The Wormhole and The Hope Part 2

Posted on Wed Dec 9th, 2020 @ 3:35pm by Captain Bethsabée Leroux & Ensign Alexandra 'Lexi' O'Connery & Ensign Michael Sloan & Lieutenant Samantha Leyton & Lieutenant JG Mattias Constantine & Ensign Elegy Nascimento

Mission: Mission 3 - 100
Location: Deck A - Main Bridge
Timeline: MD 67 11:00
4157 words - 8.3 OF Standard Post Measure

Beth could not believe after all the weeks of calm and quiet that the Vrav chose this time and place to intercept them and potentially try to destroy them. "Get the shuttle back," Beth ordered the communication chief in a low voice. "And tactical I want an image of the ship." Beth ordered the man at the tactical station.

"Yes, ma'am," Lieutenant Constantine's attention was split between the unidentified vessel and cancelling the cavalcade of proximity alarms. Analysis of the situation would have to wait, but Mattias already realized that their hyper-focused sensor arc had limited their ability to detect any oncoming ships, even beyond the challenges that the wormhole presented itself. Still, the task at hand required him to push those thoughts aside. What mattered now was to get their people back safely.

"Lieutenant Leyton, we've still got the grappler cable out there. This is gonna be good ol' fashioned visual flying. We're gonna turn the docking light on the grappling arm on to full brightness. I'm asking you to go against decades of social conditioning and fly towards the light, please."

Leyton took one look at her sensors, spotting the incoming Vrav vessel as well as several distortions moving nearby. She shook her head. "Negative, attaching to the tow cable would be too dangerous for the shuttlepod and Atlantis." She knew that a starship would not be able to perform maneuvers while towing in an object, endangering the Atlantis. "It will be safer and faster for us to return normally That way I can match any maneuvers the Atlantis needs to make. Just get the shuttlepod retrieval port ready."

Seated behind Samantha Leyton, in the cockpit of the shuttlepod Odysseus, Ensign Elegy Nascimento was only half-listening to the discussion. Elegy had opted to wear his speech-to-text eyewear, in case his cochlear implants were distorted or damaged by the spatial anomalies all around them. Leyton and Leroux's debate appeared as words across Elegy's field of vision, but there was still one more thing that mattered. Elegy double-checked the strength of the telemetry link back to Atlantis, when he reported, "The probe has entered the terminus of the wormhole. Confirming the sensor data is being logged in the science lab databanks. Darru and the others can make the most of it now--"

Samantha turned her head over her shoulder towards Elegy. "Hold on!" In the next moment, she engaged the engines to full power, while pulling the shuttle vertical, almost onto it's dorsal side, narrowly missing a passing distortion.

"Aye, Lieutenant. I'm uh-- I'm charging plasma cannons," Elegy replied. Almost as soon as he said it, Elegy had to swallow down a titter of laughter. Hearing the words in his own voice sounded farcical to him, almost. Although he didn't spare a thought on it, Elegy couldn't imagine he had said those words even once since his days in Starfleet training. Elegy rubbed his beard with one hand, while he watched the indicator bars extend across his tactical display. With the probe's telemetry signal still on his in mind, Elegy scrolled through the shuttlepod's other operational systems. He asked, "Lieutenant, should I disable the transponder? Might make it harder for Atlantis to rescue us, but it should keep us off the Vrav's radar too."

"Do it," she commanded as the shuttlepod shook as the inertial dampeners adjusted to a higher setting as the shuttle executed another sharp, high speed turn. Just as an alarm sounded. Her eyes flicked over to the sensor display. "Distortion--" she never finished as the distortion passed through the shuttlepod's starboard bow section, interrupting several systems. In response, the shuttle lurched hard, slamming Samantha hard into the bulkhead amid a shower of sparks. Several warning lights and alarms sounded throughout the shuttle. Her shoulder hurt like hell as she soon felt a warm liquid beginning to run down her head. With adrenaline flowing through her, she pushed the pain aside, focusing solely on piloting the crippled shuttlepod. They were losing fuel, controls were sluggish, and life support was failing. She aimed the shuttle at Atlantis as she watched the ship turn about to face in the incoming Vrav vessel.

Elegy just managed to switch off the shuttlepod's transponder when the whole cockpit lurched. Although he managed to keep in his chair, Elegy's shoulder smashed into the console by his side. As he strained to gather his bearings, Elegy double-checked he hadn't inadvertently changed the sensor settings or fired the plasma torpedoes with his elbow, but the systems were all where he left them... except for the struggling propulsion systems... and life support... Elegy could only imagine what Beth would think, on the bridge of Atlantis, as soon as the shuttlepod's transponder went dark.

"Where is the shuttle?" Beth asked from the tactical station as she finally saw what was following them. It was nothing they had seen before from the Vrav. It was at least five times the size of them and a lot more sleeker than what they were used to.

"It is definitely them Sir." Luis Martinez confined as Beth shook her head not wanting to know it.

"Comms contact the shuttle and tell them exactly what is going on and why they need to get back." Beth knew they would not be able to go any closer to the shuttle pod with the Vrav coming closer and closer. She refused to believe that they were gone with the transponder off. "How did they find us?" Beth whispered absently to herself confused as to how the Vrav had been able to track them so close to the distortions.

"There is no way they could track us without some kind of device," Martinez whispered back to his Captain. Thinking for a moment, a lightbulb seemed to go off in Luis' head. A bit louder for the rest of the Bridge to hear, the Acting Armory Officer explained, "What if that raid was about more than just punishing us, they knew that small party didn't have a chance. But I've never seen anything like that ship following us. Maybe that raid was about tracking us to be taken by that thing."

Lieutenant Constantine took pride in his ability to multitask, but the overload to his perception with stimuli assaulting him from seemingly every direction caused the communications officer to close his eyes and focus his attention on listening to his ear piece. The lack of response from the interrogation of the shuttle's transponder was heard before the display at his console reported the same finding. A rising sense of dread demanded more from Constantine - more focus, more effort, more work - whatever it took to get their people back.

"Atlantis to Odysseus, come in."

A beat. Radio silence.

"Atlantis to Odysseus, come in. Lieutenant Leyton? Ensign Nascimento?" Mattias's fought to keep his voice calm, though a discerning ear would have certainly heard a wavering in his unreturned broadcasts. Then, as he opened his eyes, the central processor's status light burst into activity. With his ears now unaffected by the constant interrogation and response of the Odysseus's transponder, Mattias heard the unmistakable sound of the sensor array transmitting information. His eyes grew large as he realized the truth - they had been unknowingly transmitting their location to the Vrav.

"Commander!" Constantine interjected. "Ensign Martinez is right! We have to get the shuttlepod back now and then shut down the central processor. The Vrav must have found some way to place a tracker onboard. We've been telling them exactly where we are! That's the source of the phantom processor activation!"

"Sir you deal with the tracking I will concentrate on the pod and get them home," Lexi said recognising that they would need to divide and conquer to solve this problem. "You can rip consoles apart I cannot." She whispered to the man as she took over the summoning of the shuttle pod already thinking of ways to find them. "Atlantis to Odysseus, come in. This is Ensign O'Connery. Nascimento, Leyton please come in." She repeated.

"Odysseus to Atlantis" came Leyton's labored breathing. "We're here but have taken damage when we skimmed a distortion. Try to keep the ship as steady as possible." In the shuttlepod's cockpit, Leyton had a white knuckle grip on the flight stick as it vibrated along with the shuttle. With the other hand, she flipped on the docking system as they closed in om the shuttlepod retrieval port.

"Understood Odysseus. it is good to hear your voice." Beth let out the breath she had been holding as the breathy voice came over the speaker and Lexi held up her thumb in the universal signal of success to the Commander allowing them to not deal with the other problem on the bridge - the tracking device. "Rip the bridge apart," Beth said simply moving to the Communication console as the first port of call in finding the device that seemed to be pinging back to the Vrav ship allowing them to track them.

On the Odyssey, Samantha piloted the shuttle as the controls began to fight her more. Each system coming closer to failing completely. They were now one-hundred meters from the shuttlepod retrieval port. The shuttle soon lurched as a stabilizer failed, sending the shuttlepod off course as Samantha quickly corrected, bullying the shuttlepod to respond. "Come on..." she whispered as she lined the shuttlepod up and a couple second later, the tell-tell sound of a hard dorck sounded in the shuttle pod as the retrieval port raised the shuttlepod back into the bay with the doors closing, allowing Smantha to finally let out a sigh of relief as she leaned back in her seat. "Shit..." she breathed.

Relief washing over him, Elegy slumped back in his seat, akin to a rag doll or a corpse. The only indication he was still alive was the way he was taking deeper breaths to get his panic-breathing under control. He listened for the sounds of the docking procedures and the bay repressuring outside the shuttlepod. "Samantha," Elegy said in absolute conviction, "You are a star."

"Welcome back Odysseus." Lexi's voice spoke up. "We need you on the bridge." She admitted sounding a little worried as she surveyed the scene around her.

Samantha let out a moan as she sat up, pushing herself out of the chair and hitting the door release to exit the shuttle. Her shoulder was still throbbing painfully yet the bleeding from her head still flowed although it had slowed. She closed her hands tightly several times in an attempt to calm her nerves. "We better get to the bridge. Are you alright?" she paused by the open door, offering her hand to him to help him stand if needed.

While Samantha released the shuttlepod's hatch, Elegy stared at his console vacantly and he ran his hands back through his hair. His initial reply to Samantha's question was only a weary sigh. He took another breath. Then he braced his palms against his seat pan, and pushed himself up to his feet. Elegy was quick to follow Samantha out, saying, "Peachy keen."

The turbolift door rolled open on the Bridge, delivering Leyton and Elegy to their colleagues. Elegy Nascimento darted out of the turbolift, but his determined stride turned into more of a limp. Only in doing so did he suspect he must have banged up his knee on the shuttlepod. Joining Ensign Katsu Yoshi at the science station, Elegy looked to Leroux questioningly. "What are we looking for, Commander?"

Beth was crouched looking at the main helm console as the pair finally appeared on the bridge. She took a moment to take them in to confirm they were alive and well before she indicated any console that was not in covered and being looked through. “Glad to see you both. Grab a console and look at it. We are looking for something foreign and not Starfleet issue.” She told them looking back at her own console.

Taking a deep breath, Mattias was relieved to see both Samantha and Elegy in the flesh as they walked onto the bridge. For several minutes, Constantine had been using the experience he had gained from helping the engineers out around the ship to deftly disassemble the consoles in the communications area of the bridge. Wiring harnesses darted to and from the various modular pieces of equipment used to power the ship's sensors and transceivers. Each bundle contained any number of evenly-spaced, EM shielded cables that were jacketed in identical white polymer coating.

Returning his attention to the task at hand, a small discrepancy caught Mattias's eye. One set of wires was pulled taut. The strain against the mounting bracket was easily noticeable, but whatever was causing the issue wasn't on this end of the connector.

"Now let's see," Constantine stood up from where he was working. "This is harness number forty-seven alpha, which means the other end goes somewhere to the science console. Someone pull the paneling there and check - something isn't quite right here."

Behind the freestanding science console, the majority of the science station was set into the bulkhead, curving from the edge of the communication station all the way to the aft turbolift. Hardly three steps out of the turbolift, Elegy Nascimento followed Constantine's order instinctively, squatting down to the deck. Elegy reached out to the first panel beneath the console, tapping the pads of his fingertips along the edges to find the recessed hand hold. As soon as his fingertips hooked in to the panel, he yanked it off, revealing orderly harnesses of wires and subproccessors. Elegy let his vision go fuzzy -- knowing that he didn't know exactly what he was looking for, and so he would have a better chance of looking for patterns and discords.

"This one's clear, sirs," Elegy reported back, as he pushed the metal panel back into place. After crawling a couple of paces to his right, Elegy snatched off the next panel. Not long after he mentally divided the inner workings of the console into a grid, Elegy's sapphire eyes drifted towards a white cable that had been pulled taut. Leaning in closer to that wire in particular, he could see that it was coming from the direction of the comm station, and he could see where he was going. Elegy took hold of an adjacent wiring harness and he pulled it out of the bulkhead to offer a view to what was happening behind the taut wire.

"What are you called when you're at home?" Elegy asked into the guts of the science station.

"A spy," Beth called coming over to look at the device and then the bridge in disarray. "Get everything back on." She instructed coming over to crouch to see the device properly.

"This thing has been the source of a lot of consternation and worry," Lieutenant Constantine shook his head. He had already reached for his tool kit and prepared to replace the section of wires affected by the device. "The bastards must've planted this while they were frolicking on the bridge during that boarding party. It also explains why we haven't seen them in a while - they've just been hiding outside of sensor range and using this thing to track us." The annoyance in the chief communications officer's voice was evident, but he kept working as he talked through his realizations, but his voice trailed off as soon as he saw how embedded the foreign device had become.

"Commander, Ensign," Constantine leaned away from the guts of the console. "This thing isn't just piggybacking the signal, it has literally replaced the part of the wire it's attached to. Removing it means breaking the connection here, and judging by this wiring diagram, it's a significant amount of navigational redundancy that we're going to lose while I splice in a replacement. Now, before I cut this and take away Lieutenant Leyton's eyes, are there any other potential workarounds that I'm not seeing?"

“Wait...” Lexi called. “It sounds like there is a feedback loop.” She called trying to work out what the sound was that she was hearing.

Elegy cast a glance at Lexi; he saw her return her attention to her earpiece, and he went back to reading the wiring diagrams and schematics over Constantine's shoulders. "When you disconnect the device, navigation will still have access to the lateral sensor pallets," Elegy said. He spoke quickly, thinking out loud in the hopes the words might trigger a solution in himself or the others. He waggled his fingers in spidery motions as he imagined all of the sensor inputs flowing into the Bridge. "Navigation will lose the deflector sensor array, the warp field governor sensor pallets, the lower sensor dome... We could... we could..." Elegy said. Although his words trailed off, the frantic desperation in what he said was echoed in his "Uhhhh"s. He blew a breath of air between his teeth, and he offered, "Hang a sensor buoy from the launch bay? I dunno."

"It will get the Vrav as well." Lexi pipped up pressing her ear piece harder to try and focus.

"How easily can we fix the damage after?" Beth asked both men stood at the console. "And can you fly blind?" She asked over over shoulder to Sam, Samantha sat at her console, monitoring the Vrav while the comm station was being put back together. Glancing at her console, she muttered a curse before turning to the ensign she had relieved. "Why in a Vulcan's A-hole did you reset my settings, Ensign?"

The ensign shrugged from his position near the rear of the bridge. "Sorry, ma'am. I felt the console would respond better if the controls were reset,"

"Well you felt wrong," Samantha said as her head and shoulder were throbbing with pain, turning back in her seat as she began to readjust the settings on the Helm Console.

"Touchy," Harper noticed as he he walked passed the helm station and the two butting heads. He took a mental note but moved on as he walked over to the science and communications stations. He pondered for a moment before he finally spoke up. "Things seem to be almost ready but I honestly would like to at least bring up the fact that if this doesn't work, we still have that massive threat to constantly look over our should to watch out for."

A feedback loop could mean anything but Beth was sure it would mean it would cause damage them. It was after all feedbacking to them there location, it had to be tied into there ship quite tightly to allow for that. They really had been determined to not lose them. Beth opened to her mouth to order it to be removed when Lexi spoke up stopping anyone answering any questions.

“Sir we have a transmission from the lead Vrav ship.” She announced amazed that the ship was contacting them first before they just attack.

“Let us see what they want to say as they must realise we now have detected life.” Beth turned to look at the viewscreen as it came to life with the familiar Vrav who had been spared on the Bridge.

“The Destroyers have found our device.” He announced. Beth knew in that moment why they had descended on them with the fall force of what they had left at the moment. They thought they were going to use the wormhole.

“Easy to find it when you suddenly appeared out of nowhere,” Beth commented.

“We needed to be able to track you. You have not kept your end of the bargain.” The Vrav stated clearly. He was not messing around with these humans and whatever tricks they were playing.

“We gave you food.” Beth reminded softly glancing at Harper for a moment, a plan forming in her mind as thought through what had been said about the flying blind and fixing status.

“We want more.” The Vrav demanded. “You stole our whole future.”

“No, we did not. We did not know the planet was your farm. Nothing there informed us of that. We know we have made a mistake and have owned that but this relentless attacking and following will never allow either of us to live.” Beth reminded him wishing she knew his name to actually talk to the man instead of his people. One man's mind could be changed for the betterment of the future.

“Lies!” He spat seeing the device in the corner of his screen. “You have discovered if you do that you damage both ships correct?”

“Yes but the difference is am I willing to pull the plug on this is the question you should be asking.” No matter what happened now. Beth knew there was no way to use the wormhole, they could not risk a ship like this following them wherever the wormhole led. Earth, Vulcan, Andoria none of them would be able to match it. It would lead to war and bloodshed on a scale no one had seen before. She looked at Lexi and indicated to cut the connection. “I need answers and we do not have long to end this. How long will it take to fix everything and can you fly blind Leyton?”

"Blind?" Samantha repeated. Flying without sensors could be done--it was part of Helm training at the Academy in the simulators but also no one expected to ever actually do it. "Sure, I'll do my best, ma'am."

"As far as fixing all this. A couple hours and that is before testing out the systems. Till then, if we have the remote control program for the shuttle still in the system, we could have limited sensors for the Lieutenant to patch through for flying. But we can't go to warp. That is suicide," Chris admitted as he looked at the device one last time before looking over at the captain. "As soon as I pull this, expect a couple short circuits around the bridge."

The Officer in Charge stepped up to the men and held out her hand for the tools that would disconnect the device from the computer resulting in a feedback loop. "It is mine to pull. I need you to transport the sequencer to their bridge as soon as it is done, I will pull it and Sam will get us out of here." Beth instructed.

With a long deep breath, he nodded as he knew better then to argue any case. "Yes, boss lady. The sequencer will be ready. Just look away from any consoles. Don't want your face or eyes getting hit with sparks," Lieutenant Harper stated as he headed to the turbolift. It was going to take a couple minutes, so he pulled his communicator out and called for one of his engineers to get the device to the transporter pad. "...I'll need a moment to get the targeting sensor's routed through secondary systems as the primary sensors are... well they aren't working." And with that, the turbolift door slammed shut.

“They are summoning us Sir.” Lexi said setting herself a bit back from the console for when sparks flew. Beth indicated the screen and the screen was filled with a familiar looking device and the vrav looking angry.

“What is this?” He demanded seeing the woman now held the device that would cause some damage to both ships. Lexi looked bath. Her face seemed set like stone, calculated and cold, lacking all the warmth and cheer Beth had comes to cherish in the short time she had known her, it was scary to watch.

“It is our payment. Wire that in and you have food again. Our science and engineering teams have been working on it. It will sustain you for as long as you need until you can fine a home just like we are looking for home. You need to leave us alone now.It is finished between us. We both go our separate ways at peace.” Beth said cutting the wires holding her breath for a moment as she felt the woosh of power being pulled from different places before sparks flew all around her but nothing overly looked damaged. “Cut the connection and get us out of here Sam,” Beth instructed looking deflated as she waited for the ship to move away from this scene where she had just made the choice for her crew.

After the sparks had subsided, Samantha throttled the engines to full impulse as she piloted the ship along the outer edges of the anomalies in case the Vrav decided to give chase, they would hopefully hit a distortion.

But they never did.