Responding to the call

Posted on Tue Nov 30, 2021 @ 5:44pm by Commander Ajani Carter & Lieutenant Commander Sunita Conlon & Lieutenant Commander Ethan Brash & Lieutenant Sibyl Danzer & Lieutenant JG Karl Scheer

Mission: Episode 6: Discovery
Location: Bridge
Timeline: MD -01 0900hrs
2416 words - 4.8 OF Standard Post Measure

While the ship had changed course several hours before there had been nothing to do other than runs sensor sweeps and maintain the ship along the way. Neither of which needed the senior officers, least of all the Captain. So... Ajani had decided to allow the duty shift officers to do their jobs without her hovering and had remained in bed until the start of alpha shift and arrived on the bridge just an hour before, the other senior staff were... somewhere else carrying out their duties.

The Captain was sat at the end of the situation table, she had chosen for the table to display a 2D image rather than the normal 3D, she wanted to be able to see everyone on the bridge, her XO was at the back, where tactical had claimed as their own.

They would be dropping from normal space soon, the star ahead was a dim Brown Dwarf judging by the readings, maybe a little heavier than it should be but that was a puzzle they could solve once the distress call had been answered. Although it wasn't unusual to find no planets around brown dwarf it was common to find something, a small belt of a failed planet or a cloud of dust but sensors were picking nothing of the kind up, and that was unusual. It was almost too clean.

"Sunny" Ajani unknowingly called her XO by the brand new nickname Lise had coined "You seeing this? Or rather not seeing this?" she mused.

"I am... I promise we calibrated everything before giving the sign-off at Illiran. I'm no astrophysicist, but these readings don't seem to be adding up. It's like one plus one equals four. Whatever is going on could have something to do with what happened to the Aurora."

"Feels like it has been cleared out" she hadn't ever heard of anything like this, even the Dyson Sphere the Enterprise had encountered; although whole star systems have been burned up to build it there was still plenty of debris laying around.

"Let me check in with Science to see if they can make heads or tails of it," Sunny started typing into the side of the situation table for input from the Science stations.

Ajani stood and walked over to the helm station, "Karl" she said stepping into his raised station ring, "Keep an eye on the warp field" she had a suspicion, something that another ship had encountered. "I don't know what but the closer we get the more I get a feeling."

Karl nodded, "Yes ma'am," and brought up a display of the current status of the warp field so he could keep a better eye in case the situation change.

Nodding she turned to head back to her seat, her pilot didn't need her looking over her shoulder. It was around this moment that the warp-field popped. Looking back she would have sworn she could hear the pop. It was of course impossible! The ship was torn out of its little pocket of subspace and thrown back into real space with such force it should have ripped a nacelle off. It did, however pitch her off her feet and into the situation table.

Karl cursed audibly as the ship was thrown back into normal space and began to fight to maintain control. He strained as his fight with the controls seemed to do nothing till finally bringing the ship back under his control and just barley avoiding crashing into some object.

With a grunt of pain Ajani righted her self "Report" she called dragging herself, suspected broken ribs and all to her chair

Standing opposite the Commander, Sunny had been tossed backwards, flailing her arms in an instinctual and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to apparently fly herself upright. She was sitting on her butt assessing herself and the bridge. Nothing seemed catastrophic with either and she let a crewman help by hauling her to her feet.

She made her way to the engineering station, and sent the crewman there, bleeding from a cut above their eye from their head hitting the station, to get medical attention.

"No surprise, we dropped out of warp. Looks like something threw off the field calculations and basically sheered one side off the field. Hull integrity and deflectors are mostly good, but we're lucky the ship is so compact or we might have lost a nacelle. That spit-shine didn't really last, huh?"

Karl was reviewing the sensor readings of what was in front of them, "Um Commander, you're probably going to want to take a look at this."

Ajani made her way back to the helm stations, the ship was still pitching a little and chaotically enough that she stumbled a little. "Talk to me Karl" she said holding on and looking at his readings.

Karl nodded, "Those platforms are not what worries me." His hand moved to bring up a display of a section of the sensor reading. "Those platforms are connected by these cables," he motioned to the indicated cable, "From what I can tell they are a few hundred kilometers in diameter."

"Its not going to be easy" she said pulling more power to the scan, "Look, they are all interconnected, those big thick ones are connected to each other using finer strands." She was a pilot, had come up through the ranks as one and had been a combat Ace many times over during the Dominion war. "I don't think the Eagle could manage those turns and twists at the kinds of speeds we are carrying. I think...." she didn't get to finish the thought.

Karl sat back and watched the exchange, foot tapping in irritation. Finally he spoke up loud enough for everyone to hear him, "I can do it." Suddenly realizing that everyone's eyes were upon him Kar spoke up again. "It's going to be tight and slow going but I can do it."

Carter took a deep breath, "You are going to have to shed a hell of a lot of speed, with the primary systems in flux like this you might not have the power you need for a tight turn." She really didn't know if her new pilot could do it, but they were running out of time. "Do it" she said forcing herself back to her own station.

"Ethan, get me all the power you can, but leave enough for a shield collision. I would rather have em and not need them"

The Operations Chief responded to the Captain's orders, entering in commands at his station. The bridge was devoid of speech for a moment as everyone stared at the readout on the main screen. Data was constantly streaming to it, revealing a cobweb of danger zones. The red-skinned Ethan perched his lips as he took the scene in. With nonchalance, he filled the silence, "So, Karl," He said as he began fine-tuning power distribution away from the shields, "I'm over here at Ops," he glanced over at Lieutenant Scheer, "You're over there at the conn," he swiped down on one of the non-critical system's power gauge. A down-pitching hum noise accompanied the motion as available power on another window went up by several percentages, "We're all in imminent danger and probably about to die," A wicked, white, toothy grin broke free of his crimson lips, "... is it tuesday, already?"

Karl swiveled his chair around to face his console, "Nah Tuesday is when we do this PLUS dodge incoming torpedo fire. This is more of a Wednesday." As he chuckled his response he started organizing the new surplus of power that Ethan was giving him. If his math was right, which it was quite possible to not be, he wasn't going to need all off it.

"Sibyl, can you reinforce the forward shields, pull power from the other shield grids if you need to. Work together" Ajani was on edge, she was trying not to show it, she didn't know how well she was doing as the view screen showed the first of the supporting strands approached, even at this distance they seemed to glow, a spiders web made from strands thicker than Luna and many AU's in length... They were the fly!

Having been thrown from her station, Sibyl managed her way back with an arm across her belly where she'd struck a console at counter height while standing. "Aye Captain, reinforcing forward shields." She managed with her free arm to rearrange the shielding to cover the ship's proverbial face as they barreled headlong into the web. Sibyl had to stay in the power budget Ethan was allocating, as the rest was currently being demanded for CONN. "Any chance we could spare a little juice for a last ditch phaser shot to cut through any close calls in this macrame?"

Carter shock her head, "We can't risk it, if we cut the wrong one we could de-stabilize then entire network," she glanced back at Sibyl and gave her a half shrug, "it's up to Karl now."

With everything set, Karl took a deep breath. All of this was riding on his confidence that he could pull off something that no one since Captain Picard on the Enterprise D had been able to do. "Computer," He called out, "Switch helm controls over to manual." Karl placed steady hands on the controls before him, the right corner of his mouth tweaked up into a sly smile, "Let's do this," he thought to himself. "Initiating a five second burst at full impulse. We'll drift the rest of the way only using impulse if our speed drops too low." With that Karl began the task of piloting the ship through the web.

Carter rolled her eyes 'loudly', 'This one is going to test me' she thought even as she smiled.

The trek began easy enough with Karl being able to easily dodge several of the first few cables. It was not until the ship had reached deeper into the "web" was everyone was starting to call it that things became more tricky. It started off with Karl having to rock the ship back and fourth from port to starboard in order to avoid any collisions, however this led to an unintended drop in speed as the spires' forces of gravity pulled on the Eagle. This coupled with the growing tightness of the web as the ship approached the center was beginning to cause a small bead of sweat to run down the side of Karl's face, "Decrease speed by point one fifty kph...pitch nose thirty degrees up...drift forty-two degrees port," Karl spoke in a low whisper to himself as he talked through every approaching cable and maneuver to avoid any collisions.

Karl's eyes narrowed as he noticed two very rapidly approaching problems. The first was that the cables ahead intersected in such a pattern that would not allow the Eagle to pass through them, in the orientation that she was currently flying. The second was that, if the ship did manage to bypass the "knot", it left them in a clear space between three different platforms and their respective gravitational fields. Looking at the obstacles between them and freedom there was no way that he could get the ship...then he saw it. There was an opening just wide enough for the Eagle to pass through, if she was on her side.

Solving problem one gave him an idea for the solution to problem two. The Eagle had lost a lot of speed during her maneuvers to get to this point in the web, but Karl still had some power left in reserve and it was enough for what he had in mind. His fingers flew across his console as he allocated the remaining power he had available to the necessary engines. Once everything was in place he increased his speed to just the right amount, pitched the nose of the ship up and rolled her onto her starboard side easily passing through the cables then rolled her back into her original position before firing one last burst of the engines at full impulse straight toward the platform in front of them. Karl simultaneously watched both the ships speed and distance to the platform, ignoring every natural instinct to take the controls, but he knew he had to get the ship closer. The platform grew closer and larger in the forward display as the speed kept creeping higher and higher until finally the Eagle had reached the threshold. Karl quickly fired the rear thrusters which caused the ship to spin around the platform, effectively using the platform's gravity to sling shot the Eagle into the clear space on the opposite side of the web.

Ajani relaxed her grip on the console. Her knuckles were slowly returning to their normal colour, but her joints ached a little from the death grip! "Well done Karl" she said aloud. "Put us above that platform" she said pointing out the window, "I have a feeling," she muttered. "Ethan, please start a scan and see if my feeling has substance."

Nodding his response Karl maneuvered the ship, a little more gently this time, into position and began to sync their orbit with that of the planet's.

"XO" Ajani turned to Sunita, "Can you get that fancy new replicator in the shuttlebay to build us a Type 11. I have a another feeling that we will need something bigger than that old class two" Carter really hated those small shuttles, but she did enjoy making junior officers fly them, just as her bosses had done to her.

Sunny had been following along with the excitement on the bridge, waiting to see if there was anything she was needed for. It was obvious why the Eagle had been managing pretty well with a revolving door of XO's: Carter could handle the bridge all by herself.

"You got it, and I can tweak it a bit to work better in the specific environment of the platform," she started doing some calculations and designing while keeping one eye and ear on what was going on around her.

Ajani nodded, "I will have the scans send down to you as they come in. But plan for the aft space to be full of people at some point" Sunny nodded and the turbolift doors closed. Carter turned back to the view screen as the Eagle settled into postion high above the extensive and flat platform world.