I feel ya. Request accepted.
Chapter Five
Dressed in heavy EVA suits, Captain Sharp and Commander Andreavich approached the shuttle Eagle, which sat in the center of the flight deck. Commander Bornet was at the ship’s fantail, rigging up a projector to the ship’s umbilical connection port.
“What’s that for, engineer?”
“It’s for powering that derelict over there. I don’t want to carry a portable generator for the sole purposes of opening up every damn hatch.”
“We can pry them open.” Sharp countered.
“Not if they’re dead-locked, and we don’t know what all’s happened over there. Beside that, we’ll get along a lot faster if we can restore gravity. And a portable generator isn’t going to do that.”
“Very well, engineer. Let’s get on board.”
Sharp led the way through the side hatch of the boxy looking auxiliary craft. The ship, meant to carry seven personnel plus moderate equipment, looked quite empty with only them within it. Bornet sat his equipment pack down and stood in the aft compartment to put on his own EVA suit. Sharp handed the small pack he carried to the science officer and directed her to one of the crew chairs as he took the helm. He sat his helmet in the copilot seat and keyed the comm panel.
“Shuttle Eagle to Bridge. Ship is ready for launch. Preflight check is go.”
“Roger that, Shuttle Eagle. Hanger deck control clears you for launch. Prepare to depressurize.”
Sharp closed the outer hatch and triggered the elevator control to turn the ship toward the massive clamshell bay doors. Flashing alarm panels lit on either side of the door, warning of imminent depressurization. Moments later, as the air was removed, the twin doors parted and began to reel into the bulkheads port and starboard. White nothing stared back in at them.
“You are clear to launch.”
Sharp powered the little ship ahead on maneuvering jets alone. She flew straight and true, passing gracefully past the doors and into the hazy void beyond. Having learned from Jeremy’s experience an hour before, the captain avoided use of the impulse drive and relied only on the tiny booster jets mounted all over the hull to pilot the shuttle. It was slow going, but they made their turn and passed over the upper hull of Endeavour, on their way to the Trafalgar.
Sharp watched as they passed over the unblemished, white hull of his starship. She looked peaceful sitting there below them, as though she weren’t fighting for her life and lives of the men and women aboard her. Once the Endeavour passed from sight, Sharp turned his attention to the smaller, less fortunate ship ahead.
“If I remember the design,” he said as much to himself as anyone else, “The Jutland-Class starship has a ventral docking port near to the fantail marked by red tracing.”
Still stuffing himself into his pressure suit, Bornet cast his eyes to the growing, white vessel pictured in the trio of fore viewports.
“According to the contractor’s notes, Trafalgar and Midway both had those ports moved further forward due to a slightly different frame assembly they use. It’ll be closer to the antimatter fill ports.”
The ship in question had grown to enormous proportions. She was only half Endeavour’s size, but still over 200 meters in length. Sharp dipped the shuttle beneath Trafalgar’s bow and deflector dish and followed the lines of her integrated engineering section. He slowed the shuttle and craned to look up.
“Alright, I have it. Get ready on that umbilical projector.”
Mister Bornet sat down at the copilot station and worked the computer for a moment. “Projector aligned.”
“I’m not getting any response from the docking mechanism on their end. I’m deploying the soft dock.”
Sharp rolled the shuttle over, so that her bottom aligned with Trafalgar’s. A buzzing sound emanated from the deck as the dock extended. It thumped once it made contact, and immediately filled with air.
“We have a stable seal. I’m reading power reserves at 92%. That gives us what, engineer?”
Bornet squinted.
“Powering local gravity to the engineering section and connecting hatchways… forty-two minutes.”
“Then there isn’t time to waste.”
Sharp grabbed up his helmet and headed to the center of the passenger compartment. He bent and triggered the deck hatch, opening the airlock. The long black tunnel ended with a naked, frosty portion of Trafalgar’s outer hull.
“Engines, kill the shuttle’s gravity. That’ll give us a few more minutes and make this easier.”
“Aye.”
Sharp and his people instantly drifted off the floor of the small ship. Unlike a full-size starship, there was no ‘spin-down’ time for its gravity generator. Sharp inverted, putting on his helmet, and pushed his way down the docking tube.
The tunnel was claustrophobic and ill-lit. Sharp was pretty wide-shouldered and found himself bumping into the soft material of the soft dock often. Luckily, it wasn’t a long trip. He reached the Trafalgar’s hatch and grabbed hold of the handrail beside it to steady himself.
“I’m in.” He reported over the helmet-comm.
“Powering the servo.”
The control panel next to the airlock hatch lit up. Sharp tapped in a universal code and triggered open the hatch. There was a slight whoosh as the pressure equalized. Liter drifted past in the dim spill of light coming from the shuttle interior. The captain turned on his helmet light and pushed through the entryway.
The Trafalgar was a frigid tomb. No bodies abounded in this lower maintenance section. The captain righted himself with the deck and engaged his magnetic boots, clomping down on the floor. The sound was hollow within his helmet.
“I’m in. No bodies. Just some flotsam. Just looks like she was left in a scrap yard.”
“There should be a life support access panel one deck up from you. Forward is the antimatter storage core.” Bornet told him.
Sharp unsnapped his tricorder from his equipment belt and activated it. He gave the antimatter section a quick scan. He was amazed at the high degree of interference at even such a short range.
“The antimatter core is inert. Just raw hydrogen. We should plant a secondary charge here and synchronize the timer on our way back out.”
“We’ll catch that last. The antimatter core is designed to be easier to reach for maintenance.”
“I can take care of that.” Commander Andreavich offered. “I should have some function here anyway.”
“Actually, I was figuring to send you to the deuterium core.”
Sharp reattached his tricorder and headed for the tri-access ladder in the compartment’s corner. After a few slow steps, he killed the gravity boots and glided the rest of the way to the ladderway.
“Why me?” The science officer was asking.
“Because you’re a lot slimmer than either Bornet or I am, Commander. And there’s no direct access to deuterium tankage on this ship without dismantling the hull.”
“Then why don’t we just set charges on the hull?”
“The only thing we have on board that will breach the armor casing around the fuel tanks is a photon torpedo. And I’m pretty confident that it would be inert before we got far enough away to detonate it.”
“Oh.”
“I’m heading up to deck eleven now.” Sharp told them as he boosted up the ladder way. “Science officer, come ahead on over. Bornet, you follow when I have gravity and hatch control restored.”
The next deck gave Sharp his first glimpse of death aboard the ship. A body drifted slowly past him, clad in a pressure suit just like his own. The engineer had tried in vain to cling to life for a few extra hours by donning an environment suit. Had the man had some kind of plan, Jon wondered, or had he been hoping for an unlikely rescue? Either way, he’d been unsuccessful. His face was shriveled and stretched over his facial bones. Thankfully, his eyes were closed.
Sharp stood back a bit as the corpse twirled by.
The environmental override station he sought stood alongside a subsystems compartment down the corridor from the captain. With a gentle push that way, he reached it and grabbed a tight hold of the blue-trimmed casing. His lights showed on the console. A power indicator showed the current of energy being bussed here from the shuttle. With a few keystrokes he was able to route that power to the necessary systems.
Light flooded the compartment. A dull droning sounded from somewhere aft as the gravity generator spun up. The Trafalgar engineer dropped unceremoniously to the deck with a frozen crunch. Sharp was glad the man had his suit on.
“Gravity established. I’m activating engineering doorway control.” Sharp told his people.
Commander Andreavich was now at the aft end of the corridor, her feet firmly planted on the deck before the crumpled engineer’s body. She was looking down at the lumpy form with revulsion, but no fear.
“Do we have air?”
“No. I’ll flood the deuterium monitoring compartment once we get there, but there’s no need to waste the power anywhere else.”
The science officer nodded within her helmet and knelt beside the body on the floor. She gently rolled it over and frowned at the face behind the visor.
“Your brother, Commander?”
“No, sir. It’s Eugene Tiroll. Antimatter specialist. Looks like he just fell asleep.”
“That’s about the scope of it.”
Grunting with displeasure, Commander Bornet pulled his bulk up the tri-access ladder and planted feet on the deck beside the science officer. He looked down at the kneeling woman and rendered an expression that was as much revulsion as dark humor.
“Feeling a bit macabre, aren’t you science officer?”
Andreavich shot him a dirty glance and stood up rapidly. The motion carried her off the deck just a bit.
“Gravity’s still spongy.” Sharp observed. “Let’s make our way on up to Main Engineering. We’ve got thirty-eight minutes left.”
Commander Jeremy sat in the command chair and marveled at how calm he felt in its confines. The chair was a forbidding, masculine looking thing, and looked anything but comfortable. When the captain sat in it, it looked dwarfed in comparison, but Daniel always figured it was his rank that accomplished that feat.
But sitting in it now, the executive officer felt as though every life-threatening problem was working toward its eventual resolution. Failure didn’t feel like an option.
“Reserve power status.” He requested.
Lieutenant Imura was the officer at engineering just then.
“Forty-three percent, Commander.”
“Is the drain is accelerating as projected?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Lieutenant Lania, any communication from the boarding party?”
“Negative, Number One.”
“Would we pick it up if there were?”
“Only if they route their transmissions through the shuttlecraft’s comm system, sir.”
A hint of motion caught the XO’s attention. He turned and squinted at something he couldn’t quite make out on the main viewer.
“What the…”
“Sir?” Asked Mister Sehr.
“Thylis…magnify viewer image, lower right quad. 50% enhancement.”
The gunnery officer reset the visual settings, enhancing that section of hazy cloud. A dark object was drifting across the image in a straight line.
“Magnify that.”
Sehr enhanced the image again. A long, cylindrical device was now slowly traversing their screen. It had Starfleet markings and bore the name USS Endeavour/NCC-1895.
“That’s our probe. The one we launched before we got pulled in...” Jeremy said. The thing’s navigational beacon was off. He blinked as his mind pondered that. Starfleet probes had reinforced, high capacity batteries…
“Engineer Imura, project this field’s power draining capacity and tell me how long a Starfleet Type IV probe should be able to last in here.”
Kami turned and began to run the figures on a small screen.
“Projections state twenty-seven hours, eighteen minutes, forty seconds.”
“Then why is that probe already dead?”
“It’s been… just over an hour since we launched it…” Mister Sehr said.
The assistant engineer turned to the XO. Trepidation had taken hold of her. “Sir, the boarding party is using the shuttle’s power system to operate systems aboard the Trafalgar. If the shuttle’s affected the same way…”
That confirmed Jeremy’s fears.
“Lania! Hail the Captain!”
***
There ya go! Am I forgiven for my choice to blatantly ignore my earlier failing?
Topic: Endeavour #1 (Read 13070 times)