2378 Zizegee Saurian Brandy

Posted on 24 Jul 2015 @ 3:04am by Chief Warrant Officer 2 Vasily Sokolov Ph.D.
Edited on on 27 Jul 2015 @ 6:02pm

1,445 words; about a 7 minute read

Mission: Episode 09 - Empires
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 4, Section 9
Timeline: MD 01 - 2200 hrs

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The lights on Vasily's environmental suit illuminated the officer's quarters. The dining room table was upside down and moving in a gentle rotation. Items of clothing and personal effects were likewise suspended in mid-air, launched there by the tumultuous passage of the Galileo into another dimension and kept suspended by the loss of gravity control. He stepped into the room and swept his hand-light around for a visual inspection.

The disastrous state of affairs here made him wonder what his own quarters looked like. They'd seen fit to give him accommodations that made him envious of the housing arrangements in the Gulag camps of his homeland's yesteryear. Worse, the quartermaster had taken away Dr. Alethea Coleman as a roommate and provided him with one even surlier, an Andorian security officer named Tharia. The only consolation he took from the thought of his room being turned upside down was that it would bother her more than it bothered him. And since that was the case, he decided to be downright jolly about it just to piss her off.

Inside the room it became apparent these were the quarters of two low-ranking female officers; he might have checked the manifest from his tricorder but couldn't really be bothered. As the officer took another step into the room, something floating around in his peripheral vision caught his attention. Turning, he saw a lovely pair of Tholian silk undergarments drifting gracefully toward the viewport. Something about the design and the size reminded him of his second wife, and he grinned. Sunisa had appeared to be a young, naive graduate student at the Federation Institute of Technology but by their third date he'd discovered just how wrong he'd been.

Vasily's reminiscing was interrupted as one cup of a brassiere suddenly obstructed his vision through the front of the environmental suit and interrupted his train of thought. He scowled and reached up to swat at it. Once freed, it resumed its course across the room toward the viewport.

Just as he'd free himself of the entangled lingerie something else abruptly struck the back of his helmet. Instinctively he reached for his head, though it had hardly caused any damage to the ultra-durable Starfleet issue environmental suit. Within moments he saw the culprit as it spun over his head toward the viewport: a bottle of Saurian brandy. With his hand-light he could just make out the year on the label.

"2378, good year," he muttered to himself, contemplating the opportunity to relieve the young officers of it.

So far, his idea to check all the outer hull rooms for damage one-by-one, deck-by-deck, had turned out to not be as bad as he thought. He knew one of the occupants of these quarters liked frilly undergarments and drank Saurian brandy, which gave him an edge when tracking her down later in the ship's lounge. Taking the brandy had its advantages and disadvantages. Captain Tightass back in engineering had apparently developed a love affair with the chain of command and so-called "rules," so he was liable to shake the Russian down upon his return to Main Engineering to make sure he hadn't lifted anything during his repair work.

He began grumbling at the thought of the earlier showdown at the warpcore and then grumbled even more about being sent on this fool's errand. Any idiot with a field emitter and a plasma torch could do hull repairs. Or, better yet, they could have sent the exocomp to do it. All that little bastard did was beep and boop about broken things around the ship. But no. No, no, no! Send Vasily off to do it because he was smart enough to put on his suit first. Somehow that disqualified eight years worth of study at the Federation's finest universities and years of service in the fleet. Yes, he deserved that bottle of brandy. It would be compensation for seeing all his vast knowledge of physics and engineering being wast-

Suddenly, just as he was preparing to grab the floating bottle, Vasily realized everything was moving toward the viewport: tables, chairs, clothing, potted plants... His eyes narrowed in suspicion and, trying not to panic, he reached for his tricorder. He consulted the data being fed into the device but felt the real confirmation of his suspicions came from the screeching noise that sounded like a thousand nails on a chalkboard. Or, more accurately, like a tiny microfracture in the ship's outer hull being slowly but surely pried apart by the stresses on the ship's superstructure and the lack of power to the structural integrity field.

"Oh, shit," Vasily whispered.

And then all hell broke loose.

The viewport spiderwebbed together as a whole unit in one single motion and blew out of its frame, exposing the atmosphere in the ship to the vacuum of space. The Russian engineer shouted to his environmental suit to magnetize his boots, which in theory should have prevented him from being sucked out of the room. Theory proved fact for a few moments as the contents of the room went speeding past him and through the ever-widening hole in the outer hull.

He could see the breach growing wider and wider as the explosive decompression pried free segments of the hull and the interior wall, but he remained as calm as possible knowing that he could walk back to the door to seal off this compartment easily. But within seconds he could feel himself tilting forward under the direction of forces beyond his control as the deck plating was pulled from its connections with the ship's frame. There was very likely a faulty seam running beneath the floor that joined this piece of deck plating with the next, and all Vasily could think about was some lazy ass Tellarite back at San Francisco Fleet Yards figuring what harm could possibly come from one faulty seam out of the hundreds of thousands that went into creating the USS Galileo.

With a loud pop, the deck plate finally came free and Vasily found himself flying head first into space with his feet firmly - magnetically - sealed to the deck plating.

"F--k me," he groaned, "science ship is total bullshit. F--king rear admiral, f--king Pretty Boy Jones, f--king useless piece of shit lazy Tellarite bastard, f---king deflector dishes, f--king gravimetric distortions..."

While cursing everything and everyone he could possibly think of Vasily was fiddling with the controls on his environmental suit, trying to line up a proper shot as the deck plating spun end over end into space. It was a disorienting experience, and he knew he had to time it just right. There weren't any thrusters on these variants of the environmental suit - they were meant for interior operations - so he'd have one shot before he was too far from the ship to help himself...

Perhaps only his knowledge of physics saved him in the end, all eight years studying the finer points of space and time, all of it so that he could line up a single shot perfectly. With a subtle puff of accelerant a device released itself from his gloved hand at alarming speed, leaving behind a line extending all the way back to Vasily himself. Thankfully, before the deck plating could make a full rotation, he felt the line pull taut. The shot had counted as the end of the winch had embedded itself deeply and firmly into the wall of the corridor inside the Galileo. For a moment he worried it wouldn't be strong enough to stop the momentum of the deck plating but it did, all for the very low cost (all things considered) of dislocating his shoulder.

He screamed and winced at the pain, let loose another string of curses and insults, and then finally came back to his senses. With several instructions the suit's computer system activated the winch and he felt the slow, steady, forward movement as the device worked to drag him back to the ship. Another command disengaged the magnetized boots from the deck plating, freeing him from the object of his potential demise and speeding up his movement back into the ship. Once in the corridor, he slumped down against the wall and gave himself a moment to rest. A member of his work crew appeared, apparently alerted by all the loud shouts over the comm system, and began wordlessly setting up a field emitter to seal off the room.

"God damn space," Vasily wheezed, breathless from his ordeal, "stole my f--king brandy."

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CWO2 Vasily Sokolov, Ph.D.
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo
[ PNPC - Mott ]

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