Sacrifice
Posted on 30 Aug 2020 @ 11:46am by Captain Corvus DeHavilland & Commander Thaddeus Zayne
Edited on on 30 Aug 2020 @ 11:56am
Mission:
M1 - Emergence
Location: Command and Control
Timeline: MD1 - 1415HRS
2470 words - 4.9 OF Standard Post Measure
The turbolift hummed around her, powering upwards from the shuttle bay up to the command and control decks of the Starbase. Corvus had only been in the lift a few moments but already it felt like she’d been in it too long. By now she could have traversed the length of the Praetorian but she had to keep reminding herself that the Praetorian and fifty other ships like it could fit in the docking bay that she was moving up through the middle of right now. Even at the max speed of the turbolift, it would still take a few minutes to traverse a quarter of the station. It was just something she was going to have to get used to, living on a Starbase now. Especially one this darn large.
Corvus let out a slow breath, leaning against the back of the turbolift and closing her eyes, taking a moment to calm her mind. It had been one hell of a whirlwind just getting here, and now that she was here she could see the complete disaster that this station was. It was going to need one hell of an overhaul, and she was going to need more than a skeleton crew in order to do it. Her First Officer was inbound, the Chief Engineer and a smattering of other crew but she was missing some key Officer’s. Officer’s who were going to be the difference between this station being up and running and being merely powered on.
What had her most concerned at the moment wasn’t the interior of the station, it was the exterior. Obsidian Command had been missing for eighteen months. That was eighteen months for the all the nearby powers to move into the vacuum of power its disappearance created. No normals had been achieved and they had all been turned on their head in a heartbeat. Starfleet was back with a massive presence and they were bound to draw some not so friendly attention. That meant that this station, its crew and their support ships, had to be ready to defend the facility. She had no idea the status of the stations shields, weapons or even the power matrix which meant that they were likely going to have to depend on the Fleet to hold the line until they could get the rest of it settled. That wasn’t an option she preferred. A handful of garrison vessels could do a lot of help, but they were dwarfed by the size of the station. She needed OC’s weapons and shields online to truly mount a defense.
There were so many things moving at once it was almost staggering. Corvus was used to having multiple priorities, but whenever she found herself floundering amongst all of them Captain Dansby had set her on the right path. His ability to see through the noise had always been better than hers in that respect; it was why they made such a good pairing. But he was gone now, off on the Praetorian continuing their mission. She rubbed the space between her eyes for about the four-hundredth time repressing the thought that she had made the wrong decision in accepting this posting. It was all just so much.
”What’s going to shut this ship down, Amélie?” Captain Dansby’s voice echoed in her head. It was so absurd she couldn’t help but smirk. He was right, of course. When the noise got too intense, break it down into the most important bit and work backwards from there. So what was most important to this station? To keeping everything running, to bringing weapons and shields online?
Engineering. It was that simple. Without main power, they were a floating target buoy. It didn’t matter what the garrison vessel situation was, if they couldn’t power even a minor defensive effort they might as well push the station back into the void. Corvus nodded to herself. That simple concession put the nine-hundred pound Gorilla back in its cage, at least for a little while. Once she could figure out what the status was of their power core, and their Chief Engineer, she’d feel even better.
The lift came to a stop and the doors opened and stood open a solid five seconds before Corvus even realized it. She retreated out of her own head and stepped out into the command and control center for the station. Command and control of Obsidian Command was at the very top of the Starbase, beneath the upper subspace array that effectively ran throughout the entire station. Corvus stepped out of the lift into a small ring flanked by a circular wall over eight feet tall. Two sets of stairs climbed the walls on either side and emerged through the ceiling. Corvus took a steadying breath and walked to the stairs, going up through the archway into the ceiling onto the command deck itself.
The deck was a massive circular space four standard ship decks tall and stretching from edge to edge of the space, at least seventy-five yards from the center. Where there should have been bulkheads at the edge of the deck, there were instead massive transparent panels between equally large support struts currently giving an unfettered view of the space around Obsidian Command, including the planet Obsidian III that they were orbiting. Corvus knew that the command center was in the center of the top deck, which meant that the surrounding space should have been obscured by the other buildings and equipment around them. Looking closer she could see the faintest hint of an outline on the glass, only when she moved a certain way which meant that there was a display overlay on the glass.
Behind her, in the center of the desk above where the lift was, there was an expansive, rectangular table where a series of holodisplays were, one of which was a replica of the docking bay with small holographic blips moving in and out representing the different vessels, shuttles and pods moving about.
Spread out from the central command table there were dozens of stations, some with traditional terminals, others with holographic interfaces and interspersed between them all were holographic readouts and apparatus similar to the main control table. It was Federation and Starfleet technology at its pinnacle, and it made sense that here at the heart of the 9th Fleet, they had the very best.
The deck was alive with personnel hard at work, albeit far fewer of them than she knew would be standard. There simply wasn’t that many on board just yet. One of them was standing by the large, rectangular command table with his back to her, quietly reading a report on display in front of him.
“Morning,” Corvus said by way of greeting, approaching the table on the man’s left.
The man was a little bit taller than Corvus but not much larger in all other respect. He was slim in build but she got the impression he was more of a rapier than a simple stick. Maybe it was the posture. His golden blonde hair was shaved almost bare on the sides but was long on the top and slicked back. Like Corvus he was in command red, and turned at the sound of her voice.
“Captain DeHavilland,” he replied, turning and offering his hand. “Thad Zayne, Strat Ops.”
She shook his hand fervently, taken by surprise, “Commander Zayne, I would have thought you’d be on the first transport back to Falkirk,” she replied.
He turned a pained smirk back at her, brushing a hand through his hair to keep it slicked back, “I couldn’t leave the job unfinished,” he replied, glancing briefly to the display he had been reading. “MacTaryn’s done without me eighteen months, what’s another week or two?”
Smiling, she approached closer, “We’ll be glad to have your help, Mr. Zayne,” she said, glancing at the readout as well. “What can you tell me about what happened?”
He let out a slow breath, glancing down for a moment to collect his thoughts. “It was less than an hour of absolute chaos when void aperture formed,” he began solemnly, “The Captain evacuated everyone immediately, but it wasn’t smooth. Power failures were cascading through the station. We had to abandon the escape pods because the void aperture was drawing them in, and the grav shear was destroying them…” he trailed off, turning his eyes up to her, “We lost a lot of good people. Families,” he said quietly.
Corvus just shook her head in disbelief. It was every Fleet Officer’s worst nightmare, the one fail safe - the escape pods, being rendered useless.
“Everyone else we put it anything that would fly and had a warp core. I was here when it all began. Chief Barmeadow worked out that it was the stations mass that was preventing the void from getting any bigger, and that if it got any bigger every vessel within half a million kilometers was going to get sucked in. She convinced the skipper she needed stay behind attempt to keep the station from being sucked in with a makeshift shield inversion. She was just trying to buy time,” he explained, “But she couldn’t do it alone. The Skipper and seven others volunteered, but…” he gave a dark chuckle, “Some not so friendly neighbors were patrolling the area. So Skipper was needed on the bridge of the Bavaria, the Galaxy-class we had under refit,” he continued, once more looking up to her, “Barmeadow transported him to the Bavaria,” he declared, “The eight of us left did what we had to do to keep the station in place long enough for all the ships to depart. Until we were sucked in as well.”
“Do you know how many didn’t make it?” Corvus asked, a question she needed to know the answer to but had no desire to know.
He shook his head, “I can’t tell yo how many made it. I can just tell you that four-hundred and sixty-seven didn’t… before we were pulled through.”
Four-hundred and sixty-seven. That was almost three-quarters of the Praetorian’s crew, destroyed in moments. That the cost of command on a station this size; the innocent lives that had nothing to do with Starfleet or her mission. They were just bystanders, spouses and children, here to live their lives in peace. Lives that were snuffed out for no reason. No strategic gain, no higher cause, just because of a random anomaly in subspace.
Corvus cleared her throat, checking the emotional reaction she was having. “And the eight of you? Eighteen months in the void?”
He nodded, “We put everything into shields and weapons,” Thaddeus continued, ”After we were pulled through I searched for every anomaly that Starfleet’s ever encountered similar to this and found one exact match. USS Voyager was pulled into a subspace void like this in the Delta Quadrant where they found a dozen or more ships who had been pulled in as well. They were stuck and had resorted to raiding one another for supplies.”
“There were others in the void?” Corvus asked incredulously. That was a detail she must have missed in her rapid review of all the relevant data.
“No,” Zayne replied, “At least… not that we encountered. The void plays hell on warp cores, effectively draining them. So if there were other ships in the void, they’d be easily preying on one another. Our fusion cores kept our weapons and shields powered. So, if there were raiders in the void. They wisely avoided us.”
“I see,” she said, letting out the breath she’d been holding. “Eighteen months of waiting… that’s…”
He nodded in agreement, she didn’t need to articulate it any further. “You understand how the Voyager crew felt. If you’ll ever see home again.”
Corvus nodded, touching his arm reassuringly, “I know it doesn’t seem like much, but you saved thousands of lives sacrificing yourselves,” she explained, “You had to know that there was a chance you wouldn’t make it back, but you stayed anyway and in doing so got thousands of others home safely to their families.”
Thad’s face gave an awkward twitch, a mix between disgust at what it’d cost and gratitude for the praise, but instead of replying he gestured to the holotable, “Main power’s at thirty-five percent,” he declared matter-of-factly, “We did suffer power drains like Voyager did but Barmeadow was able to counter the effect. The work around taxed the cores heavily and one by one they’ve had to be powered down to overhaul. The Corps of Engineers took them all down but one, which is why we’re at such low power now. They’re estimated a week or more before all the cores are back online.”
“Weapons? Shields?” She asked, “This might have been uncontested space eighteen months ago, but the locals have had a good long while to get used to us not being here.”
“That was my thought as well. I tried convincing the Corps of Engineers that but they told me I was being over-cautious. Petty Officer Thompson and I managed to scrape some power from unessential systems and have shields powered to fifteen percent. We have the main phaser array available on the outer rim of the docking ring, at eight percent. It’s not a lot, but it should be enough buy us time to convince the Engineers to get off their high horse and give us the rest of the power we need.”
“I guess that’s better than nothing,” Corvus replied, reading the holographic display herself. She took a moment to read through it and then looked back to Thad, “How long until you have to return to Earth?”
“I convinced Command to give me another week,” he replied, “As of this morning,” he added so she knew just how long he was going to be here. “I’m not going to be able to convince them again. I think the only reason they didn’t push any harder now is because this station is desperate for able bodied crew.”
“And because you know it inside and out,” Corvus added. “Ok. One week to get every bit of information I can from you,” she smiled, gesturing back to the terminals. “Let’s start at the top then?”
Thad smirked, manipulating the display to be a more complete rendering of the stations status. “Aye, Captain.”
