Suited and Booted
Posted on Mon Jan 4th, 2016 @ 5:58pm by Captain Tim Williams & Lieutenant Commander Ciaran McIntyre & Lieutenant Ethan Kessel & Lieutenant Griffen Tanol & Lieutenant Ryan North
Episode:
Lost Property
Location: Derelict NX-class starship
Timeline: MD02 0920hrs
When Tim walked into the transporter room, kitted in his EV suit with his helmet under his arm, he found the rest of his little boarding party already in the room and waiting for him, similarly equipped. "I see you couldn't resist coming over yourself, Ethan?" Tim grinned as he saw his chief engineer standing next to the portable generator which had already been placed in the centre of the transporter pad.
"With respect Sir, you could keep me off this ship if you tried! A Starship like this is a relic! They are ancient by Starship standards. You know I can't resist a good mystery." He said.
"My thoughts exactly," Tim agreed.
"Though I warn you, I'll do my best. But she might end up needing a Historian as much as an Engineer!" He said enthusiastically.
"Right, well let's get ourselves over there, shall we?" the captain said. He stepped up onto the transporter pad before lifting his helmet onto his head and securing it down. The group stood around the transporter pad for another few minutes as they each went through the process of checking each other's suits to make sure they were all sealed up before Tim looked towards the transporter operator and gave the order to beam them over.
Derelict NX-class vessel
Tim and the others immediately flicked on their helmet lights once the transporter beam released them, and the beams of light revealed them to be in the ship's sickbay, almost dead-centre in the ship's saucer. It was also one of the most open spaces aboard, which meant that the transporter operator hadn't needed to worry about whether they would be beaming in among too much fallen equipment or anything else. There was absolutely no power on the ship - which meant that not only was there no light aside from the helmets and control surfaces on their EV suits, but there was no gravity either, and Tim could feel his stomach going a bit queasy at the sensation. He reached down to the controls on his leg and activated his magnetic boots, which fastened him to the floor.
"Everyone alright?" he asked through their helmet comms, looking around at the team.
Ryan shown his wrist light around the area. The gravity was out, not surprising considering the age of the ship, there was also no power, although again, he wasn't expecting anything to be working.
"Zero G," Ryan remarked. "Reminds me of my MACO training."
"WO Chineylo reporting, sir. Yes, I agree, Lieutenant Ryan. It reminds me watching my next door neighbours jumping on their beds."
"I bet there is a story there..." Kessel commented, and tried to stop his inertia from making him spin. His training had covered many eventualities, and Zero G analysis and repair was a mandatory requirement. It came with the territory. Even in this day and age, it was sometimes necessary to exit the ship to perform repairs or maintenance. Indeed, it occurred in drydocks around the Federation on a regular basis.
His final exam had involved a performing a Warp Core repair without life support or gravity. Apparently, his sadistic professor had acquired the idea from a similar exercise performed by the Medical officers received.
Like Kessel, Mac had never been particularly good in zero G. While he didn't like to admit it, the lack of gravity turned his stomach and keeping one eye on the floor was the only way he could think off to stop an unfortunate 'internal contaminant' in his suit. "There's not as much damage as I'd expected."
He was right. From the power outage, Kessel had expected extensive damage. Indeed, the fact that the ship was out here at all implied that it wasn't capable of returning to home space, and that was usually indicative of a catastrophic accident. Or hostile activity.
Griffen gazed around the room, she remembered this room. Or rather the design of it, back then it had started to become a rather standard design within Starfleet ships. Grif had been in one once back when she was Horac, that was a long time ago though, lifetimes. Literally. Pulling out her tricorder, Grif began to scan the area. With a rhythmic thump of her mag boots holding her down, Grif slowly circled the room.
"The computer core should be right above us," Tim said, pointing upwards slowly and deliberately in the zero-g environment. "There's an access ladder back there that should take us up to it." He pointed behind the two main work stations to a small ladder which disappeared into a circular hole in the ceiling. "Thankfully the zero gravity environment should make getting the portable generator up there much easier."
Mac was getting used to the lack of gravity - it always took some time but the feeling tended to subside if there was a floor to stand on. "This medical equipment is quite something." He said, picking up what looked like a hacksaw. "I wouldn't have fancied going under the knife of this sawbones."
Steline frowned. "Something happened here." She knew straight away that it was the most idiotic thing to say. But it was now said.
Ryan shrugged and got out his tricorder. "I'm not detecting any unusual energy signatures... wait, looks like there are traces of triolic radiation."
Kessel's eyes widened.
"I wouldn't worry about it though, the readings aren't consistent enough that it should cause us damage. There have been some theories out there that say pockets of interphase space contain low levels of the radiation but its still thought not to be a naturally occurring phenomenon," Ryan stated.
"Sometimes I don't know whether to think you're an augment or you're carrying an encyclopedia hidden up your uniform, North." Mac joked. Ever since he had performed what seemed to be a miracle in breaking through some of the Klingon cloaks and dampening fields in the Astrometrics Lab the young scientist hadn't ceased impressing him.
Kessel winced at the mention of triolic though. "That's not good." He scanned the area quickly, and breathed a sigh of relief. *Traces* was the right word. "Thank goodness its that low... Triolic energy is nasty stuff." He paused.
"You are right. Triolic Radiation doesn't occur naturally. Its a byproduct of several forms of energy production. But Triolic radiation is extremely dangerous to human life. No Federation ship would be equipped to generate it." He added.
"The readings seem to be low enough that they aren't going to cause us any harm," Tim said, looking at his own tricorder. "But that throws up some more questions about what happened to this ship two centuries ago." Tim looked around the room again, but in the limited light thrown out by their torches, couldn't see anything out of the ordinary. There were a few bits of fabric against some of the cabinets on one side of the sickbay which he guessed would have been blankets or sheets or whatever else would have been in the room at the time that had piled up there, but otherwise the room looked as it would have when it was in use - power not-withstanding.
"This room is pretty much dead-centre in the ship, so it's not too surprising that there isn't any damage in here," the captain said. "Even the micrometeorites that have been causing holes in the outer hull all these years would have been stopped by bulkheads elsewhere on the ship long before they managed to get through to here. Let's get that generator up to the computer core; see if we can at least find out the ship's name. We should be able to get a few more clues from the Highlander's databanks then."
"Assuming we can get the uplink to work, we'll have to widen the signal bandwidth and then then work on setting up a temporary file interface," Ryan said.
"A datalink would take a while to set up," Tim agreed. "The computer systems on this ship are ancient compared to ours. They weren't even duotronic, let alone isolinear. But if we can just access them locally, then we should be able to at least find out the ship's name, which we can start searching for in our own databanks."
"Hopefully Mr. Kessel has more knowledge in that area than myself," Ryan said. "Ancient starship operations were never really my strong suit."
"Finally!" Mac smiled through the faceplate of his EV suit. "He does have a weakness!"
Ryan waved a dismissive hand toward the chief engineering. "Computer systems never much interested me. You work on getting the computer back online, I'll work on assessing the ships systems with Lt. Tanol."
"I always had a thing for old ships, hold up surprisingly well." Grif commented as she closed her tricorder, her scans had shown up all the same things that the others had already pointed out. "Also I thought they were pretty advanced for their day, or at least Horac did. You humans were leapfrogging other civilizations in terms of technological advancements, it took you a hundred years what it took us Trills almost two hundred and we love science and stuff like that."
"I'm more curious about what happened to the crew but left the ship relatively intact," Ryan said. "Was is a biological contagion? Some sort of ship wide failure of the environmental systems? That's the real mystery."
"Computers should have recorded if they evacuated or anything so we'll see." Grif replied with a shrug which looked rather comical in the EV suit., "Though if they evac'd after they lost power then we're going to have a lot of work to figure it out."
"Well let's get the generator up to the next deck and see if we can't find out," Tim said, making his way over towards the ladder and peering up. "There's a hatch at the top of this, but it shouldn't be too hard to shift." He deactivated his mag boots and pushed lightly against the deck plating, using the ladder rungs to stead himself as he rose. It was a tight fit with his EV suit on, but once he got to the top, he wedged himself between the jeffries tube-like cylinder he was in and the ladder rungs, and reached for the release mechanism on the hatch. It moved with a shove, but the hatch itself wouldn't budge at first. He repositioned and flattened his back against it, and heard it pop free as he pushed with his legs.
Drifting up into the computer core maintenance room, he looked around. The ship's computer core surrounded him, making up the walls of the circular room, which seemed smaller than the sickbay below as a result. Between him and the exit hatch were two workstations, facing each other. The rest of the room was empty - likely not needing to be manned very often, it didn't have any other equipment or anything else. Looking further up, he could see that the rungs of the ladder continued up the length of the room for the three decks that the computer core occupied. There was a walkway at each level, and he knew from the ship's deckplans that there would be another entry way on at the top, on B-Deck, just below the bridge. It was here that he could start to see some of the damage that had been evident on the outer hull of the ship too; at the very top level he could make out small holes in the bulkheads, where micro-meteorites had penetrated through the layers of metal. He could see some had lodged themselves in the upper levels of the computer core, damaging the components they had hit, whilst there were a few fragments that had fallen down to the floor.
"OK, bring the generator up," Tim said over their comm. line, pulling his attention back towards the hatch. "I'll guide it up from here."
"Coming up." Grif replied as she moved back to the small pile of equipment they had brought with them, grabbing the generator from the top. "You're going to have to watch the powerful, this generator is a hell of a lot more powerful than the ones they used back in the ships hey day. If you don't watch it you might fry it all." Grif dictated over to comm as she used the lack of gravity to lift the device and push it towards the open hatch.
"And blow every relay on the ship," Ryan commented.
"Motion seconded. Lets not fry the ship. I wonder if this qualifies as an antique..." Kessel said.
Ryan paused, making a few sensor recordings with his tricorder. "The interior systems seem like they are in pretty good shape, all things considering. A few hull breaches but it does look like most of the emergency bulkheads closed off before the whole deck could decompress."
"So you're saying there's actually the chance something organic might still be alive in here? Interesting..." Grif said as she turned off her magnetic boots and pushed off the deck to pop her head into the hatchway, "Actually I'm not even sure our generator has compatible connectors. Are we all good sir?"
"Maybe," Ryan offered, looking at his tricorder. "It seems more likely that the crew left, otherwise I'm sure we should be able to pick up some kind of reading from their remains."
"Wasn't so much worried about the crew as the fact that this thing's been sitting adrift for a couple hundred years. If anything organic was left, it might be interesting to study it's evolution in isolation." Grif replied looking back down at the Scientist.
"There have been very few documented recordings of such things taking place," Ryan replied. "Though I suppose it's not entirely beyond the realm of possibility."
Kessel though the the various mugs of tea he'd left lying around Engineering.
"Lets hope not. Might not be a pretty sight..." He said, mostly to himself.
"We going to be good with our generators?"
"We're going to have to fudge a few of the connections," Tim answered down the comm line. "But since we're dealing with power here rather than data, we should be able to make it work." He had found what looked to be a power connection port at the base of one of the computer racks, and was trying to map out which connection on the ship matched up with those on their generator - thankfully modern-day Starfleet thought to include a variety of tools with the generators to allow them to interface with ships of alien design that a crew might need to provide assistance to. At least for this old ship, all of the labels were in the same language.
"I've got the connections made," the captain said, after fiddling with the parts that were really too small to be handled properly with EV gloves on. "I'm putting one percent power through the local circuits." Localising the power would mean that if he did blow anything, it would be on just the one rack in the computer core. If that worked, then they could make the same connections to each of the other racks as needed. He watched with a smile as status lights began flickering on up the computing rack. "It looks like we're in business!" he called out.
Kessel watched, impressed. The man should never have left the Engineering department.
"Does someone want to try seeing what data we can access on one of those consoles back there?"
Ryan stepped toward the indicated console and stared at it. The configuration was vague but he could at least take an educated guess at what the buttons did. Hopefully, he didn't end up blowing them all up or something equally embarrassing. "Looks like the main computer is still a bit slow... its booting up now. Or trying to at any rate."
Mac motioned for his security team to spread out around the space, just in case their tricorders were wrong and there was something living in the hull of the ship. The sooner they had some semblance of artificial gravity and maybe even life support, the better.
"Systems coming online... I think. De Salle, NX class," Ryan said, reading from the screen. "Hang on, I'll try accessing primary systems."
"No life support... No Gravity... No Power. What *happened* here? Any sign of damage to the primary systems? What knocked out the power to begin with?" He asked. Then, thinking aloud, he looked back to the name of the ship.
"De Salle? Anyone know the ship by name? It was a long shot." Kessel asked. "Can we run that through Starfleet's Databases, try and work out what it was doing all the way out here?" He asked.
"Sensor logs have been badly damaged and it looks like a large section of the ships files have been corrupted," Ryan spoke up, tapping a few buttons. "Looks like most of the primary systems are intact... most of them anyway."
"You two stay here and see if you can get any more of the computer core functioning," Tim said, looking at Ethan and Ryan. "And get someone on the Highlander looking through our database for records on the ship. Grif, come with me to engineering; I want to see how likely it is that we'll be able to get the ship's own power plant running again."
Captain Tim Williams
Commanding Officer
Lt. Commander Ciaran McIntyre
Chief of Security
Lieutenant Ethan Kessell
Chief Engineer
Lieutenant Griffen Tanol
Assistant Chief Engineer
Lieutenant JG Ryan North
Chief Science Officer
Warrant Officer Steline Chineylo
Security Officer
USS Highlander