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Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 | 2200 hrs | The hunt is on
Last post by Pierce -
[ Lt. JG Ashley Kerina | Access Tunnel to Forward landing Strut | Vector 3 | Deck 31| USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Nesota Kynnovan @Eirual [Show/Hide]

Ashley finally made her way down the corridor as she attempted to navigate the massive starship. She'd never been on one this large before. It was truly a marvel of modern engineering that left her in awe. But one that left her consistently lost. The turbolift was ahead and she entered as she went to Deck 29.

As the turbolift opened with the hiss, she found an access tunnel open already with minimal light. And the heat was kicked up 3 degrees celcius which was higher than the upper decks. Thankfully, she was used to it between the Orion and Romulan blood coursing through her veins. She tied her hair back into a pony tail to prevent it from coming into her face. She was curious why she and others in the science department were tasked for vole duty when there were likely others or even the ship's AI that could have done this in record timing. Something she'd have to ask Frost about later.

"Hmm... the lights aren't kicking on..." She pondered. Ashley looked for the nearest ODN conduit which she then traced back to a simple computer console interface. Tapping the controls she found the source of the issue. Being it wasn't tied to the modern LCARS systems due to lack of normal traffic, the automations didn't kick in. She toggled a few systems on and back off before finding the one accidentally that turned the lights on in the pathways.

Turning around it lit up bright like a warp core breach and she quickly turned the lights down to 24% before looking back to see it was much more of the normal tones to the corridors but slightly dimmer. This was a workable option she decided. Closing the console out, she turned to the tunnel and began her descent into it. She wasn't sure who else was tasked with this hunt, but she looked forward to meeting them.

As she descended there were sounds up ahead, likely one or two additional officers? Kerina hoped that's what it was at least. Her mind began a little racing as the excitement built a little in her. Her arm thumped an arch in the tunnel and a loud thunk as she yipped. A slight tear in her jacket saved her flesh from any residual damage but she'd need to be more careful.

"Anyone in here? Is there an access hub ahead so we can sit and discuss the plan?" She yelled into the echoes ahead of her. Her voice warm and inquiring.


""
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Episode 02: Cosmic Imperative / Re: Epi S: [Day 03 | 0900] Changing lanes
Last post by Pierce -
[ Lt. Commander Alana Pierce | Central Intelligence Suite | Deck 5 | Vector 1 | USS Theurgy ] Attn: @Krajin
[Show/Hide]

Alana sat back in her chair as she awaited Lt. Va'rek's arrival in the suite. She knew it'd be a quiet day at the moment with a lot of the Intel department scattered. Some on assignment and investigation, and unfortunately others had shifted off their mortal coil. Regardless, she had someone clearly interested in the department and that curiousity and investigative research is someone she could use. Likely mold into the role in the event something ever happened to her or she needed trusted eyes somewhere she couldn't be.

Drinking her cola, she set the glass back down on her desk as she pulled up a PADD with his service record. She remembered behind her was a display of some of her favorite 23rd century tech. The communicator, the tricorder, and the phaser. All hers from a different life...a different time. It seemed like a lifetime ago since she held those devices. On the adjacent side of her was a model of the USS Eagle. Her home for years, that she'd just recently had the opportunity to serve on once again. Although she met her end in that battle, not that she would have survived it, she had given Pierce hope for the future. A rebirth. Something she hoped to pass on to those she worked with. This crew had been through a lot and together their motly cru were doing all they could to cope. So a little 23rd century optimism was just what the doctor ordered.

The door chimed finally as she'd finished her thoughts. "Come" she stated as the door swished open and the lieutenant stepped forward with his arms behind his back. She calmly observed his posture and ability to dutifully wait. But she was old fashioned and honestly formality wasn't something she needed a lot of these days. She lifted her arm and gestured to Thane to sit down in the chair across from her desk.

"Please, sit. Can I get you anything? Tea? Cola? Coffee?" She asked kindly still seated with her legs crossed beneath the oval desk with PADDs strewn about.

"It appears you've been out of commission for some time. Something unfortunately I too can relate." She paused taking a sip before continuing.

"It seems we've been interested in learning more about each other Lieutenant. I'm a little honored and curious. What interested you about my personal profile? Any questions I can answer?" She smirked a warm smile as she folded her hands on her lap getting comfortable as she continued to assess the situation further.
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Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Day 01 [1100 hrs] New Stars
Last post by chXinya -
Day 01 [1100 hrs] New Stars

[Ens. Irnashall “Shall” ch’Xinya | Stellar Cartography | Deck 15 | Vector 3 | USS Theurgy] attn: @TWilkins

As dark as the welding goggles looked to an observer, for the user they were actually quite transparent. Unlike the archaic lenses Shall had seen in museums, modern technology allowed him to see right through these goggles with an effect little more than light sunglasses up until he triggered the welding torch. A blessed spot of complete darkness snapped into being the moment the torch activated keeping his vision safe while still letting him see what it was he was doing. At the moment that was finalizing the join in the EPS conduit that he was almost done replacing.

For once Stellar Cartography had been spared the worst of fighting: no major system losses, no bulkhead collapses, no Borg nanoprobe injections, just a simple EPS conduit rupture that forced him out and into the arms of a Romulan boarding party. It was a miracle he’d survived that (and his side still twinged a bit even though Sickbay had cleared him), and now it was time to get back to work. Humming to himself, the Andorran’s blue hair reflected the welding torch’s light as he reached the end point, and switched the torch off. A close look was followed by a nod in approval and he stood up from his crouch, tossing the torch back into the kit and pulling off his gloves. “Thea, run a level 2 diagnostic on Stellar Cartography’s EPS system, and if everything checks out reinitialize the primary power flow.” The positronic woman was always so helpful and within moments the wall-sized screens snapped on with their standby pattern and the holo-generator in the ceiling hummed to life. Sighing in contentment, Shall looked up and gave Thea a well-earned thanks. A few moments was all it took to get the bulkhead cover back into place and sealed, and with that his lab was good as new.

Setting the toolkit aside, Shall strode out to the control panel sitting at the circular end of the walkway, plopping down into his familiar seat with practiced ease. Fully comfortable and overjoyed to be back in his element, long fingers tapped the control board to start up the boot sequence. Various blocks of text and code flew across the screens wrapped around him as the computers did their thing, local buffers and data flows synching back up with the main computer, various sensor platforms connecting with various levels of compatibility and priorities, and a multitude of other automatic tasks all done in the background to allow the lanky Andorian an unparalleled view of the galaxy around him.

Even more exciting for the chan though, he wasn’t just back in business after a day of healing and repair work, for the first time in months he was due for an upgrade! Now that at least some level of official status had been restored to Theurgy, he could finally access the Starfleet databases and get an updated set of charts straight from the source. Glancing at the chronometer, Shall dared a small smile as it was just about time for them to be delivered. For the first time in a while, his skin was prickling with excited anticipation…
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Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [2100hrs] When All is Stretched Thin
Last post by Dumedion -
[Ens. Talia "Shadow" Al-Ibrahim | Private Transport, Inbound | Uuluma Chain, Romulus] Attn: @Ellen Fitz

She'd made the mistake of leaving the harness loose, yet again; it was a bad habit of unknown origin, something overlooked once too many times until it had become accepted as normal. The bruises earned during the three-day sequence of running engagements and dogfights that had just been discussed still hurt, and were all due to Talia’s solitary slip in an otherwise methodically — and this was not an exaggeration — perfected pre-flight routine.

There was no warning; no alarms, no flashing prompts, no damage reports she could decipher — the ship heaved, then the nose rose as it started to roll.

Talia met Hirek’s eyes for a split second, long enough to shoot a glare of ‘what-the-hell-are-you-doing’ at him; nothing more.

“Ah, shit — here we go,” she grunted, mostly to herself; arms and hands shot up to the roof of the canopy, legs braced instinctually. Years of training kicked in by muscle memory — Talia clenched her core, and held on for the ride. “Why cant we just have a normal day together?” That came out in a growl of effort as the roll continued, and everything fell from below at the mercy of gravity: her hair, with the hastily braided locks coming apart in a drape of black — the slitted hem of her dress, the front part anyway — her whole body, thanks to the loose harness — even her tits decided to flop free. “Fuck sakes,” was added in, during the struggle to situate, cover, and move everything out of her face at the same time with minimal success.

Fortunately, Hirek was too busy to notice; Talia shot him a look that turned into a double-take, eyes widened in shock, mid-roll, at a literal wall of blackness approaching at a speed her brain couldn’t quantify. The warning left her lips as something entirely too calm and rational for the situation, and really wasn’t much of a warning at all: “Um, wave.”

Somehow, she managed to point at it.

There wasn’t much else to do after that than hold on; the ship spun like a top, albeit in the slowest, most terrifying way imaginable. Talia’s eyes stayed open and her mouth stayed shut for most of it, due to how hard her teeth were clenched in equal parts fear and control; they darted to Hirek, the controls she had no hope of understanding, then to the storm and waves — in a repeating circuit.

Hirek recovered control gradually, with visible effort. ‘That was not the sea,’ he stated, then twisted around to look behind them.

“Huh,” Talia huffed as she threw her hair back out of her face, then followed his movement with a grunt of effort; it really sucked being smaller than everyone. While in possession of remarkably sharp vision and the situational awareness to track multiple targets at distance, as much as she strained against the harness, all she could see was the ass-end of the ship, streams of rain, and the worst flying conditions beyond that she’d ever witnessed.

Then the glow and flash of incoming fire registered, and with it, a hissed line of rapid-fire Arabic curses. “I cant see the bogey — can you shake it? Who the hell are they anyway?”

Hirek responded with what he knew and what he guessed, which was better than what Talia could manage; her eyes narrowed as they both turned back around. “No ones killing you today — certainly not the fucking Tal Shiar,” she promised; a hollow promise, perhaps, but she meant it all the same. “What can I do? I need to do something!”

He told her to tighten her straps, as the nose of the craft pitched down — towards the churning depths. Talia complied, post haste; tightening each individual harness with an audible screeched of protesting fabric.

‘You’re about to find out how deep this hull goes.’

“I’d really rather not — doesn’t this thing have weapons?” Talia’s eyes stayed fixated on the waves, growing larger by the second; she felt the blood drain from her face. “N-no — no way, this is insane, Hirek!”

‘They’re better armed. Considerably. They bought it by cutting hull mass —'

The nose pitched further, diving towards the rolling mass of water; Talia visibly squirmed in her harness, head shaking rapidly. “Nope — noooo, no-no-no,” she protested over the rest of Hirek’s explanation; everything that followed out of her mouth was a rapid deluge — a high pitched, incessant plea: “I don’t like this, I don’t like it, no! Please listen to me — we can evade and call for backup! DB is in a Valravyn, we’re less than a hundred kilometers out, she-could-be-here-in-minutes-and-vape-this-asshole-HIREK-PLEASE!”

The waves had become a textured tapestry of imminent death; crested with foam, rolling, blue-black in the near darkness. She could see the reflection of their running lights on the surface — a bullseye that grown exponentially. Amidst the panic that threatened to undo all her training and supposedly impenetrable will, Talia clenched her eyes shut. Her entire existence had fallen away, reduced to a terrified version of herself with only the capacity to drone the same words over and over; a pleading mantra.

“Please-don’t-do-this, please-don’t-do-this, please —"

‘Brace.’

Every muscle in her body was already locked rigid; arms crossed over her chest, straps clenched in fists. There wasn’t a scream; Talia’s jaw was locked beyond the capacity for speech — the sound that left her started as something in her chest, near the back of her throat: a growl that rose in pitch, in octaves, rapidly. By the time of impact, it had the same intensity and whine as the over-worked engines; a screeching whine — something produced when nails raked over chalkboard — nothing intended to be produced from human vocal cords.

The impact itself was a bone-jarring assault on every sense; a roar of protesting electronics, matter and energy. It was a traumatizing clash of physics. Talia felt herself bodily thrown forwards, then back. It knocked the wind from her; blood registered in her mouth — pain flared through her entire body. Red flickered in her vision, even though her eyes refused to open. Her chest rose and fell with great heaps of breath, and she had no hope of slowing it.

Something hissed — crackled; a power conduit? One eye opened to peak. Yes, something underneath her seat had shorted out, spewing sparks up at her bare legs.

Darkness surrounded.

Her gaze drifted to Hirek; his head was leaned back, body limp — unconscious. Talia disengaged her harness instantly, hands reached out to cradle his head. “Hirek,” she croaked — voice hoarse, dry, and painful. A gash bled freely from above the left brow; the same blood marked the console in front of him. She acted without hesitation and ripped a length of fabric from the hem of her dress, then quickly wrapped it over the wound.

“Hirek, wake up,” Talia insisted — as the ship drifted, deeper and deeper into the black. On instinct, one hand gripped the control stick, while the other forcefully — but purposefully — knuckled his sternum.

“Hirek — wake up! Wake up — come on, darling. Please!”
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Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 | 2200 hrs | The hunt is on
Last post by Eirual -
[Ens Mia Dunne | Access Tunnel to Forward landing Strut | Vector 3 | Deck 31| USS Theurgy ]
ATTN: @Pierce, @Nesota Kynnovan

“This is not what a scientist should be doing,” Mia grumbled as yet again she was squeezing through the tight confines of the access tunnel on a search for the Zoologist’s mistake. The tight confines were aggravating and more than once she’d had to tug her uniform free from something it had snagged onto. It didn’t help that her damn breasts were much larger than average. In some cases, their size was a hinderance, like now. Still she was doing what she’d been ordered to do, but next time someone lost their pet projects they could leave her out of it, Thank you very much!

The wrist lamp lit up the access tunnel enough for her to know no damaging creature had made its way here. Just about the only positive she had was that it was a bit of a straight line to each of the landing struts. And there was a small space at the end that allowed her to turn and head back the way she came. She sat in the small area for a moment to inspect her uniform. Thank god for replicators, since this uniform had more snags than a latch hook rug. “If Frost doesn’t kill that jerk who brought that thing on board,” She said hotly to herself as she began the crawl back to the Jefferies tube, “I am going to do it myself!”

Once again having to tug her uniform free from whatever it had caught on she heard it tearing and she let out a loud frustrated growl, “Oh they are soooo going to suffer!”
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Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [2100hrs] When All is Stretched Thin
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[ Hirek tr'Aimne | Private Transport, Inbound | Uuluma Chain, Romulus ] @Dumedion

"You didn't."

It was a lie, and he told it to the console, because the console was not currently the problem. But her fingers had traced his jaw, and the craft had bucked, and she'd pulled back apologizing. The gooseflesh had already gone down his neck to the shoulder by then. It was still there. The whole line of it had lit like a circuit closing, from a contact that could not have exceeded the weight of a wet leaf, and it was not obeying any instruction he gave it.

The dials, then. The dials were the argument he had left. Altitude, heading, rate of closure on the outer bands — and the barometric column falling faster than the descent accounted for, which he noted, and corrected for, and could not make himself care about in the way the number deserved. He drew breath to say something else, something dry enough to file the moment down to a size he could carry.

The transport went over.

Not a drop — a shear, taken low on the starboard flank. The horizon rolled up past the canopy and kept rolling until the sea hung overhead and the storm ran beneath it, and the harness bit into his shoulder hard enough to make him wince. Then a wave took them across the dorsal plating, all of it at once, several thousand tonnes of water arriving at a decision. The hull screamed. The engines came back howling in a register he hadn't heard out of this class in forty years.

His hands had the trim before the thought reached them. Full over, power fed against the roll, boot braced on the pedal rail. The craft came round the long way, groaning through the recovery, and settled upright with the deck plates still ringing in his teeth.

"That," he said, "was not the sea."

The second shudder came up through the drive shaft, and it came from behind him. He twisted against the straps, far enough to put his eyes past the aft coaming. Two hundred meters back, thirty low, running dark — beacons off, hull glow suppressed, riding the trough where clutter off the wave-faces would swallow the return whole.

It fired while he was watching. The projectile came slow. That was the entire craft of the thing: slow enough that the deflector geometry read it as debris and let it walk through the envelope unchallenged. It struck aft. External sensors folded down the right-hand column one after another, and the vibration coming up through the deck from the shaft had a frequency he disliked immediately and on principle.

He dropped back into the seat.

"They'll keep firing. The shields won't stop it." A third impact rang the frame as though answering him. "I don't know who they are, but I have a suspicion. Tal Shiar — what's left. The ones with no cell to report to and nowhere in particular to be." He glanced at her once. "They want me dead about as much as I want them dead."

The wave-tops came up through the rain, black and moving like country.

"Straps. Tight — tighter than you think is necessary." He was already trimming the nose down. "You're about to find out how deep this hull goes." Another round went past the canopy, close enough to see, slow enough to insult him. "They're better armed. Considerably. They bought it by cutting hull mass." He pushed the nose over and the sea came up to meet it. "This craft takes pressure. Theirs folds at a third of it. So either they follow us down and are crushed, or they stay up here and try to track us through sea and storm till when we surface again." The canopy sealed. The vents shut with the sound of a held breath. "Brace."

The water took them, and the storm went out like a lamp.
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Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [2100hrs] When All is Stretched Thin
Last post by Dumedion -
[Ens. Talia "Shadow" Al-Ibrahim | Private Transport, En Route to the Uuluma Islands | Romulus] Attn: @Ellen Fitz

There was no answer from him at first, and when one came there was little surprise when it took a path she hadn’t expected; so Talia had sat, and listened, and allowed Hirek’s voice and the shape of his mouth and the comfort in his eyes to distract her from what they were flying into.

It helped — truly — until it didn’t. The anxious knot in her gut refused to abate because the patterns and names were recognized for what they were: a rotational cumulonimbus system, a massive one; the main column stretched nearly 10 kilometers tall, easily. At its foot, the monster sucked in stratocumuli in all directions, devouring them, eating their energy to fuel its own. There was more than one term humans used to describe such a phenomenon on Earth, depending on which side of the planet one lived on: hurricane and typhoon.

…And they were flying straight into it, or, more accurately, beneath it.

Talia also knew that wasn’t what had rendered her speechless: Hirek had. If it had been easy to sit, listen, and absorb his account — delivered in calm measured tones as if he had spoken about nothing important at all — processing how it all made her feel proved extremely difficult. Even so, there was no attempt to hide it behind a carefully constructed mask; there was no time and zero preparation for that. All too late she realized, in that moment, that a part of her that had always been guarded finally slipped the leash, broke through its own battlements, and refused to follow all the rules so carefully maintained — and she didn’t waste a heartbeat fighting it.
 
She wanted him to see her: to see the concern, the worry, the anguish about what the Tal Shiar had done to him. Behind that, she wanted him to see the outrage, the anger, the desire for vengeance. Deeper still, she wanted him to see how much she valued him, how wrong she had been for everything before, and how sorry she was; if only she had known what he could have faced, what had been waiting for him before…

That didn’t matter — what she chose to do about it did.

Her hand reached out for his arm; the body moving on its own to communicate the words and emotions the voice couldn’t. She squeezed, pouring in everything she felt, everything her eyes carried, everything she wanted to say but didn’t possess the language for.

The moment passed; Hirek’s attention returned to the controls and the weather — out of necessity or something else? Talia couldn’t tell. The ship bounced again, nothing dramatic, but enough to break her mind free from the emotional soup, but her hand stayed where it was just above his elbow, nestled against the curve of bicep, like that was where it had always belonged.

‘How did the last mission go for you,’ he’d asked; Talia inhaled a breath, then chose how to respond. Truth deserved truth; trust deserved trust. There were a dozen reports he could read on the matter — she had written some herself and attended several review sessions to listen and read the others. Instinctually, her mind pulled that file up for recitation: almost an hour-by-hour account of the previous three days: what happened when, why, how. What mistakes had been made and what lessons had been learned. Her mind slammed the file closed though; she could do better than that.

He deserved better than that.

She told him what she felt instead; something no after-action-review contained — something no one knew, and likely never would, beyond the two of them. The words didn’t come easy, and didn’t come clean, which he almost certainly noticed; Talia pushed on, even as she watched him for reactions, and discovered that his patience and presence offered her a different kind of courage. He’d offered the gift of a space for her to simply be — to be heard and seen. She refused to waste something so precious.

The carrier scrap went first:

Talia spoke of how the sheer size and shape of the thing had inspired both awe and dread; how painfully powerless she’d felt losing Ghost, how the entire affair seemed to happen so fast in hindsight, but had felt the complete opposite at the time. The sheer agility and aggressiveness of their opponents had shocked her — how the simple fact that it had taken entirely too long for her to realize that they were, in fact, trying to kill her — had shaken her. But it had been the end, when she’d broken; seeing the wreckage on the deck — the fires — the bodies. She'd carry that around for a long time.

The convoy op followed, after a pause that lasted longer than it probably should have, due to a series of bumps and shimmies that forced her eyes closed.

When the ship settled, her eyes opened, and Talia told him how they’d found the colonists, devoid of escort and on the wrong side of any border — unaffiliated with anyone, with their only intention set on finding a new home. It had felt good to try to help; that was the Federation she believed in — the one she fought for, you see? But then everything went wrong in the form of a flying-electromagnetic-disruptor-wielding…mechanical squid, from the future, apparently; a drone, sent back in time to destroy its own creators.

A pause followed, broken with a brief chuckle; the math hurt her head and didn’t make sense no matter how hard she tried, so she asked him not to press the issue. In the end, the day was saved by the unlikely arrival of an antiquated vessel of the Vaharran Navy — which also nearly killed her too, by the way, when it came out of warp right on top of her — but enabled the civilian convoy the freedom to pursue their own ends. Yay, happy ending.

That part ended with a lopsided smile; a dash of humor sprinkled over near-death — just as Hirek had done. Lightning flashed abruptly, close enough to make Talia flinch; the thunder that followed was an audible assault, a rolling cacophony that silenced the rain for several seconds. In its wake, she let the moment draw out unintentionally; because so much had been said already about the Triangle — and so much had been left unsaid.

She didn’t describe the battle itself; anyone with eyes and a viewport had seen it. She didn’t bother with details of combat tactics, or how her coms had shorted out, again. All of that happened, and she’d talked about it ad nauseam.

She told him about the parts that hurt. The parts she hadn’t had time to let herself feel properly, never mind come to terms with. When the words left her lips, they began as little more than a whisper: how she couldn’t accurately account for how she’d survived, when others with far more experience and skill hadn’t. How hollow it felt after; her hands bloodied, conscience in tatters. How she’d puked her guts out almost immediately, and couldn’t stop her hands from shaking for hours after that. Nothing and no one could have prepared her for it, and that was no ones fault but her own; she should have known better. How the entire thing had been saved by the sheer stubbornness and courage of Klingons, and the last minute fortune of a stolen prototype fighter – whose pilot she owed a drink, but had not yet found the time to hunt down and properly thank.

“I owe Dr Leux one too,” she added quietly, and Talia left her account to linger in the space between them; even as she raised her hand to trace Hirek’s jawline with the back of her fingertips without conscious thought.

The craft almost instantly bucked, more violently than ever before, forcing her to snatch both hand and arm back to grip her harness with a surprised hiss of effort.
 
“Shit – sorry, didn’t mean to distract you!”
8
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [2100hrs] When All is Stretched Thin
Last post by Ellen Fitz -
[ Hirek tr'Aimne | Private Transport, En Route to the Uuluma Islands | Romulus ] @Dumedion

The transport well cleared Dartha without incident but Romulus had never been a planet that rewarded confidence. The government had changed, the Citadel was rubble, the Tal Shiar had been scattered into cells and safehouses and whatever cousins would still open a door for them — and none of that had touched the instincts that had kept generations alive. Silence could mean safety. It could equally mean surveillance, or exhaustion, or that the person waiting to act had not yet decided how. Hirek kept one hand on the controls and the other near the auxiliary systems out of habit.

The weather had turned while they were in the capital. Cloud had stacked over the eastern sea in bruised layers, the lower edges torn apart by wind, and the rain came in sheets that whitened the canopy before the deflectors threw it aside. Below them the sea was already disappearing. He had flown through worse, which was not the same as saying this was survivable. He adjusted course by three degrees, watched the turbulence indicators climb, and did not complain. Nature and governments shared exactly one trait: neither cared how carefully a man had planned.

Talia's comment made him smirk, and he resisted the temptation to cause the transport to wobble just to tease her. Instead, he filled the transport with an anecdote of the last mission, not exactly his first with the Theurgy but assuredly the most intense. He delivered the play-by-play in a matter-of-fact voice, occasionally interjecting with asides meant to draw out a smile or a snort of playful annoyance, making light of the realities of his near death more than once.

The last mission had required him to work beside people who did not think like Romulans while standing on ground where everyone involved had sound reasons to distrust him. Then the Tal Shiar had taken him. There was no need to embellish what followed. The interrogation had been methodical, and the torture had been worse for being methodical — they knew enough of his history to make it personal, and they knew which parts of it were load-bearing. He had endured it because survival was a skill and because pain and defeat were both things he'd tasted before and wanted not to taste again.

What they had put inside him was his own work. He had designed the device decades earlier, for an entirely different reason, and wasn't it like the Tal'Shiar to twist something meant for good to deal out evil? He hadn't known it was there until Dr. Leux found it, and by then it had started. Then he had taken the remains of his own near-death, rewritten it, and put it into a Vulpinian corpsman. He had been back aboard barely long enough to change his uniform before the battle for the ship started, and had walked into it beside the Vulpinian he'd later save.

He noticed that now, with the storm shaking the airframe and the inertial systems catching the drop a half-second late, they were due for a rough ride in a few minutes, no matter his expert claims earlier. The transport dropped several meters. The inertial dampeners caught it. Below the break in the rain, black ridges of water rolled past like moving country.

Remembering her earlier concerns, Hirek continued to drawl out his thoughts, using his words and voice to distract her from the worsening weather. Or perhaps, they were just working to make her even more frustrated. Either way, he would know soon enough. Again he explained his position, now that he'd made it through the mission and was once more on his home turf. He could stay aboard Theurgy and go on hunting the Infested, on the reasoning that a parasite that had held a Praetor could hold the next one, and that everything his people were rebuilding was scaffolding over a hole nobody had filled. Or he could remain here while the Tal Shiar were still on their back foot, and put the last decade of his particular expertise into ensuring they never stood upright again.

They were now passing over a stretch of uninhabited islands, their reefs looked calm from above the surface and were nothing of the sort below it, and a diver who did not read the currents before descending was a diver who did not come up. He had built an entire character out of that principle. Assess, then commit. Know precisely what you are standing in before you stand in it.

He had already committed. He had done it somewhere back on the island, in a simulation, with her hair in his hands and no assessment performed whatsoever, and he had gone on descending ever since, and the honest part — the part he would take a spear through the chest before saying aloud — was that he had no intention of surfacing to check.

He checked the instruments, distracting himself from letting his thoughts go any further on that matter.

She had come through the same mission from a different seat, with different wounds, and he had learned long ago that what a person survived was rarely the same thing as what they carried out of it. Now that he'd passed the time regaling her with his side of the past few days, Hirek kept his eyes on the console a moment longer, then looked across at her.

"How did the last mission go for you?"
9
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 | 2200 hrs | The hunt is on
Last post by Nesota Kynnovan -
[Ensign Jaya Thorne | Upper Gymnasium | Deck 06 | Vector 01 | USS Theurgy]
Attn: @Eirual @Pierce

A soft, rather bored sigh escaped Jaya’s lips as her brown eyes idly stared at the ceiling of the Upper Gymnasium. It had been a little over fifteen minutes since her arrival and the Assistant Chief CONN Officer was now laying on one of the yoga mats; her hands folded behind her head for additional comfort as she waited for Lieutenant Junior Grade Ashley Kerina to show up.

”It’s always the same…” While she was laying on her back, Jaya muttered softly. ”The eggheads stumble from one avoidable problem into the next, and the rest of us have to solve it for them.” As she griped about her situation, Jaya’s voice was as dour as the expression on her face. She took a couple of deep breaths and briefly closed her eyes to get a handle on her frustration, but that was easier said than done; it was one thing to help out the Science Department, they were colleagues after all and Jaya really didn’t mind them, but what bothered her was the plain fact that they asked for help and subsequently failed to show up.

After waiting for another five minutes or so, at least according to the chronometer displayed on one of the wall panels, Jaya sat up with a sigh. It had been twenty minutes now and there was still no sign of the scientist. Tired of waiting, the Denevan got up to her feet and began to walk towards the exit of the Upper Gymnasium. While she did so, she reached out and tapped the combadge on her chest before speaking up. ”Thorne to Kerina. Ma’am, I’m not sure if you’re on your way to the Upper Gymnasium or not, but I’m heading down to Deck 32 to see if the other search party has any success in capturing the vole.”


[Ensign Jaya Thorne | Deck 29 | Vector 03 | USS Theurgy]

Jaya had never gone down beyond Deck 28, where the Below Decks Lounge was located. As she rode the turbolift, the Assistant Chief CONN Officer mused that she’d expanded her horizons a little bit that day by going down to Deck 29, and a part of her wondered if there were any turbolifts that ran all the way down to Deck 32. She figured that it was unlikely given the fact that the lowest three decks only housed the forward landing struts and the emergency warp core jettison control; leaving Jaya with the unpleasant feeling that she’d probably have to climb three decks down using the Jefferies Tube system.

As the turbolift arrived at Deck 29 and the doors opened with their signature hydraulic hiss, a blast of hot air immediately filled the carriage. It prompted Jaya to stumble backwards and she instinctively raised her right arm to protect her eyes from the heat. She could smell the sharp stench of plasma in the air and, as Jaya’s eyes began to sting and tear up, the Assistant Chief CONN Officer slowly took a couple of steps forwards onto the deck. The sounds of her footsteps on the carpeted floor cut through the eerie silence and, given that she couldn’t hear the sharp crackling sound of a raging plasma fire, Jaya figured that life support on the lower decks was most likely damaged to some degree and that she was likely breathing in the residual fumes of an extinguished fire.

It definitely explained the heat on the deck.

The Assistant Chief CONN Officer coughed as she continued to walk along the deck. She was met with the sight of numerous escape pod hatches mounted into the outer wall and, with each hatch she passed, Jaya inwardly cursed the Chief CONN Officer and wished for more dishonour upon both the man and his cow. In her mind she pictured how Lieutenant Junior Grade Ashley Kerina was comfortably laying in her bed instead of assisting her like she’d been supposed to, and it only made Jaya’s mood even worse.

By the time the Denevan Ensign reached the nearest Jefferies Tube access hatch, she was panting for breath and perspiring heavily. If the air hadn’t reeked of stale plasma she would’ve audibly cursed, but Jaya knew better and instead just opened the hatch before crawling inside. On the bright side, the air didn’t smell like plasma nearly as much and Jaya couldn’t help but breathe a relieved sigh after the hatch automatically hissed shut behind her. On the flip side however, of which there ALWAYS seemed to be one lately, the lights inside the Jefferies Tube didn’t automatically come online as she entered; in fact, Jaya found herself surrounded by pitch-black darkness when the hatch closed behind her.

”Now, that’s amazing!” As she spoke, Jaya’s voice was dripping with sarcasm. She reached out for the only source of illumination, that being the flashlight mounted onto her left wrist, and activated the small device; bathing the narrow Jefferies Tube in a bright beam of light. Jaya wiped her forehead with her right sleeve before slowly starting to crawl forwards. Given that the lowest decks weren’t all that big, the Assistant Chief CONN Officer figured that she’d run into the other search party fairly quickly.
10
Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [ 0700 hrs] The Salvage Job
Last post by Dumedion -
[Ens. Talia "Shadow" Al-Ibrahim | Wolf-04 | Near last known coordinates of Cayuga] Attn: @Krajin  @Eirual @Ellen Fitz @Nesota Kynnovan @RyeTanker

It was fun to cut up with a new wingman en-route; Talia quickly realized the more they talked, the more Atlas seemed like a genuine goof-ball — which turned out to be a running theme with the Wolves. For her part, she had tried to reciprocate, but as soon as her hand eased back on the throttle to drop the Valkyrie from warp, Shadow switched back to all-business-mode.

The stars settled to distant pinpricks of light as the pitch of her engines dropped to a lower octave. A visual scan of the heavens around her revealed Atlas, a ways off to port, with the convoy of shuttles between them...

…And nothing else but infinite darkness.

In the following moments, she'd already checked the Valkyrie's sensors twice, along with a mid-level navigation diagnostic — just to be sure everything jived with the original flight plan the mission team had been given from Theurgy’s astrometrics. The obvious was apparent as soon as they'd arrived: there was no sign of the Cayuga — no emergency beacon, no IFF transponder, no debris…

Nothing.

Coms chatter filled Shadow’s helm while she circled back in a wide arc around the convoy, opposite to Atlas’ relative path, to open up space while forming a defensive screen — a standard redeployment maneuver. Active proximity scans of the system yielded unremarkable returns; long range showed the same. Dark eyes, tinted almost black behind the faint blue  illumination of her helm, narrowed with worry.

Are we too late?

The probes launched. Shadow tracked the dull glow of their drives as they streaked away into the darkness. While the others talked and voiced possible theories, the pilots hands and fingers played across her control panels — accessing Theurgy’s astrometrics again.

Every known stellar object with sufficient mass to affect a disabled vessel of Cayuga’s tonnage was accounted for. While the data couldn’t rule out the possibility of a rogue element, or unmapped object — a comet perhaps — Shadow couldn’t help but consider that an unlikely scenario.

She wasn’t an astrophysics expert, however; the science nerds were — but that didn’t stop her from using her basic comprehension of fundamental physics to draw her own hypothesis.

Shadow’s eyes turned to the distant blue speck of the system’s far away star. To her mind, anything left powerless and adrift in-system long enough would inexorably fall into its gravity well, without fail. She’d already turned the nose of her fighter towards it when Atlas spoke up on a direct channel.

“Four copies,” she nodded, then a typed out a few quick commands on her OPS console. “Sensor network established, links active with both pups.”

She hoped he didnt mind the use of shorthand for the probes. Shadow chewed her lip in thought for a moment, considering Atlas' question.

“Doesn’t plasma cool and disperse relatively quickly? But yeah, we might get lucky and catch a trail,” she shrugged, then paused again. “We know Romulans favor plasma-based weaponry and cloaks — which have been known to leave trace tachyon emissions and anti-protons. The Savi — based off the Hobus mission data — used graviton beams. So…maybe if we look for what hunted the whale, that will lead us to her?”

Her hand keyed in the adjustments to the ship’s sensor sweeps; even with active sensor envelopes keyed in for max resolution — that still left a literal astronomical search area to cover.

“How about a clockwise spiral pattern split between us and the pups? It’d put some distance between us and the convoy, but only a few light-minutes at most. Or we can work it by quadrants and stay close; that’ll take longer, but our sweeps would overlap tighter, giving us more accuracy.”

Again, her eyes turned to the star at the system’s core.

“Your call, Atlas.”
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