The Muse and the Ogre

Posted on 14 May 2021 @ 12:31am by Commander Calliope Zahn

Mission: M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Marine Decks, Engineering Storage
Timeline: MD03 ~1800hrs
907 words - 1.8 OF Standard Post Measure

So many things had become second nature for Calliope in the course of her career. She had always performed at her best when she was juggling and the connections were firing. It was hard to overload her as she thrived in the chaotic soup where she could find the intersections and pry open the complexities of a situation to get to the gooey center of what was really at issue. The unresolved matters were all opportunities waiting to be puzzled into place and made to serve or to improve on performance. And often, they informed one another, either directly or indirectly inspiring other solutions. There was nothing so satisfying as getting the zipper teeth of all the problems presented to line up and close neatly.

But having been so weak and thrown out of her element for so long Calliope found herself feeling sluggish as she switched on the light in the Marine Engineering Storage Room. Right away she winced. The light fixture needed tuning. Her over tired eyes were all too sensitive to the repeating rate. She took a moment at the computer panel by the door to calibrate it.

She’d returned to the marine decks in the hoverchair. Her ankles and knees were swollen after over doing the cane, having taken her detour to find Finn before making her best possible time to meet up with Lorne and his friends in the Environmental Ring. She was already in pain when she got there, but had feigned being fine as she followed through with the walk, taking up a bench after making enough effort. Calliope had done her best to keep the pain out of her face and promised Lorne she’d make it back to Sickbay on her own steam. She just wanted to enjoy people watching before she called it a day. She did go back to sickbay, for a minute, in order to fetch the hoverchair. She slipped by the desk and out again so she assumed she was technically still under Lorne’s watch as far as the log was concerned.

Calliope didn’t think Lorne was stupid. Quite to the contrary. She just wasn’t sure he’d understand her need to be in the Marine decks examining a broken robot. Who could? She clutched her necklace subconsciously. Lance. Lance understood how much she needed to do this right now. He knew she wasn’t going to get any better languishing around meditating and navel gazing. He knew she needed this as much as any therapy. She kissed the rhodium charm and tucked it back into her collar, moving to the side of the room where a backlit drop cloth shrouded a very promising shape she instantly recognized.

Reaching as high as she was able and pulling hand over hand like a sailor at the ropes, Calliope ripped off the cloth and let it slip to the deck.

The revealed chassis was just as she remembered from the rubble in Medical after the attack. It was heavily armored over a geared skeleton of Cardassian manufacture. Not that it was obviously Cardassian, just that Calliope had seen the same design on a moon in the Kervid system when the Paracelsus rendered aid for an outbreak among the miners. She’d been impressed by the operation and one of the foremen had shot the breeze with her about the automatons.

“They don't make them any more. They’re off brand, from an out of business manufacturer but they're perfect for us here,” the foreman had explained as he proudly walked her through a garage fully stocked with models that were variations on similar forms. “Since the undercarriages are so highly adaptable, we can strip them down and re-tool them depending what environment we need them to function in, or what we’re mining for, or what tasks we need. The program bases are simple enough, if you know older kardasi Volnak coding and can think in Kardasi base 9 math. I got a guy that is aces at it, but there’s not many that still work in Volnak code this far from Cardassia. That’s why these handsome machines were so affordable! I got an amazing rate, seeing as they woulda scrapped them otherwise. Perfectly good machines!”

“—They just need someone who knows how to speak their language.” Calliope said now as she had when she’d first seen them.

The body of this beast was shy of three meters tall. It would have been taller, but the leaf spring shaped legs had been disassembled and laid out on a table like a pulled apart grasshopper. From the main housing, four sockets protruded for the arms. One of the sockets was sheared away, the others just left empty. The arms with their terrifying looking many articulated jointings and formidable piercing claws had been splayed out beside the legs.

The head was stripped of it’s armor, leaving a complex display of sensors and control circuits exposed as if it had been mechanical big game boiled and peeled of its skin.

“Hey there Ogre.” Instinctively, Calliope named it and put a hand against the charred side plating as she picked up a tricorder. She almost felt bad for it, taken from its original purpose in its honest blue collar labors and made into a instrument of death. “Let’s you and me have a talk, huh? Tell me who did this to you...”