Cold Comfort pt 6: Sparks Will Fly
Posted on 10 Oct 2022 @ 11:00pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Command Master Chief Tāne HaiRoa
Edited on on 06 Feb 2024 @ 10:22pm
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: DSSO 717
Timeline: M3 - Backstory, following Cold Comfort pt 5: Split Forces
3668 words - 7.3 OF Standard Post Measure
Jor pressed her hand to the side of her helmet, pushing the speaker closer to her ear, and above the hiss and rattle of static she could just about hear a report from the search team.
She had been trying to raise them for several minutes, demanding to know what was going on, but all she got back was some garbled messages
"-o Humanoids... dum.. ies...... trap.... down.... rders?"
She hissed angrily, this tiny group of Starfleeters was making fools of her and her own crew. She looked out to the rest area, the two captives were laying on the floor, unmoving. Where was that inept Gatah now? How long did it take to check on an elevator?
She got up, drawing her disrupter pistol and went out to look for him. Entering the corridor, she saw Gatah laying prostrate on the deck. Sweeping the corridor with her weapon, she cautiously approached her crewman. Keeping her eyes up she gave him a prod with the toe of her boot, then risked one quick glance down. He was still alive from the readout on his suit. The idiot had been caught off guard twice now!
Checking her helmet scanner she saw a faint wafting residual heat signature; some by the elevators but it was mostly centered around one of the ladder hatch doors. She they had learned the Humanoids were using them to move around, but she did not have enough crew to cover them all.
"Search team report! What is happening? Report! Or return to the control room now!" She ordered into her commlink. There was just a rush of static in return.
She looked up and down the corridor, then risked a peek into the elevator shafts, they were both stationary many decks below. Jor considered her options, the Control Room was the most secure place, having only one entrance, and it was where her crew would expect to find her.
She backed up the corridor, keeping her front and weapon pointed down the corridor until she was back to the door way. She stepped back through and went to close the door when a large heat and movement signature to her left, in the rest area, flashed up on her visor.
She spun in that direction, pistol coming up. Instead of just two, there were now three humans there!
A third was stood over the two beaten prisoners. He was short, stocky and had bizarre black markings on his face.
She saw in his eyes they had each surprised the other, now it was race to recover and fire!
HaiRoa had clambered out of the hatch in the bathroom, it was empty and he padded softly to the door, stopping just outside of the range of the automatic-opener sensor.
He got a solid grip on the Breen disrupter rifle, bringing it up into his shoulder, right hand on the pistol grip, finger on the trigger, left hand under the shroud, eyes along the sight, hunching his body over the stock, a bladed stance, left foot forward, right under him and to the side. Keeping his balance while minimizing himself as a target.
"Ka mate, ka mate! ka ora! ka ora!" he said softly to himself Tis death, death or tis life, life
Setting his face into a fearsome grimace, he shuffled forward, keeping his ready- position until he triggered the door sensor.
A split second later the door slid open, he stepped quickly out into the open frame and swept the room with his weapon, ready to fire if needed.
No Breen!
But Malmrose and Rowle were there, both prone and trussed up. He moved forward, keeping his weapon focused on the doorway that led to the corridor and control room beyond.
He could partially see into the control room through the open doorways, It seemed deserted. Moving cautiously, he approached Malmrose and Rowle.
Clearly both had been beaten, Rowle seemed out, but Malmrose opened his eyes and blinked as HaiRoa moved closer and looked down at him.
"There was two Breen!" Malmrose whispered, "One's the leader, they both went into the corridor!"
HaiRoa looked back towards the door just as a figure came in from the right. It was a Breen, it turned towards him, a large disrupter pistol coming up . His own finger tightened on his trigger as he brought the rifle to aim.
They both fired in the same instant, the green beams passed each other, a shower of sparks flashed as the energy bolts almost collided.
Both shots hit their mark, the Breen took it in the chest and dropped like a stone. The Breen's shot had been slightly off, it hit HaiRoa's right elbow.
He cried out as a searing pain swamped his nerves and his arm went completely numb, the rifle clattered to the floor and his arm fell to his side, useless.
"Whakianga!" He cursed. "Sonofabitch!'
He dropped down to his knees, his head was spinning and he could feel the numbness spreading up to his shoulder, if it reached his neck he was out
"No No No!" He punched his left fist into his right shoulder, he felt nothing.
He slammed the fist in again and again. The numbness crept into his clavicle, he felt dizzy, light headed and like he was going to throw up. He gulped air and willed himself to stay conscious as a wave of nausea hit him. His leaned forward, left hand on the deck, his eyes closed.
"Bosun! Bosun!" Malmrose was calling to him
HaiRoa forced his eyes open and sucked in deep lungfuls of air. His head slowly cleared, he moved back to his knees, His right shoulder and arm were completely numb, he looked down at his right hand, it was flopped on the floor by his knee. He tried to lift the arm and move his fingers but there was nothing!
"Dammit! I can't move my arm!" He grumbled, using his left hand to pick his arm up and put it on his knees. He looked over Malmrose and Rowle, the extent of their beatings coming clear now. "What did those bastards do to you two?"
"Roughed us up pretty bad, I've got some broken ribs. They got some stuff out of Rowle before they beat him unconscious. But we lied about how long until the ship returns, they think they have another three days." Malmrose wheezed as he struggled to sit up in his bonds.
HaiRoa used his left hand to go to the shackles the Breen had placed on their hands and feet. There was some kind of locking mechanism but he had no idea how to open it.
"Gonna have to cut those off," he concluded and picked up the rifle. Propping it on his knee, he flicked the setting from stun and changed the beam setting, then shrugged it up under his left arm and swung the barrel towards Malmrose's feet. "Hold still!"
HaiRoa squeezed the trigger, a thin green beam lanced out and instantly began cutting a hole in the deck, which smoked and flared as the paint blistered and burned. He walked it forward between Malmrose's ankles, the beam sparked and then began cutting through the bonds, seconds later his feet were free.
"Put your arms out in front of you," HaiRoa instructed and repeated the process to free Malmrose's hands. The man winced as hot beam seared the hair on his hands until he could pull the bonds apart. Then they freed Rowle.
"See if you can wake Rowle," HaiRoa said, then clambered to his feet and, with the rifle held awkwardly in his left hand, went over to check on the Breen.
The figure was unconscious, and from the shape of it's suit was female. He kicked her pistol away back to Malmrose and continued into the control room.
It was empty. He glanced around looking for the heating and life support controls. He found them and cranked everything over to full, instantly there was an increased hum as the system began working to heat the station to normal levels.
Satisfied, he gripped the rifle by the neck of the butt and pounded the control panel switches until they broke. Hopefully they would stay at the high level. He did the same with the reactor panel, breaking off the shut down controls.
He went back to Malmrose, who had Rowle sat up now, but one look told HaiRoa the technician was barely conscious. His head rolled, one eye shut and blackened and the gaze in the other unfocused. He groaned indistinctly when HaiRoa spoke to him.
"Get him up!" he urged and between him and Malmrose they managed to drag Rowle to his feet. But he could barely stand and had to be supported by both of them.
"There's no way he can climb a ladder!" HaiRoa concluded "But we need to get out of here before the rest of them come back to find out why it's getting warmer. We'll have to risk the elevator!"
They managed to stagger Rowle over to the door. HaiRoa peered around it, the corridor was empty and they moved down toward the elevators.
Malmrose reached out and called one of the lifts, it whined to life and began moving upwards. The seconds crawled past like hours as they waited for it to arrive. Eventually the safety barrier slid aside and the lift arrived. They crowded on.
"Deck Four!" HaiRoa ordered, that was where he and Zahn had agreed to rendezvous. Malmrose pushed the deck button and the safety barrier slid shut but just before they began to descend, they heard the noise of the adjacent elevator start up.
In the cargo bay the two Breen were cautiously clearing the remaining space. There had been no more shots after the two had stunned their comrades, but they took no chances. Working together they moved from cover to cover, keeping low, and behind the dozens of cargo containers, as they methodically searched the bay.
They took their time, not wishing to be ambushed again. They found several of the large containers were open and they carefully opened the lids and checked each of those, lest one of the Starfleet crew was hidden within.
Eventually the only space left was the rear right corner. The left side was full of containers, pushed up hard against the bulkhead, there was no room to hide over there. But on the right, there were three containers in a row, sticking out from the wall, they could see there was a space behind them and what appeared to be a hatch in the floor.
Exchanging hand signals, one moved to the end of the row, the other climbed up on the container nearest the wall. On an agreed signal the pair rushed the space behind the containers. It was empty!
They had cleared the entire bay, this was only space where anyone could have hidden and fired at them. They moved to the floor hatch. One aimed his weapon at it, the other reached own and swung it up and open.
The first fired a wide incapacitation beam into the hole as soon as he had a shot. The green beam flooded the hatchway, he put in another couple of shots for good measure, then cautiously leant forward and looked in.
It was some kind of utility conduit, small, low and cramped but there enough room for a Humanoid to crawl around in. They were debating where or not to enter when there was a garbled communication in their helmets.
"-port! What ... ha... ing? Repo... ...oom now! "
They tried to respond "The are no Humanoids here. Just some dummies, it was a trap! Fruj and Basg are down! What are your orders?" but the static slushed everything.
They moved back to where their fellows were and dragged both, in turn, to the corridor outside the cargo bay. They had just moved the second one when there a sudden increase in the background hum and their helmet sensors immediately began detecting a temperature increase from a nearby ventilation grill.
"Why would Jor make it warmer?" One asked the other, before he could reply there was a whine down the corridor, and they heard one of the elevators began ascending.
They moved to the lift area just as one of them passed on its way upwards. One reached out and called the other lift.
"What is going on, who was that? We need to go back to Jor"
"What about them?" His comrade pointed to their stunned comrades.
"Leave them for now, we must return to the Control Room and tell Jor what happened!" Neither of them looked forward to that but it was the only option. The elevator arrived and they boarded it, pushing the button for Deck One.
It only took a couple of minutes to sheer off the lock on the Breen's airlock door. Still, two whole minutes were already missing from her count down on the suit's heating capacity. When that ran down, she was going to lose all of her body heat, and fast.
She took the butt of her welding tank and battered the door with it. Once, Twice. "Third time's the charm." She said, her teeth grit. But the third time did no charming. She got out a small wedge and began chiselling open the gap. Finally, the cold air from the other side spilled into the docking collar she was standing in like a mad science lab experiment gone wrong.
"That's a good sign, I guess." She said to herself, before unhitching a pry bar from her cart and working the airlock the rest of the way apart.
It fell back finally and, like a giant coin, it rolled around slowly on its edge making a ringing gong noise fit for announcement.
"Honey, I'm home..." Calliope murmured, pulling the hover cart of tools along, the cutting torch held out before her in defense. They had to have left someone aboard to defend their ship, she had thought. But as no one responded to her ringing the doorbell, she grew less certain.
It remained eerily quiet, the fog from the meeting of the two atmospheres obscuring very much from her view. Not many people had reported back on the interior of a Breen ship. Holodeck training had only guesstimated the appearance based on battle remnants from the Dominion war... Calliope's heart rate was running too high to remember to compare the details, however. She just needed to find what amounted to power generation and get it to shut down irrevocably.
As she tracked along what she knew to be power conduits, following smaller outlets into bigger cable systems, she could tell by the vibrations in the floor and the thrumming feeling in her bones that she was getting closer. The scout ship had a few decks, but there were more ramps than most Federation ships allowed for, making getting below to the engineering deck a rather basic experience.
The larger open area on the lower most deck featured a small bay door and had one shuttle in it. Calliope's heart fell a little. She couldn't plan an escape in it, with the rest of her crew unable to reconvene and meet her here before their signals began showing up on sensors again. She'd have to try to disable that as well, obviously, or else the Breen might still get away with someone as prisoner. It was a small shuttle, and probably only able to accommodate four or five people crammed together. But there was no telling how that might play out if they let it. It was a complication she hadn't thought ahead for. She passed it up for now, planning to vandalize it on her way back through.
The bay was otherwise stacked full of stolen federation supplies the Raiders had selected form Seven Seventeen over the past thirty some hours. Expecting that the forward part of the bay would meet up with the ground floor of the reactor, she pressed from aft now, towards the forward section of the below decks portion. She felt as though she were truly in the belly of the beast now and could hardly believe there really was no opposition to stop her from coming this far.
She moved between the towers of familiar materials with her floating supply cart, listening to just the terrifying sound of the background reactor thrum and her own breathing-in-a-fishbowl experience that was part and parcel of wearing the EVA suit. There was something else that sounded like tapping, which she passed off for some unknown mechanism or some deck plates settling, when she couldn't see anything to account for it.
Once it came into view, the Breen reactor was truly alien to the Ensign, who was looking up at a set of spiraling energy fields glowing purple. There was no exterior containment- only the forces of magnetism containing the funnels leading out of the floating spherical core and running into giant coil collectors sparking with fields of lightening.
It was probably stable, partly because of the colder atmosphere the core unit was being operated in. She wished sensors were working well enough just to learn what kind of exposure she might be risking. The suit itself seemed to be spiking with gamma as she approached, but it wasn't high enough to trigger alarms.
"Wouldn't want you to turn green..." Calliope repeated a joke her mother had said when she had been averse to taking out the trash. Her mother was the best, but sometimes just awful.
She waltzed up to the central unit and bit her lip, looking for something familiar, like a regulator she could fuse in place, or an emergency containment and core ejection system that she could release, to let the core float off away from the ship and strand it a while. Whatever she did to bust it up, it would have to be damage that would take days to repair.
As she was taking stock of what to break, something flickered on the outside of her visor, and, startling, she turned to see. But there was nothing there, just the matrix of latice-like structures forming the center power grid lines, conducting current off in a variety of directions.
"Just a shadow. Nothing," she tried to assure herself. The light from the collectors was flickering after all, making the shadows jump around.
Another unexpected movement made her gut wrench with a primordial reflex and she spun around to look—
This time the shadow had a form, tall and spidery, with rows of red, orb eyes, and it was rushing at her with open mandibles and an ear piecing screech—
"Deck Nine!" HaiRoa ordered, that was where he and Zahn had agreed to rendezvous, with the Control Room damaged they could hold up around the reactor and hopefully prevent the Breen from trying to shut it down manually. Malmrose pushed the deck button and the safety barrier slid shut but just before they began to descend, they heard the noise of the adjacent elevator start up.
HaiRoa counted off the decks, his rifle held awkwardly in his left hand, while he tried to support Rowl. His right arm still hung uselessly by his side.
"Two.... Three... Four... Hit the stop!"
Malmrose did as instructed. The lift stopped on Deck Five and the low barrier slide aside, just as the opposite lift passed them on its ascent. HaiRoa came to a decision, Rowle could not move around unaided, and they would never get far trying to get him down a ladder tube. With only one arm working he was not much better himself. It was time to make a stand.
"Hold him up!" he said to Malmrose and slipping free of Rowle he rushed out and left, leaning over the safety barrier of the next shaft he looked up. The underside of the elevator was some eight feet above and moving upwards.
He hefted the rifle, struggling to get it raised up by the pistol-grip alone. He could not really aim it at that angle and the barrel waved around erratically, but he pulled the trigger and fired off a burst of energy bolts into the underside of the lift and the elevator shaft walls. Several missed but he got three or four on target and punched holes in the plating.
The lift gave a lurch and slowed, then stooped, there was grinding noise, and it started up again. Sparks and a whisp of smoke dribbled from the impact holes but it kept ascending, moving up another ten feet.
He fired again, managed to get another shower of sparks and the elevator finally died, jammed in the shaft.
Malmrose had dragged Rowle to the front of their elevator and looked to HaiRoa. "Where to now?"
"Down! Where its warm and they have to come to us!" He replied and moved to get back on the elevator. As he did so he glanced down the corridor to the Airlock, wondering how Zahn was getting on, hopefully she had sabotaged their ship and was already back on Deck Nine waiting for them.
He turned to reboard the elevator when there was hiss from the Airlock, the door slid aside, a roiling mist of freezing air poured through the doorway, there was movement within the white cloud, a dark shape was coming through the Airlock!
HaiRoa swung the rifle up, trying to aim from his left hip as he backed towards the elevator. There was something odd about the movement, something strange and the shape was wrong for a Breen! It was too big, too awkward...
HaiRoa felt his hair stand on end, a shiver ran through him, What the hell is that?!
