‘oozat then?

Posted on Fri Nov 4th, 2022 @ 7:46am by Senior Chief Petty Officer Thral Skrit & Lieutenant Anthea "Thea" Mariatis
Edited on on Fri Nov 4th, 2022 @ 7:48am

Mission: Scylla and Charybdis
Location: Ready Room, USS Avalon
Timeline: During Bridge JP
1337 words - 2.7 OF Standard Post Measure

Crouching around the threshold of the open doorway between the CO's ready room and the bridge, Thral squeezed the phaser in his hand, ready to fire if necessary. Given that the Starfleet vessel had arrived, it was highly likely that Starfleet officers and not a hostile was about to beam onto the bridge; but it never hurt to be ready. Eyeing the two nerds crouched on the far side of the open door, he sighed inwardly as reevaluated his chances of winning a fire fight. Hie antenna twitched with excitement as the telltale blue columns of a Starfleet transporter confinement beam appeared across the bridge. A big grin erupted as he rose to his feet and shouted with great excitement; "Oi OI! Ozzat then?!". His grin hung around just long enough for him to realise that the difficulty they were experiencing in interacting with the physical world, and anything beyond the bubble, apparently extended to their would be rescuers as well. "What the Donald Duck....?" he exclaimed, looking at his companions who had also risen to their feet, "right bleedin' cream crackered aint we?" he asked, his antennae having dropped in dismay.

Just as disheartened, Winfield sought visual solace in his wife. "Our fears were correct, then. We're likely not even visible to them on the current visual spectrum," he said. "If I had access to the right tools and some power I might have been able to create something to alert their attention somehow...but we're stuck here."

As had been the case at nearly every juncture since their plight had escalated, Thea seemed placidly unsurprised. "The question of whether or not we're dealing with partial or total phase variance seems to have been answered," she agreed, her gaze moving between each of the individuals as they moved into the space to investigate. "They're picking up the subspace interference though," she murmured, as if able to read the intent on the away team's confused faces.

"If only we can make use of that somehow," Winfield wondered. "Make the lights flicker in morse code? Turn the bridge into a weird spooky disco?"

Thea watched intently as the officers bunched together in an attempt to compare readings. "If we're not careful, they'll attribute our efforts to increased radiation activity and attempt to reengage contamination control." There was an implication there that the scientist would often have left open to interpretation but, for once, she spelt out her concerns. "Any atmospheric adjustments they make run the risk of collapsing subspace in the area."

“Ah well that’s just bleedin’ marvellous ain’t it…?” Thral exclaimed. “Right, before that landin’ gay n ‘earty turns us into brown bread, let’s get sumfin sorted…”. Pulling out the phase discriminator he’d kept on him since pulling it from the bridge detonation pack - which, he then noticed from his vantage point, not a single one of the Starfleet Orificers on the bridge had actually noticed a largely unprotected bomb sat beneath the wide open floor panel. “Ruddy ‘ell….” He chastised, shaking his head in dismay as he attached the discriminator to the tricorder and accessed the calibration functions to run a diagnostic. “Err…right, dots and dashes innit guv…?” He asked Win, without really asking him as he set the diagnostic on the discriminator to run at intervals of seconds which matched the frequency of the Starfleet standard “sos” pulse.

Three second long bursts, followed by three two second long bursts, repeated by three second long bursts again in a cycle. “I ain’t got a Bynar’s Two what this is gonna do to the field by the way Guv…” he said as he carefully set the tricorder on the floor and nudged it forward very slowly with his toe. “‘N’ it all depends on one them bleedin’ numpties out there remembering that one soddin’ page on it in the survival syllabus”. As he edged the contraption slowly forward he realised his rudeness, he hadn’t even spoken to Thea about it. Pointing enthusiastically at the tricorder, he made a big thumbs up gesture, and then an explosion gesture whilst slowly mouthing “boom”, before offering an exaggerated shrug to indicate he really didn’t have much of an idea if it would work, but at least it was better than just passively waiting to die he figured.

"They're bringing power up," Winfield noted, pointing at the Starfleet officers poking around their ship. "I hooked the field generator up to the EPS grid. If they bring everything up too quickly it'll overload the generator and we're even worse than 'boom'. We need to find a way to slow that process down."

“You ‘avin a bleedin’ giraffe guv!” Thral replied with a genuine panic in his voice. Nudging the tricorder the final few centimetres to the field perimeter, a discreet chirp from the device told him that the mocked up morse code transmitter had made contact with the field. “You tryna get us killed or sumfin? Bleedin’ ell….”. Jumping over to the Captains desk, Thral spun around the PADDs left scattered on the desk. He took a poignant moment to think about it, these items just left here, the CO would have meant to pick them back up later, and had no idea they wouldn’t make it to that later. It was fleeting, it was all he could permit himself time wise, but it was a sad moment all the same. “All these will have some command access to the primary systems…” the Andorian muttered, throwing one a piece to both his perilous colleagues and looking at the final one for himself. “Nuffin major like, but just so’s the skipper can access ‘em…find sumfin what lets us start a diagnostic on the EPS grid….it’ll lock them lot out from powerin’ up and turnin’ us into annuver effin name on the obituaries…”. As he started to work through the menu index on his own PADD, Thral realised that in addition to not being vaporised or worse, if an active diagnostic lockout had just been initiated then at least the away team might start to figure out someone was still alive, more or less.

Shuffling through the stack of PADDs, Winfield found something useful rather rapidly. "Ah. If we override the main command systems though..." he trailed off, figuring he didn't need to spell it out. "I can shut down the EPS grid, but the outcome is that our containment field might end up shrinking somewhat."

His antenna now twitching wildly, and his head feeling as though it was splitting open, Thral was sickeningly far more aware of the disruption to the bubble from the away team now unwittingly at its perimeter. “Well what the Risan Luck are you waitin’ for! Ruddy do it!” He shouted to Win, who proceeded to rapidly key through some kind of configuration on the PADD. He didn’t know what he was expecting as such, but it certainly wasn’t for “nothing” to happen. The sickness and head pain gone suddenly and without incident, the Andorian rose to his feet and noticed that both Win and Thea were now semi obscured behind a kind of fog which clung to each of them individually; similar small patches of this fog hung around the ready room. “Ya broken it ain’t ya?” he called, surprised to sense a vaguely muffled echo coming back to him. Far from shrinking it, the engineer had shattered the subspace bubble and seemingly only luck had meant that sufficiently large fragments were now clinging to each of the three individually.

Thral took a cautious step forward, and noticed no change. “‘Ere guv….this is stickin’ to me like an ‘appy Tribble….” he took a few more steps an investigative motion to the open Jeffries tube hatch; it didn’t swing further open as if he actually had physically hold of it, but it most definitely moved, meaning that at least now they could seemingly exert some better force over objects.