The busy Bolian

Posted on Wed Sep 2nd, 2020 @ 6:04am by Commodore Jacob Kane & Lieutenant Commander P’rel M.D

Mission: The Shadow of Arachne
Location: USS Athena - Bridge
Timeline: MD-01. Concurrent with Advena posts.
948 words - 1.9 OF Standard Post Measure

ON: Bridge. MD-01.

P'rel stepped onto the main bridge from the thankfully working turbolift. She surveyed the scene, noting that most of the aft MSD consoles had been completely blown out by, presumably, a plasma conduit overloading. A random array of destruction littered the bridge, as she walked round to the command pit; an odd experience given her prior perception. She momentarily remembered the memory-come-hallucination of Kane having been sucked into space, a pile of debris over the command chairs, and pushed the image back into the locked off place in her mind which was the USS Warspite. She noted a person laying on the floor, their golden tinged hand suggesting a Vulcan, but their face hidden by a duty uniform jacket draped across their face. She stepped respectfully past, reaching the Captain who seemed more than a little busy; in her own way she was conveying sadness and shared pain at the events which had transpired and the lives lost, though it didn't necessarily translate that way when she addressed Kane with "What moron decided to put the command centre on the very top of a ship?"

"Not the time for criticising the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, Lt P'rel," Kane admonished, trying to take in a tactical view of their situation and plot an escape plan. "In case you hadn't noticed, we're being hunted by a vindictive Breen fleet captain and we're not looking all that safe right now."

P'rel opened her mouth to try to explain, she had misspoken, her attempt at camaraderie had failed. "Captain, might I have a word..." she looked at him intently, locking eyes with the man to emphasise the importance, "...right now?".

Kane motioned to the bridge, clarifying that leaving his seat for any sort of reason would be the worst thing he could do. "It had better be more important than two Breen destroyers on an intercept vector," he said.

The Vulcan’s eyes followed Kane’s gestures, seeing the dampening chaos and reaffirming to herself that it would indeed take a very special kind of moron to place a command centre on the very top of a warship. “Perhaps equally so, sir” she began, her attention now on the view screen and one of the destroyers as she began for theorise connections between the intruder and the pursuers. “Lieutenant Commander Brill is aboard. Covertly. I have sent Petty Officer Saghir to observe and await instructions”.

"Brill? Is on this ship?" Kane's head turned sharply. "Where is he? We're in the middle of a catastrophic situation and he could be feeding all kinds of data to the Breen. We don't need someone tailing him, we need him in the brig, immediately."

Surprised by his reaction, P'rel countered "I assumed you would want to know about it before I ordered that kind of action". She sat down, uninvited, in the XO chair next to Kane and leaned across; "In any case, someone was running a parallel search for additional Bolians, I believe that someone is already on the way to apprehend him." She wondered a moment who it might be, and who would also have cause to suspect this Bolian..."I do not know who". Cocking her head, she was unable to read Kane's expression as it changed before her eyes.

"You suspect additional rogue elements on board?" Kane asked. Knowing their luck the last hour or two, it would certainly fit within the realm of possibility. And it would be the last thing they needed. "At least give me some good news for once."

P’rel considered his request, and contemplated the cumulative situation around her along with the likely scenarios and possibilities. “I have none to offer, Captain” she replied flatly. She looked up the rear of the bridge; someone she didn’t know, an ensign with a gold uniform trim, spoke up with urgency.

“Captain, I am reading a strange power surge in the phaser assemblies on decks four and fourteen...” she tapped further on the tactical console reading something, “Sir, those areas are becoming flooded with Theta radiation...I do not know how, but the phaser batteries appear to be locked into some kind of high intensity charging cycle...”. P’rel and Kane locked eyes, as it dawned on the solitary Vulcan that Kane should have been her first port of call.

"Shut it down!" he barked. Not only was the radiation a significant threat to life, it was also an exotic element that would make them easier to track. The young junior lieutenant at Tactical shook his head helplessly.

"It's self-cycling...I can't override it from here."

"Shunt power through the secondary relays. Interlink the output through the secondary EPS grid and through the deflector array," Kane responded. Remarkably, he'd seen this before; trained for it, in fact, when he was a tactical officer himself. Normally, the phaser coils were supposed to have a number of redundancies. But Starfleet's advanced tactical training was designed to test the standard operational procedures. Kane glanced at P'rel, who for a Vulcan, might have actually been surprised by his response.

"It's stopping the build-up, sir, but there's something in the system preventing a discharge."

"Get someone to phaser control," Kane responded. "They need to get in there manually and shunt the overload." He looked at P'rel. "Your Bolian has been busy."

P’rel nodded....contemplatively. “Let’s see by just now much...” she replied, checking her phaser was in it’s holster and running through the various person intelligence recovery techniques she had been trained for, and those somewhat on edge of her training set. She stood from the XO’s chair and turned to walk from Kane.