Fixing A Hole

Posted on 07 Nov 2013 @ 7:17pm by Chief Petty Officer K8 Yellow & Lieutenant Lilou Zaren

4,858 words; about a 24 minute read

Mission: Episode 04 - Exodus
Location: USS Galileo - Decks 3 & 4
Timeline: MD03 - 0500 Hours

[ON]

Kate had told Thanis to meet her on Deck 4. They had a lot of space to look over, including multiple labs full of highly specialised equipment, but the priority was core ship systems. On her way, she stopped by the Operations Office to pick up her equipment belt, which she fastened around the "waist" where her thorax met her abdomen. She then made her way to a Jefferies tube and scuttled up: over multiple decks, she found she could make her way quicker than the turbolifts.

She did not know the young Trill engineer well, though she had seen him around the ship before. She imagined him to be competent: Quinn and Peers trained their staff well, in her experience. So she would oversee him and provide advice, but do her best not to take over and do everything herself. She was also keen to get to know him: the Trill were a fascinating species, so utterly bizarre and alien. Kate pulled herself up, rubbing three pairs of hands together and wiggling her antennae, and exited the tubes on Deck 4 outside the EPS Node Monitoring room.

Thanis hopped to attention when he saw the operations officer exit the tubes and come towards him. The Galileo was the only ship he'd ever worked since being approved to apprentice on a Starfleet vessel, and he'd never seen anything like her. It. Whatever her - it? - heritage, she outranked him and she clearly knew what she was doing, so he just hoped he could learn something and not make a complete fool of the Engineering department in the process. He'd thrown a pair of coveralls on and laden himself down with every tool he could think of that might come in handy; and if the crewmen laughed as he jangled past with belts and harnesses strapped all over himself... well, that was fine. Laughter couldn't hurt him. It was actually kind of nice that they could find laughter in them after everything that had... After everyone who'd been... He swallowed hard. "Chief Petty Officer," he greeted her, offering a PADD. "I ran the local system diagnostic you requested, if you'd like to take a look, sir."

"Don't call me sir, click!, I work for a living," replied Kate with an agitated swish of her antennae, though her voice remained typically leaden. Like most senior non-coms, she disliked being referred to as sir or ma'am. But this was no time to get hung up on protocol. She took the PADD with one of her middle hands, the upper two unfastening the tricorder from her belt. Her lidded eyes blinked as she read the report.

"Very good," she concluded. "We need to begin by click! calibrating the plasma conversion sensors. They were knocked off alignment click! when the conduits on Deck 4 were damaged. Once the click! sensors are back online, we will be able click! to better visualise the full state click! of the plasma network. Would you like to take the lead, click!, Crewman?"

Chief Quinn's words repeated by the Chief Petty Officer were a bit mind-boggling, but Thanis did his best not to react. "Take the lead?" He was an apprentice, barely capable of tying his own shoes. Sure, Chief Peers had put him to work on his own a bit, but he'd proven himself over time to her. Plus, he imagined she still was trying to build his confidence back up after he'd electrocuted himself on the hull. Calibrating plasma conversion sensors, though... he could do that. He was pretty sure. He'd seen it done enough times, hadn't he? "Yes. All right." He fumbled his tricorder from his belt and headed for the EPS Node Monitoring bay. "Where are you from, if you don't mind my asking, si- Chief?"

Kate was a strong believer in hands-on learning: having six hands probably influenced her views. Though she could see Thanis was nervous, she wanted him to at least try to do this on his own. If he succeeded, he would be encouraged, and if he failed, she could always console him that the task was too much to expect anyway. She scuttled after him into the bay, studying her own tricorder, antennae wiggling purposefully.

"My people are called Nasat, after our click! planet. And you, click!, I see by your spots, are a Trill. I know that click! some of your species are entwined." The complexity of rendering an insectoid language stretched even the Universal Translator, mangling the word 'joining'. "Are you? I hope it is click! not impolite for me to ask."

"Questions aren't impolite; just answers," Thanis remarked, quoting his older sister with a sideways smile. "No, I'm not Joined. They don't let us this young, and there's not many who can, anyway. My sister is. It's an honor to the family." Double checking the tricorder results, he bent down and removed a panel from the EPS Node Monitoring main station to manually reset the sensors. "I guess you have me at a disadvantage... you know secrets my planet kept for centuries and I've never heard of yours. Would you tell me about it?"

Kate humoured him: a little light discussion would make him feel more at ease, so she didn't mind. She bent her triple-articulated legs to scan the exposed relays. "The first sensor click! is out of alignment by .click! 24 microns. The second by .08, click! the third .19, click! and the fourth is out of alignment by .16 microns, with a phase variance click! of plus two in the gamma spectrum. Proceed with your repairs, click!, Crewman."

She stood again, her antennae twitching: all six of her knees were a little stiff. "Nasat is the second click! planet of the system, which is the click! principal star of the Caemara sector. click! Our world is covered in forest, and under the click! soil, there is a large vacuum tube structure click! that we use for travel." Nasat society was intensely xenophobic: there were experienced anthropologists in Starfleet who had never learned as much as Thanis was now being told by Kate, but she swished her antennae twice and continued. "We are one of click! two major species from the click! planet: the others are called click! Citoac. They are click! not like us."

"Not communicative?" he asked, wrinkling his nose at the relays. "Peaceful? Warp-capable?" He bit his lip, calibrating the microoptic alternator to ten parts per million and adjusting the tricorder to relay changes in the sensor alignment by clicks. His finger twitched on the alternator's switch for two seconds on, two seconds off, on, off, on, off, until the tricorder read the alignment was in order. He exhaled and moved over to the next sensor.

Kate watched him work. He was very diligent: the most important in an engineer, she felt. She rubbed her antennae together in approval. "They are a very strange race click!. They are sentient plants. They do not click! use technology, and they communicate click! by telepathy. They are peaceful now." She gave a long, solemn, contemplative, clllllliiiiiiccck!. "But there have been tensions in the past."

While he continued to work on the sensors, she scuttled over to the LCARS console on the wall and brought up a schematic of the ship's power flow distribution. "Structural Integrity is click! our next priority. We have minor hull breaches click! and the Borg tractor beam click! is putting a shear stress on the remaining click! nacelle that I don't like."

"Who's in charge?" Thanis wondered out loud. "If the Captain and the Commander- How are we supposed to- If we can get the Galileo repaired and push enough power through her to get away... are we just leaving them all behind? Chief Peers... the computer can't locate her, so she must be..." He exhaled a shuddering breath and continued his slow progress on the problematic sensors.

For all her decades of experience in engineering Starfleet systems, this was the kind of situation Kate still struggled with. Many mammalian species exchanged physical gestures to console or comfort one another: patting shoulders and knees, holding hands, even hugging. These were all unknown to the Nasat, whereas her own species' approach, to excrete pheromones, would have no impact on the Trill. She clicked her antennae three times in agitation, and scuttled back to join him.

"Do not worry about that, just click! concentrate on your repairs," she urged. "The ship has a click! chain of command. Lieutenant Commander Blake is click! in charge, and you saw click! how organized Lieutenant Fahad was. There are lots click! of officers we can rely on. But click! they will rely on us, too, so we must do our click! work as best we can."

"I will, I just..." He frowned, finished the second sensor and moved to the next. "People keep disappearing from this ship. It scares me. What if I'm next? Would they leave me behind too?" Thanis looked up at her, then winced and went back to work again. "I'm sorry. I talk when I'm nervous."

Though Kate sometimes struggled to interpret humanoid body language, even she could tell that Thanis was quite emotionally affected. She twizzled her antennae clockwise, a traditional Nasat gesture of sympathy, though of course she doubted he would pick up on it. She had to resort to that much less efficient mode of communication, speech.

"Talking is allowed, Crewman. But, click! try to use your fear to click! sharpen your instincts, click! rather than wallowing in it and becoming victim to your own click! nerves. The sooner we complete this work, click!, the sooner we can use the sensors click! to try to track down Commander Holliday click! and Lieutenant Peers."

"You're right," he agreed. But it was hard to take the solid advice and make it real when he was still so scared. His thoughts were spinning; what if they didn't escape the Cube's tractor beam, maybe he should put a message in a black box beacon so his parents and sister could hear his final thoughts to them, would they assimilate him or just kill him? The last of the sensors recalibrated, he sheathed the tricorder and microoptic driver in his tool harnesses. "That should do it. Computer, display a visual diagnostic of the Galileo's plasma network."

As the computer came up with a display of the Galileo cross-section, showing deck-by-deck the plasma relay coming to life, systems restarting as power was restored and occasional dead zones where subjunctions had obviously been too badly damaged, Kate twirled her antennae contemplatively as she considered the young engineer's plight.

Unlike most of the humanoids on the Galileo, Kate did not have a visceral fear of the Borg. She had served on two ships that had encountered them, and certainly had an awesome respect for their technical capability, but she had noticed that in her colleagues, the fear clearly ran deeper than that. It was the drilling and gouging and sawing of flesh that undoubtedly affected the soft-fleshed, warm-blooded mammalian species. By contrast, the Borg had never visited Nasat, and she knew of no member of her race that had been assimilated. Could Borg tubules even puncture her shell? For her, it was more of an academic consideration than anything that made her fear glands swell.

But she was not a philosopher; she was an engineer. She clacked her middle four arms on her thorax purposefully. "Good work, Crewman," she clicked approvingly: though her voice was utterly flat, she had to hope the young Trill would pick up on how genuine her antennae-wafting was. "Now, do you think you can help me click! on the structural integrity field generators? click! Unless - you need to take a minute click! to take on some food or rest?"

He shook his head. Sleeping or eating while they were still on a collision course with assimilation seemed like an exercise in futility. "I'm yours to command, Chief."

"Good, then, we will click! continue," announced Kate with a purposeful double-swish of her antennae, signifying duty. She led the young crewman from the control room out to find a main subjunction console: from there, they should be able to repair the SIF, sensor and phaser systems without having to track about all over the decks. Her electronic screwdriver whirred as she removed the protective panel to reveal complex circuitry and isolinear chips.

"Bring up another cross-section of the ship, click! so that we can see which decks need fortifying," she instructed Thanis, pointing one of her hands to the computer panel above her, while the other five hands reached into the open access hatch to pull out the damaged components.

As they worked, she asked him. "Is this your first ship, Crewman?" He seemed very attached to the Galileo and its crew: she remembered how, many years ago, she had a similar attachment to her first ship, the USS Caldicott.

Thanis nodded. "I'm an apprentice. Trill handles the timing of training differently than many other Federation planets, so I've done my Academy equivalencies, but I have to put in apprentice time on a ship to be considered for officer training. I've learned so much more in the field than I ever did in course study. And Chief Quinn and Chief Peers were really helpful in augmenting my on the job training with course work, but things keep happening. Horrible things. And when you're way out in the middle of space with only the crew to turn to... well, we start to feel like a family. After everything this ship's been through since she launched..." He shuddered, then perked up, "There seem to be some irregularities in the structural integrity field. Not sure if that's computer sensor error, but if this is true... we should be able to reroute some of the field's strength to the weaker aft field. Shouldn't we?"

Kate pulled herself out of the hatch opening and scuttled over to double-check his readings for herself. She agreed with his conclusion. "The irregularities are from sheer stresses click!. Any fix will be temporary until click! the Borg release us from the tractor beam, but click! we can reroute the power for now as you suggest. Let's say click! 17% shift? That click! should be enough for now, but we will need to click! monitor it as we go on."

As she reviewed the plan, she considered what Thanis had thought. His concept of family was more alien to her than his strange warm blood or soft skin, his having only two arms and no antennae. As bizarre as those biological details were, she could just about imagine them. But she could not imagine what it was to have a family. She had known neither her parents nor her children, and nor had any other Nasat. In her larval stage she had grown up with hatchlings, some of whom were her siblings, some of whom were not. Since leaving to enlist in Starfleet, she had met fewer than half a dozen other members of her species. Family: she had encountered the word in sociological texts, but its true meaning was beyond her.

"Let's click! make the adjustments and see click! how it affects the inertial dampeners."

"Yes, sir. I mean 'Chief'." He looked at her, abashedly. "Sorry; I'm just used to going with 'sir' for everyone. It's a rote habit. I'll try to stop." Prodding his palate with his tongue, he made the seventeen percent adjustment as she'd suggested and watched the computer's modulating hologram adjust accordingly. "The inertial dampeners don't appear to be taking any additional stress from the shield power shifts... That's good, right?" He glanced at her again; it was kind of pointless. He couldn't tell what she was thinking by looking at her, but there wasn't really any reason for her to tell him anything but the truth. His making mistakes would put them all in danger and reflect badly on her. So he just had to believe whatever came out of her mouth. That was easy enough. He didn't have a very suspicious mind. "It looks like there's a power disconnect to the left bank phasers... EPS relay problem, maybe? I hope not; the last thing we need right now is a plasma leak somewhere..."

"Very well spotted!" clicked Kate approvingly. Nasat did not exchange physical affection outside of mating: where Quinn or Peers might have patted Thanis on the shoulder, Kate merely gave him a waft of her antennae. She also avoided pointing out that phasers were not a priority, given the Borg's adaptive shielding: such a thought was only like to scare him further, she decided.

"We can reroute the plasma flow click! through one of the auxiliary conduits click! for now. Then we will repair click! the defective relay. "She pointed with one of her middle arms to the location indicating the error on the ship cross-section. "The access hatch is click! in Jefferies Tube 4-B2. It is quite isolated. click! Perhaps you would find it click! preferable for me to perform the repair?" She suspected the apprentice would not want to crawl up a lonely Jefferies Tube with Borg infesting the ship, but she also knew that if she ordered him to, he would comply. Resistance was just as futile within the Starfleet hierarchy, in her many years of experience.

Abashed, Thanis glanced towards the nearest access shaft. The drones seemed to have stopped abducting people, but who knew how long that would last? What if they changed their minds and took him? He should have sent a longer message to his parents. His sister. And he'd forgotten his cousin Torun... "I... If you want me to-" he swallowed. "I've never done a plasma repair on my own, but I've watched a few times. I can. If you're busy here..."

Seeing the way he was acting, Kate could only assume he was still rather scared. She decided it would be best for them to go together. "We will click! both go to perform the repair," she said. "You can watch me repair the first click! and then you will do the second. click! Come on." She twitched her antennae towards the access hatch.

Scuttling over to the entrance, she adjusted her tool belt. Though Kate was rather lumbering when she moved around on two feet, she could outpace any biped when she ran on all eight. But moving through Jefferies Tubes was difficult for her because of the large plates of shell covering her body. As she climbed into the hatch, she got stuck, rear four legs wiggling wildly as she tried to squeeze through. Eventually she popped through with a loud metallic clang, and began to climb.

He couldn't have said whether it was just nerves that made him laugh or if the sight of her many feet waggling in the air as she squeezed through was amusing. He was too scared to really find anything funny, but the short laugh oddly helped him to breathe a little better. Securing his tools to his arms, legs, waist, and torso, Thanis climbed in after her. The sound of them crawling through the tubes was not unlike a herd of indigo mammoths stampeding across a plain of aluminum, such was the racket of exoskeleton and tools beating against the sides. Nevertheless, they made it to the EPS access hatch without incident. Either the Borg didn't hear them, didn't care, or were simply waiting for them to emerge to grab them and shove their tubes of brain-eating tiny robots into their necks. That last was a thought Thanis would have preferred not having had. Holding a light in his teeth, he carefully unlatched the panel protecting the grid and pushed it to the side.

Kate, who was no young woman, was quite out of the breath by the time they reached the repair junction, causing her carapace to rattle with a tinny echo that rebounded in the narrow confines. She unstrapped her tool belts and sorted them out neatly, searching through for those appropriate to the task, a job made considerably easier by virtue of her six hands. She was soon holding an engineering tricorder, a hyperspanner, a sonic driver, an iso-modulator, a bipolar torch, and a decoupler, with an ever useful self-sealing stem bolt tucked into her remaining belt. Waving all six tools around, she approached the access hatch and examined the relays.

Both appeared badly damaged, with burns and scars to the metals indicating there had been a small plasma fire. However, the relay junction itself was sufficienly intact that it could be repaired without needing to replicate an entirely new set of parts. The hardest part for Kate was not conducting the repair, but allowing Thanis to watch what she was doing: Nasat were not the most flexible of species. She tried to compensate by talking him through what she was doing.

"The most important thing to make sure of click! is that you have shut off power click! through the relay before you begin." She wiggled her antennae severely for emphasis as she showed him the switch to power down the relay, nudging it off with the butt end of her hyperspanner "Never work on a live relay click! or by the end, you will no click! longer be live!"

Thanis chuckled, despite himself.

She then scanned the dead relay with her tricorder and held the readings up for the apprentice to see. "We can see which EPS filaments have burned out, and replace them." Using the sonic driver, she manipulated open the first relay and began threading out burnt-out filaments, placing them in a neat pile. She then began to thread in new replacements, scanning again to check the alignment. "There is a .4 phase variance click! but we can correct that using the click! iso-modulator." Finally, she sealed the relay with the bipolar torch until it was back into position.

Turning to face Thanis, she wiggled her antennae at him and clicked: "Would you like to try click! the other one now?"

He nodded, albeit nervously, and took the tools from her one by one. "Seal off the power," he said to himself as he did so, "Check readings. Locate the burned out filaments. Remove- ow," he shook his hand and went back to work, "Replace... replace... replace..... Align..." He bit the tip of his tongue between his teeth, "Check with the iso-modulator... and... seal.... Done!" He sat back, blinking a drop of sweat from his eye, and removed the element stopping the flow of plasma. As it began to flow normally, he sighed in relief. "Computer? Give me a localized check on the plasma relays to the phaser banks."

"All phasers are at normal function."

Thanis turned to Kate with a slight smile. "One down."

Kate clicked her antennae together in approval at the computer message, but made sure to check Thanis's handiwork for herself anyway to her own discerning standards. "Very good work, Crewman. click! You are learning. I think hands on learning click! is very important." She waved all of her hands at once to illustrate the fullness of her commitment.

She gathered up her tools and looked up the location of the next relay on her PADD and, with the sounds of her feet echoing around the Tube, scuttled off, leading Thanis. "Soon you will be click! teaching these repairs to apprentices click! yourself!" she called over her shoulder.

Thanis wasn't entirely sure she was right about that, but he could appreciate the encouragement regardless. "How did you learn? Was your training through Starfleet?"

"I trained on Nasat originally click! and then just after I got my second shell I went to work on a trade ship click! for about three years. I joined Starfleet just after I'd click! hatched my first batch of children." Kate's voice was almost drowned out by the sounds of her shell and limbs clacking on the metal deck. "I learned a lot through Starfleet click!, but I also owe a lot to my click! civilian training."

As they reached the relay junction she turned to face Thanis and gave him a solemn wiggle of her antennae. "It was a very valuable experience. click! I wish more Starfleet engineers saw a little of life outside click!. If you ever get the opportunity, you will click! be surprised how much you can learn that's click! not in the Federation manuals."

"You have children?" was all Thanis could think to ask. He couldn't tell how old she was; she might well have been like the El-Aurians or Vulcans, with their respective longer life-cycles.

"Yes, nine hundred and forty seven," said Kate matter-of-factly, turning away from Thannis to the relay. "But, click!, I have never met any of them. The Nasat click! concept of childhood is ... not like yours." She wiggled her antennae as she searched for the panel opening, but her face and body language betrayed no sign of emotion.

Thanis made a choking sound, "Nine hund-" He clapped a hand over his mouth and let her continue. "No. I guess not. My mother thought having four of us was a handful."

"We Nasat can have click! rather big handfuls," said Kate, holding up six hands and then unleashing an ear-splitting series of clicks so loud and piercing they sounded as though she was activating some kind of warning alarm; in fact, it was laughter. When the din ended, she continued, "But I did not raise my children, click! nor did my parents raise me. Almost all Nasat click! are raised in municipal hatcheries, operated by click! midwife drones."

"Municipal, like an-" he stopped himself before he could say 'orphanage'. They had them, on Trill, and the children there were happy and cared for, but Thanis had always thought it must be very hard to not have a family. Of course, they were all family in a way and the children there were supported by their community as much as they were by their docents, but still... A world where everyone was parentless probably didn't know the difference. Maybe there was no difference, to the Chief Petty Officer, but Thanis still felt a little sad for her anyway. He couldn't help it. And feeling sad for her, made him sad for himself, missing his family, wishing he could see them right now just to assure himself that they were okay, even if he... might not be soon. "Oh," he said again, because he could think of nothing more to add. "We check the nacelle next, I guess?"

Difficult as it was for her, after so many years of dealing with warm-bloods, Kate had just about learned to pick up on emotions in their speech. Thanis was obviously having some kind of hormonal problem, but she couldn't say why: it was impossible for her to link her mechanical rejection of the notion of family with anything emotional. She tried to remember whether Trill males ovulated or not, to explain his behaviour.

"You are correct, Crewman, click! but I am afraid I am not so young click! as I was when I first got my shell," she admitted. "Soon I will need to stop to replenish click! some nutrients. Perhaps one more click! repair, and then we shall break?"

Thanis nodded, eager to get the work finished and happy of the company. Anything that would distract him from the presence of the Borg on the ship and the whereabouts of their missing crew was welcome, and he had a strange feeling that staying close to the Nasat might, just maybe, keep him safe. At least for a short while.

[OFF]

CPO K8 Yellow
Transporter Chief
USS Galileo

Crewman Apprentice Thanis Rothgra
Engineering Apprentice
USS Galileo

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