The Gentle Touch

Posted on 15 Oct 2015 @ 1:09am by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius & Lieutenant Min Zhao & Ensign K'os Beaumont & Chief Warrant Officer 2 Riley Cameron & Chief Warrant Officer 2 Vasily Sokolov Ph.D. & Petty Officer 1st Class Unit Cu-47 "Copper"

2,224 words; about a 11 minute read

Mission: Episode 09 - Empires
Location: Asteroid 6/0983 Saalm
Timeline: MD 05 - 1220 hrs

[ON]

Lamar sat in the tight cabin of Celeste, Galileo's tiny one-person workbee support craft while he attempted to keep a steady control over the small yellow craft's movements. Extended in front of his cockpit were the two workbee's arms which currently clasped a replacement panel for a section of the Nova-class' forward sensor array, and which weighted several tons under an Earth gravity environment.

But it was not as simple as just holding a panel in place -- especially when there were several other personnel within a 10-meter vicinity in EVA suits conducting repairs themselves. Several beads of sweat dripped down Lamar's forehead and into his eyes, and he did his best to blink them out of the way with his heavy eyelashes.

"Celeste to Alpha team...standing by with the new panel. Let me know when you're ready," he said with a deep and heavy voice over a distorted comm channel.

Cameron focused on the noise of his own breathing as he slowly started manoeuvering himself into positiion to take part in the exercise, and tried to blot out the thought that one wrong move with his thruster controls and he would end up spiralling out into space...doomed....

=^=This is Cameron...the primary power relays have been shut down and discharged...ye can connect the panel without getting fried now. =^=

"...Copy," replied Darius. He took a deep breath and steadied his hands as best he could on the workbee's forward arm controls. Using light inputs on the touch-sensitive control pad, he slowly and delicately extended the arms which held the panel towards Galileo's hull while keeping one eye glued to the proximity reading being displayed on the console in front of him.

"5 meters," he called out. "4...3...2...1-point-five...aaaaandd contact!" he called out as his little shuttle jolted a bit but remained stable. "Ready for you to secure it."

"Aye." Came Riley's response as he grabbed the hyperspanner from the magnetic couplling on the site of his EVA suit and began locking the various connectors and rivets into place to secure the panel.

"Ok...we're in business. How's it looking from your end boss?"

K'os' grey-blue eyes watched the workbee and the panel with the focused attention that a neurosurgeon might have when operating. Even though he wasn't operating the workbee, he was still nervous about it. It wasn't like this was his first time supervising a repair job, but with the added stress of being in the EVA and being outside of the ship, the responsibility placed on him was much greater than he'd experienced before. He almost didn't hear Riley, and he wasn't even entirely sure if he was addressing the young hybrid or not, but he turned his helmeted head towards him and cleared his throat.

"Looks goo--" K'os was inturrupted by movement whizzing by him quickly and it nearly startled him.

Copper surged forward with a few bursts of his thrusters and inspected a couple of the rivets. He scanned them down, processed some unseen amount of calculations then turned to Lamar in the workbee, then slowly turned to regard Riley. If the machine had eyes, it was probably blinking slowly at the him. Without a word he turned and tightened a rivet another .003 micrometers then beeped a series of beeps. If K'os didn't know any better it was as if the exocomp was lecturing them all. No doubt just his imagination, but sometimes with Copper one wasn't quiet sure.

"Right," K'os said. "Darius, Cameron, can you um," K'os consulted the screen on his arm, "you two can start replacing the damaged subspace field distortion amplifier?" He said it more as a question than a command, in K'os' usual way. "Copper, help Vasily with reconnecting the array graviton polarity source generators after they replace the amplifier. We'll do a diagnostic after we restore power."

Once again the mechanical creature had caught Lamar by surprise. It had whizzed by him in such a startling manner that the warrant officer had involuntarily tapped a thruster control to move his workbee out of the way, and now he scrambled to re-stabilize the yellow pod. "Dammit, it's that...repair thing again!" he said through the comm. "Someone tell it to let me know BEFORE it buzzes my cockpit!"

The small machine whirled on the yellow pod, and the flesh-machine riding inside. He displayed the message on Lamar's side panel, "Does Flesh-machine Lamardarius have a malfunction? Brunel Class Maintenance Pod proximity sensors are fully operational."

"No, shut up!" answered Lamar a bit too loudly over the comm as soon as he saw his LCARS console being overridden with text from the machine. "Proximity sensors are in my eyes, not the shuttle," he declared, pointing to his temples inside of the cockpit as though the exocomp could somehow see his hand gestures.

"Correction. Does Lamardarius require new ocular sensors then?" Copper began scanning the contents of the pod to ascertain the flesh-machines vital signs.

"No, I don't need new eyes! What are you going to offer me next...cybernetic brain implants?!" answered the chief with a disgruntled huff and edge to his voice. Who's bright idea had it been to bring an egotistical repair robot aboard the starship...

Copper began listing off examples of cases involving flesh-machines having implants for various complications and mental disorder corrections. When he suddenly interrupted himself to state, "Lamardarius your blood pressure is rising above 130/80. Are--"

"Stop reading my vitals!"" Lamar was on the boiling point now with this coy machine, and just wanted it to go away for the moment. Hopefully Vasily would be next in line to tolerate it.

Copper zoomed towards the Russian engineer but slowed when he saw the flesh-machines expression.

"I am not working with robot again. I do it on my own," Vasily grouched through the comm, replying to K'os' instruction to work on the graviton polarity source generators with Unit Cu-47. He refused to call it 'Copper,' which seemed far too familiar of a name for a robot. Aside from not liking it - the exocomp was annoying and entirely too opinionated, for a robot - the older Russian was having some trouble adjusting to the newly christened ensign's authority. K'os had too much of a baby face to take seriously.

K'os chuckled rather than get upset at Vasily. Whether he liked the man or not, K'os had rank and that was all the confidence he needed. "Well, when you gain the ability to grow more arms, you can use the help."

As if on cue, or to prove a point, Copper replicated a pair of thin metal arms under his frame with little clamps. He gave Vasily a quick, 'beep boo' over his comms. Whatever that meant.

Vasily stared at Copper through the face plate of his EVA suit, and then shouted. "Dr. Vasily Mikhailovich Sokolov does not stand for such slander! If Vasily must work with robot then robot keeps beeping and booping to self. Also arms. And no projections. Just work."

"Settle down now Doctor S...the wee robot thingy is just trying tae be helpful aren't you now little guy?" Cameron replied as he floated towards the location of distortion amplifier. Throwing a wink of his own at the small mechanoid as he floated past.

Silently grumbling to himself but trying to stay focused on the task at hand, the chief support craft pilot tapped on the workbee's helm controls and slowly maneuvered it towards the center-most area of the secondary deflector array where the subspace field distortion amplifier was located. The car-sized module was a delicate piece of equipment and it appeared to have suffered extensive damage upon first glance. Lamar wasn't sure if he would be able to simply detach it from the hull or if it needed some TLC prior to extraction.

"Hey uh, Cameron...can you take a look at this? I'm seeing some severe hull fusing on the components housing. I think you might have to cut it free before we remove it or risk damaging the rest of the deflector array."

"Och why isn't this ever simple?" Cameron called back as he reached up with one hand to examine the damage to the hull. There was definitely some charring, and some of the outer housing had warped, probably from when the original electrical damage took out the system in the first place.

"Aye...I'm going to need a plasma cutter over here - anyone got a spare pair of hands?"

K'os had already been moving toward Cameron to inspect the damage for himself. He reached into the tool kit attached to the hip of his EVA and handed him a plasma cutter before moving around him to position himself better to help. "I'll help." K'os said to the man.

"Cheers." Cameron replied, grabbing the plasma cutter that had been passed to him and beginning his work.

"Give me five minutes and we'll have this thing sorted......"

Vasily waited for Cameron and Darius to finish with the amplifier before stepping up to work on the graviton polarity source generators. With Copper, ostensibly. Preferably without him, though, as the robot was quite annoying.

"Okay, robot, now disconnect primary phase variance compensa-...what are you doing? No, don't do that. You can't... You... That's going to..." Vasily stared at the exocomp as it bypassed the EPS flow to the compensator in a procedure he'd never seen before and carried on with reconnecting the generators. He continued staring for a minute and then frowned. "You are very annoying robot, think you know everything, hm? Vasily was doing this before you were even circuit board."

When everything was in place, and K'os had looked over the work, he opened a channel to the bridge. "Beaumont to Lieutenant Min Nicholas." While K'os hadn't worked with Min all too often, he did know enough scuttlebutt around the ship to specify Min rather than her partner Jared. "We're nearly ready to bring the secondary deflector online. How do things look from your end? Any adjustments that need to be made, we can do it now."

"Looking good from here Ensign. I'd like to do a low power run first to make sure all the ODN and EPS relays are working properly, then we can begin feeding more power into it. Intial power on I'd like everyone at least 5m away from the deflector relays for safety in case this goes sideways." Min replied over comm's.

"Good thinking." K'os said. He tried not to look out into space. The idea of a burst relay sending them scattered off into empty space with transporters still offline wasn't something he wanted to think about. To the rest of them he said, "Alright team, let's wrap up what we're doing and pull away from the deflector at this point here." K'os tapped the PADD attached to his arm and sent them a designated safety area five meters away.

Cameron was one of the first to respond, having been taught from a very young age to stay away from things that might possibly have you end up dead. With a quick push off against the hull, he allowed his own inertia to move him towards the safety zone, before using the small thruster pack on his waist to bring himself to stationkeeping.

Min watched the video feed of the EVA team and the sensor display showing where each team was located. Once everyone was clear Min got back on the comm's. "When your ready Ensign."

When everyone was at a safe distance, K'os watched results from his tricorder as he said, "We're good to go here, Ma'am."

"Roger. Beginning power up." Keeping a close eye on the readouts, power feeds and ODN performance mainly, Min began feeding power into the sensor array. Things were looking smooth as the unit came alive, settling into an idle mode as the internal systems booted. "Looking good from here. How's external readings Ensign?"

K'os sighed, and shook his head at the read outs. "I'm still reading that same strange power cascade from earlier. It's drawing power from the ship too quickly. These generators we replaced are freshly replicated, I don't-- could it be a program glitch? A line of code in the ODN that's causing the deflector to draw too much power?"

Min glanced over the readouts from her end. "One sec. I think I found something." Looking over the ODN stream she could see a small hiccup in the code. Adjusting a couple things, Min got back on the comms. "Looks like it was a corrupted code line. I'll want to double check a few things but it's looking better at this end now."

"Here too." K'os said tapping a command on the LCARS display on his arm. "The physical hardware looks to be repaired. Nothing more we can do out here, we're coming back in." K'os signaled to the team to start preparing to return to the ship interior.

[OFF]

--

RADM Lirha Saalm
Mission Advisor
USS Galileo

CWO2 Riley Cameron
Engineer
USS Galileo
[pNPC Holliday]

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

PO1 Unit CU-47 "Copper"
Damage Control Specialist
[PNPC Beaumont]
USS Galileo

Ensign K'os Beaumont
Acting Chief Engineer
USS Galileo

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