99 Problems, Plus One
Posted on Sun Oct 26th, 2025 @ 10:55am by Lieutenant Alexis Ryan & Lieutenant Didrea Zade
Mission:
Aeon's End
Location: QSD Control Room, USS Athena
Timeline: BACKPOST - Immediately after The Big Oopsie
3497 words - 7 OF Standard Post Measure
Adri gasped as she jolted awake, then groaned. The piercing blare of a red alert made her head ache, and she looked around. Through the strands of brown-greyed hair that escaped the headwrap, the corridor was a mess, beams and debris were everywhere, and only about half the crew in the immediate vicinity were moving. She carefully pushed herself up, feeling debris roll off of her. Nothing felt broken, just bruised by some miracle. Dust tickled her throat, and while coughing she adjusted her sleeve into a makeshift mask across her mouth.
A few steady breaths eased the coughing fit, so she turned her attention toward the nearest body and pressed two fingers to their neck. The pulse against her fingers was faint, but present. A groan nearby caught her attention, and she lifted some debris to help the Ensign stand. "Does anything feel broken?" When the Ensign shook her head, Adri did another assessment of the area. A couple more officers were coming out of the rubble now, some bleeding more than others but all trying to get their bearings. For the current situation, she was the ranking officer. "Alright, people!" She called out. "Check for survivors! If you can walk, get the injured to sickbay, and..." Her brow furrowed when she saw wide eyes, prompting her to turn around. "...a-and then... holy shit..."
The bodies and damage weren't nearly as daunting as the new window currently providing an exclusive view of space.
Adri swore her heart got jettisoned. Eyes wide, she took a couple steps back, hoping to every god out there that the emergency forcefields would hold. "... R-right," she stammered, forcing herself to look away from what was guaranteed death. "Find survivors, get the critical to sickbay, then report to your department head for assignments. If you are an engineer... please make sure we don't get sucked into space." It felt strange to give orders to another ship's crew, but in the immediacy of crisis, it didn't matter who gave direction, as long as someone did.
Rushing to an officer with a gash that didn't want to stop bleeding, Adri yanked the wrap off of her head. Appearances and personal comfort weren't important right now. Her brown hair draped around her shoulders as she turned the fabric into a makeshift bandage, tying it as tight as she could make it. She helped the officer up before passing him off to another Ensign, then looked around to identify where the hell she even was on this ship. Fifteen unfamiliar decks were harder to navigate when the corridors looked like a war zone.
Spotting an LCARS panel that was still active, she tapped on it to pull up the ship layout. "Hadzin to Ryan," Adri said with a tap to her communicator. Squinting to try and read the stuttering display, she eventually located the dot that referred to this particular panel's location. "I think I'm on Deck 8, section 16B. This section is secure..." Her gaze became uncertain as it drifted back to the hull breach, "... more or less, but I'm not familiar with Athena's protocols. Where do you want me?"
Though sluggish, the comm. link eventually engaged to the sound of garbled interference. Through the disjointed convergence of several conversations attempting to cram into the one frequency, Ryan's voice emerged and promptly vanished again. Coherency wasn't easily discerned but the woman's tone was pitched at a level of tension that matched present expectations.
After a few seconds, the channel cleared enough for the Science Chief to once again emerge from the static.
"...lost the QSD! I need you to....stabilise..."
The channel faltered, succumbing to the insistence of a high-pitched squeal that lasted several seconds before Ryan's voice attempted once last repeat.
"-eck 5 if you...the damage."
It was difficult enough to hear that Adri removed her communicator so she could bring it to her ear, then winced as the high-pitched shriek made her regret that decison. What did come through wasn't promising, though. The combination of lost the QSD and stabilise were enough to strike dread into anyone with a basic understanding of quantum mechanics. These damned things were delicate enough, but they interacted with slipstreams that were highly sensitive to phase variance and exotic particles. An instability could rip the ship apart like tissue paper. "Ryan, you're cutting out, but if the QSD was damaged, you need to flush the coils to prevent phase bleed!" It certainly wasn't a fix, but it would slow things down. She was mostly certain that the other woman had said Deck 5, and she quickly typed on the flickering LCARS to update the map. When the jarbled nonsense continued, Adri frowned. "Ryan!" Even if the message got through, there was too much noise to hear a response or even an acknowledgement.
"Ok, this is fine," she muttered to herself, turning off the communicator. The self assurance didn't land as she searched for the main science labs on the Deck 5 layout. She remembered seeing something about a QSD maintenance room when she first visited the ship. They don't let just anyone access the QSD, and for good reason. "This is fine, just a quantum time bomb on a damaged ship next to a temporal rift. Just don't think about it too much, Adri." Spotting the lab, she memorised the section number and the route to get there before taking off for the nearest turbolift.
The Science hub, like much of the rest of the ship and certainly most of Deck 5, was a maelstrom of sheer chaos. Amidst the scorching stench of damaged circuitry and the lingering effects of a fully ignited terminal that had required manual efforts to extinguish, Athena's small compliment of Science personnel had at least navigated the worst of the impact with minimal casualties. Those who required First Aid had tended to each other, patched attempts to stem the flow of blood until more permanent treatment took precedence. For now, there was a general scramble to stabilise the area, a united endeavour that was not particularly aided by a sudden dip in power levels that plunged the main office into emergency lighting.
It had taken only several minutes of struggling without success for Ryan to accept that her terminal's access to Main Engineering, where she'd been keyed in to monitor the data-flow from the attempted intervention, had been severed entirely by the sudden surge of destabilised subspace that had set every alert in the room off. In the absence of remote access, the next viable alternative was direct input at the source, which meant getting a whole lot closer to an unstable QSD than was strictly comfortable. Hazdin's summons had been the best piece of news to come out of the last half hour and still the odds had stacked against it.
Already enroute, having left Bailey in charge of the more localised damage control, Alexis caught her balance against the bulkhead as the lights flickered, faltered and then failed entirely. Muttering her opinion of fate's whimsical sense of humour under her breath, she snatched the flashlight she'd stuffed into her pocket and aimed it at the floor to step over the mangle of a blown-out door to press forward.
"Ryan to Engineering."
She'd been persevering with the attempt to raise Keating for the last few minutes to no avail. There was a thought, somewhere in the back of her mind, that this potentially didn't bode well for the situation in Main Engineering but Alexis chose to view it as a communication problem until she had the capacity to do anything about it. Right now, the priority was making sure the QSD didn't turn them all into space dust.
The spark from an overhead conduit provoked a reflect duck, and the curve of an arm to protect her face pushed Alexis forward to climb over another pile of crumpled ceiling panels. Switching tactics, she hit her comm. badge once more.
"Ryan to Hadzin."
Messy static carried over the line for a few seconds before anything of substance came through. "...zin here."
The transmission was grainy, still distorted by interference that gave the other woman a slightly robotic delay, but it was a start. "The hub's offline, I'm headed to Engineering. I haven't been able to raise Keating or any of the engineers on duty, I may have been last person to have eyes on the QSD's data stream before it went rogue." Ducking under a sagging conduit insulation tube, Alexis paused to shine her light ahead and added, "Power's out. Back-up's holding but we're on a tight timeline. Where are you now?"
A response that could be passable as "arriving to the turbolift on Deck 8" was interrupted by the unmistakable hiss of a conduit exploding over comms. While severely garbled, the tone that followed sounded an awful lot like a string of unfavourable language. "If you... eyes in Engin-... am closer than y... if... -eed extra hands."
"Just meet me there."
The frustration in Ryan's tone was not the fault of the officer on the other end of the shoddy line but, for a moment, it was an available avenue for expressing it. Signing out, the Lieutenant paused only long enough to get her bearings, which was an odd consideration in a normally obstacle-free, straight corridor. Crawling through the strewn wreckage alone was only marginally preferrable to finding casualties along the way because the absence of life was still decently perturbing. A twist of tension in the pit of Alexis' stomach churned guilt on a spin-cycle.
This was your plan. You backed it. You pushed for it.
"I need to fix it."
Pushing aside a dangling access panel held aloft only by the tangled mess of circuitry wrapped around it, she tried to pick up the pace.
Adri strained as she used the emergency hand actuators to force open the doors to the QSD maintenance room. She got them open enough to squeeze through, and once inside she rushed to the console. Her breathing was heavy from the running and the adrenaline. The left sleeve of her jacket was charred and tattered. Where her skin was exposed, it was burnt and irritated. The pain made her grit her teeth, but she'd deal with the conduit burn later.
It looked like the command to flush the coils had gone through, which was promising, but there was still a higher-than-normal presence of various particles found in the slipstream. The containment field that kept these exotic particles from flooding the maintenance room was holding, but only just. On the console, there was a readout measuring phase variance, and a warning indicated that the QSD matrix was starting to drift out of phase with the warp core's resonance. Another warning called out benamite crystal degradation due to the particle saturation. Hell, just about every alarm possible was going off.
"Hadzin?"
A voice cut through the swirl of acrid smoke. Struggling a moment to fit through the gap the other woman had managed to wedge open, Ryan held her flashlight aloft to confirm it was the other officer and then darted the beam around the space from pulsing light to pulsing light.
"Do we have a status report?"
Adri turned her head only briefly to see the Chief of Science join her. "Lieutenant," she greeted, turning her attention promptly back to the console. Annoyed by the swish of loose hair, she quickly paused her efforts to grab her spare hairtie and pull her hair back. It was a rushed bun-ponytail, but it kept her face clear. "The whole damn thing is a light-show of warnings. Primary concern right now is the phase variance. It's deviating from the warp core's resonance, and if it keeps slipping it will rip the ship apart. The particle saturation is starting to degrade the benamite crystals, which is only amplifying the instability."
As Adri spoke, she was trying to deal with the phase variance, which felt more like trying to balance a broom on the wrong end. She let out an ugh! of frustration when her realignment efforts missed the warp core's resonance, again. "Containment is holding but it's straining against 25 ppm of slipstream particles. Normal operating condition is ten, and thirty-five is where the concentration becomes dangerous. The good news is that the coils are flushed, so we shouldn't see that number increase."
"All right, now give me options. How do we stabilise it?"
It wasn't the same as passing the buck. That had been a lesson learned a long time ago, when humility had enforced itself as a priority and a much younger Alexis Ryan had been left with no choice but to learn the difference between slacking off and intelligent delegation. The initial plan had been to cross her fingers and hope that a comm. link back to the hub would be stable enough to pick Bailey's brain and they could muddle up some solution that didn't result in Alexis having to jettison anything into space with her still inside. Hazdin's appearance was the first piece of good news since Hell had opened its doors and welcomed them in.
Adri puffed her cheeks to release a tense sigh. There were so many problems happening at once that she had to fight the stress-induced panic that kept trying to seep in. The simple solution would be to force-shutdown the QSD, which would technically stabilise the drive, but with the existing instability it would also obliterate the crystals, rendering the drive inoperable. "The QSD can self-stabilise once the variances are less than 0.08. I'm working on a microflux dampener to help realign the phase variance," she responded. "We need to keep that containment field up because those particles can create temporal anomalies outside of the controlled flux environment."
The console gave an angry alarm, and Adri glanced to the side. It was an ongoing grievance of hers that starships really liked to remind users that the problems they were currently working on still existed. "Yes, I know it's out of phase, shut up!" she hissed to the console, dismissing it with an annoyed jab. Breathe. Getting overwhelmed wasn't going to help anyone. "We also need to reduce the concentration of particles around those crystals so they don't fracture. Try a counter-phase diffuser around the crystals."
"We're going to need more than emergency power first."
Stepping over the crumpled remains of a service hatch, Ryan retrieved a toolkit from a busted-open equipment locker and crouched down to force open the front panel of one of the adjacent terminals. Thankfully, the bulk of its issues seemed confined to a blown power relay, though there was enough buckling to the base that she wasted precious seconds fighting with an access port that didn't want to stay open. Wedging her shoulder under the lip of the panel so it couldn’t snap shut again, Alexis traced the tangle of scorched conduits with her free hand, mapping what had fried and what could still be bullied into service. She yanked the warped relay clear, tossed it aside, and jammed in a bypass coupler, the motion so swift and decisive it felt like tearing off a bandage.
Sparks burst the moment she forced the connection, biting at her knuckles and peppering her sleeve with glowing pinpricks. Pain bloomed sharp and hot across her hand, but she kept her grip steady, jaw set against the instinct to recoil. The coupler hummed low, then gave a stuttering whine as the circuit pulled enough rerouted power to light up the terminal's display. Tentatively, she removed her hand.
Good enough.
With a terminal of her own now online, the Science Chief pulled up the interface and tried to locate the data Hadzin was referring to.
"Data stream's partially corrupted," she reported, her voice a thin razor's edge away from snapping. "Your console's the only one maintaining a direct feed but I can," Alexis swiped closed the attempt to begin another, "get you more power."
Rerouting in the midst of a ship-wide emergency, without information from Engineering to determine their own priorities, was risky but there would be time eventually to explain the rationality of limiting the potential for one malfunctioning QSD scattering their atoms through subspace. As she dug her way past system safeties, Athena's power grid was a grim chaos of fractured networks, EPS relays screaming in red, and a spiderweb of bad data batches where damage had severed reporting nodes. With a surgeon's neutrality, the Lieutenant pushed aside the fury of self-recrimination and tried to ignore the fact that the ship she'd spent so long studying at code-level was screaming at her. Briefly, the main lights flared, dipped again, and as a manual recalibration bypassed a faulty junction, finally stabilised.
Warning: containment field compromised. Energy input is unstable.
Adri had adjusted parameters for the microflux dampener and was letting it recalibrate, and in the meantime was working to get the counter-phase diffuser prepped in anticipation of Ryan's efforts to get power. When the computer alerted to the containment field's struggle, her breath caught in her throat. Moving quickly, she rerouted some of the energy so the containment field would stabilise. It helped, but not enough to avert the crisis.
The air tasted faintly metallic. Maybe she imagined it.
"Redirect that energy to the field emitters around the crystals!" Adri told Ryan. It felt like her heart was going to hammer out of her chest as inconvenience forced her to chuck a half-developed diffuser into action before it was ready. It's not like it would make things worse for the crystals. That sudden increase in power had to go somewhere, and the ship was not well off if it took this long for the computer to auto-adjust.
For a fleeting moment, Ryan sank into the relief of directed purpose, a task she could execute at the behest of another's perogative. Almost immediately, she was likewise frustrated by the necessity, driven by pride to produce some sort of result that didn't leave her with the unenviable task of telling Kane they'd had to jetison a vital component in the hopes it didn't add to their subspace turbulence.
"We need to make a call." As tempting as it was to defer to Hadzin's expertise, the grim-set of Ryan's jaw made it clear she understood where the responsibility for action rested. "Will it stabilise?"
For a long beat, Adri said nothing. Her focus was entirely on giving the field emitters something to output before they lost all containment. An unstable visual of the chamber kept flickering on the console, but through the interferencd she was able to see the diffuser activate around the crystals with a little sparkle of light. "Come on..." she whispered to herself. The judgement call Ryan was waiting on felt like a spear looming over Adri's head. She certainly didn't want to jettison the drive, and a sideways glance at Ryan's serious expression told her that the science chief didn't want to make that call either, but if this didn't work...
One of the many alarms in the room disappeared. Then, another. Adri read the statuses as they came in. "I think it will stabilise... the diffusers are working." Another alarm turned off, the same one Adri had chastised earlier, and after reading the new data some of the tension in her shoulders released. "Variance is at 0.079. The auto-stabilisers are kicking in... oh, thank god..." her words were followed by a sigh. Taking a step back from the console, she raised her hands and clasped them behind her head, chest rising as she forced deep breaths. Her eyes watched the console closely, in case it was too good to be true. "We're ok... it's not perfect, but we'll be ok."
These days, it wasn't very often that Alexis Ryan let the universe know what she was feeling. Lessons learned in hardship had knocked that out of her, not through any healthy application of denial according to some. Right now, her bowed head coupled with her slumped stature, weight propped against her hands as she leaned against the console, was about as honest as anyone could expect.
After a few seconds, she forced her head up and then pushed upright.
"I'll need to report to Command. And we need to make contact with Engineering, this communication black-out will have to be addressed. I'll go," Ryan continued without taking a breath, already making her way to the door. "Stay here and watch it until the levels are fully stabilised and then report to the Science hub. Bailey will find you something to do."
It wasn't much to offer a woman who had just been stolen by circumstance but Alex didn't have room for Hadzin's predicament on top of the whole remaining shit-show she was about to dive into.
She'd just have to add it to the list of apologies she owed.
