Here's sum more soup for the bowl. Maybe the toilet bowl, who knows...
CH. 4
Commander Benjamin Thomas checked the power level on the phaser rifle in his hands and set it for maximum stun. There was no intel on how much stun force was actually required to bring down a Gorn, but he was quite sure light stun wasn’t going to do the job. He looked across the transporter room at the other members of the away party who were busy getting into their own EVA suits. None of them had yet picked up their weapons, let alone check them out. Ben was very proficient, after three decades of service, at getting into a space suit.
“When you claim your Type Threes, check ‘em out and set for level two.” He glanced at the redhead who was just strapping down the last bit of her shiny white suit. “You got any experience with reptilian lifeforms, Doctor Keller?”
Keller looked back at the huge XO with little emotion showing on her pale face. She had dark brown eyes, almost black, and seemed to prefer darker lipsticks. “Only more common terrestrial animals, Exec.” Her British accent told him. “Few scientists in the Federation have had opportunity to examine the Gorn species.”
“Well, you’re gonna be one of the first. How good are you with a phaser?”
“I don’t prefer rifles. Too ungainly.” She picked out a Type Two from the open arms locker and strapped its holster to her belt. “But I practice at level eight with the pistol unit.”
Level Eight was better than most marines could best on the range. Vulcans and Andorians were the only species that possessed the hand-eye coordination to consistently score better than seven. Thomas decided that he’d check out here marksmanship file before becoming too impressed. He didn’t begrudge the doctor a pistol, though.
“That’s just fine, Doc. I don’t intend to have a running firefight with these guys anyway. We’re a rescue op.”
The XO looked his team over, watching as they turned to double check the suits of their neighbors. When all were ready and armed, he led them out into the main section of the transporter room. PO Goodwin was manning the main controls within the booth, supported by a gold collared engineer. Ben’s team assembled upon five of the six pads in the alcove. Goodwin looked back at them all.
“Commander, the sight I’ve picked is deep within the interior of the ship. I’m not reading any active transport beacons, if they even use them… The temp in the chamber you’ll beam into is twenty bellow freezing. There shows to be plenty of O2 on sight, but our scanners could be wrong in all of the interference. Be careful.”
Ben nodded back at the NCO. Goodwin was a good hand with plenty of experience under his own belt. Thomas had picked him personally for security four years back. He felt a bit more secure with him on the controls.
“Sounds good, Dawayne. Keep a sharp eye on the sensors and pick us up if you hear a peep out of us.” Thomas turned in his bulky white suit to face his men. “Helmets on and visors down till I order otherwise.”
Each of them slid their round helmets over their heads, obscuring any hint of who they’d once been. Only the patched attached to the shoulders of their suits held any clue to the identity of the person within. Ben looked back to the control booth.
“Energize.”
Within a darkened and frigid compartment of the stricken vessel, five shafts of azure light formed and split into glowing humanoid forms. As the energy of the transporter beam faded from around the group of rescuers, they each activated their shoulder and rifle mounted lamps and flooded the room with garish light.
Thomas took a few trial steps forward from the beam-in point and panned the channel of his lights about the interior of the space they’d found themselves in. The room was large and spacious for such a small space going ship. Modules that might have been computer banks lined one of the walls facing the away party, its screens dead. There were no chairs to be had, nor any other furnishings. A single lighting device occupied the center of the compartment’s ceiling. It too was dead. Various items like to data pads floated in the weightless environment, bouncing from obstacle to obstacle.
Eerie sounded filtered through the dampening of their thick helmets, and their lights played grotesque shadows upon every surface. The gravity felt squishy, but it was nothing their magnetic boots couldn’t solve for them.
“Alright, tight formation, we don’t know how stable this thing is after all the damage it took. Keller, how’s the air?”
The lady doctor had her tricorder up and taking readings. Through her tinted visor, her eyes scanned the information displayed. “Atmosphere is filled with bio-toxins. Something on this ship has decomposed and flooded the air with microbes.”
“Deadly?”
“Not while the temp remains below freezing, but the moment these buggers meet body temp, they’ll cause rampant infection. Our helmets stay on.”
“You heard the lady! Helmets stay on.” Ben told the rest of them. He pointed to the chamber’s only door. “Let’s prize this hatch and have a look at the rest of the ship.”
Commander Davenport slowly trudged his way to the hatch and began to run a thorough scan over its mechanism. “No power to the system, but there is a manual release.” He handed his tricorder over to Lieutenant Surall.
With a quick flick from a small pry bar from his belt kit, Ronald detached a foot long wall panel from beside the door. After a brief examination, he tried the lever within. It wouldn’t budge. After a few more grunts, the former engineer shrugged and stepped back.
“Too tough for me. Gotta be at least an eighty pound pull on that thing.”
Surall stepped in closely to Davenport and slid her hand into the crevasse. After a swift jerk, the lever came down and the door opened. Surall turned and might have nodded to the XO, though it was hard to say due to her suit’s bulk. Both she and Mister Smith stepped out into the corridor beyond, rifles raised and scanning the way. Ben chucked Ron on the shoulder.
“Gotta let the girls open your doors for ya?”
Davenport shrugged again.
“Turnabout’s fair play, XO.”
The corridors they passed through were littered with debris and the wall panels and overhead conduits showed remarkable signs of damage. This ship had taken a beating. Smoke hung thick in the chill air in several places. Thomas led his men on, hoping to lead them toward what science had decided was the bridge.
“Reading a bio mass ahead, Number One.” Came Keller’s voice over the helmet comms. It took Ben a second to realize she was referring to him.
“I go by XO round here, Doc. What kind of bio mass?”
“Reptilian. Inert.”
Around a thirty-degree bend in the debris-filled, grey-brown walled hallway they came upon a crumpled form laying face down on the deck. It was obviously a Gorn male, well over two meters tall. Its green scales were dull and without luster, and many of them were cracked. The alien was wearing a military uniform and possessing no weaponry beyond what nature had equipped him with. Its great green muscles sagged in dead weight and its slender tongue hung stiffly between a row of needle thin carnivore’s teeth. The creature’s normally reflective eyes were without shine.
Keller’s suit bent low as she ran a palm scanner over the corpse.
“This body has been through partial decompression at some point, but that wasn’t the cause of death.”
“What was?” Asked Smith. Ben stood just behind the doctor, rifle held at the ready.
“I believe he froze to death. There’s evidence of tissue laceration at the cellular level, as though ice had formed in its body. It’s wide spread, so I’d say this corridor got a lot colder than it is presently. There is also evidence that after it froze, the body was then subjected to intense heat.”
Thomas found himself nodding, though there was no one able to catch the gesture.
“This ship’s been on a roller coaster ride since it got disabled. Let’s get to the bridge and see what we can salvage. Hopefully there’s a compartment somewhere aboard with survivors.” He remembered Surall’s phantom bio signature. It seemed more and more likely that whatever had caused the reading was not a lifeform.
Captain Ford sat uncomfortably in his totally comfortable chair and resisted yet again the urge to stroll around the bridge. The small warship held aloft by his ship’s tractor beam still dominated the main viewer. It was a constant reminder that his comrades were out there, without him, sharing all the risks and the adventure. Hoarding it, one might say…
“Keptin,” Nechayev’s uninvited voice broke off Ford’s melancholy reverie and called him back to reality. “Long range sensors now detecting traces of an active varp field.”
“Where away?”
“Approaching from directly ahead, Keptin. And growing in strength.”
“ID?”
“None as yet, Keptin. Too much subspace interference.”
“Keep an eye on it. Mister Bates, hail the XO.”
Commander Thomas’s communicator beeped within the confines of his helmet; a message from Endeavour. With a tap to the key on his suit’s chest panel, he opened the line. “Go ahead Endeavour.”
“Ford here, XO. Be advised possible incoming vessel. Maybe even a Gorn rescue ship.”
Ben stopped in his progress toward the bridge hatch they’d found.
“What are our orders if it is the Gorn?”
“We’ll beam you the hell off of there and back off. It’s their ship.”
Thomas had to agree with the idea. The Gorn were territorial and protective of their property. Snooping around on their ship was a good way to get shot at. But till they got here, this ship was open to inspection. “We’ve reached what is likely the bridge, Cap’n. Mister Davenport is making entry.”
Ahead of him, both Ron and Surall were peering into an open control panel and figuring out its workings. There came a flurry of lit indicators and the door reeled up into the ceiling. “We’re in,” he told Ford.
“Understood. Keep me upraised.” Said Ford as he killed the connection.
The bridge of this craft was akin to many of the other compartments they’d looked in on. It was spacious, with a lot of overhead. There was still not an over abundant amount of lighting within, but the fixtures were at least functional here. Each of the team in turn killed their own lamps and spread out to examine the interior of the room.
Ben stepped up to a central control station, which was ringed with panels and displays. The monitors were dead or showing red default messages. Static showed on several screens. Very little was online aboard this escort. The keyboards of the alien designed station came up to the XO’s chest area.
Some of the differences in this bridge stood out from other races’ designs. The first was the lack of chairs. No space built on this craft showed any evidence of a place to sit down. Not even the few cabins they’d examined along the way had any sort of seat. Only giant cushions placed on the decks that might have been meant for sleeping. Their mentality seemed to be either to stand or lay down.
Another difference was the apparent lack of a main view screen here on the bridge. There were plenty of visual displays on the console spread out within the compartment, but no central viewer. Ben found that an oddity. He looked over to Surall, who scanned every millimeter of the room with her tricorder. Davenport was near to her, doing likewise and also poking at various consoles and interfaces.
“You two get all the intel you can from this bird. Fleet intelligence would give its left nut to be in here with us.”
“Ouch…” Came from Ron, whose suited figure faced Thomas. “We’ll get every thing possible. We need to get Mister Smith working on translating these panels for us. I need to find an engineering station.”
Thomas looked for the tallest among them. Finding him, he waved the kid into action. Lieutenant Smith lumbered over to Davenport and eyed his tricorder while referring to his Universal Translator PADD. They went from station to station till halting at an after console.
“This one mentions antimatter relays, XO.” Smith called. He had halted at the only console that actually had an occupant. The dead Gorn officer lay in a heap before the station, still crumpled where he’d fallen. The two Starfleet officers dispassionately stepped over the corpse.
Ronald began to confer with the Smith in quiet tones as they began to decipher the meanings of the readings listed there. Surall stepped nearer to Thomas. “XO, I have examined the readings taken of this vessel’s available battery power.”
“And?”
“The system is depleted to within two hundred terawatts of its capacity. The rate of drain also suggests it has been this way for some time. I do not believe we will find any survivors aboard.”
Ben looked more fully at the white clad science officer.
“It was your sensor scan that led us over here.”
“Agreed. However, having been unable to localize further readings of the bio signature since our arrival, I must conclude that the reading was erroneous. Possibly due to interference.”
Ben decided not to mention that she had vehemently ruled out the idea of interference being a problem while aboard Endeavour. “Well, we’re here and it won’t hurt to look around some more. Key your sensors for life readings only and see what you can find.”
“Aye, sir.”
Surall stepped away, joining the form of Doctor Keller. Both began to scan for life signs. Ben remained silent and let his teamwork. He wondered why there weren’t more bodies on the bridge. What had been more important than remaining here? Davenport was the next to call out to him.
“Hey, Commander! We got something.”
Thomas stomped their way, halting behind Davenport and Smith.
“What is it?”
“The computer lists the reason for main power failure,” the chief of ops told him, pointing at the lit graphic in the center of the monitor in front of him. The schematic was definitely that of an EPS type power grid. “An ionic surge overloaded their entire EPS relay and blew the sucker out. Every thing from life support to main armament. It destroyed the power conversion system in their warp core and destroyed nearly all their reserve systems. All they’ve got is a few backup battery modules built into their secondary equipment.”
“I assume they tried to repair it?”
“Yeah, but they weren’t able to finish their repairs before the ship encountered another series of plasma discharges. They were able to tap what little battery power they had and direct it to the maneuvering systems to correct their flight, but that just drained even more power.” Ron tapped at the image on the screen, “Odd thing is, they could have routed the power they had left to life support and kept several compartments safe for at least a week…but they didn’t.”
“Ran out of time?” Ben offered.
“No, they seem to have chosen not to. The time index on the modifications is well in advance of life support failure. They chose some other system over keeping themselves alive…”
Ben could think of very little that he would have opted to keep running over life support. But then, he was thinking as a human. Who knew what a Gorn thought of as being more important? Maybe they’d been on an important intel mission, or some kind of defensive deployment.
“Could the system they chose be related to life support?”
“Can’t tell. The UT doesn’t make the translation. There’s some kind of symbol that isn’t repeated in any other context.” Smith explained.
Ben leaned into the console, examining the image before him to see if it might jar some memory. Nothing came to mind. “Can you locate this system?”
Ronald began to slowly tap at the controls. The image on the monitors began to change, resolving outward into a side view of the forked ship, then zooming in again. The symbol Noah had mention blinked in blue above a compartment highlighted. “Three decks down, three sections aft. A heavily armored area in the belly of the ship.”
Ben grasped the two officers on the shoulder.
“That’s where we’re headed folks.”
***
And I leave off again for more response, like an adulation/nit-pick junkie!
Gimme! SNORT...ahhhh.
Seriously, tho, I hope y'all that actually still visit this site enjoy whats posted.
--thu guv!
Topic: 'No Good Deed'--Story #2 (Read 12672 times)