly.

- - - - - - - -

USS Cygnus

Emilie tapped the Science console and brought up the display for the external sensors. There was nothing on the display that made a lot of sense to her - she was a pilot, not a Science officer. She did have a few Academy courses under her belt detailing the basics of working the Science console, but that was a while back. It wasn't exactly like riding a bicycle - she had to work hard to remember the notions.

The sensor data she was looking at was fragmentary. The sensors had been badly damaged, but as the Captain had already said, she could track the more massive pieces of debris - the sensor and communications pod, and the port nacelle being the largest pieces. Of the freighter, nothing remained that was much bigger than a few hundred cubic centimeters.

The incident had occurred when they were on a direct heading to Deep Space Nine, travelling at a speed of a little under Warp Three. The freighter's explosion had ruptured their Warp bubble, and the nacelle had been ripped off, colliding with the saucer section and sending them into a tailspin - had that diverted their trajectory? She tried using nearby celestial bodies to triangulate their position and compared it to what she remembered from before the accident. From what she could tell, they had been thrown about half a light---

Something on the screen caught her attention. Two things, actually.

"Captain," she called out. "I'm reading two incoming Warp signatures." She tapped the console to identify them, but the sensors were too badly damaged. "I can't tell who's coming, but we've got company on the way."

Bane, who had turned to continue talking to Commander Stovek, turned back around. He approached her and looked over her shoulder, where she helpfully pointed on the screen what she was looking at. "Huh, neither of those were there before when I looked at it. They must have just come in range of our limited sensor capability," he said helpfully. "It is probably our rescuers. Starfleet no doubt learned pretty quickly when we stopped transmitting that something was probably wrong and came looking for us." He patted her on the shoulder, reassuring her as much as he was reassuring himself. He had to admit a huge weight was lifted off his shoulders. Though, a nagging thought tugged at the back of his mind. Why two ships, and why from different directions?

“Wait,” said Stovek as he moved to the Science II station and fed the limited readings to that station also. “One vessel is on a directional vector from unmapped space. If memory serves correctly, the Federation does not currently have any exploratory missions within this or any adjacent sectors along their projected course. It is therefore logical to deduce that vessel is non-Federation.”

Plase looked again at the telemetry of the ships. One was coming from the direction of Federation space. The other, from contested space. Who knew what the hell was coming at them. "It is safe to assume then that this ship," he said, pointing at the one they knew was coming from the contested space, "Is up to no good." He had no other option at this point. He couldn't even make the ship self-destruct, first because there were only two senior officers here, now that Ziyal and Winters had left (along with Bast, in the state he was), and second because the self-destruct program was off-line still. Nor could even contact the rest of the ship rapidly enough to let everyone know what was coming. He only hoped the crew would be able to react in time, in the event they were boarded. He knew they would resist, to the person, if they were boarded. "As the Klingon's are fond of saying, 'Perhaps today is a good day to die.' Arm yourselves and take up defensive positions. We hold until the last." He looked at both of them carefully and sternly. "To the last. Am I clear?"

Just then, his commbadge crackled to life. Some static, but he was able to understand the person on the other end clearly. It was Lieutenant Ziyal. =/\= Lieutenant Ziyal to Captain Bane, can you hear me sir? =/\=

Plase smiled huge at the new development. Ziyal had gotten internal comms back up and running somehow. He smacked his commbadge harder than he intended, excited about being able to talk to anyone where ever they were. "I hear you, Lieutenant. Whatever you did, outstanding work. I need you to get to the Bridge though. It looks like we may have to defend the ship. Get here as quickly as you can. Bane out." He tapped off his commbadge, then to the computer, he said, "Computer shipwide announcement."

He waited while the computer chiruped, then continued.

"Attention all hands. Red alert. Arm yourselves if you can. Defend the ship. This is not a drill."


OFF

A post by

Lieutenant Commander Stovek
Chief Operations Officer
USS Cygnus

and

Ensign Emilie D'Astous (as played by Lieutenant Commander Bast)
Flight Control Officer
USS Cygnus

and

Bane Plase, Captain
USS Cygnus, Commanding

 

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