Resistance is...exhausting!

Posted on 28 Mar 2012 @ 4:52am by Lieutenant Lilou Zaren & Captain Jonathan Holliday

4,465 words; about a 22 minute read

Mission: Episode 01 - Project Sienna
Location: USS Galileo - Holodeck 2
Timeline: MD 01 - 0600 hrs

[ON]

She woke in darkness, fully alert. Her quarters were small and spartan, the way she liked them, the single table and chair piled with rolled transparencies of ship specifications and ODN outlines. She tapped her PADD bringing the screen to life and saw the time - 0500 gleaming merrily at her. She had another two hours and change before she was due for her shift. She put her head back down and waited. No. She was clearly not getting any more sleep tonight. Slipping into her uniform, she decided she might as well make use of the free time suddenly availed her by her waking mind. Slipping into the turbolift, she rode up to Deck 2 and checked the readouts on the holodecks. Both were open. A rare treat. Tapping in her PADD ID, she uploaded her exercise routines and stepped inside as the doors opened.

"Begin Command Sequence - Exercise Pattern 2, Lilou Peers."

"Exercise Pattern 2 commencing in 5, 4, 3, 2..."

The was a loud crash and the air vacated the room. Adrenaline poured through her system as she took off at a sprint. The cold air streamed past her face, colliding with her back, tearing at her hair as she fought the grappling frozen hands of space. Shunting through a narrow opening, she slammed her elbow into an emergency panel and blast doors crashed closed behind her, sealing off the breach in the hull. The walls - close and dull grey - loomed around her like steel giants. She leapt over a burst pipe, flipped in the air and hit the ground with her shoulder, rolling into an open hatchway.

Furiously, she scurried down the narrow crawlspace, twisting on herself as she reached the end of the line to get her feet ahead of her and kicked the access plate away with a bang. It fell, catapulting three stories below her into an abyss of sparking red lights. She could hear a thousand tiny feet skittering up behind her. Quickly, she unhooked her self-ratcheting grapple from her belt and threw it, catching hold of an access walkway high above and leaping out into the open channel beside the engine, swinging wide as the massive nano-spider infestation poured like lemmings after her, ricocheting off the sides of the channel into the waiting sparks where they sizzled and screamed.

Slowly, hand over hand; she pulled herself up the grapple line until she reached the walkway. With a grunt, she swung herself up onto it and started running again, ducking under low-hanging cables, leaping over piles of cargo boxes, hauling herself up into access shafts that navigated through the ceilings of corridors. For the next thirty-five minutes, she was a blur of activity, sprinting, leaping, rolling, catching hold of hanging bars and catapulting herself across or over them. Her breath was short and burning her throat as she skidded to a halt in the mess hall to see four Borg drones turning to face her. She dropped into a crouch, overturning a table and peering out from behind it to fire her phaser at them. She took one down in the first flurry then threw herself into a side roll, ducking behind another overturned table to fire at the next. It took about ten minutes, but she finally managed to take down a second. As she turned to make another tactical move, she found the fourth of the drones had somehow come up behind her. Well, there was a nice tidy explanation for why she hadn't gone the security and tactical route like her mother. Sloppy-

Its hand gripped her throat, lifting her bodily from the floor so that her feet dangled off the ground. She dropped her phaser, grasping instead onto its arm, swinging her legs to kick at it to no avail. Her breaths were ragged, the pressure on her neck increasing the more she struggled.

"Resistance is futile," it said gently. "But you don't want to resist - do you?"

"Shove off!" she choked; swinging her legs at it again, she caught it around the waist and used that leverage to give herself just enough reverse pressure to breathe. Snarling, she scrabbled for one of the tubes sticking out of its neck and yanked, dark blue mess spewing over her hand and following an arc outwards.

The sound of heavy boots to the side and also behind her informed her of the approach of yet more. The third drone was still somewhere and more were trooping in from the corridors. Too much noise. Damn it. The now disconnected drone's hand around her neck released as she collapsed to the floor, rubbing her throat and coughing and scrambling towards the corner.

As an early bird himself, John wasn't used to having much competition for the holodecks. It had already happened once when he had tried to slip in quietly one evening, and he had ended up having his butt handed to him in a sparring match by their Betazoid crew member. For a change, he had decided to try going early in the morning to get a match in, but to no avail...both holodecks had successfully been stolen from him.

Sighing as he stood in the corridor outside the large metallic entry doors, John looked up at the panel, and saw the program being run was a pre-programmed one of crew design, rather than one of the standard Starfleet protocols that had been added to the Galileo's computer memory. Curiously, he tapped in his override code to release the doors, which dutifully slid open ahead of him.

A few steps into the rather industrial design of the program, John had still very little idea over what the parameters were designed to be. He decided to take the only obvious route and follow it through. After a few steps, he caught a glimpse of Federation technology rather out of place against the dark and oppressive background, it looked like a phaser.

Bending down to inspect the device, John looked at the settings, it was certainly set high, in fact, anything that managed to be on the receiving end of a discharge was likely to end up dead, if not badly wounded, and according to the capacitor, it had been recently fired.
As he stood back up, he saw the reason the weapon had been fired. A Borg drone lay slumped against a wall, phaser wounds having torn through its cybernetic systems easier than a knife through butter. John's curiosity was now well and truly peaked. Quickly, he got back to his feet, and sprinted down the corridor towards whatever lay ahead.

Eventually, the grunts and groans of combat became audible, and John followed his instincts to guide him towards the source, hopefully something that would give him an answer. It only took another moment or so before he came across the sight of a rather tangled up officer, currently surrounded by an ever-closer approaching set of drones.

Still he had no idea what the program was for, a survival mission, hand to hand combat, or just some kind of crazy suicidal design, but he was probably going to find out the answer from this individual. Raising the phaser, he quickly took aim at the two drones approaching from her rear and fired, watching as the deep orange glow of the weapon's beam leapt forth from his hand, the two drones' chest plating exploding in a shower of sparks as the particle beam ripped through their currently un-adapted Borg technology, giving them no option but to slump to the floor.

Lilou was close to calling it quits. Breathing hurt; her lungs burned from exertion, her neck throbbed from constriction, her body ached everywhere, and she was pretty sure she'd come out of this with more bruises than she'd planned on. She'd only made it past the second Borg troupe once in the two years she'd been running this simulation and she'd never once reached the end. Which was sad, when she thought about it, considering she'd written the program and knew what happened in it. At least in theory. Somehow, something new always came through. She'd left too many variables, she supposed. Like that one telling her she wanted to be assimilated? Where had that come from?

A phaser blast erupted from across the room, shaking her from her thoughts; she flattened herself against the floor, staring wide-eyed at the officer at the mess hall doors who'd just taken out two of the drones in one shot. What- had she programmed in another survivor? She would have remembered something like that, wouldn't she? Giving herself help in something like this certainly didn't sound like her... A hand gripped her uniform at the back and hauled her up into the air. Grunting, she jerked a photon torch from her thigh holster and cut the drone's arm off, thumping resolutely back to the ground and rolling to her knees, gasping for air from the impact. Blearily, she pulled herself to her feet before... "Gah!" she wheezed, half-choking as she ducked the drone's remaining arm swinging towards her and shoved the engineering tool between its collarbones, driving upward. The force of the attack shoved the torn irretrievably deep and she stumbled back, panting. The room was empty but for the two of them. She scrubbed her face against the inside of her arm, wiping away sweat and Borg-fluids, and had to clear her throat twice before she could get words out. "You're... not part of my program, are you?" she panted.

Watching with a look of shock on his face as the crewmember he had met dispatched the final drone; John lowered his phaser and smiled.

"I hope not, unless you have a habit of including your superior officers in a Borg loaded holodeck program?" Noting the lack of any further aggressors, John no longer felt the need to hold onto the phaser in his hand any more, and gently tossed it aside, letting it roll along the floor before coming to a rest somewhere near a small pile of debris.

"Lieutenant Commander John Holliday, welcome aboard Miss..."

She was too tired to do anything but gape. Superior- Lieutenant Commander Holliday- the XO? The XO was in her Borg program? "No, sir, I'm not, sir. Peers," she drew herself up to her full height, which - she could freely admit - wasn't terribly impressive. She lifted her hand to salute, a glob of blue oil & biofluid dripped with a plop onto her boot. She winced. "Master Warrant Officer Lilou Peers, Engineering, sir." In a distant part of the ship, an alarm began to sound. Another hull breach. "Did I overstay, sir? Am I needed somewhere? I didn't hear a command call-" Another glob dripped and she shot a dark look at her saluting hand.

"At ease Warrant Officer" John sensed the sudden level of tension in her voice. Considering he had only wandered in here to satisfy his own curiosity, John felt a little embarrassed that he had caused one of his crew to react in such an official way at such an early hour.

"There's no emergency, calm down, the warp core is still in one piece. I just saw the program running and thought I'd come and take a look - fighting Borg is a pretty crazy workout - and pretty realistic by the looks of it "he pointed towards the various Borg fluids that coated her outfit, seemingly as part of a very well programmed scenario.

"Oh," she puffed the sound, some of the tension releasing. As her hand dropped from salute, another slough of goo slumped to the ground at her feet. Lilou cleared her throat awkwardly. "Like my mother always said, 'the devil is in the details', sir." She shifted slightly, looking at him. "It's... a personal nightmare of mine. I love machines so the idea that they'd take over humanoids and turn against me... well. It keeps me going even when I feel like stopping. Most of the exercise simulations available on my last assignment made me want to take a nap - beaches at sunset and gyms looking out over high-rise cities..." She shrugged. "This... is motivating." The alarm was getting louder. "Did you... ah..." She glanced at the wreckage surrounding them. "Did you want to see the rest? There should be a hull breach on Deck 5 now..." She squinted. "I think. Haven't made it past that last group in a while." Her lips twitched into a wary smile. "I guess I should be thanking you."

"Well" he said, looking around at the relatively destructive scene that was laid out in front of him. It was true that he had been looking for a workout this morning, although this wasn't exactly what he had originally had in mind. Rather than a Borg invasion, he had mostly been looking forward to getting up close with a treadmill and some weights.

"I suppose we can always see where this ends...you did remember to leave the safeties on right? I don't fancy getting assimilated on our first day out of dock!"

"Computer, pause simulation." The random sparks that had been showering from torn cables in the ceiling froze in mid-fall; the goo leaking out of the drones on the floor stilled. "See. Safe as Kansas," she assured him. "The key is to not let them catch you. And if you see any piles of things moving, avoid those." She paused; realizing details were probably something he needed to come along on her disturbing mental trip with her. "Nano-spiders," she explained. "They're burrowers. Explaining those in sickbay is... not fun." She looked at the door and frowned. "Computer, one replacement photon torch," she asked the air. The requested item clattered to the floor in front of her. As she bent to retrieve it, and to search for the phaser the XO had tossed to the side, she said, "You might want to ask for some weapons. I remember it gets pretty nasty once we seal the new breach." She glanced at him, "Ready?"

Nodding in acknowledgement of her comment, John decided that seeing as he had wandered through this far, he may as well get his workout one way or another.

"Computer, give me a phaser rifle - compression class" As he spoke, the fizzle of the hologrid quickly gave way to the dull metal thud of the weapon materialising just above the floor in front of him. Reaching down he picked up the rifle, and brought the power cell, and the built in torch online.

"Lead on!" John called back with a grin on his face as he began to see a little further into the psyche of his new engineering officer - he had to admit, it was a rather interesting, almost deluded situation to be in, but sometimes you just had to let everything go and see what happened next.

"Computer, reinitiate simulation." The sparks continued their descent to the corpses. The doors of the mess hall opened as she approached them. She cracked her neck, "Hope you like to run," she said with a sideways smile and took off, leaping over the wreckage in the halls and ducking into a non-working turbolift as the sounds of heavy boots came towards them again. With a yelp, she grabbed John and yanked him in with her, holding her breath as a squadron approached, paused, and then continued on down the corridor. She let out a breath and bent to the controls on the turbolift. Yanking a spanner from the holster on her thigh, she pulled the aesthetic plate off and tossed it carelessly to the ground, searching through the data lines. Quickly, she cut two and cross-paired them. The doors whirred shut. She shoved her arm down into the control panel, shining a light in and peering in around her hand until she found the thick metal coil. Holding the light with her teeth, she connected a clipped data line to the frayed end of the coil and the lift began to move. "Full service simulation," she said, rocking back on her heels and watch the deck numbers tick by on the screen above them. "Almost..."

The doors whirred open; wreckage and bodies were streaming out a giant hole in the ship, torn into the inky black beyond. Before she had time to catch hold of something, she was falling sideways with the others. Grunting, she caught herself on a wedged section of wall, which began to buckle the second she grabbed hold of it. She fumbled at her side, grasping for the phaser, which slipped from her hand and plummeted into the abyss. "Control panel!" she shouted, fighting to swing her legs up and onto the wedged plane. "Shoot it, shoot it!"

The level of authenticity in this program looked like it was far beyond what you would normally find in the standard Starfleet training programs, for a start the software had obviously been designed to let you interface with the ship's gravity plating to allow it to simulate the effects of a deck decompressing. That said, right now he really didn't have much interest in the state of affairs with the environmental controls, and more to the fact that he was almost horizontal laid out across the desk, his shoulder wedged almost solidly against a small doorway as he struggled to keep himself inside the simulation. Turning his rifle, he quickly squeezed off a blast as best he could, almost missing the target as the atmosphere was slowly being dragged out through the breach. Luckily, the panel was large enough for him to score a hit, and after a shower of sparks, an emergency bulkhead slammed down across the breach, as almost immediately the debris and detritus that was being thrown around by the rapidly escaping atmosphere settled back down to the ground, along with his companion in this nightmare.

"Damn...you...you really made this real didn't you?"

"Unph," Lilou grunted, gingerly rolling up from where she'd been flattened by the sudden renewed pressure on the deck. "No point in the training if you give yourself cheat codes. Equipment replacements and an escape hatch are more than enough. Otherwise, there's no reason to push yourself to the limit, is there?" Slowly, she stood up, carefully rolling her shoulder as she looked around the trashed corridor, eyeing the blackened control panel. "Nice aim, sir." A laser blasted past her shoulder and she yelped diving for cover as a group of drones rounded the corner firing. "I don't remember programming that many unfriendlies on this deck," she muttered to herself. "Maybe they're congregating from other parts of the ship. Stupid Borg hive mind..." she cursed under her breath. She started to peer up over the wreckage blockage and immediately had to duck as another flurry of laser fire blasted past her head. "I can't even get a good enough look to count them..."

The appearance of additional drones was, he had to admit, rather unusual, it wasn't like the Borg to act in that way, but within this simulated environment, they could only do what they had been programmed to do, and in this case, it was to be merciless, seemingly preferring to eliminate rather than assimilate their targets. It wasn't standard doctrine, but it made things a little harder to anticipate, he could see why the program was so popular.

"Let's just go with lots shall we?" John replied with a hint of sarcasm on his mind as additional weapons fire began to soar overhead. Taking cover behind the doorway that he had only a few moments ago been pressed up against for dear life, he looked around to see the spine chilling image of drones making their way through the wreckage.

"You programmed the drones with weapons? Man...talk about kicking it up a gear!" He called out as a deep green discharge slammed into the wall next to him, leaving a patch of charred metal, blackened and twisted. Taking a deep breath, he swung his rifle up and fired a few shots across the distance between them, managing to clip a couple of drones well enough to disable them, but missing the rest. In the darkness it was hard to see exactly where he was aiming

"Just keeping things interesting, sir!" she called back, crawling to the other end of her makeshift protection. The overturned console still had flickering lights. "Got an idea!" she announced, digging into her thigh holster for a sonic driver to loosen the bolts on the exterior of the console. When they were loose enough, she tugged the plate off and almost tossed it aside, before looking over at him. "Think this'd help at all with those blasts?" she asked.

"It might do the job!" John shouted over the noise of continuous phaser blasts, managing to return a couple of shots of his own in between the emerald green plasma bolts that every few moments threatened to take his head off should they get too close.
"If that thing still has power, we can blow them out into space!"

She beamed at him, the verdant blasts of laser fire lighting her face in wild bursts. "Shield yourself! I'm about to be useless for a minute or two!" She laid the panel on the ground and kicked it towards him, firing several blasts over top the barricade before diving bodily inside the console.

"Just don't do anything stupid! It might be a holodeck but you can still come out with a few cuts and bruises more than you expected!"

Grabbing the panel, John let off a few more shots from his rifle before turning back inside the door to the relative safety that he had been hiding behind only moments previously. Picking up the panel, he waited for the inevitable.

It took more than two minutes and while she tinkered, testing data lines with her tricorder and re-routing the power supply in a repeating cycle, she could hear the fire-fight going on all around them. "There," she made the final connection and scurried backwards out of the console. "I give up! I give up!" she shouted. "Come and make me a machine!" The laser fire slowed, and she peeked up over the wreckage. "I don't care anymore. Just don't kill me."

The drones moved as one, crossing towards her. They passed where John was hunkered down and safe, seemingly having disregarded him as a nuisance in favor of the promise of assimilation. She climbed up onto the wreckage, holding her hands up. "Just don't shoot me, yeah?" They were getting closer. Closer still. They'd reached a mere foot away from her, circling her island of junk with her on it. Come on, come on...

"Stand down and join us, human."

"I'm not human," she told them. "Run, run, run!" she called and leapt over their heads, hitting the deck with a jarring grunt and scrambling at a run away. "Four, three, two-" She covered her head with her hands as the console exploded, tearing the whole unit of drones asunder. Panting, she sat up, rubbing her aching shoulder. "Well. That was interesting." She flopped back on the deck. "Thank you, sir. I haven't had this much fun in a while."

"Damn....I said blow them into space not...blow another hole in the deck...the bulkhead release would have done the job!" John looked around as the muffled explosion finally died down and left his ears to recover from the unexpected boom that had passed through that section of the simulation.

"Your Borg need some work....far too nice for my liking...never met a drone that could speak before either! That said...the guns were a nice touch...." He sat with his back against the wall, letting his rifle drop down in front of him, panting as the adrenaline slowly began to work out of his system.

"So...." he half laughed and half coughed as a mouthful of smog and dust made its way into his lungs. Regardless of their holographic nature, this simulation had been programmed to be as real as possible it seems.

"You come here often?" He smirked as he enjoyed the silence that began to descend over the holodeck.

Lilou shut her eyes and laughed, the sound escaping from her like oxygen from a leaking environmental suit. When the last hiccups died down, she leaned up on her elbows. "Not as often as I should. Maybe once a month or so." She breathed in the smoke and disorder. "You're welcome to use it anytime you like."

"I might just have to do that....you engineers certainly have an...active imagination....just lemme catch my breath before heading out...good job I got time to hit the sonic showers before my shift starts on the Bridge...damn that was a hard workout"

She rolled stiffly to her stomach and pulled herself wearily to standing, rolling her shoulder slightly as she did so. "No better way to start the day. And there's more still to go, but..." She stretched her arms up, her back making a series of popping sounds. "Computer, simulation off, please."

"Simulation counting down in five, four, three, two-" The debris and detritus hitched a second, like static, and they were left in the empty holodeck, all smooth walls and clean floors. The goo was gone, but the feeling of it sticking to her skin and hair remained; her uniform was askew, sleeves hitched up to her elbows, and the comforting weight of the tool holsters on her thighs and waist were gone. At least until she donned the real ones on her upcoming shift. With a little hiss, she bent sideways, caught her knee, and pulled, feeling her ribs creak open once more after all the impact. When she was upright again, and saw him still there, it finally hit home that he wasn't going away like the simulation had. He was a part of her permanent life aboard the Galileo. Awkwardness reasserted itself inside of her with a roar as she realized she had no idea what to say or do. She was grateful for the company, the temporary staving off of the loneliness that drove her to express herself through Borg simulations.

"Well then....I best get prepared for the rest of the day....I'll see you at the briefing later on this morning, don't be late!"

And with that, the commander pulled himself to his feet and headed for the holodeck doors, maybe one day before this mission was complete; he would get the holodeck to himself. He had certainly enjoyed himself, but sometimes, a date with the treadmill is all that it needs.



[OFF]

Lt Cdr Jonathan Holliday
Executive Officer
USS Galileo

MWO Lilou Peers
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

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