Sea & Sky: Against the Wind
Posted on 12 Apr 2023 @ 9:29pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Chief Petty Officer Ibis Xeri & Lieutenant Commander Cesar De La Fuente Ph.D. & Lieutenant Ethan Gunnarsen & Lieutenant JG Maxwell Tilmer
Edited on on 15 Oct 2023 @ 7:58pm
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: USS Acamas, over the island, on Korix
Timeline: MD09 ~0520-0525 immediately following Sea & Sky: Along the Way
2405 words - 4.8 OF Standard Post Measure
As Calliope seated herself, the runabout was lifting off, pressing to one side as the pilot tried to compensate for the winds. The effect was stronger and stronger as they gained altitude.
"Shields up, Mr Tilmer. De La Fuente, show me the Pyrryx ship–" Calliope watched the fluctuation on all of the instrument readings. The kelbonite below was resonating with the static of the storm until up was down. She was thankful for an experienced pilot right now. "Get it on scope, even if you've got to stick your head out the window with a pair of binoculars!"
Leaving the search to De La Fuente, Ethan focused his attention on maintaining altitude as the shuttle skirted the edge of the oncoming storm. Inwardly he was cursing the luck that put them face-on to a monster such as he would never hope to witness outside of a holo-flick. Already the controls were vibrating wildly to the touch; Ethan took a moment to wipe his palms across the tops of his thighs before returning his focus to the matter at hand. The storm seemed diffuse one moment, brutally solid the next, and the constant shift left him mildly disoriented.
“On screen!” De La Fuente answered, finally managing to get the feed up, showing the view from their craft, aft.
The ship was in the rear view image screen, Ethan fighting the winds to put more space between them. Occasionally the cloud density would break and there would be a clear view of the ship, outlined in lightning. It had a predatory silhouette, the wings cut a mean angle and the talon like form of the fuselage threatened to bite through an enemy. Calliope felt strangely, however, that it wasn’t angled more directly at them, and seemed to be fighting to get upward over the storm. Maybe it was trying to get a tactical advantage— to come at the Acamas from above.
“Helm! Maintain as much of a climb as you can!” At the present distance there would still be a good chance of dodging or using countermeasures against a torpedo volley or of the shields diffusing a phaser attack. “Don’t let it overtake us!”
Calliope noticed a small signal bar flash to life on the comms console. If the system wasn’t lying, they had a weak link to the Pathfinder. She pressed the comms. “Pathfinder, this is Acamas. Come in Pathfinder.” It seemed to have an outgoing signal, but only static to be heard back on her end. She left the comm open in case something could come through.
Up, Ethan could manage; it was maintaining space while moving up that was proving the challenge. The temptation to follow the currents in a spiral could prove a disaster if the Acamas came in contact with an outlying arm of the storm looking to rejoin the main front. Swearing under his breath, he angled away from the directional flow and dove up and further in toward the eye of the storm, hoping it was spacious enough to provide a larger zone of stability.
“Commander. I have enough break in interference I can get a scan of the exterior of the vessel. I’m not picking up power fluctuations. They’re not powering weapons,” Cesar called out somewhat frantically at first but calming himself as he went. There was no reason to freak out. He had this. Gunnersen had this. They were ok.
For good measure he was continuing to scan, trying every pass of the more analog wave he was using to counter the interference to take it one level deeper but was finding the hull alloy hard to penetrate. Maybe if he’d had the Pathfinder’s more sophisticated and sensitive systems he could have. But this wasn’t a ship meant for that purpose. He was lucky he was getting anything at all.
“Still not getting anything on weapons,” he called out again for posterity as Gunnersen fought the craft against the weather. His attention was mostly on the scans, seeing things in different wavelengths on the readings but kept glancing to the display of the vessel, just to be sure he didn’t see a weapons array light up that the scans missed. Through the storm’s rain and gusts sending them off their established course trying to shake the craft he kept noticing that the vessel had odd running lights. Most Starfleet vessels had the standard colored lights to port and starboard, indicating their side respectively. But this ship seemed to have one just under the nose, almost like a landing light.
It clearly wasn’t working properly, or maybe it was some kind of weapons array. Cesar felt his heart clench in his chest to think that this was some kind of Pyrryx weapon that they hadn’t seen yet, but he didn’t want to scare Zahn until he was certain. He zeroed in the scan as best as he could and was picking up power fluctuations, but they were so small there was no way that they were a weapon. So small and so steady in their rhythm that it had to be a malfunction. Short, short, short, long, long, long, then three more short bursts before repeating. Must be a short somewhere in their array, he thought. Something rattling with the motion. Nothing to worry about, he thought to himself, starting to write it off.
The obvious hit him like a freight train and he snapped his attention back to it, focusing on it with the comm’s array now. It came back with the obvious answer so quickly, he almost kicked himself for missing it.
“Commander!!” he called out, actually turning in his seat this time. “The nose light. It’s signaling, Commander. It’s signaling an SOS!” he said, pointing to the view and blowing it a bit so she could see it better.
As soon as Cesar pointed it out, she recognized the pattern as well. It was easy to take it for a flicker on the display, but now it was impossible not to see. Calliope wanted to come to her feet, but she’d secured herself to her chair during all the turbulence. Could it be that the survivors of the Sunrise had tried to get off the island themselves? “Gunnarsen! Take us around, if you can. As close as we need for life signs!” Still worried it could be a trap, somehow, she tried to stay wary but hope was, on balance, the stronger urge.
The Pyrryx vessel was clearly not made for flying in conditions like this; that said, the Acamas wasn’t particularly designed for the specific purpose either, but it was adaptable. That said, Ethan knew it was going to be a tight shot to try and reach the other vessel. Already they were falling dangerously close to the outer ring of the storm, putting them at risk of being ripped to shreds when they were hurled free. Taking a last glance at his previous goal - the safety just beyond the inner ring - Ethan plotted a tight curve to bring them down while still maintaining a course against the wind. He could feel his ears popping as the pressures shifted rapidly outside the shields, but he managed to hold a point within range of the floundering vessel.
With the ship now much closer, Cesar was able to cut through the interference much more effectively with the more sophisticated scanning methods and quickly made purchase, catching three life signs within the vessel.
“Three life signs, Commander!” Cesar called out excitedly. “Two humans and one Betazoid!”
“Can you get a transporter lock?” When no answer came immediately Calliope barked, “Mr Tilmer! Can you get a lock on them?”
Until then, Tilmer had felt more of a passenger than an officer, uncertain what he could lend to the situation as one thing after another had unfolded and he was just trying to hang on, watching it all happen like a bad dream. “Yes, Ma’am, attempting to get a lock!” He shook his head twice to try to get the twitch in the display to resolve, as if the problem were in his own nervous system and not the sensors themselves. He had the readings Commander De La Fuente was running clarity passes on. And he patched the three lifesigns through transporters but he was getting an error reading. Tilmer remembered a trick Wiser had forced him to use in one of their play acts gone wrong on the holodeck and he set the buffers for a slower rate. It came back green. “I have a lock, but we have to maintain this distance or closer, or I’ll lose them all!”
“Drop the shields,” Calliope ordered. “Gunnersen, hold in as tight as you can. Tilmer, on my mark—” Calliope watched the distance on the visual meter. When she felt they were inside the best possible range she could hope for, she signaled. “Now, Max!”
The sound of the transporter in the alcove behind them whirred. But the hum was disconcerting to Calliope. It was lower pitched and slow compared to what she had come to think of as a typical transporter beam. She jerked around to look behind her and in the wash of light there were humanoid outlines, fluctuating in and out of clarity. Her heart froze when it was obvious that two were children.
Max Tilmer was sweating bullets as he adjusted for distance and interference and countered buffer errors. It was seconds, but to him it felt like an eternity of focus until he matched the input and output signals and closed the beam.
The full throated, live scream of a small child pierced the cabin, announcing their safe arrival, and Calliope laughed with the relief of the moment, unlatching her harness and intending to turn to meet them.
Ethan felt the wave as the shields dropped. His head throbbed violently as the pain he’d been keeping at bay by sheer will threatened to overwhelm him completely. “C-commander,” he rasped as his control slipped, the storm catching hold of the Acamas to pull it down with the other vessel.
Calliope’s attention returned forward and she found herself watching a sudden plummet on the forward screen. The inertial dampeners didn’t immediately kick in and everyone was bucked backwards. “Gunnersen!”
The pilot was sagging in his seat, but still conscious. Regaining her own footing, Calliope fumbled his harness free and had him up on his feet when the shuttle lurched again. In the next moment Calliope managed to scramble into the helm herself, grasping with Cesar to get the nose back up and counter the sudden spin.
They’d lost so much altitude that they momentarily broke through the floor of the cloud cover. There was a fireball going up in smoke on the side of the mountain. It would occur to her later that it was the fate of the Pyrryx ship without its betazoid pilot any longer. But at that particular moment there were more pressing things to observe. Calliope was on the thruster’s manual attitude adjustment controls, and Cesar didn’t seem to need her to explain that he needed to control power inputs to help her to compensate. Wordlessly, they worked in concert, and then they were back in the clouds.
Ethan staggered away from the helm a few steps before his legs gave out completely, sending him crumpling down into a heap near the chair Zahn had abandoned. He just managed to draw his legs in before a body went hurtling by, then he was out.
Calliope barely had a moment’s breath to be relieved at not nose diving into the top of a volcano, when the scrawny betazoid woman, smelling very much of low tide and hauling the wailing child in her arms, was right between her and Cesar, shouting something about isotopes.
“It’s a molecular bond of gallium and thuridian! Its valence is five electrons shy! It’s excited by level three scans. You still have the same level three scan protocol, don’t you, the standard one used in 2390? Please!” The small woman was beside herself determined to be clear but obviously terrified. “Scan the side of the volcano! He’s still there, he’s got to be. He was running from something called a Pyrryx! You have to find Porter! Porter has the isotope on him. Gallium and thuridian!”
“I’m… I’m getting a little something in that protocol range,” Cesar answered, desperate to find what she was looking for simply to save her the anguish she was clearly suffering. “It’s just so faint… I can’t determine a life sign or not… I’d… we’d have to be right on top of it.”
“Go back in, fly closer!” The woman demanded.
Calliope was seeing the cloud break ahead. She was almost clear of the storm wall now. With her pilot down, she didn’t have enough confidence in her own abilities heading back into the wind. She had two delegates holding on to their seats in the ops compartment, and had already left three men on the ground that they would need to return for. There was a chance Stiener would get to this Porter who had remained behind. But she wasn’t going to put money on a guy running from a Pyrryx during a hurricane. It was possible the isotope was on his dead body by now.
Calliope stayed the course into the quiet eye of the hurricane. Everything suddenly stopped shaking, the meters all lined up and the displays resolved their flicker. The silence was almost deafening as the kid took a breath between wails.
The bar on the comm link to the Pathfinder took a sudden leap almost to full. “Pathfinder,” Calliope said, as she cut a wide soaring upward corckscrew into the sky without resistance and the stars all came out to greet them. “This is the Acamas. We’re coming back to the nest.”
As if she were a paper crane, suddenly crushed into a vacuum at her center, the woman between Calliope and Cesar collapsed to the deck, clutching the boy and weeping.
