Under a Rock: Voilà

Posted on 10 Jun 2021 @ 9:32am by Commander Calliope Zahn & Commander Bruce Kensforth
Edited on on 23 Sep 2022 @ 2:09am

Mission: M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Loki System- outer ring
Timeline: MD06 0400 following Under a Rock: Outliers
1836 words - 3.7 OF Standard Post Measure

Looking up finally from his data PaDD, Bruce decided that they were finally close enough to their destination to rouse his passenger. He put the device down and looked aft at the woman asleep in the rear science station, leaned back in the chair as far as it would go. Part of him wanted to roll his eyes at her near Ensign-like behavior, but he wrote it off as something to do with whatever her current medical condition was. He resisted the urge to scare her awake with a quick juke of the craft and instead rapped on the back of the console behind him, a quick ‘shave and a haircut’ to rouse her awake.

“Wakey, wakey,” he called out.

Calliope rolled out of the reclined seat and reflexively put a hand on her head to check her hair, which wasn’t there. Her kerchief was crooked though and she resettled it. As she stood to walk back around to the cockpit, she wondered how long she had slept. She’d collapsed into the back set station after her last episode of nausea, exhausted and in need of respite. Finding a chronometer reading she decided the nap at least had made the time go faster. Even if it gave her that much less time for her research.

Resuming her seat at shot-gun, Calliope cast a gauging side glance to Bruce. If their roles had been reversed, she would have taken the time to get a look up on his file. Surely by now he had to have decided she was a recovering drug addict on probation. She exhaled with acceptance of that likelihood, secured her cane and found the now cold tea under the dash to whet her throat.

“Sorry,” Calliope began by way of explanation, “I’ve had a bit of a sensitive stomach since my treatments. It’s not that bad all of the time. Maybe it's the motion.” Inertial dampeners were good, but there was still that innate sense that threw the inner ear.

“Good thing I don’t need you to pilot,” Bruce shrugged, “For your lunch’s sake, let’s hope we don’t have to make any sudden course corrections,” he smiled, slowing their approach slightly so that they could turn their sensors to a more in-depth review of the large rock that they were approaching. They approached from the relative direction of its endless spin, so Bruce rotated slowly on their center axis (purely for his passenger’s sake) and then adjusted course so that they were floating synchronously to the huge space rock. “Should get better sensor clarity now,” he offered.

Right away, by eye, it was apparent that the rock was heavily pitted. Calliope ran some scans, but skipped the basics. Passive scans were unremarkable and Kavalar and Isuri had done the standard scans already and hadn’t found anything before they’d broken away. Calliope had another protocol ready, this one based on something she’d looked up about an older cloaking technology. “The signalling count they detected was in an older Romulan numbering convention. This system used to get a lot of secretive Romulan activity, going back a hundred years or more. My theory is that in one of these craters, there’s a small cloaked telecom device our modern day pirates and company have brought back online for their operations in the Loki system.” Calliope’s protocol was complex, filling the air in front of her with three dimensional integrated menus that she poured through, rotating and zooming in and out of various settings. A combination of experience with Romulan tech and the research she’d prepared made her working of the display look maestro-like. “There’s currently no signal, but I think there’s a trace of a field modulator here.” Calliope zoomed the visual sensors in over one of the craters. It just looked like a crater. “Betting that’s where the comms unit is. I’m preparing an inert-vertion beam to see if I can unmask it without tripping it…” She paused. “Huh.”

“What you got?” Bruce asked, bored of the standard rotational flight path and wondering if he could convince the young woman to take a closer look by flying through the caverns to give him something more exhilarating to do.

“This is just really weird. Based on mineral composition, I would have thought the sensors would detect more mass than that.” Involuntarily, Calliope yawned as a hold over from her nap, and tried to talk through the reflex, “I’d say it’s ten to fifteen percent underweight. Those caverns must cut fairly deep. Charging the deflector.”

“When in doubt, deflector out,” Bruce commented, making the micro-adjustments to the impulse drive to compensate for the sudden pending burst from the deflector as well as the power drain associated with it. “But I wouldn’t mind a closer look. Caverns look like they go on through the rock. Might be tight, but we could manage it,” he said, smirking hopefully.

“Okay,” Calliope smiled back. “We came all this way. Why not look around? Let me just confirm my theory first.” The deflector chimed as ready and Calliope engaged the beam as a wide area dispersal. Nothing changed on standard visuals, but a dozen other scanning frequencies began to build a ghostly image over the display. A set of narrow antenna and blister domes became apparent. “Voilà” Calliope said smugly, complete with magic show hand motions. She didn’t explain it to Bruce, but there was far more at play than just one little hidden century old comms array...

“Let's take a closer look, eh?” Bruce grinned, adjusting their flight path against the rotation slightly and approaching the rock. He sat forward in his seat a little bit to get a visual view of it all. Space rocks were one of the things he found fascinating as a pilot. No two were ever the same and sometimes they had the strangest rotations and axis’, borne of eons of rolling about in the void. He angled them towards the sensor contact, pointed more to one of the nearby caverns. Maybe there would be more to find as they went inside?

Calliope logged and closed her work on the cloaked comms array, peeling away layers of holographic displays until she was just seeing the approach into the cavern’s mouth. Her sense of uprightness was challenged by the view and she reached up to pull the harness over her shoulders, hoping maybe the security of the straps would help counter the sense of flight in the viewer. She didn’t comment. Bruce was edging towards it slowly enough. Maybe once inside the cavern she might be able to accept that their orientation was itself enough reference for up to be up and down to be down. Calliope felt mad at herself. She was never motion sick on trips.

“Scans look good for outlets,” Bruce observed as he nudged them closer, halfway paying attention to just how green his copilot was. Maybe if she’d been a fresh Ensign he’d have not felt bad about pushing her to her stomachs limits, but it felt almost rude to do it to a fellow senior officer. “Some spots with a tight squeeze… but we can make it,” he added, double-checking the dimensions. “Long as we’re not going too fast,” he chuckled.

In the face of all his grinning, she did her best to keep up smiling, though she worried it might look a little like a grimace. “You seem pretty happy to be out here. It must be tough, coming up as a pilot and going into command track,” The idea triggered a sympathetic thought for Corvus’ sake as well. “You don’t get out into the sky as much as you’d like, I’d imagine.”


“Not even half as often as I’d like,” he replied distractedly, cocking his head as they approached. He blinked his eyes wondering if he was just seeing things. He thought he’d noticed something.

“I guess I should shut this down. I found the answers I needed.” She stretched out to the deflector controls on the console and began the power down of the Deflector Array. But just as the dispersal reading was twinkling out, a ghostly glimmer the shape of a ship’s hull, maybe a fighter’s nose and wing form, was emerging from one of the caverns on the growing horizon of the rock. Her eyes flew open at the fading outline on the science display and she shouted. “Eleven! Eleven O’clock, On the rise!” She reached for the shields even as she was shouting.

“Brace!” Bruce barked in answer, quickly slamming his hand to the terminal and forcing the nose of the craft down as fast as the maneuvering thrusters could manage. The rapidly decloaking vessel fired a disruptor blast that would have blown right through the cockpit had it not dodged at the last second. Instead, it gouged a stripe in the hull along the port just past the hull, hitting the port warp nacelle nestled against the hull.

An alert claxon began ringing immediately, indicating that the nacelle had depolarized and they were venting plasma from that side of the hull. The fighter started the pull up and to his port to come around on them but Bruce cut up and to his starboard to force the fighter to have to come around once again, not getting a clear shot. He hit the control to power phasers but the panel shorted. He covered his face from the sparks and quickly recovered their maneuver, trying to keep the shuttle underneath or above the enemy fighter, just not in front.

“That was phasers, do you have comms?” Kensforth called out.

A series of angry computer raspberries issued at her repeated tries. “Comm system is fried!” She growled, spitting acid from her empty stomach to the side and then adding, “but the shields are up. Now.”

Two more fighters emerged from other hidden recesses. One fired a volley, shooting dangerously close to his fellow. Bruce rolled the runabout ninety-degrees to starboard in a hurry and the shot flew right past, very nearly missing the first enemy fighter. “He won’t do that again,” he complained to himself, looking quickly to Calliope. “Can you repolarize the nacelle?”

“Yeah, I have to—” She lurched and burped involuntarily, “Have to shunt the plasma, vent the overflow and do an ion flush. Need a couple minutes.”

“Hold on to your lunch, Commander,” Bruce called out, once more sending the runabout into a nosedive. This time the artificial gravity didn’t counter as quickly and they both felt their stomach’s stay put while the rest of their body moved on. Bruce hit the controls to deploy the auto harness and once he was secured (grateful that Zahn already had been) he killed power to the grav plating and rerouted it to the impulse engines.