It's Wabbit Season! Part 1

Posted on Mon Feb 17th, 2025 @ 11:48pm by Lieutenant Didrea Zade & Lieutenant Commander Finnley Keating VII & Lieutenant Kevan Dash & Ensign Ziahli Lorel

Mission: Pandora's Box
Location: Wreckage
Timeline: MD5 - After 'The Things They Do For Profit'
1955 words - 3.9 OF Standard Post Measure

The inside of the planet killer was about like any standard wreckage; no power, dim ambient lighting, some debris and loose conduit scattered around. Atmosphere had more or less been set up in certain areas to allow the various Starfleet personnel to work without the restrictive suits. It so happened that a series of blue shimmering lights appeared in one of those pockets, depositing the Athena's security team. A few seconds later, Zade's communicator chirped, and she got confirmation that the Spruance team transported in as well, to a different area of the wreckage. They were in EV suits in case they had to pursue in the less forgiving parts of the wreckage, or worse on the lunar surface.

It was easy enough to make sure their transport site was clear, and Zade wasted no time in her briefing of the situation, keeping her comm line open so the Spruance team could hear her. Some raiders had managed to get through the defense perimeter and transported to the surface, likely to try and loot what they could. Many of the raider transports were near the computer core and what was likely an engineering section, where the Athena and Spruance teams were respectively close to, and both areas contained things that the raiders could sell for a wealthy sum. Their job was to hunt down the approximately 30 raiders while the Edison's and Aurora's security teams protected the scientists. "Heavy stun, we want to question some of them if we can and we can't question the dead. Good luck." At Zade's signal, the groups fanned out, searching for raiders.

There was a brief moment, after the Security Chief had disappeared from view and the only remaining distraction was to familiarise themselves with their new surroundings, where Zia was taken by how much the situation reminded her of the kind of scenarios the Academy liked to embellish under the pretence of training better recruits. That was to say, there was an eerie sense of excessiveness, because who actually believed that their career would involve traipsing the corridors of a device intended to obliterate entire planets.

The normally vivacious brunette had been subdued throughout the briefing, and remained silent now as the group's natural hierarchy deferred command to Dash. It wasn't so much that she was spooked, though the possibility was certainly available for future consideration, she'd just never coveted this aspect of a career in Security. The cerebral pathways of investigation and incident management came at the cost of some rookie experience, however, and Zia knew her worth at least in terms of psionic prior warning. Despite the oppressiveness, she lowered her mental defenses enough to get some scope of their quarry and nodded to the Trill's wordless query regarding their intended direction.

Nylara Tarit, a Bolian not to be confused with the blue face from engineering, looked around as well. It was spooky, knowing that this thing had destroyed planets, and now they were standing inside of it. Like sitting inside the jaws of an orowat. The Ensign would be lying if she said she wasn't at least a little unsettled.

"Well, pirate hunting wasn't on my bingo list this week," Kevan mumbled, hand phaser already out in his hand and a flashlight in the other. Despite having atmosphere set up locally, that didn't automatically equate to good visibility, and the moon itself wasn't close enough to its sun to provide too much illumination. So the flashlights would have to do. "Keep an eye out. Zia, if you sense anyone that isn't us, try to give us a heads up or something?"

A look passed between the pair, one that reassured whilst simultaneously managing to point out the lack of necessity in even making the request. Zia turned to the third person in their group and offered a confident smile, however, since it made it much easier to track unfamiliar psionic registers if those closest to her weren't panicking. "I think this corridor is clear," she vocalised, "but it's hard to pinpoint anything specific." Turning back to Dash, the Betazoid frowned. "This place feels..." She shook her head. "It's nothing."

Kevan gave her a curious look but figured after a second or two that he trusted her judgement. "I guess we fan out then."

The three went off in a direction not already taken by the other teams. Nylara had to admit that she was glad to be on the same team as the telepath, as it meant that they'd get a little warning. It was worth the downside of Zia being aware of just how unsettled she was by this wreckage, and for her sake she tried to keep it together. The wreckage provided some variable terrain, including tight passages made by twisted metal for them to squeeze through. According to their maps generated by scans of the wreckage, the computer could be accessed by a series of control rooms, likely only there for convenience during the construction phase, and they were close to one of those rooms. They eventually got within eyesight of it, a black opening mangled by a large bulkhead spearing through it.

In truth, the only reason Zia had any cause to complain about the elevated stress levels of her colleagues was a matter of distraction rather than judgement. She felt skittish herself, unnerved by a sense of foreboding that she couldn't put a name to. Any attempt to focus her mind resulted in sluggish delays, the kind of psionic feedback it had taken several minutes for her to recognise as similar to the areas of Betazed where the specific geological conditions created a kind of nullification zone. They had been heavily utitlised during the Cardassians' occupation, given the tendency to also mess with scanning telemetry, and were often considered places of spiritual significance. Zia had never enjoyed the sensation much, finding the notion of a quiet mind inherently lonely. Right now, it was like trying to pick out individual voices with their volume turned right down, amongst a whole lot of background static.

"Maybe three," she murmured to Dash. "But it's hard to tell for sure."

"And we can't tell if there's another way in or out," he grumbled. This would be easier if they called in reinforcements, but that risked losing the interlopers. "Think we can take 'em?" He grinned, phaser in hand as though pretending to be an action hero or something.

The effort earned him a withering, if not secretly amused, look. "Why is it," Zia murmured, "that every time we're put in the same team, it involves being shot at?" Admittedly, the last time it had happened, it had been the Trill who'd limped away heroically injured but that was hardly any kind of measure of comfort.

There was an inside joke here that Nylara could recognize but clearly wasn't a part of, so instead she looked at the layout of the wreckage on her HUD. Thank the stars for a copy of the sensor sweeps over the last two days. "Not that I'm volunteering," she said in a hushed tone, "but what if we lure them out somehow? We have decent cover here."

Kevan broke his grin at Zia as if almost only just noticing the Ensign. After a pause of assessing the idea, he nodded. "Okay, we can make that work. You both hang back here, I'll lure them out somehow." He glanced at Zia again. "I mean, apparently it's tradition that one of us gets shot at." Not waiting for either of them to protest, he lurched himself off into the gap. "Hey, space pirates! Yarrr!" and then set off at a short run away from the two Ensigns.

On the other side of the gap, three raiders turned their heads at the sudden noise, and swung their weapons around to fire at the Starfleet officer. One of them, a Klingon, growled as the weapons fire missed their enemy. "After him!!"

The other two, who were in the middle of grabbing pieces of scrap, dropped what they were doing and pursued. They practically stumbled over each other as they fit through the gap in the door, some weapons fire recklessly firing in the direction Dash ran off in. "Get back here and die in battle!!"

"And now they're chasing him." The exasperation in Lorel's murmured tone failed to take into account that it was her current companion's idea that had lead their exuberant leader to run screaming in a direction that only forced them further into the ship. "Do you have a clear shot on the other one?"

Nylara's eyes went wide when Kevan drew the attention of the raiders in... well, a rather unique way. She wasn't expecting him to agree with it, let alone jump right into it, but the damage was done, he was currently under fire. "I think so," she answered Zia, aiming at one of the two that emerged from the destroyed door.

A heavy thud made a raider's head turn, spotting her companion now taking a phaser-induced nap. Gritting her teeth, she turned to see two other Starfleet scum shooting at her. She fired back, seeing them duck behind their cover, before making a run for some cover of her own.

"We can do this the hard way, or the even harder way," Zia called out, weapon poised but a genetic predisposition towards diplomacy exercising her tongue first. "You're trespassing, but being alive and inside a jail cell is better than being smeared all over the wall of a ship you're not supposed to be inside."

The female raider poked out from around her cover to fire again. "We stake claim to-!" Whatever monologue she was about to give was cut short when a weapons blast hit her collarbone, making her do a rather ungraceful spin before hitting the ground.

"You can stake a claim to my finely-toned ass," Kevan retorted, loud enough that he hoped the other two could hear it.

So much for diplomacy. "At least offer something of value," Zia retorted, flattening herself back against the wall as a streak of weapon's fire zipped past her.

"Your buddies are down! You can give up now!" Kevan called out from makeshift cover. The weapons fire stopped, and a temporary silence fell over proceedings. "Huh...that worked..." he mumbled to himself, peering out. He could only see Zia and Nylara. "Where'd they go?" he frowned.

Though not advisable in the middle of a gunfight, Zia hesitated and allowed her confused gaze to drift downwards slightly as she turned the bulk of her attention towards extra-sensory feedback. "No where nearby," she confirmed, as several deliberate attempts to reach out telepathically was met only with the familiar resonance of her companions and an otherwise blank void. "Did they figure out how to compensate for the interference?"

Seeing there was no more imminent danger, Nylara took out her tricorder to scan the area. "Unsure," she said after a few seconds. "There's no residual transporter signals that the tricorder can pick up. There is a lot of noise or... something, though. The tricorder can't really make sense of it."

"Guess my ass also functions as an improvised disintegration device," Kevan grinned, making sure to give Zia the most cocky wink possible.

For once, the playfulness seemed lost on the Betazoid, whose expression bore all the hallmarks of someone paying attention to something beyond the current conversation. The faintest wince wasn't so much an expression of pain as it was an attempt to make sense of a psionic mess, as irritating for its incoherency as it was its volume.

"I don't sense them but there is...something else here."

TBC