Labs Away Team

Posted on Wed Oct 12th, 2022 @ 6:18pm by Lieutenant Commander P’rel M.D & Lieutenant Alexis Ryan & Lieutenant Commander Thy'lissa Shan & Senior Chief Petty Officer Mason Malone

Mission: Scylla and Charybdis
Location: USS Avalon - Labs
Timeline: MD-04
2403 words - 4.8 OF Standard Post Measure

Materialising aboard the Intrepid Class starship, P'rel was surprised to see how intact it was. For a critically damaged vessel, adrift in a state of total abandon there was very little visible damage. A handful of consoles had clearly overloaded, and there were some warped aesthetic panels most probably from radiation, though all in all the labs looked in good order. Unclipping her tricorder from the external dock on the EV suit, P'rel ran a broad range scan of the room and immediately noticed an oddity. There were two vastly different sets of readings with a clear perimeter. "Commander...." she spoke through the comm line, looking over at Shan and wondering if stuffing Antennae into a standard EV helmet was uncomfortable. Pointing to the floor and walls and then offering her tricorder screen to Shan; "there's a clearly defined line here...damage to the systems and radiation signatures are vastly lower in the area surrounding the primary console up to a radius of around eight metres. Almost like a bubble of some kind...where the nebula's radiation didn't penetrate. She shone her wrist beacon around the room and across the surfaces, as if there may be some clue to be found.

"Not naturally occurring, either," Thy'lissa observed. The weird buzzing-antennae-ache she'd had on Athena was a little more noticeable here. Perhaps the added shielding her home vessel provided had kept the worst of it at bay. Even so, she found that she needed to concentrate to ignore it. "What about power readings, Lt Ryan?"

Mason stayed close to the group, eyes glued to his tricorder for the moment though he held one hand ready to grab his phaser just in case. He said nothing as he glanced around, taking in the room as he was trained to do, taking readings as he went, just pivoting on the spot for the moment to take them. Glancing around, he waited for orders from the superiors in the team to spread out and investigate.

Ryan, her tricorder held aloft, followed the readings as an elongated sweep, much like the rat attempting to heed the piper's call. She stopped several steps away from the edge of P'rel's 'bubble' and divided her stern expression between her readings and the unscathed area directly ahead. "The main console's intact, power signature is stable." The Science Chief cast her gaze towards the Andorian expectantly, curbing a natural impulse to allow procedure to take priority. "Permission to bring the lab online, Commander?"

"Start off with just the lights. Let's not overload the system just yet. Ease the levels up gradually. I'm sure the team in Engineering will tell us if that causes any more issues," the Andorian replied.

"But where are all the people?" Mason mused out loud as he finished his own scan. "Shouldn't there at least be bodies of all the officers that served here?" He gestured around, indicating the complete absence of anyone besides themselves. "There's nothing," he noted, "not a single lifeless body."

"Lack of bodies does not mean lack of deceased," Alex observed quietly as she stepped forward, navigating some of the minimal debris with large steps. Careful, deliberate taps of her gloved fingers brought the console out of standby mode and then, with a glance upwards to watch for signs of overload, she slowly brought up the lights.

"That makes it at least a little less spooky and haunted," Thy'lissa noted. "Ms Ryan, this is your show. We need to access their sensor data and begin working on figuring out if we can recover their findings."

Arching a mildly irritated eyebrow, P'rel shot a look of disdain at the Andorian; "I have yet to understand the willingness to believe in ghosts...the lighting of the room does nothing to alter what is in the room..." her eyes found an interesting collection of items on the floor around the back of the primary console, though the lighting hadn't changed the contents of the room; a little illumination had apparently shown more than was otherwise obvious. As she began to walk over to that which had caught her eye, she activated the scanning beam on the tricorder. "Besides Commander...it is not the dead we have to consider, but rather the living...". Sat on the floor in a neatly stacked pile, were an assorted collection of used ration packs, water packs, and biological waste units; the tricroder reading was even more interesting. "All of these have been used recently; the contents of the bio-waste units are in the region of one week old..." she looked up at Shan; "there are survivors here somewhere...".

"Except I'm not reading any life signs," Mason pointed out, holding up his tricorder. "Permission to explore the vicinity ma'am?" He asked, looking towards the Vulcan team leader.

Thy'lissa cleared her throat, glaring daggers at Mason for assuming that P'rel might have some sort of seniority over her. "Explore. Carefully." She told the security officer. She whirled back to the Intelligence officer, wishing that she could express her annoyance simply through antennae motion but feeling restricted from doing so. "If there were people alive a few days ago, I can't see how they've survived without life support. From the data we've captured so far, systems were shorted out more than just a few hours ago. We're talking days at least."

Intercepting a look the Andorian commander sent to Mr Masonn, P'rel was curious as to it's intent. Probably another trite insecurity from a Command officer, but that was unimportant. "Possibly Commander, though there is a flaw in your logic..." she slowly took the few awkward steps to the nearest wall in the cumbersome EV suit, and ran her gloved hand over the ever so slightly visible arching threshold of the apparent 'bubble' of sorts; only minutely perceptible by a slight change in colouration over the wall panels, and minuscule warping of the same. "Whomever was ingenious enough to survive here, during an event which clearly killed the rest of the crew - so severe to have crippled this vessel - could very well have found other means of survival..." she surveyed the room again, as if her own mental recollection were insufficient. "This area was clearly protected, and someone was here, though there are no bodies. They left a safe shelter for a reason...".

As the conversation continued, laced with undercurrents that were of little to no distraction, Ryan had moved into the relatively unscathed portion of the lab and adjusted her scan frequencies several times before consenting to mount her tricorder into the main terminal to forge a direct link. As much as the Intelligence Officer's analysis was backed up by observable proof, there was nothing about classifying the area's virtually non-existent radiation saturation that could possibly count as an easy explanation. The conundrum, all aspects of it reflected adequately in the current conversation, wasn't going to play nice and unravel itself in obvious ways.

Which only left room for the methodical, Ryan's bread and butter. Setting a pace that both respected the desire for haste and the need for thoroughness, the Lieutenant accessed each of the primary systems in turn, the dart of her eyes lifting the initially beneficial from the screen to inform her next search. Once that terminal had been set to interact with the tricorder, she moved to another, pausing to frown.

The data encryption was intense.

But, also, intact, which was honestly more astonishing. "Barring issues with minimal power, this area seems fully functional, Commander," Alex provided the update whilst still on the move. "I can use this to access sensor logs, we might even be able to reroute access to communications and security from here too. It's going to take some time to clear away the access restrictions though."

Here, Alex turned to look at the pair of women.

"Someone's changed almost every access code Starfleet provided us with."

Frowing and moving to look over Ryan's shoulder at the display, P'rel offered her view to Shan. "Commander...it would be typical deception for the Romulans to have located the Avalon, and then to have moved away to veil such a discovery. However, it his highly improbable that any Romulan officer could have rewritten all these codes to such a level in such a short space of time. The only logical conclusion is that, at least for a time, at least one Starfleet officer survived. Based on the artefacts left behind..." she gestured to the small pile of packs and waste units again, "...I suggest that between two and four officers initially survived...somehow."

"But where are they now?" Mason asked as he circled the area. "And how long did they survive for.... and more importantly, if there's no-one here now, why have the Romulans not moved in to salvage the Avalon?"

Ryan, whose primary focus was effective access to the Avalon's systems, was not so much dismissive of the fate of the crew as she was unable to split herself in two to do anything about them. "Auxiliary power will have rendered internal communications fairly limited," she pointed out, having already turned back to her work. "I can liaise with our Bridge team to bring internal sensors online, we can run a sweep that way, but even then the residual radiation is going to run interference." She glanced over her shoulder at Shan. "I also need to get to work on integrating extraction protocols. If the Captain decides salvage is the only viable option then making sure we don't leave our Romulan friends any information they shouldn't have will be a priority. Any rescue attempt," Alex concluded pragmatically, "May need to be executed the old-fashioned way. Foot-work and flashlights."

"Plenty of bodies here for that," Thy'lissa nodded. "Do what you can to bypass the lockouts. If it comes to it, we'll have to recover the data the old-fashioned way, too; elbow-grease and yanking out the data cores from the main computer. What's your best guess on timescales for that?"

It was, Alex reflected, the one aspect of her job that was the most difficult to guarantee. "Give me an hour." It probably wouldn't be long enough, except for the fact that it would have to be.

As she watched Lieutenant Ryan begin her work, both she and P'rel noticed a live alert flash on one of the secondary displays. The pair shared a look of brief puzzlement as another encryption pathway had been added, that very moment. "There..." she pointed to a line of compressed data which was flashing yellow in contrast to the otherwise blue text. "This encryption pathway, it was added only moments only ago..." P'rel frowned with confusion. "It is however a low level encryption pathway....". Though she had improved her ability to work with others, having spent decades as a lone operative, the Vulcan often returned to type when an interesting or pressing task presented itself; unaware that she might be stepping on the toes of the subject matter expert, she pressed on with operating the secondary display, paying no mind to Lieutenant Ryan. "Commander...", P'rel alerted Shan to come to their console. Recognising part of the new key, a low level root pathway for restricted Scientific reports, she entered a standard decryption key known to any senior officer. In lettering flashing between blue and yellow the screen read; '3SAF'. Looking at Shan, who would also understand the shorthand, she elaborated verbally; "Three Souls Accounted For"...". Though delayed, P"rel became aware that she had effectively sidelined Lieutenant Ryan and taken over the console; though she would perhaps find the words and method to apologise later if it were necessary, she instead made a snap judgement to non-verbally convey her awareness and at least step back from the console once again.

"Is there any way I can help?" Mason offered, "I used to be a radioman... I'm not much of a cryptologist but I do know language. And 'computer' is just another kind of language right?" He smiled, hoping to lighten the mood a little. He listened as the Vulcan woman spoke. "Three souls accounted for? Does that mean what I think it does?"

Allowing Commander Shan and and Lieutenant Ryan to assimilate the new information and look at what do do about it, P'rel turned to the young man and frowned at his juvenile assumptive nature; "In the absence of further information, it does not mean a thing..." she derided.

"It means..." Thy'lissa turned her glare towards P'rel this time. "That we have potentially three survivors on board. Or somewhere close by. Judging by our other findings, that would be a natural conclusion." She looked back over at Mason, who despite asking to explore hadn't even left the room. "Chief Malone, begin a visual sweep of the neighbouring compartments, as you originally proposed." Somewhat pointedly, she added, "Leave the science to the scientist. Lieutenant Ryan, any further conclusions of what we might be looking out for?"

Tiny whispers, the scrabble of unrealised deductions, taunted Alex beneath the scowl of a deep frown. Whilst there was satisfaction to solving complex puzzles, having to hunt down the pieces amidst a series of clues that didn't quite add up was routinely culpable for inordinate amounts of frustration. Something was missing, a pivotal element that would explain the gaps in logic they were dealing with, chief amongst being why a group of survivors would bury their existence under encryptions without offering any hint to their location.

"Consider why they are intent on hiding," she replied, turning back to the main console to continue her work. "And watch your step accordingly."

About to offer accompany the Chief, P’rel suddenly felt a wave of nausea come over her. It was overwhelming, and somehow did not come from herself - she paused a moment to collect her composure, and found her attempts to do so violated by a creeping sense of anxiety, though again this was not an internal feeling. “Comm…” she winced in pain, a sharp headache lancing at her over her right eye, bringing a hand up to futilely grasp at the outside of the EV helmet, she continued. “Commander….I believe I am experiencing a telepathic….disturbance….” She frowned, confused, as the headache at least began to dissipate taking the other emotional experiences with it. “It was not a communication….though a definite….disturbance…”.