[AU] It’s Only A Matter Of Time

Posted on Mon Jun 22nd, 2020 @ 5:36am by Captain Nycolas Temple & Lieutenant Kalin Brennan-Griffin PhD & Lieutenant Krysia Kaleri-Smith
Edited on on Fri Jul 10th, 2020 @ 4:53pm

Mission: New Moon Rising
Location: Deck 1 - Corridor / Bridge

A Mission Post by Captain Nycolas Temple & Lieutenant Krysia Kaleri & Lieutenant Kalin 'Shae' Brennan PhD
Mission: Divided We Fall
Location: Deck 1 - Corridor / Bridge
Timeline:
Fri May 18th, 2018 @ 10:19am

Captain Temple and Lieutenant Kaleri were returning from Deck Two, having climbed out of the Turbo Lift shaft and were now walking quickly towards the Bridge. Temple was struck by the news that Kaleri had just delivered.

"Time differences?" Temple asked, shaking his head. "How long have we been experiencing this?"

“We didn’t know ourselves until Ensign Vieers spotted the timestamps on the tricorders, plus we’d both been away in the Jeffries tubes on separate occasions and the amount of time we’d been away hadn’t correlated with how long it seemed to everyone else” she slowed her pace somewhat as she still wasn’t feeling well.

Nyx nodded along, "It could be the silence and the situation playing tricks on us." He rubbed his face tiredly. "Long hours without sleep will do that."

“It’s alright Captain” she offered a smile, “None of us have much of a chance to properly rest at the moment, I want answers as much as everyone else. I need to know what’s happened to Owen... I’ve only just got to know him as my brother rather than just a co-worker I don’t want to lose him now."

"We'll get back to them soon." Nyx tried to add helpfully. "But, between you and me, let's not discuss family around Lieutenant Brennan. We're both trying to keep our heads on straight right now."

“Of course” Krysia nodded she could sense the emotions but could only imagine what it must feel like to be separated from a child, both for Shea & Nyx plus Nyx also had his wife waiting for him.

Guiding the Lieutenant over to the far side corridor, Nyx began explaining the situation, "We've found that the ship is using the power stored in the escape pods to keep us alive. We don't know why, really, but I'm darn grateful that it is. Unfortunately, the ship is taking from the Pods unevenly, draining some while ignoring others. We need to find a way to spread the power load across all of the escape pods on the decks we have left."

“Okay...” she paused to think, “there has to be a reason we just have to figure out what that reason is.”

The two entered the corridor and Nyx nodded to Lieutenant Brennan, "We're back." He declared.

True to her word, Shae had managed to compose herself and was inside one of the active pods, attempting to get the beacon started so they could try to get a signal back to the Pandora. "Oh hey," Shae said, then poked her head out to see Nyx and Krysia. "Just trying to get the beacon going, but whatever started these pods on their task is not taking kindly to the pods being re-tasked," she remarked.

“I still don’t understand how come the ship is draining the pods anyway, there isn’t a system set up to do that in the case of emergency & none of us have programmed anything to set it up.” She walked over to one of the open pods, “I don’t understand this at all but at least they’re working and that’s a blessing in itself.”

"The source of this setup will eventually have to be investigated, but for the moment I'm not looking a gift-horse in the mouth," Shae replied. "The only problem is that they're not running efficiently, we'll run out of power very quickly if we don't do something to conserve our power and air consumption, so we need to figure out how much each pod is contributing to our air and power and then limit the number of pods running to account for the minimum safe allotment for us to survive, then as they are depleted we'll need to start cycling them out for fresh pods. So for starters, we'll need a head count to know how much air we're using."

"Perhaps we could get everyone together in the temporary sickbay we just set up?" Krysia suggested, "at least we can see who we've got as well as getting a head count."

"Aye, that'll do," Shae said with a nod. "And I have some readings from the shields; since you probably know more about shields than I do, you're more likely to accurately estimate how much power it's consuming, so take my tricorder," she continued, then offered the device to Krysia.

Krysia took the tricorder, then looked at Nyx “First things first we need to get everyone to the conference room, that way at least we’ll know how many people we’ve got to provide life support for.”

Nyx nodded, "Let’s get this program underway and I’ll head down afterward. It’ll be good for the crew to speak with their Captain." He looked to Brennan and Kaleri. "Once we have some extra power, we’re going to need Comms back. I'm getting a little tired of climbing through jeffries tubes."

"You're not the only one Sir" Krysia smiled, "It would help if I understood why the pods are being used by the ship in the first place, they're not programmed to be used to provide power for the ship it's very confusing."

"It's something we'll have to look into later, priorities demand that we we make sure we have enough power and air to see tomorrow first," Shae said in a grim tone as she focus on retasking the pod she was in.

Nyx settled himself on the floor with his PADD while the others worked on the escape pods. After much consternation and a few mumbled curse words, he gave a sigh of relief. “Okay, I’ve managed to formulate a recurring program that will tell the pods to cycle through your commands. However, it has to be manually reset every 108 minutes, otherwise the program falters.”

He stood and handed the PADD to Brennan, who had been working on reprogramming the escape pods. “It’s the best I could do without full access to the ship’s computer.”

Krysia looked at the PADD alongside Shae, "It looks good to me, hopefully this should work to get the pods doing what we want."

"Perhaps down the line we can work out something a bit more reliable, but this will get the job done for now," Shae replied once giving it a look over.

“Let’s boot it up.” Nyx nodded.

Krysia nodded, "I'll monitor the readouts, fingers crossed it'll work" watching the readouts Krysia smiled and nodded, "I think it's working!"

Temple watched his PADD as the power figures for the escape pods started to change and balance out. Lieutenant Brennan's hard work was paying off as their systems began to re-configure to the new programming and cycled their power supply back into the ship. Each pod's battery level was shown in a simple bar chart and while at first they showed a multitude of different levels, they soon evened out as the pods began to act as one singular, joined power supply.

"YES!" Nyx cried out, giving a firm fist pump. It was the good news he had been looking for. He turned the PADD over to show Brennan and Kaleri. "Fantastic work, Brennan, you've out-done yourself."

"Your turn, Kaleri." Nyx nodded to the Chief of Ops. "Let's get that distress signal out."

“Yes Sir!!” Krysia grinned like a Cheshire Cat feeling excited for the first time since they’d got in their predicament, heading round to Ops she traced her fingers over the controls and activated comms sending out a distress signal. “Signal away Captain...” she looked at Nyx & Shae.

Nyx gave a deep sigh, a feeling of relief falling over him as he heard the signal go out from the escape pods. "Alright, very good Lieutenant, that's more good news."

He took a slow stroll over to his Captain's chair and sat down, relaxing into it. "Now we just have to wait for the Palatine or the rest of the Pandora to hear it and we'll be reunited again. Only a moment of time."

== One Week Later ==

Nyx sat in the darkness of the Bridge, curled up in his Captain's chair, head resting against the back cushion. The week had been long and stagnant, the constant pinging noise of the distress signal going off into the galaxy was the only sound across the empty room. Except when Nyx softly and sadly hummed an old Danish tune. His face was overgrown with a stringy, unkempt beard; the dark circles around his eyes a noticeable sign of the fatigue he was feeling. He stared incessantly at the PADD in his hand, watching the signal transmit from the Pandora. Maybe one of these times there would be a reply. Maybe this was the day, hour, minute someone out there would hear them. Maybe.

Walking into the bridge Krysia nodded to Nyx as she arrived for her turn on the bridge, with so few people everyone was taking their turn. She had to admit she found it lonely sitting on the bridge listening to the ping of the signal it could almost be relaxing in the quiet if it wasn't for the fact it signalled that they were so alone & still waiting for rescue. She nodded and smiled "My turn again Sir" she held out her hand taking the PADD as Nyx passed it over, "go and get some rest Sir, I'll call if there's any change."

Nyx looked up and stared intently at the Lieutenant for a long, awkward moment before nodding. “I’ll be in my office. Let me know as soon as you hear anything.” He tried to keep that positivity in his voice, but it was obviously fading. “You have just over an hour before the program needs to be reset.”

It was about this time that Shae stumbled in. Shae had been working on understanding the mystery of their predicament, but even after a week she was no closer to answer. She would spending days on end analyzing the beacon signal, using it to study the nothing-space it disappear into, but the more she studied, the more perplexed she became; for all the theories of the scientific community, Shae had no idea what to make of the nothing-space or how to get their signal out. When she finally pulled herself from the pod sending out the signal, she was looking more than a little worn down, sleep deprived, and utterly defeated.

"Captain?" Shae murmured as she wandered onto the Bridge in search of Nyx. "Oh, sorry, guess you're turning in too," she mused aloud when she noted that Nyx was trying to leave. "There's no change in the beacon, still no indication that the signal is being received," she reported, quickly followed by a heavy yawn. "But I'll keep working on it, I just need to catch up on some rest first," she added, then headed off to the lift shaft so she could return to her quarters for some much needed sleep.

“Ah huh.” Nyx replied, shuffling himself off to the Captain’s Quarters. He stood for a moment inside the office until the doors closed before him, then gave a heavy sigh. A week had passed and there had been no sign, nothing to indicate the Palatine or the Pandora had heard them. Or if they were even out there. He had no idea if they were ever going to be rescued, but he had to keep pretending this was working.

OFF