EP 2 BTS | D02 | 2300 hrs] Turning Into the Wind

January 22, 2025, 11:01:39 PM

Lok’s ears shot up as the red alert sounded, his hands still in the innards of Janus’s fighter, he hadn’t had a chance to fully finish hooking all the opti-cables into the array that controlled the starboard panel screens of the fighter’s cockpit. With no time to fix it, Lok looked around and spotted a nearby crewman fully alert from the blaring alarms and gestured to him to come over. “Get this back together ASAP!” he shouted. Once the crewman had swapped spaces with him, the large Kzinti sprinted across the flight deck, the exhaustion he had been feeling before was smothered in a wave of adrenaline, something he would surely regret later when all this business was done. He needed to reach his gear which he had left on a workbench at the far end of the hangar, along the way though he shouted words of encouragement to his guys, “let’s get these birds ready”...”grab your gear”...”let’s whoop some Romulan ass”...and so on.

[Inbound enemy contacts bearing 0-5-2, mark 0-2-3, range fifty thousand kilometers! Wolf Squadron to your spacecraft!] sounded the Flight Operations Officer over the hangar’s communication’s system.

He reached the workbench and grabbed his phaser along with his tricorder, stuffing them into their holsters, then his comms earpiece and Fight Ops PADD. Once the earpiece was shoved into his left ear and hooked around it, and after taking a moment to listen to the flurry of voices over the comms, Lok sprinted back towards the flight deck launchers. Along the way he ran into the line of pilots running to their fighters. Like his own people, Lok shouted words of encouragement to them as well, though perhaps a bit harsher owing to them being officers and all that, “move your asses”...”are you waiting for an invite from the Romulans, move move move”..”Shadow, get your ass in that plane, now”...and so on. Finally though he reached his station and noted with some satisfaction that the crewman he had tasked with finishing the repair on Janus’s fighter had completed it and was just putting the panel cover back on. With a moment to spare as the pilots reached their birds and went through their initial pre-flight checklists, Lok took the time to open a window on his PADD that showed a simplified view of the tactical situation; Theurgy, or Ranger specifically, and her allies shown in white dots with the names and applicable registry of each ship on the left side of the screen, the enemies in red with simple contact designations on the right. The dots were all in motion, the allied fleet was turning to engage the enemy fleet which was coming straight in, no sign of enemy fighters detected yet though.

His momentary curiosity satisfied, Lok went back to the business of getting these birds in the air, though he had yet to hear the order to launch from the Flight Operations Officer so there was still time yet. He spotted Janus climbing into his Valkyrie, at the head of the pack of course and soon to be first into battle; he also spotted the larger Atlas, climbing into his own bird, a moment of anxiety filled him at the thought of never seeing him again, but he brushed that aside. He knows what he is doing, just do your job, Lok thought to himself. Getting back to the task at hand, Lok sprinted over to Janus’s fighter and ascended the pilot steps before they were pulled away; he wanted to take one quick look at that control panel before letting the squadron commander fly off.

“Excuse me Commander, I just need to check something”, he said to Janus as he reached down and pressed a special button on the right hand panels to run a function check. The LCARS display flashed three times and then momentarily lit each button in its own unique color before going back to normal and the function check button flashed green. All was well with the panel at least, who knew what hidden damage lurked inside the rest of the craft, with only a few hours to service it after the previous round of fighting earlier in the day the possibility of some kind of failure was much higher than it normally would be. At any rate there wasn’t much time to worry about it now. Satisfied, Lok climbed down and walked over to his post where the rest of the lead spacecraft inspectors, ordnancemen, and signal warrants were standing, all waiting patiently for everything to kick off. As he walked, Lok felt a brief moment of familiar vertigo, the sign of a Starship making such a tight turn that the inertial dampeners needed a moment to catch up. Sure enough when he glanced out of the open entrance of the hanger bay Lok could see stars streaking past along with the occasional Klingon or Romulan ship; Theurgy was in a tight turn to port, to confront the advancing enemy.

OOC NOTES-
-This thread is specifically for the battle from the perspective of anybody in the Fighter Assault Bay and Lok, once the pilots take off from the ship they should switch to THIS THREAD to continue the action in space unless they wish to return and land in the hangar.

-ALL PILOTS, please do not take off until after Lok gives the go ahead as part of the regular launch operations of the flight deck.

-Refer to this post for additional information on the current state of the flight deck.

-If you were tagged in this post and do not have a character here just ignore this thread beyond the requirement by the GMs to keep it in mind when writing your own posts.