Sink or Swim

Posted on Tue Aug 11th, 2020 @ 7:41pm by Captain Bethsabée Leroux & Crewman Timothy Richardson & Ensign Michael Sloan & Lieutenant Aurelius Davis & Lieutenant Samantha Leyton & Lieutenant JG Mattias Constantine

Mission: Mission 3 - 100
Location: Deck A
Timeline: Day 35, Month 2, Year 0 04:30
3505 words - 7 OF Standard Post Measure

By this point in the proceedings, the main junction on A deck had become a mass of humanity. The team that had started in sickbay had rendezvoused with Commander Leroux and Sloan, making the area effectively standing room only. If there was any tension left over from Gunnery Sergeant Rhodes pointing a weapon towards Beth, it quickly evaporated as the crew focused on developing a plan to retake the bridge.

Lieutenant Constantine looked around at the gaunt faces of his friends and fellow crew. Months of training and endless repetitions of drills for hostile intruders would be called upon now. Matt was thankful to have some of Starfleet's best by his side, because it was certainly his experience that it was a rare trait to find people that were capable of rising to the occasion. Most simply sank to the level of their training.

The sound of his own voice seemed to startle the tall communications officer momentarily. Constantine realized his perception had narrowed, which he fought against as best he could. It was an obvious question, but someone needed to break the silence.

"Orders, commander?"

Beth knew that would the next question and she was still trying to work out her options. No one had protective gear on with them barely dressed, they barely had any weapons and worst of all they did not know if the bridge has been taken over or not. They did not have much time to gather intelligence at all so Beth took a deep breath in and looked at the door the separated them from the bridge.

“If the bridge has put itself into lockdown only my code will regain access.” The redhead whispered as she started to tell them how they were going to regain access. “Gunny I need you to move in as soon as the door is released.” Beth did not want to order someone into danger but it would be the only way to regain the bridge.

“I will go with him, Ma’am.” Timothy piped up wanting to feel useful.

Samantha was nervous as she breathed a ragged breath. She was a helm officer, not really trained for combat. Sure, she knew how to fire a phase pistol and could handle herself fairly well in hand to hand combat but she had never actually been in a real world close combat situation which she knew was an entirely different experience. She looked at the Vrav weapon in her hand that she had taken off the dead Vrav back on E Deck. "I'll go, ma'am," she said finally. It made sense as the Commander and Sloan were CO and XO. Losing either would be detrimental to the ship. Aurelius couldn't do much with his hands. That left only her and Constantine as the only two other viable option to go.

Aurelius absolutely hated to feel helpless and he did in that moment. He knew who would go in and even if he offered to go with them he couldn't be of much use. He felt like a liability and it ate away at him, slow bits of guilt growing as they devoured his calm exterior. And still, he did not speak up. He didn't want others hurt because they had gone in his place and he didn't want others hurt because he had gone when he shouldn't.

Lexi frowned a little at all the volunteering to be heroes but nodded. What could she say to change their minds when they all looked so determined. "Fine let's change the plan then." Beth started to form something when the ship shook. If they had not been so tightly packed in the small corridor. "Okay ideas?" She requested clutching the nearest person.

"The two guns in front move in and each take half the room," Mattias recounted to the group in a quiet, but urgent voice. "Buy us enough of a distraction for Timothy and I to charge in and take this fight to the ground. I'll make a beeline for the nearest Vrav and try and teach him some manners. It's not much of a plan, but it's the only one we've got." As he spoke, the big communications officer rolled his head around to loosen his neck, something he had done prior to big moments in sporting events as a kid growing up. He took a few deep breaths, feeling the surge of adrenaline in his veins before he turned and nodded to the others. "C'mon, let's light this candle before I run out of courage."

Beth did not want to like the plan but it really was all that they could do at this stage. It was impossible to not do something similar. The Officer in charge nodded at Mattias, he really did have the makings of a very good senior officer.

On the Bridge, the senior Vrav sneered at the displays as he held a Vrav weapon in his hand. 'Disgusting people,' he thought. In his time and service, her had never encountered such a species and their actions baffled him. First, they take and use their food and then they run like cowards. "Thieves," he snarled. "Any luck?" he asked another Vrav nearby as he stepped over the body of a dead human.

The Vrav shook his head in frustration. "No. Their system is still locked. It will take another fifteen minutes to break. It is a rather impressive encryption system."

"Work faster," he commanded as he eyed the door to the bridge. "I want to know everything about this ship and these people. You three, keep alert for anyone coming through those doors," he ordered just as the doors opened, spying several of the cursed humans beyond it.

Samantha took a step in and fired off a shot from her Vrav weapon as it struck one of the Vrav center mass in the chest just before another grabbed her by the throat and slammed her against the bulk head hard. Pain blinded her and the breath was knocked out of her. 'Damn this asshole is strong,' she thought as she dropped her weapon, recalling in a instant a desperate move as she reached out and grabbed the Vrav's head. She could hear the fighting in the bridge but it seemed far away as her world began to turn black. She pressed her thumbs hard into the Vrav's eyes.

The Vrav Commander had immediately raised his weapon and fired, narrowly missing the a human that entered the bridge.

"Mistake!" Matt shouted as he sprinted to cover the distance and drove his shoulder through what he assumed was the Vrav commander's sternum. The sheer force would've knocked the wind out of most humans, but the communications officer soon found himself in a heated tussle, using every trick he knew to gain enough leverage to pin the Vrav to the ground. For a moment, the outcome seemed uncertain and Constantine looked as if he was in trouble. Instead of resisting, he rolled with the Vrav's momentum and used it to end up in a position where he had physical control. Matt kicked the weapon out of the Vrav's hand and hooked him with a left to the jaw.

"That one's for Lexi," he spat nearby as he felt the Vrav commander go limp. Though his wrist stung from the force of the punch, nothing seemed broken so Constantine looked around to see if anyone else needed help.

Beth followed onto the bridge despite the Marine and XO trying to tell her not to and pulled out the translator so they would be able to understand properly what she was saying. They deserved that much despite the bodies that littered the bridge. She just had to hope that some of them were simply just knocked out. She knew they had prepared for this possibility but she was now going to put that plan into effect by changing the environmental controls. “This ends now.” She said simply as she moved to where she would be able to broadcast across the ship. “Find out how they got on board.” She demanded to Constantine seeing him knock out the commander.

"On it," Mattias replied with a nod, releasing custody of the Vrav commander over to Gunnery Sergeant Rhodes. Constantine sprang to his feet and keyed a sequence of commands into his console, using his newly acquired status as a department head to gain access the ship's logs. As he scoured through hour after hour of entries, every status report for all of the airlocks, hatches, umbilicals, and all of the exterior doors on the ship was identical except for a short period of activity two days prior. The expected opening and closing of the shuttlepod doors for the negotiations were logged, but so too was an additional cycling of the doors approximately an hour after the team had returned.

"Oh shit, these sons of..." Constantine muttered under his breath as the pieces started to fall into place. "Commander, I believe we may have brought some additional baggage back with us in our rush to leave the planet's surface. Once we got back, they opened the front door for their friends to come over, as it were."

"You are kidding me?" Beth said all decorum lost as she moved to the console to look at the information. How had they been so stupid? The pod had been checked surely?

Samantha's hands were partially covered in Vrav Blood as they shook from the violence of the battle. The Vrav she had struggled with now laid dead near her. Her breathing was rapid and her body shook uncontrollably. "Shit..." she cursed under her breath at realizing she killed not one but two Vrav in the battle. She had never killed before. She closed her eyes tightly, fighting back tears as she wanted nothing more than to be back home. 'Come on, Sam,' she consoled herself. 'You're a Starfleet Officer and a Senior Officer. Get a grip.' Looking up, her eyes, locked onto her station and forced her body to move towards it as she stood on shaking legs. A moment later, she sat down at the helm station and began to run a checklist of the engines.

Seeing her shaking and trying to pull herself together Aurelius came up behind her and started to rub one shoulder lightly, distractedly as he looked over the scene in front of him. Samantha was a bit of an enigma to him. One minute they acted as if they were brother and sister, teasing each other and offering a hand when needed and the next he would hear her say a word and it would make him stop and stare, not quite wanting to assume her meaning.

The former Chief Armory Officer looked down the barrel of the projectile pistol he had taken off a Vrav when he had met up with Beth. Fully expecting to be back in his cage when all this was over, he motioned with the weapon to indicate the reaming Vrav. "What do we do with them?" he asked, offering no suggestions. He was in jail for being a spy and only a short time out from them messing with his mind, any suggestion he could offer was one that he would regret later.

Beth slumped into her chair... wait her chair? At that thought, she stood up again and looked at the translator in her hands. She saw the remaining Vrav being put into the corner of the room. "Where is your ship?" She asked into the device. She wanted to send the ones that reminded back to their ship. "The killing and dying needs to stop. You are killing both of us." She said trying to make them see by pointing to where bodies were bleeding out both red and dark brown.

Speaking back to the Commander, the more lively Vrav stepped slightly forward to be heard. "Out there... beyond your eyes, stalking," it indicated, probably saying that their ship was beyond the Atlantis' sensor range. "No peace, Vrav will still die and be killed." The last part only strengthened the argument that their mission had been simply retribution, it had no significant hope for the team to return. Their mission was only to cause as much damage and chaos as they could.

Beth did not raise a weapon or anything as the Vrav came forward, she knew they would be stupid to try anything now. It was over and they had lost this time. "You will not die. We want to help and make up for our error." Beth said frustrated as she listened to the reptilian beings word translating into English out of the device that she held. It was ridiculous that they just could not see that they really were wanting to help and fix the mistake they had made.

"It is a trap," the Vrav replied. "You give us poison so we leave you with our treasure," it added. The universal translator had begun to make the translations better as it received a bigger sampling of the Vrav language.

"No!" Beth said simply. "We have been trying to research," Beth argued looking at her crew as a few of the people who had been lying on the floor that had been on nightshift stirred. Not everyone was dead thankfully. They could not function much longer on so few ships, it would impossible to cover everything that was needed. The Vrav had to be in the same circumstances.

Deciding that living in jail was better than a slow death of starvation, Sloan stepped forward. "Listen up dha'rudh," he spoke up, calling the prisoner an idiot in his own tongue. "We signaled to the planet when we arrived, no answer. Your people kidnapped and tortured me, and we let your team live. Now, we have food for you. If we wanted you dead, do you really think we would have tried to negotiate peace terms with you?"

The Vrav glared at Sloan for what seemed an eternity. "I do not speak for us. G'reil speaks for us," he pointed to the commander unconscious on the deck.

"Well, we are talking to you now as the only one awake. Do you want peace or death?" Beth asked simply. She was not going around and around anymore, it was not working it and it was making a mockery out of everything her crew knew and were. They had made a mistake but they were the best her planet had to offer and wanted to fix things.

The Vrav turned to the female who had spoken and narrowed his eyes. "If you lie, we will ensure this ship dies," he hissed. "You return all of stolen food now," he spoke as the translator began to work more efficiently.

"We cannot return it. It has been processed past that but we have created a device..." Beth started to explain but the Vrav charged at her with a scream of lies and knocked her to the floor with an OOF as the wind was knocked out of the Officer in Charge.

Samantha turned in her seat, grabbing the Vrav weapon in her hand and fired it. The weapon's projectile tore through the Vrav's shoulder as it cried out in pain, falling to the deck. Samantha kept the weapon leveled at the Vrav as she glared at it through blood shot eyes. "Make another move asshole and see what happens! Now stay and shut up!"

The Vrav Commander's eyes, shot open and it let out a groan and sat up. "Enough! Explain," he pointed at Commander Leroux. "Explain this device."

Kicking himself for missing the chance at saving Beth, Sloan stepped between the wounded Vrav and the Captain. He did not say anything, but he held his own Vrav weapon at the ready. HIs eyes moved from the injured Vrav to the one who was supposedly unconscious. His Vulcanoid hearing allowed him to pick up the faint sounds of their breathing.

Beth slowly sat up herself and sighed as she tried to make sense of it all. Why could they just not listen when she was trying to explain how something would be beneficial for them. "We have been looking at a way to turn the things we took from you back into something you can process." She explained still sat on the floor winded. This evening was really not her night at all. She was battered and bloodied.

G'reil stood slowly as he gathered his senses, keeping his gaze on this alien commander. "What is this 'something'?"

"A machine. To turn some of what we took back into something for you. " Beth explained. It was why the resequencer were offline so long after they were damaged they were trying to copy one of them to create something sustainable for the species that they had doomed. She glanced at Michael stood there and hauled herself to her feet.

"Your words make no sense," the commander snarled. "Food cannot come from machines! It must be grown!"

"No, it can," Aurelius finally broke into the conversation. "It's a machine that allows us to use the subatomic particles around us and forms them into something substantial. Think of it like this. It's a machine that makes the growing of plants and food instant. No more waiting and watering crops." He hoped that was a good enough explanation, he was no scientist.

G'reil paused as he digested the new information, tilting his head in the process. "Instant food? I demand proof!"

"Uh sure. Here, Can we walk to one?" He looked to Beth for approval first.

Beth nodded and a small group of them moved from the Bridge to the messhall that for the most part had avoided any battle wounds other than a few chairs and tables being upside down.

Aurelius approach it and had the Vrav watch him as he pressed buttons. He ordered vegetables thinking that the Vrav would possibly understand that as food. "See," He slowly raised the cauliflower to his lips and took a bite. "Food. And it came from particles around us, we changed them, made them food."

"We just need time to make it work for you. Your diet is different than it can work with. We are nearly there but these attacks need to stop. We are killing unnecessarily." Beth said looking at the man waiting for him to decide which path he wanted to go down.

G'reil looked from to the female commander back to the machine and then back at the woman. The technology seemed unimaginable and he would not believed it if he had not just seen it. He would give them a chance if anything to give his ship time to prepare should they lie. He gathered his composure and stood straight, taking a step towards the woman. "You have 12 hours or we will destroy this ship," G'reil snarled.

*Friendly fellow,* Asher thought to himself but that was better than nothing and at least the being appeared to believe them now.

Beth shook her head with a tut. Impatience was not going to get them anywhere. "We need more than 12 hours. You have been attacking up constantly we need to be able to make it work for your systems and requirements." Beth said shaking her head. "We are different enough that it requires time. You can follow us. you know we cannot get far quickly compared to you."

"Then I suggest you work quickly as you were quite quick in stealing our food," G'reil replied. "I am done here."

Beth rolled her eyes. They were always going to bare that grudge but how were they to know that the planet was someone else's when their were no drones, satellites or anything telling them that. "And I am done here too. Get your people off my ship, take your dead. You have an hour to it." Beth said knowing they had the upper hand now as they had repealed a boarding party.

Watching and listening nearby, Lieutenant Constantine took a breath as the tension in the room slowly de-escalated. The fight or flight autonomous response of his nervous system slowly dissipated, and the rush of adrenaline faded away with it. Then and only then did he start to feel the toll that the brief, but heated physical confrontation with the Vrav had extracted from his body. It was still unclear if they had convinced the Vrav of anything except for a ceasefire while they collected their bodies, but he was thankful to not have to fight.

"Well, at least they didn't scream at us this time," he spoke quietly as he walked towards the other officers. "Is everyone alright?"

"Yeah. You?" Beth asked not sure she would get any answers for a moment but the worst was over for now. They had swum when they could have easily sunk. It was a good end but what would be the cost to the crew. How many had been lost before the ceasefire?