Vortex (Part 2 of 3)

Posted on 24 Jun 2015 @ 1:51am by Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Captain Jonathan Holliday & Commander Norvi Stace & Commander Allyndra illm Warraquim & Lieutenant JG Drusilla McCarthy & Lieutenant Min Zhao & Lieutenant Jared Nicholas & Jynn & Lieutenant JG Manuel Lucero & Lieutenant JG Grayson Jones & Lieutenant Benice Gyce Ph.D. & Chief Warrant Officer 2 Riley Cameron & Petty Officer 2nd Class Eva Kovalev & Ensign K'os Beaumont & Commander Andreus Kohl & Lieutenant Tuula Voutilainen M.D. & EMH Mark X-C "Shirley"

3,198 words; about a 16 minute read

Mission: Episode 08 - NIMBUS
Location: USS Galileo - Various
Timeline: MD 02 - 1955 hrs

Previously, on Vortex (Part 1)...

"Security team Alpha-Two, this is Lieutenant Benice. Meet me and Admiral Saalm outside main engineering," Gyce spoke as she tapped her badge and looked respectfully to Holiday. "SOP states no flag officer goes into a potentially dangerous area without escort, Sir."

Holliday nodded to his security officer, protocol was protocol and in the event of an emergency he would want to be sure that he could remove the flag officer from the situation and if need be, the ship.

"Indeed. The Admiral is your first priority in the event this all goes south fast Lieutenant Benice. Get her and your team to safety however necessary - understood?"

"Phasers on stun, if she does something stupid, Sir," Gyce promised. Though she hoped it would not come to that. Gyce quickly left in pursuit of Admiral Saalm.

And Now, the Continuation...

[ON]

Allyndra looked perplexed and then started to head for the bridge. She then remembered that she was now no longer the Executive Officer now that the games had ended and turned to make her way to sick bay. What this was all about she was not sure but best to wait to find out and besides see what had happened to the place.

Dru has been sitting quietly, with Mott tied up with the last of the casualties in sickbay, she had come along in order to give the injury report. The change in conversation had captured her attention, watching the conversations of the officers as it became apparent something wasn't quite right.

Pushing herself back from the table, the counsellor moved to leave the room, figuring it was back to sickbay she needed to go.

Min had been sitting quietly through the debrief as her role in this hadn't been of any significance in that she was doing her role on a different ship. As she stood to leave, Min all of a sudden felt really dizzy, a wave of nausea hitting her. Sitting back down, Min placed her head on her hands, leaning against the table surface as she tried not to throw up.

As she moved by one of her fellow officers, Dru reached out to rest her hand against the woman's arm in concern, "Lieutenant? Are you ok?" The woman's colour didn't seem right, she was paler than would have been expected and caused the counsellor a reason for concern, "Do you need a Doctor?"

Min felt the hand on her shoulder as much as she heard the women's voice. She took a deep breath, steadying herself. "I'm okay but thank you. Just been having some nausea the last few days." Min slowly rose, hoping the nausea would stay away. So far so good.

Jared who had been about to move to the bridge to man one of the science stations stopped suddenly when he saw Dru and his wife huddled together. "Min,"he asked concern in his voice, "what's going on?"

Steady on her feet again, Min smiled at her husband reassuringly. "Just feeling a little sick Hun. Probably just nerves."

"Are you sure?" he asked not convinced by her argument.

"I am fine Jared." Truth was she wasn't entirely but she felt well enough to take her post so a small white lie would suffice.

Still not convinced his wife was really alright, he let her go. He had no choice really, he knew her too well. He gave her a brief, curt nod, "Okay, but if something happens, then you can go to sickbay. There are plenty of competent people aboard."

Dru hesitated a moment more as people continued to rush from the room. She had no choice but to take the woman at her word because right now everyone needed to be in their respective stations. Squezing the woman's shoulder lightly, Dru moved off towards sickbay.

The moment the yellow alert sounded Jynn had reluctantly left the trouble he had been getting himself into. And it was most excellent trouble, indeed. A few minutes later and he found himself by the side of his most trustworthy assistant CFCO, still flush with both new and familiar emotions. As he leaned in over his shoulder to view the console he questioned Tinaro. "What's our status?"

"The Helm is sluggish in responding. There seems to be some sort of power issue in Engineering and the re-routes are slowing response time. With your permission, I'll try to boost the relay controls from shuttle contol." Cyi replied before relinquishing his seat to the more senior officer.

"Head to shuttlebay and do what you can," Jynn said before hopping into the seat.

Stace rose quickly from her own chair, the yellow alert status now upping her adrenaline levels. Both her and her crew had been on a knife's edge throughout the entire day and now suddenly, like muscle memory, her jittery state shot back like a crack of thunder. She allowed those before her to leave the observation lounge as she then strode over to her new chair. Taking her seat, she awaited the captain.

Lucero made way for the other officers as he waited for Kohl to pass through the threshold with further instructions on the way to the bridge.

The last to leave the briefing room, John quickly made his way to the Bridge and to his rightful place in the big chair - he had missed the now-familiar feeling of its cushioning and was glad to be back.

=^= Engineering - how are things looking down there? =^=

Lirha was now at one of the side terminals in main engineering intently studying a readout of the ship's various EPS relays and bio-neural gelpacks. She was hardly an engineer but had originally been trained as an Operations officer, and as such, power management systems had been drilled into her head at the Academy and were difficult to forget.

What she was now looking at seemed extremely strange, and like Jones had assessed a few moments ago, the primary capacitors which handled power distributions were currently running at above-maximum capacity, and several of them were red-lining. "Mister Jones, I thought you said you were shutting down the secondary deflector array?" she asked, still seeing an influx of abundant surges coming from the prototype technology.

Everything he was trying wasn't working. This was quickly turning into something of a situation by Grayson's standards. "We were, but nothing seems to be working. If it wasn't for some quick thinking, we would be locked out of the system right now. I can't explain it, but it is like this situation has a mind of its own. I'm getting one problem of it solved, another one pops up somewhere else. We need to disconnect all connections the deflector has to the grid," he finished talking to the Admiral and looked at some of his department near by, "Get up there and start cutting the physical hard lines. Take flash lights and breathers. I'm cutting power to that entire section. Phaser them off if you need to once it is discharged." Once again the Chief turned to the Admiral, "It is a last ditch effort idea, we cut the power hard lines...it can't reboot and start getting power again. Only the physical mounting points would remain to keep it on the hull. We'd keep it dead until we get to a starbase and have it checked out."

"And what would that mean defensively for the ship?" Gyce asked. She and two other security officers had stood out of the way and remained invisible so as to protect Saalm and prepare to bulldog her to safety, if it came to it.

"Aw shite, I'm on it!" Cameron called out as he grabbed his toolkit and headed across Engineering. Grabbing a hold of the manual release he jimmied open the hatch and slid into the Jeffries tubes which led to the power transfer conduits. Muttering to himself about the confines of said passageways, he shimmied on his belly until he reached the right access panel, and deftly pulled it free before laying on his back and facing upwards at his work.

=^=This is Cameron!=^= He called into his commbadge. =^=This is insane! The power conduits are handling charge about three times higher than they are supposed to - this whole junction is lit up like a Christmas tree! =^=

Grabbing a tricorder the young engineer passed it over the panel and felt his eyes widen at the readings. One small slip and he would be a very well roasted Scotsman with an extremely short Starfleet career. Reaching for his toolkit, he grabbed a hyperspanner and got to work.

=^=Disconnecting primary plasma feeds, moving onto secondary.....someone tell me if this is doing anything?!?!=^=

Eva watched dumbfounded on the displays as the power surge continued. She'd never seen anything like this and there was no possible that much power was being fed through the system. =^=I'm having troubles making sense of the board Cameron.=^=

Looking for a way to vent more energy, Eva realized there was one she'd overlooked. Doing the best she could, Eva began shunting EPS energy from the EPS grid into the main impulse manifolds. Normally energy went the other way but right now she needed a way to draw off excess and back feeding the impulse reactors was the only way.

K'os had caught the change in the energy flow, and nodded at Eva when he'd seen what she'd done. It bought them some time to find the root cause of the surges. He was certainly impressed with her thought process.

Cameron finally shut down the hyperspanner as he severed the final feed, but for some reason the panel in front of him was still illuminated.

=^=Guys - I've shut down the power supplies but it's doing bugger all! The power levels are cycling within the capacitors like they're bloody batteries - we're looking at a system breach imminently! =^=

The engineering team was fast at action attempting to sever all replays to the new deflector dish, but as Lirha continued to monitor the reading on her display, she noticed several irregularities. Most importantly, even with active power transfer lines being severed, the new array was still channeling and recycling energy, and something was very wrong with its internal capacitors. The rear admiral was not sure if there was still an active program or series of commands being delegated to the piece of technology, but the advanced array appeared to have suddenly gone into a discharge mode to prevent any internal overloads to its components.

And so, with all relays severed between the secondary array and Galileo, the only way to discharge energy was into the cosmos, and the small dish powered up and began to actively transmit a heavy stream of gravitationalized particles from its central emitter out into space directly in front of the Nova-class.

"Jones," K'os said with an even tone and a passive expression. "We've disconnected the deflector but the central emitter is now discharging gravitationalized particles."

The entire starship rocked violently as the gravitational discharge from the secondary deflector array surged outward and began to create a dangerous singularity. Pulses of greenish-blue particles visibly throbbed from the front of Galileo as the anomaly received energy and began to grow exponentially in size.

"Captain, it appears we are being attracted to the anomaly ahead," Jynn spoke in a matter-of-fact tone. And it was certainly most attractive, he thought, despite the danger that it imposed upon them.

"What the hell?! Impulse engines - full reverse!" Holliday called out as he stood up to look at the particle field gathering in front of his ship. How the hell was this happening? The prototype was meant to have been made safe for field testing, and instead it was launching a graviton beam into space?

"Aye aye, Captain," Jynn responded immediately. With a blip-blop-bloop he poked the panel before him and tried to guide Galileo, as well as everyone aboard, away from what would appear to be an untimely demise. "All reverse." The command had been input and the energy had been directed accordingly, but it seemed Galileo was rather reluctant to leave. All Jynn could do at this point was stare in wonder at the viewscreen before them.

Holliday nodded as his flight control officer carried out his orders. Right now he was at a loss - he couldn't shoot, he couldn't run, and right now his fate was entirely in the hands of his engineers several decks down.

=^=Bridge to Engineering - I need some good news or we're looking at something seriously wrong, seriously quickly!=^=

Before any engineer could answer, Stace stood up right next to Holliday to add her own suggestion to the choas. Power distribution wasn't her specialty, but with allowing Grayson and his team to rig up the power distribution patch with the holodeck she couldn't help but feel somewhat responsible for what was now happening to Galileo and the crew. She braced herself against the arm rest as the ship rumbled and then leant in further now standing up straight, speaking into Holliday's shoulder.

"Grayson!" she bellowed, "It's Stace! Can you use some of the additional power surging through the system to give an extra boost to the engines? Even if everything blows out, the force may push us away from the graviton beam!"

"Already on it Commander. We're trying to drain the EPS feeds through the Impulse engines. Should give you an extra 2% boost in output." ~If we don't burn out the taps or the exhaust manifold in the process.~ Eva noted to herself. Her job was to keep that from happening.

Calling up to the bridge, the annoyance in Grayson's voice was clear, =/\="A little heads up would have been nice before the plan was carried out. Bridge, you are going to need to take extra care of that power transfer. Isolate the relays and shunt the power in a low yield directed current. We could risk blowing the wrong part of the exhaust manifold at the wrong place or time and either push us in more quickly or send us into an uncontrolled spin. Right now we won't have time to compensate." =/\= He made a mental note to have a discussion later, should they come out on the clear...relatively and hopefully in one piece.

Stace's face relaxed somewhat as her suggestion was already in the process of being executed. She looked to Holliday and then sat back down in her seat, activating the power grid readout on the central readout with a flourish of her hand. "Good luck," she called out quickly.

Seated at the science console to the port side of the viewscreen, Andreus Kohl swiped his fingertips across his wide companel. He tabbed through the sensor readings dominating his LCARS interface, and banished the readings of lesser import to the panel on the bulkhead beside him. Kohl adjusted the controls to add scrolling measurements along the bottom of the viewscreen, providing empirical data to the visual spectacle blooming ahead of Galileo. "I'm reading unstable gravimetric flux density from the anomaly," Kohl reported.

Stace quickly flashed through her own knowledge of the information her Chief Science Officer was relaying to the bridge. "Unstable?" she questioned, reading through the catalogue of possibilities it could mean in her mind. Her eyes flashed about the bridge as she furrowed her brow. She shook her head and cast off the thought immediately. "Captain," she said, shouting over to him as an eruption of sparks sprayed out of the back consoles like a fountain. She ducked her head automatically and then righted herself. "This could be the beginnings of a singularity! Kohl, can our sensors pierce through what's developing? Any matter or atmosphere on the other side of that thing?"

Kohl shook his head in the negative, from where he was leaning into his LCARS console. "High-energy sensor sweep isn't detecting anything clear beyond the anomaly itself," Kohl reported. He grabbed hold of his console for support, as he twisted his torso to look to the science officers at the aft workstations. "See if you can punch through the anomaly with long-range sensors," he said.

"On it." Lucero attempted to utilize long range sensors but they returned null values. He frowned and changed interfaces. The Lieutenant input parameters to slightly extend the sensor resolution beyond the triangular parallax of the anomaly to the ship from a randomized astrometric focal point within the anomaly itself, this way, the sensors were scanning from the peripheral, rather than directly at or through the anomaly. In this manner, the computer may be able to simulate the space behind the anomaly, if not visually, then with data. It was a roll of the dice, however. And they may not have enough time for maybes.

"Yes, that's--" Kohl said, starting to commend Lucero, but he caught himself because this wasn't the time or the place for such things. Rather, he reported, "Commander, we're starting to--"

As Kohl spoke, Stace quickly glanced to the read out again as the warning beacons began to flash wildly on her display. "We're losing structural integrity, Captain!" she screamed, looking up to him. "The gravitational force from the singularity is too much on the hull with our engines at full reverse! She's gonna rip herself apart!"

Holliday furrowed his brow - a singularity could lead to anywhere, assuming the ship survived making it's way through in the first place. John was stuck between a rock and a hard place - keeping the engines powered up like this was going to tear the ship apart for certain, but going into the singularity might not kill them all. Right now it seemed the lesser of two evils.

Heading back to his chair he settled back into the seat and gripped the armrests before giving his orders.

=^=Red Alert! All hands this is the Captain. Secure your stations and standby for possible widespread damage across the ship. =^=

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

RADM Lirha Saalm
Mission Advisor
USS Galileo

CAPT Jonathan Holliday
Commanding Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant j.g. T'Vanna Murray
CIO
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Manuel Lucero V
Asst. Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo

Cadet SO Wintrow Paragon
Support craft pilot
USS Galileo
[PNPC T'Vanna]

Lieutenant JG Jynn
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant Commander Andreus Kohl
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Grayson Jones
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant Min Nicholas (ne Zhao)
Chief Operations Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Tuula Voutilainen
Medical Officer
USS Galileo

Lt. Jared Nicholas
Linguist
USSGalileo

Ens K'os Beaumont
Assistant Chief Engineer
USS Galileo

Crewman Apprentice Sigrid Thelin
Scientist's Mate
[ PNPC Beaumont ]
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Benice Gyce
Security Investigations Officer
USS Galileo

Commander Norvi Stace
First Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Drusilla McCarthy
Chief Counsellor
USS Galileo

Lt Cmdr Allyndra illm Warraquim
Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo

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