'ere come the sucklin' teat

Posted on Wed Oct 12th, 2022 @ 6:17pm by Senior Chief Petty Officer Thral Skrit & Lieutenant Anthea "Thea" Mariatis

Mission: Scylla and Charybdis
Location: Bridge, USS Avalon.
Timeline: MD4. Prior to teams beaming over.
1871 words - 3.7 OF Standard Post Measure

Thral's antenna swivelled to his left; ever such a slight change in air pressure could be sensed and as his eyes found where his sixth sense had directed them, he felt his stomach knot tightly. "Well that's a bit a' pony n trap aint it..." he muttered, walking over to the port wall. The solid matt finish to the aesthetic panel was no longer the same, instead it become somewhat...patch-work in its appearance. The same colours and finishes for the most part, but certainly intersecting with some kind of strange texture. As he drew nearer, his awareness of the drop in air pressure grew as did his identification of the welcome coldness coming from the strange area on the wall. He gingerly placed a hand near to it, and felt the now familiar pushback of the edge of the subspace bubble; a strange feeling, almost the opposite of gravity. "Guv...." he called, to get the Lieutenants attention.

Placing his hand near to the area again, he pulled it back and repeated the motion a few times. "Yep, right shitter this one..." he informed the Lieutenant. "This er...bubble of 'ers..." he began, with both his antennae swivelling around in Thea's direction. He dropped his voice to a whisper, so she couldn't hear and wouldn't be offended; "I don't reckon it's movin' wiv the ship like...reckon she mighta dropped a bollock....". Looking again at the patch in the wall, it was an increasingly sure conclusion that the subspace bubble was static in space, and with the Avalon slowly drifting in the currents the edge of the bubble was now intersecting the aft port wall as the ship drifted fore-starboard. Though not fully breached just yet, the bubble was starting to move through the interior sealed skin of the ship and into the exterior skin carrying long-run conduits and systems. This cavity between the interior skin and the external hull had no need to atmospheric containment, and if the bubble moved so far as to breach this space the air would be depleted in fractions of a second. Moving through the Avalon, and in the science labs, the bubble had been nowhere near an external wall until now. Neither of those ships had started to move towards them yet, but sooner or later one of them was bound to - and the application of the inevitable tractor beam from either of those ships was bound to be disastrous for the trio.

Thea had given up being concerned at all that the Andorian seemed incapable of grasping how to communicate with her. Far from a more typical silent protest, her lack of functioning implant was already an isolating experience, especially on a ship devoid of any presence outside the three of them. She had taken to long moments of introspection, of staring into space whilst disappearing into her own thoughts, her own theories, the solitude of situational analysis. It wasn't as if deciphering Thral's meaning was as clear-cut as figuring out what he'd said anyway. Not for the first time in their relationship, she had left Winfield to tidy away the diplomacy requirements.

And had instead focused on damage control. Despite Skrit's assumption, the problem he was only just now discovering had been categorised as a 'significant potential development' when she'd first calculated the projections that had allowed her to fast-track an experimental response to their imminent predicament. There hadn't been time to seek a way of limiting it, no time to design a work-around that would allow the bubble an unaffixed mobility, or a way to reset and rematerialise its dimensions to remain viable. In twelve minutes, she had done what she could with the power they had, and a bunch of untested theories.

Leaning against a terminal, arms folded across her stomach and her head bowed, Thea sorted through available options and circled back around to the very persistent, singular solution, which wasn't so much a solution as it was an unlikelihood. Recalibrate subspace. Even if they could draw the required power, she was losing access to the systems. She lifted a hand to rub the pad of her middle finger against her forehead, teasing at the tension headache that had settled, and then turned to stare once again at the display she'd been leaning against.

Winfield's face was equally creased with worry, trying to negotiate their current predicaments without an added one to the mix. "Do we still have the ability to access communications?" he asked the Andorian, hoping beyond hope that they had at least something that could make a difference in this situation.

Wheeling his head around the old intrepid class bridge, Thral's eyes stopped at the nearby ops station, he moved over and squinted at the readouts, trying several times to switch displays to the active systems root main. "Oh....Tommy Tit...." he muttered to himself. Looking up he made eye contact with Win beckoning him over; he looked over to Thea who also met his look, and he waved both hands frantically above his head. "Guv! Forget comms for a sec!". A proximity overlay had automatically taken over the display, showing Avalon and the two contacts advancing on them. "I aint got a Scooby if it's still runnin', but both those contacts are on the way in response to the transponder...". He squinted at the display again, unable to enlarge it. Curiously, nobody had heard an alert beep and Thral wondered whether the difficulties they were having interacting with the universe, also meant the universe wasn't able to interact with them either; perhaps external sounds were being dampened, which only added a complication for the three of them. 'Oh' he chuckled at his mistake, 'two of us'.

"Errr..." Thral continued, "oh, luvvly jubbly!" He explained. "Right, so the sucklin' teat ship will get 'ere first....buggered if I know what the other contact is...". For some reason, neither of the Lieutenants faced lit up. "Bleedin' 'ell, who died?" he chuckled aloud, looking at Thea and pointing enthusiastically at the display screen, with a simultaneous large plastered grin and an even more enthusiastically waving 'thumbs up' on his other hand.

"Regardless if they're friend or foe," Winfield said, trying his best to interpret and respond to the Andorian, "Do we know whether they'll know we're here?" He hoped his wife, the scientist, would have a clear enough response to that.

Already persevering with making the terminal cooperate, Thea couldn't hear her husband's concern so much as sense it radiating outwards. A decent amount of intuition lay at the heart of their relationship and she didn't need to see his face, nor hear his voice, to understand where his priorities lay.

Hers, on the other hand, cast slightly further into the future.

It wasn't unusual for the scientist, in her own unique and eerily brilliant way, to invent contingencies well in advance to emergencies that might never happen. It was, though many people failed to understand it, therapeutic for her to map out cause and effect scenarios, not only because it gifted her a sense of preparedness but because it kept her exceptionally agile mind busy. If there was no palpable problem to solve, Thea could be relied upon to invent one, even if only for her own amusement.

In this instance, the prior composition came in the form of a particular security sub-routine, benign enough but also infinitely useful in their current predicament. After struggling a moment to get the computer to initialise her access, Thea straightened and exhaled through her nose.

"I'm burying computer access under an additional layer of protection," she declared quietly, staring straight ahead through the viewport at the nebula. "It will slow them down and should, if they are astute, point to the ship being occupied." Turning, she glanced between the two faces before settling on Winfield's. "Starfleet will destroy the Avalon rather than risk it falling into Romulan hands. We need to start leaving breadcrumbs."

A shrill alarm sounded at the tactical console on the far side of the bridge, and Thral hurried over to intercept the readout waving exaggeratedly and pointing emphatically at the console, whilst holding his ear and looking at Thea. "Ahhh 'ologram ducks...." he muttered. "Errrr Guv? That sucklin' teat ship! Looks like there's three of 'em, and err...one of 'em is lockin' a magic dream onto at least three sites... 'n one of 'em is deffo the bridge". Judging from the very confused and conflicting readouts, it was hard to get an exact intercept time, but Thral's best guess was that they had mere minutes before Starfleet officers stepped out of a transporter beam on the bridge - and he suspected that both Thea and Win had about as much idea how that would affect the subspace bubble as he did. "Fink we need to bubble gum, boss!".

Winfield frowned, looking at the Andorian for a little guidance on this new idiom. "We just have to hope they're friendly," he said, thankful that Thea had thought to give them at least some protection in the event that it wasn't. "What are the chances they even know we're here?" he asked again, having not heard an answer to the question he'd already pondered.

Thea, having abandoned an attempt to understand the Andorian's bleating beyond her initial understanding of his exclamation, was preoccupied by several ad hoc calculations. "We should be fine to enter the Ready Room," she announced eventually. It was the best they could do it retreat with some semblance of guarantee that the subspace pocket would remain stable. A flash of her hands answered Win's question, rendering the conversation immediately private. We won't know until we try to interact. I'd rather get a good look at them before that.

Looking at the flapping hands, Thral wondered actually why nobody had thought to incorporate physical communication into a universal translation protocol. Something for another day, he supposed, before wondering if there even would be any more days. “Guv….time to Botany Bay….we can ‘ave a butchers when we’re safe. The teat’s are gonna be ‘ere like pretty sharpish.” He stepped down and took the few large steps across the bridge from the ops console to the ready from door, noticing neither had moved with quite so much enthusiasm as he. Jabbing the door release several times until he read his input, Thral called back - “Scapa Flow time!”, as he hurried into the ready room. As the bubble had began to intersect the aft starboard bulkhead, it made sense that port fore of the ready room whilst not being in danger of atmosphere loss, had the trade off of being smaller. There was the vaguest of shimmers in the air, like one would see on a hot day on an M Class planet, just behind the Captains desk indicating where this edge of the bubble could be found. He grimaced, coming essentially face to face with the literal border between life and death. There had to be a way to fix this. Getting onto that Starfleet ship, he concluded, was probably going to be their best bet.