Infiltration (Part 1 of 3)

Posted on 15 Sep 2024 @ 10:17pm by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius & Ensign S'Ers-a M'Lyr'Zor & Chief Warrant Officer 2 Kalliste Bacri & Chief Petty Officer Afthinam Naime

3,626 words; about a 18 minute read

Mission: Episode 20 - Reconstruction
Location: USS Galileo-A - Deck 7, Main Engineering
Timeline: MD 02, 2251 hrs

[ON]

The heart and soul of the Mark II Nova-class USS Galileo-A was serene and sparsely populated at this late hour in the evening. The two-point-five decks which the engineering bay encompassed within the small starship were predominately occupied by the large throbbing warp core and its blue pulsing lights, as well as the distinctive dual power transfer conduits which cast purple glows from supercharged plasma streams to each of the two large nacelles.

The hour was late and shift change would occur soon, within the next ten minutes. Beta shift personnel were scheduled to be relieved by their Gamma shift counterparts and be brought up to speed with all relevant updates. This benign distraction presented the perfect opportunity to infiltrate main engineering, for only one crew member was currently on duty and roaming the bay. There was enough time to slip in then out, just like infiltrating a Jem'Hadar prison camp during the Dominion War.

An overhead Jefferies tube hatch quietly hissed open within deck 7's upper level. A Human head slowly poked out of the hatch and silently observed the room with dark brown eyes before disappearing back into the maintenance tunnel. A short moment later, Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius' large frame quietly descended feet-first from the opening down the ladder then silently jogged to a nearby alcove where he momentarily took cover. His head half-poked out again while he noticed the sole Beta shift engineer, Chief Petty Officer Naime, tending to her duties on the sub-deck below him. Hope she didn't plant any Houdinis, he said to himself in preparation for the next movement.

She hadn't, but not for the lack of time, it had been a slow end to the evening here in engineering. In the space below Naime was idly sipping a cup of something hot and reading something else from a PADD. It could be technical specifications or repair reports, doubtless some very important engineering business as it definitely had her suitably distracted.

He lowered his red-collared body into a low crouch then delicately walked along the upper concourse with practiced silent footsteps until he came to the primary port ladder which would take him down to the main level...to his objective. His head swiveled to perform a quick 360-degree sweep to ensure he hadn't been detected yet, then he proceeded to descend the ladder using only his hands and a variable grip to slide down without producing any audible footsteps. He lowered his body again into a crouch then silently jogged on the balls of his feet to hide behind the large warp core housing.

The humming quiet of the warp core was interrupted by a half laugh coming from the engineer. She still wasn't quite looking in the intruder's direction so was presumably talking to herself when she uttered "Well... Unexpected eh?" It was quickly followed by a clink as the cup was set down and then by a yawning-stretching sound as the chief stood to make a last inspection of the ship's status before Sera arrived.

He peered out from behind the large reinforced matter/anti-matter housing within the middle of the engineering bay then took notice of the semi-familiar Farian woman who seemed to be happily talking to herself and performing her duties...and now setting her beverage down and leaving her station to perform some rounds, he assumed. His timing was impeccable. The closest of the tool lockers was less than 15 meters away in a visually exposed area, but that was a better bet than maneuvering himself into the engineering office with only one way out. Slowly and steadily, he kept an eye on the yellow-collared chief petty officer while tip-toeing through her blind spot until he reached another alcove along the wall and took cover. He discreetly poked his head out again to determine if his next move was clear.

The coast was clear, as were the maintenance logs that Naime was checking over. Everything had been dealt with, there was no outstanding issues in the ship. It was actually pretty miraculous given the number of changes that the ship had undergone in the last few hours, but realistically most of those changes had been personnel and so most of the engineering call-outs had been helping the new boffins connect their boffin machines, not much in the way of any real problems.

Oh, there was one thing on the logs. Seemed like the shuttlecraft had been flagged as needing servicing. But that wasn't her problem, someone else was going to have to deal with that.

One black boot cautiously moved in front of the other when Darius slinked out of his hiding spot and crouched back down to knee-level. He saw the small opening presented and realized now was the time to execute his plan. There couldn't be any turning back now. Either he'd be successful and achieve his own personal victory against the conceited Vulcan engineer, or be caught and forever lose his agency over the shuttlebay and suffer humiliation. The stakes were too high to fail - the warp core too bright - and the tool locker so close.

While the chief petty officer walked in a different direction and presented her backside to him, he stealthily arrived at his destination then quickly tapped his abbreviated Level 4 security clearance into the locker's small LCARS panel. It softly chirped then hissed as its lock released and the panel opened, and suddenly the conn officer's dark brown eyes became wide. There were so many tools. He'd expected maybe five or six different common utility instruments but this...was an entire cabinet of close to a fifty different engineering apparatus. Several of them he recognized such as a hyperspanner, ODN recoupler, coil scanner and phase modulator, but the others were a complete mystery. All he needed was a plasma flow regulator but he didn't know exactly what it looked like and nothing was labeled. What sort of anarchy was going on in this department?!

The chief's voice called out from a partially obscured alcove. "Is that you Andrews?" Had she imagined that? It had sounded like someone was opening a panel but surely there was nobody here but her. It had been quiet, obscured by the hum of the warp core but she was sure she had heard something. After a moment without a response Naime craned her head a little but couldn't glimpse a thing. Perhaps a panel was malfunctioning. It would, at last, be something to give her purpose! She closed the display she had open and began to turn to investigate before a second much more prominent sound caught her attention: the opening of doors.

"Ensign! Good evening." Naime gave a warm greeting. She hadn't been expecting Sera for another couple of minutes but trust Vulcan punctuality to mean early. She grabbed the mug she had put down with one hand while her other, still holding a PADD, rubbed the top of her head. "It's been mostly quiet. Nothing much to report."

Sera tilted her head to Chief Naime in reply as she walked up to the petty officer who was at the end of her watch. "Given your report, am I to presume the intermix ratio issue has been resolved? Is the core harmonics back into alignment?" Sera remembered her first conversation with Naime regarding the 'sound' the cores make and the care it took to keep it running in a harmonious manner. It had been a fascinating discussion.

"Indeed, that turned out to be a bit of a paper tiger." Naime moved to hold out the PADD in her hand to the ensign but just in the nick of time she stopped herself "Wait, no not that one." Though she was sure that the Vulcan would not mind that she had been spending the last idle minutes of her shift engrossed in a work of romantic fiction it would be a much better idea to hand her the maintenance report rather than said work. There were no details of warp harmonics contained in that particular text.

Luckily the device that Naime actually wanted was just in reach so with a graceless lean she scooped it up and duly presented it. "The issue was with the recalibration we had to perform after the fused plasma conduit was reopened. We had overcompensated for the damages so the plasma was running much cleaner than we had calibrated the mix for. The warp core is now back to singing it's merry song, sir."

Darius' breathing began to increase while he momentarily squinted his eyes shut. The sound of the multiple voices he could now hear meant the chief petty officer wasn't alone anymore...and listening to the hesitant and pointed cadence of the other female voice, he identified it as her. His nemesis. The conn officer snapped his eyes open and once again stared at the multitude of unidentifiable engineering tools. He'd have to call a hail mary on this one, and so he began to grab as many instruments as he could and stuff them into his pockets. Hopefully the odds would be in his favor and he could discern the one he needed later once he escaped back to the shuttlebay. Five, then eight, then ten tools now bulged the sides of his dark pants' pockets before he tried to fit another two inside and they instead slipped out and clinked on the deck plating. Shit! He picked them up then put both in his rear pocket before tapping his commbadge and loudly whispering, "B-K, the egg has two yolks! I repeat, the egg has two yolks!" Darius hastily closed the cabinet but left it slightly ajar in his haste to retreat back to his original hiding alcove and retrace his steps to the upper level.

Kalliste's commbadge chirped and Darius' concerned voice crackled through the line. Egg yolks. Two. It was excrement fan time, wasn't it? "Get out of there, Chief - we can get the tools another way!"

He tapped his commbadge twice to discreetly relay a makeshift, non-verbal affirmative chirp then reassessed the path to his prior hiding spot behind the large warp core. The only way out was either through the front door covered by both engineers, or back up to the Jefferies tube from which he'd arrived. There wasn't much of a choice. He peeked his head out from the alcove just a fraction of a bit to check the lines of sight, then didn't hesitate to crouch back down and take two large, bounding steps before launching himself airborne into a forward somersault with his hands tightly clutching his pockets. He rolled back into hiding behind the pulsing dilithium crystal articulation frame then scooted his back up against it in a sitting position while he held his breath and remained silent.

Sera tilted her head assent. "That is agreeable, Chief Naime. You are relie..." She stopped mid-sentence as the sound of tools hitting the decking suddenly rang out. She turned and walked towards the sound and heard a hushed tone calling out to someone else something inexplicable regarding...eggs?

"I was not aware you had additional personnel here, Chief."

Well at least Naime knew she wasn't hearing things. "I'd thought I'd heard Andrews a minute ago but nobody responded when I called." Who else would be here? Main engineering wasn't exactly a social hub and if someone was trying to hide that could only signal nefarious purposes, or an impending practical joke.

She followed close behind the ensign, peeking over her shoulder. "Who's there?" She called out in a firmer voice.

It seemed Darius' presence had been detected but only intermittently. Judging from the chief's audible question, his covert operational stealth hadn't been completely compromised. There was a still a chance, and he was, of course, a former marine with superior warfare skills which had honed him into a fine instrument of destruction during the Dominion War and would now...help him escape main engineering? This was so stupid, he finally thought to himself with a shake of his head. But he'd committed to this adventure and now it was time to put practical theory into application. 'Fight the enemy where they aren't', like the ancient Earth general Sun Tzu had once said. Or something like that. He looked back to his previous hiding alcove in the opposite direction of the ladder to the upper level then slowly pulled one of the unknown tools from his pocket and raised himself to a bent crawl. First the subterfuge, then the escape. It was only about 15 meters to the ladder which he could make in four to five steps. The conn officer firmly tossed the instrument back into the small recess where it loudly clinked and bounced off several bulkhead facings before coming to a rest on the deck.

"Alright someone is definitely up to something nefarious." Upon hearing the clatter Naime immediately picked up her pace and stepped around the ensign to investigate the alcove there was something on the floor, something out of place she knelt down to inspect it.

It was an innocent looking item, a Hötzendorf manifolding torquator, used for a specific calibration of dilithium containment units. "We haven't used this since last week, I don't know why anyone would have taken it out of the locker. It's not used in anything else."

Sera remained a few steps back as Naime stepped into the alcove and crouched down to inspect one of the tools that had been carelessly dropped to the decking. Naime's explanation was use of vision, to be sure, but Sera's senses picked up more than just an erstwhile tool...a scent.

Inhaling deeply through her nose, Sera was suddenly somewhere else, again taken by what was becoming a more frequent inconvenience...

Sera stepped towards the Conn officer, well into what would be considered his personal space. The differences in their respective heights were...negligible. Her eyes darted to the juncture where the red of his collar met the uniformed jacket, and she was caught by the similarity between the red of his uniform and that of the crimson blood which flowed through the vessels under his rich, umber skin. She purposefully leaned in and breathed deeply through her nose, taking in his scent in a distinctly alien manner.

He smelled of citrus, clean and bright, with nuances of cedar and cinnamon...and of course the pervasive undertone of Human pheromones that many of her kind found overwhelming...

Sera jerked suddenly as she was 'dropped' back into reality. It was the same scent. The Conn officer had come into Main Engineering, unannounced? Her brow rose in a most imperious manner, the only outward manifestation of her growing vexation with the man.

She looked down to Naime, who was rising back to standing. "Chief, we appear to have a ch'kariya in our house." Turning slightly so that Sera's field of vision encompassed a greater area of engineering, she got an idea.

Her hand tapped on her comm badge, and she was rewarded with the chirping sound. "Ensign Sera to Mr. Darius, please respond..."

The engineering duo was rewarded with the faint chirp of a comm badge opening a channel somewhere in the distance.

"How efficient are you at hunting, Naime?" Sera asked, her eyes filling with a predatory gleam that hinted at the Vulcan's far more primal past.

"Well sir, I prefer to conceptualise myself as some kind of ruminant ungulate, perhaps with a nice coat of wool and some keratin horns." Naime still spoke in a conversational tone but her body language had changed completely to something more alert as she began to slowly advance in the direction of the sound. It was clear from the sniff Naime had heard that the Vulcan officer had identified a scent, she had to wonder if that was something she might have picked up on had she not lost her sense of smell. It was no matter though, she could still hear. She raised a hand to point in the direction she could best identify the sound having come from.

Another expletive escaped Darius' lips in a hushed whisper. Quickly pulling his commbadge from his chest, he turned it over in his hand and dug his short fingernails into its rear access panel then removed the housing to expose the inner circuitry. Time wasn't on his side now that his position had probably been revealed. They'd be coming for him quickly, if not momentarily. It was time to take drastic action.

Former SFMC personnel weren't often the brightest lightbulbs Starfleet had to offer but they were exceptionally competent in the art of improvisation. Their training and deployments demanded it, and ground engagements during the Dominion War had honed it into a fine skill. The red-collared pilot rapidly pulled the hyperspanner from one of his pockets then used it to manipulate the small subspace transceiver assembly within the comm device, making several hasty adjustments to bypass the control program then directly link the audio speaker to the dermal sensor. His thick fingers fidgeted a bit but he focused on the task and reassembled the device's back panel. Then he blindly swung his arm just barely past the side of the warp core's bulkhead and sent the commbadge flying in the air several meters until it landed in the general vicinity of where he assumed the engineers to be. Hopefully the lure would bear fruit. He pushed both of his index fingers into his ears to plug them in anticipation.

The sound of the something clanging against the decking near the warp core was picked up by Sera's sensitive hearing, and she rushed over--recognizing this was a possible ruse to allow for escape--to see what exactly Mr. Darius had used as 'bait.' If he had thrown one of 'her' tools...well, Sera was Vulcan, but she was also an engineer. A 'keelhauling' might be an appropriate punishment in her mind.

Sera looked down at the commbadge glimmering on the decking. It did not matter. The ship was only so large, she could hunt him at her leisure. She crouched down to pick it up when a curious thing occurred. An ear-splitting sound erupted from the device, sending the physiologically noxious sound straight through her skull. She clamped her hands over her ears in a desperate attempt to shut out the agonizing sound. Gritting her teeth against the pain, Sera collapsed to her knees.

Suddenly she was somewhere else...a jefferies tube, climbing, and then a jarring sensation--her hands grasped at nothing and she was falling, falling, falling...Sera suddenly screamed as the noxious sound of reality collided with bone breaking crunch of her body hitting the grates decks below where she had lost her hold on the rung. Anyone looking down on main engineering from above would see the ChEng curled up in an attempt to protect herself from attack both heard and utterly unseen.

Instinct took hold for the other engineer. Too many times in her previous life had there been a sound like that. Screeching metal on metal as excavation machinery buckled, high pressure holmium containment screaming out in delight at the prospect of escape, the nightmare alarms that could smell the poisons in the air, and all of these mixed with the screams of some poor soul. In every instance of horrible sounds in the mines there had been one constant: her comrades in danger. Naime always looked after the herd. She went into action.

There wasn't much thought in it as she crushed the device under her heel, only the urgency of knowing that it was hurting Sera. With the source of the noise taken care of she knelt down next to the ensign and gave a quick visual check for any injuries. Nothing visible. "Ensign, are you alright?"

With no immediate response Naime put a hand on the Vulcan's shoulder. Sera looked scared and hurt and even if Naime knew Vulcan's don't get scared like the rest of us she couldn't help it. She knew it wasn't advisable from a first aid perspective but instinct was still in charge, probably also the reason why she didn't consider Sera's distaste for being touched. "It's okay. I'm here." She murmured.

The ear-splitting trap had activated and Darius performed a quick visual check from behind his cover. He observed the two engineers gathered around his commbadge, or the remains of it, which was verified after he watched the Farian woman grind her boot into the metallic object and disable it. He caught a quick glimpse of his Vulcan nemesis who appeared to be on the ground much to his initial delight. The bigger their ears, the harder they fall, he smugly mused to himself before sprinting from his crouched position to the nearby ladder which led back up to the next engineering deck and the Jefferies tube from which he came. He began his rapid ascent while his distraction was still in play then cast another glance downward to see how far away his pursuers were. Something seemed wrong. Neither were in pursuit and it now appeared the Vulcan officer was incapacitated more seriously than he'd anticipated. He slowed his ascent then stopped. Shit! Why couldn't things just go according to plan?

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

Ensign S'Ers-a M'Lyr'Zor
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo-A

CWO2 Kalliste Bacri
Conn Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC M'Lyr'Zor]

CWO3 Lamar Darius
Conn Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Tarin]

CPO Afthinam Niame
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Ullswater]

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