[AU] It’s A Small World After All

Posted on Mon Jun 22nd, 2020 @ 6:04am by Cailus Griffin & Captain Nycolas Temple & Lieutenant Kalin Brennan-Griffin PhD & Lieutenant Krysia Kaleri-Smith & Lieutenant James Smith & Lieutenant JG Vecon Fick & Mauricio Arnaldo
Edited on on Fri Jul 10th, 2020 @ 4:56pm

Mission: Divided We Fall
Location: Bridge

A Mission Post by Captain Nycolas Temple & 1st Lieutenant Mauricio Arnaldo & Lieutenant Cailus Griffin & Lieutenant Krysia Kaleri & Lieutenant Kalin 'Shae' Brennan PhD & Lieutenant James Smith & Lieutenant JG Vecon Fick
Mission: Divided We Fall
Location: Bridge
Timeline:

After a week of no response from the emergency beacon, the stranded crew of the Pandora were no closer to figuring a way out of their predicament. At least they were recovering from their respective injuries and surviving thanks to Lieutenant Brennan’s work to reprogram the escape pods into powering the essential services and life support. Though the food rations were not winning any fans either.

Unsure of what to do, the beleaguered Captain Nyx gathered the senior crew to the Bridge to discuss their situation and hopefully come up with a new plan.

Krysia walked onto the bridge she was doing her best to keep her spirits up given their situation, especially now she’d been given the news of her pregnancy, she was glad she had James with her & once the meeting was over she had plans to tell him he was going to be a father. Up until now wrapping up in his arms at night had been the only thing keeping her spirits up. Shae nodded to Nyx who was looking more and more down every time she saw him, not that she was surprised, his family were missing too.

Fick joined the group. He also looked pretty downtrodden. He didn't say anything either, unlike his normal behavior. He slipped into his seat at his console and just sat there. None of it made any sense to him anymore. How were they supposed to figure where or when they were in space when there was no space? He took a deep breath and sat up straighter.

James arrived shortly behind Fick, he had been trying to run scans and system checks to figure out what had happened to them, he continued to embed codes in the computer system in a hope that anyone would find them but he was getting discouraged everyday he failed. He one solace was the time he spent with Krysia. Looking over at Nyx he frowned a little, he had never seen his friend look like this, he could tell that he wasn’t doing well.

Krysia could tell James was worried about his friend she gave him a reassuring glance as she moved to stand alongside him, she had to admit she was feeling tired herself the whole situation was energy sapping, simply because there was so little anyone could do. She frowned for a moment as she got a strong sense of there being more people on the bridge than there actually were. “Does... anyone else feel that?” She looked around at Nyx, Fick and James. “It’s like a feeling of...” She shook her head. “Forget it, I’m just imagining it.”

Sasha surprisingly appeared from underneath the Science Station, where she had been working for quite a while. The Bridge had been relatively silent and this suited the young Linguistics Officer well. Though she had gotten a little carried away and ended up almost wholly submerged inside the console. She only just managed to wriggle her way back outside again when she heard the others enter. “Oh!” she gasped, as she stood. “People. I didn’t miss the program reset, did I?”

Nyx frowned at the young Ensign before lazily looking to his PADD. “Another fifteen,” he replied.

“Wonderful,” she sighed.

“But what if you had gotten stuck in there, Ensign?” Nyx asked tersely. “And hadn’t made it out in time to hit the reset? You risked the only system keeping us alive.”

“I had a reminder,” she protested. After seeing the look in Nyx’s eyes, that made it clear this wasn’t a sufficient answer. The Ensign bowed her head. “Sorry, Sir. Won’t happen again.”

Nyx turned back to the others, “Who are we waiting on? I asked specifically for the meeting to start at 10.”

"Pretty much everyone..." Fick responded. "I'm sure that there were more than five people on this crew."

“There are,” said a disgruntled voice that seemed to come from the open turbolift shaft, the doors having been kept open for ease of access. Moments later, Cailus clambered in awkwardly through the door, grunting as he climbed inside from one of the ladders alongside the portal. The security chief still looked just the same as ever in his spick-and-spam uniform, nodding sternly at his colleagues before peeking back down the shaft, only a certain stiffness in his left arm hinting that it was still healing.

“Lieutenant Brennan will be along soon enough, she was just waiting for the results of a scan,” he said off-handedly, frowning as he tried to peer into the darkness below. “She can climb that thing in seconds anyway.” At that, he looked to Nyx. “Sir, we might as well get started. I’ve just been below decks, and everyone is either working or asleep.”

“When I schedule a meeting at a certain time, I expect people to be here.” Nyx replied with a heavy tone. “I don’t believe our situation precludes us from maintaining our Starfleet protocols. Or should I start relieving people of duty now and stop wasting time waiting for them?”

"I'm here!" came Shae's voice from the turbolift shaft. "I'm sorry, I'm here, I didn't mean for my test to take so long," Shae said apologetically as she crawled free of the shaft. "And unfortunately, nothing new to report yet; these tests feel like a waste of time and power at this point, but I have to keep trying," she said in a downtrodden tone as she joined the rest of the senior staff for the meeting.

Fick was spinning slowly in a circle in his chair. "I think we're all kinda feeling you there, Dr. Brennan. We keep looking and looking and everyday it seems like there are no answers, but the questions keep piling up."

“We need a new plan then.” Nyx said and he instinctively clapped his hands together. For a moment he surprised himself with the action, but merely shook it off. “Given our power resources are limited, perhaps we need to divert energy to the ship’s sensors. Finding a way to combine programming again, and try one piercing scan as far as possible?”

Krysia sighed, "Wouldn't it just be a waste of what power we do have?" she looked around the others, "I'm not saying we give up but shouldn't we consider that we might be stuck here for a while? We have to keep on living our lives in hope that they'll find us and for that we'll need as much power as we can conserve."
She took a seat at one of the stations. She wasn't feeling one hundred percent anyway, she frowned for a moment. "There it is again... Are any of you feeling that?"

"Feeling what?" Shae asked.

"It's like a sense of..." She shook her head. "Like we're not alone on this bridge. I keep getting a sense of more people than just us and it's always strongest here on the bridge."

Shae sighed. "There's no one else here," Shae said. "Believe me, if there were I'd hear them, but it's just us." And that invading silence that permeated through all areas of the ship was deafening to her, but she was trying not to let it get to her; at least for now she had the comfort of everyone's breathing and their heartbeats to break this maddening silence. "The brain can be so desperate for what was once there, we can 'sense' things that aren't real; it's been well documented throughout history that people will 'sense' loved ones when they're missing or even long dead. It's not like a hallucination or anything, we're not going crazy, although that is a serious concern with such prolonged isolation, but actually it's rather like phantom limb syndrome; it feels very real, but it's just damaged nerves looking for the missing limb and sending false information back to the brain."

Krysia nodded. "Maybe you're right..." She massaged her temples and waited to see what ideas others came up with.

"Back to the matter at hand, I'm in agreement with Lieutenant Kaleri," Shae stated. "It's simply too much ventured with no guarantee of any gain; if we reroute power to the sensor pallets on our available decks and we're unable to detect anything that can help us, then we've just damned our chances of survival. And... I'm not sure if now is the best time to bring this up, but while studying the beacon's signal and how it interacts with the nothing-space, I've come to notice something unusual about the Pandora's hull, an abnormally high refractive index; I haven't given this much attention seeing as my focus was elsewhere, but I'm wondering now what is causing the phenomenon on the ship's hull and if we could maybe use it to strengthen the signal enough to penetrate the nothing-space."

“A high refractive index? I wonder what would cause that?” Krysia looked at Shae. “I guess if we could find a way to use it maybe we could try and increase the signal but how are we going to use it?”

“We would need something separate to the hull,” Nyx commented. “If it has any hope of piercing the nothing-space and being able to be detected by the others. What if we drained one of the escape pods but left just enough power for sensors and comms and launched it? Like a very basic probe?”

Smith nodded. “That might work, but it would also give us one less escape pod for us to survive on. Is there any other way that we might be able to penetrate this space we are in.”

Fick stopped spinning in his chair. "What about a proton beam? Do you think we could get up enough energy to make one? They penetrate almost everything..." He shrugged. "Just a thought..."

“Adapting the escape pod into a probe is feasible,” Cailus said, although there was a haunted look to his usually stoic eyes. It was highly unusual for the security chief to contribute to technical or scientific matters, but he spoke with grim assuredness. “Escape pods rely on multiple power sources, but right now, we only have the radioisotope thermoelectic generators. It’s effectively an unlimited source of energy derived from radioactive decay, but the power generation is very poor. However, if we separate a pod from the network, it could then build up charge in its batteries, enough to operate whatever form of sensor we strap onto it, like a proton beam. We would have to make some power savings here, but it would give us a reliable makeshift probe that can last for at least a century.”

“Good.” Nyx replied. “Let’s try that. Brennan and Kaleri, work on the new modifications to the escape pod. Fick, try to find a suitable trajectory through the surrounding space. Griffin and Smith, evacuate the rear half of Deck 3, we’ll save power by no longer using that section.”

“What can I do, Sir?” Sasha asked, speaking up.

“Sit and wait for the reset.” Nyx replied. “And no more adventures into the console.”

Fick sat up straight in his chair and turned to look at his console. For a moment he was excited to feel like he was doing something, but the minute he looked at his console and the surrounding blackness he sighed again. "How am I supposed to do that when there's nothing?" He sort of didn't ask it to anyone in particular and was now staring hard at his console. He tapped several button on his screen and then his fingers took off, making calculations.

"I was going to mention that, but I was getting a bit tired of being the one to burst everyone's bubble of positivity," Shae remarked. "So before we get ahead of ourselves, do we even have the resources to build a proton beam emitter? It's not like we have a phaser bank that we can modify, nor the means of getting it outside on the hull where it would actually do us some benefit."

Krysia nodded in agreement "I have to agree Captain, how are we going to get outside the hull? Our resources are extremely limited & I'm not sure we'll have what we're going to need."

Fick lifted his head from where he had been looking at his console intently. "Okay... so if we calculate where we were when we got hit... and how hard the wave hit us... which we have cause we recorded all of that when it hit us... I think I can kinda guess how far we are away from where we started and which direction might be the way... nearest to where we came in here at least... if this is an in here at all. It's just... we gotta try something."

"And how do you propose we propel ourselves?" Shae countered. "No nacelles, no maneuvering thrusters... We could vent atmo to get us moving, but I for one am not keen to give up what little air we have," It was then that Shae sighed, rubbing a hand over her tired eyes as she tried to refocus her thoughts. "We need to stop thinking about methods without also considering if we have the means. Decks 1 through 3 are painfully small and offer little resources, so we need to focus on what we do have, and what we have are the pods. Lieutenant Griffin's idea of disconnecting a single pod to use exclusively for sensor use is viable, but I'd like to go a step further and send it out past the shield protecting us to see what it can gather from inside the nothing-space. The problem I'm running into now is that so far it's behaving like Dark Matter, sensors and signals go in, but if nothing is reflected back then I have nothing to work with; so, if the pod can collect some viable data, maybe it could be what we need to find a way to contact the rest of the Pandora."

Cailus nodded in grim agreement. “As soon as we have a connection to the outside universe, we have options, and we can get rescued. The Pandora can still maneuver and enter warp without the Bridge or upper decks, at least enough to return to Salvaxe or Carnwennan Station for refit.” At that, he looked first to Shae then Krysia, folding his arms. “Lieutenants, we have eighteen Type-II phaser sidearms and five Type-III phaser rifles. I suggest that we keep a reserve, but the rest could theoretically function as an improvised proton beam emitter if cobbled together. It could also serve as a beacon, or a crude space-borne weapon.”

"I was trying to figure out which way we should send the pod..." Fick said, his tone irritated. "I wasn't talking about the whole damn ship." He put his hands up in the air. "Just go ahead... I'll go find something else to do." He stood up out of his seat and yanked on his uniform and headed for the turbolift.

Krysia looked towards Fick as he headed for the turbolift "Hold on Fick..." She sighed. Everyone was tired and irritated. "Come back." She looked around the others, "I think we could all use a rest at this point... Maybe we'll be able to think straighter on some rest."

Fick had stopped, but it was obvious he was upset. He crossed his arms over his chest and did his best not to cry in front of the whole bridge crew, his lips pressed so tightly together they were a thin line and his face was red, his eyes on the deck flooring. "I don't need to rest..." he growled softly. "I wanted to do something... Anything besides just sitting here or repairing a ship that's not even a freaking ship that we can go anywhere on!" His voice was starting to rise in volume a little and he had uncrossed his arms so he could gesture.

Smith watched and agreed that some rest would do everyone some good. Turning to Nyx he said, “I agree with Krysia, everyone needs some rest and maybe we can come back here much fresher and less irritated.”

"Plus some of us could do with clearing their heads..." Krysia massaged her temples she had a headache just trying to think about things with so much tension and uncertainty in the air "...even if it's just for a few minutes."

"No, we're going with Cailus' idea," Nyx interjected. "The sooner we get to work on it, the faster we'll be out of here. As for making the probe, we're all trained and resourceful Starfleet Officers. Let's use whatever we've got to jimmy up the necessary parts and when we get back to Federation space, we're going to win some kind of Science award for it. They'll name it after us. Agreed?"

Krysia couldn’t help but smile at that one, “Agreed Captain”

"I may have something that could help Mr. Fick," Sasha spoke up. "I was working on creating a relayed feedback loop that would mean we could power individual terminals without draining the escape pods. It was almost done."

Nyx nodded to the young officer, "Go ahead."

With an enthusiastic nod, Sasha jumped back underneath her console and began talking excitedly. "I got the idea from the shield program we're using. I thought if we could simultaneously heat and cool the bio-neural gel packs in the Bridge's consoles, it would effectively give us a... steam engine? Something like that. In theory it could work, or it could cause them each to disrupt." She pulled her head out of the console. "Maybe it's not a good idea?"

"Just test it first on the Ops console," Nyx suggested with a frown.

"Aye, aye," Sasha replied, ducking under again. After a few moments she called out. "Okay... Ready!"

Nyx looked around at the faces of the crew. If it worked, this would be another step forward for them all, a significant progress in getting back home again. If it didn't, well they would be lumbered with yet another problem. There was no time to step back and think about it, the crew needed to get back to the Pandora and soon. "Activate."

Sasha was holding two wires and on Temple's command, inserted them into the gel pack's base unit. Almost immediately there was a hum from the Ops console nearby. And then the screen flickered on, buttons began to appear, and within moments the station was functional. Albeit it would flicker occasionally as the feedback loop changed between power sources.

"Success!" Sasha cried.

"Let's give a hand to Ensign Veers," Nyx called out, leading the round of applause.

Joining Nyx Krysia grinned as she gave her round of applause, “Nice work!”

While attempting to stifle a heavy yawn, Shae added her applause as well. "Very nice, indeed. This could drastically speed up analysis of anything we get back from the make-shift probe."

"I want to see how long it sustains and then we can activate the Flight Control station," Sasha said, her smile was evident. She nodded to Fick. "You'll be able to steer the escape pod, probe from there?"

Fick hadn't responded. He had just been standing there, looking at the deck the whole time. When Sasha explained what was going on, Fick lit up again. It started with a small smile and then he nodded. "You bet I can... I can fly anything." He returned to his station and took his seat again with more determination.

"This could work, and I don't know about the rest of you but I am ready to get out of here," Shae said with a wearied optimism. Shae had been trained to stay up for days on end, operating on small power naps when fatigue hit her, but after a week pf this she was fast approaching a hard limit, and it was written all over her face in the heavy sagging of her eyes how much she needed sleep. "I can help Veers with the console, maybe we can stabilize it and cobble parts together from other consoles to improve the response time communicating with the probe," she continued, eager to stay out of those claustrophobic pods for a little while; honestly, she couldn't understand how Cailus and the other survivors from the Churchill had survived years in their pod without going mad, even with cryo to pass the time!

Sasha smiled to her boss and nodded as she stood next to the console,"That would be..." Her eyes had drifted down to the screen and the readings that had started to come in caused her to pause. "Brennan... and, well, everyone, I think you should see this."

Moving over to the Ops console, a faint hope that maybe the ship had detected a return signal or even the Pandora approaching, Nyx stepped forward quickly. Of course, it wasn't good news.

The ship had started to map the sensor readings and emergency beacon signal the crew had conducted and began to display those results on screen. Instead of the usual vast plain of space with geographical markers and direction indicators, the screen was showing their surrounding space as a singular round spheroid no more than three kilometres in pure diameter. The sphere seemed to dip in the exact center, from top and bottom, as if being pinched together in this spot, with a vague unidentified object floating at the heart of this bubble. The Pandora was situated near the lowest point of the sphere, angled up towards the centre.

Nyx stared at the console and whispered, "Oh no."

Krysia’s gaze turned to Nyx, she couldn’t read his emotions she’d never been able to but there was something about the way he was looking at the console. “Captain?”

Fick turned at his console to look at what was going on behind him. His face fell when he saw their Captain's face.

“Shae, I may need your analysis,” Nyx spoke gravely. “But I think I see why our signal’s not being picked up.”

For a long while, Shae said nothing, instead simply staring at the screen with an unreadable expression. The pit that had been forming in her gut threatened to undo her completely, but she kept her expression neutral so as not to betray the raw pain she felt.

"I don't know what you want me to say, Captain," Shae finally said in a quiet soft tone as all of her suspicions were laid bare before them. "When I told you we were surrounded by a theoretical nothing-space, did you really believe we were still in our own universe?"

Nyx sighed. “I thought we were stuck somewhere, I didn’t imagine that we were... not in our universe!” He rubbed his face as he walked away. “And now it appears the universe we are in is a bubble no bigger than three kilometres wide?!”

"I tried..." Shae replied, fighting by the urge to give in to sorrow as her wearied eyes moved to follow Nyx as he walked away from the console. "I tried so hard to find something, anything, that could prove we were still in our universe, and barring that I tried to find a way to get our signal to our universe, but... It's the nothing-space, sir, without recognizable stellar phenomenon, I can't work out the location of this universe relative to ours, and I haven't even come close to figuring out how to penetrate the nothing-space. If it's any consolation, this 'bubble universe' seems to be surprisingly stable for its small size, although that could just as easily be bad news depending on one's point of view..."

"Bubble universe..." Krysia looked at Nyx and Shae, her hopes of seeing Owen again had more or less just been blown out of the water and the overwhelming feeling of wanting to cry was bubbling up inside her. "If we... can figure this out then Owen, Mindo and the remaining crew will work it out." She turned to look at James, glad that at least he was here with her.

Looking over at those assembled James said, “Any idea on how we can get out of this bubble universe? We know what caused it, but how can we communicate with those on the other side of this bubble if they don’t know we are here.”

Shae scoffed in frustration at Smith's question; normally she would have never done something so rude, but in her fatigue she simply did not have the mental fortitude for any pretense of politeness, and she was far too tired of people not listening.

Seeing Shae’s temper start to fray and everyone else growing increasingly irritable, Cailus stepped closer to the console displaying the new sensor data, as if to see it for himself. Of course, it wasn’t necessary; a three-kilometer diameter bubble was easy enough to visualise. It did, however, put him at the center of the Bridge, best placed to defuse any further tension along with the captain.

“If I understand correctly, we can do neither,” Cailus said to Smith. “At least in the short-term. Commander Nash will undoubtedly be looking for us, but with our current resources, returning to or communicating with our home universe will likely be a long term endeavour. Therefore I suggest we start thinking about long-term survival, which means maximising water, food, life support and power generation, as well as changing our shift schedules to accommodate our new environment.”

Krysia sank down into the nearest seat her head was spinning. "Agreed."

Fick sighed and put his head down on his console.

“Kaleri and Smith, work on establishing our long term survival plans,” Nyx instructed. “Brennan and Griffin, start on finding resources for our probe prototype. We have to keep trying to find a way to reach the others. Fick and Veers, get the rest of the Bridge working using the modified power process. Start finding a way to make the replicators functional too, I have a feeling we’ll need them.”

Fick lifted his head. "Yes, sir."

"Aye Captain." Krysia nodded and looked wearily towards James.

Smith nodded as well, “Aye, Captain we will get right on it.”

Shae was about to object to her assignment, but Shae could still read the temperature of the room, and it wasn't hard to guess that Nyx probably wasn't in the mood to hear objections to his plan; truth was, Shae actually liked confined spaces, they were cozy and good for hiding when one was in need of hiding place, but after a week inside a pod it was starting to feel like a cage, and she couldn't bear to be in another cage. But orders were orders and as a Starfleet Officer she had accepted that sometimes she would have to follow orders she didn't particularly like.

"Yes sir," Shae said numbly.

The Captain sighed and leaned against the console a little. “The good news is, I think this means the rest of the Pandora is safe. We were swept up by the wave and taken to this bubble universe, but I know our friends and family are okay and they’re looking for us. It may take us longer than anticipated to escape this world, but we will get back to them.”

At this, Shae had to say something. "I have faith we'll get back to them, but perhaps the plan can wait a bit?" Shae suggested. "I know I'm not the only one who has been working around the clock and now is suffering from fatigue. Add in the news of our situation, we can't possibly be working at our best. We are in need of a break, even just a few hours to rest and process the gravity of our situation so that we can refocus and attack the problem with greater zeal."

"I have to agree Captain," Krysia looked at Shae then back at Nyx, "I can hardly think straight let alone make up a viable survival plan, just a little time to rest would give us some breathing and thinking space."

James stretched a little he wasn’t thinking or functioning straight and thought some rest would be a good idea, “I’m in agreement as well, maybe with some rest we can all think more clearer.”

"Fine." Nyx replied after a while. "Mandatory rest period of eight hours, then we're back into getting us out of here. Dismissed."

OFF