Warning Bells

Posted on Mon Oct 11th, 2021 @ 3:42pm by Lieutenant Commander Emni t'Nai & Commodore James Smith & Ensign Noah Balsam & Lieutenant Sovaan & Lieutenant Cassian Pell

Mission: The Place of Skulls
Location: Asteroid Mining Facility
Timeline: Mission Day 16 at 1230

Previously…

Scanning the space, Emni flicked the control in her suit to open a channel with the Sojo. "t'Nai to Kodak," she remarked, directing her message. "Sir, we appear to have reached a central power station. Balsam and Smith are working on power, but it appears that everything is coming back online, life support among those elements."

She paused then, looking to the team around her. "We're checking the mining operations and will evaluate if there are logs or other data banks we can retrieve to bring back with us, sir." She took a breath then, "we appear to have found the interface that will require your presence, sir, but I want to make one last sweep before you come down. Standby and we'll let you know when we're ready for you. t'Nai..."

She didn't get to finish the message closure as a loud klaxon blared throughout the space, red alarm lights flaring as the sound filled the area around them.

Warning, the alarm intoned between blaring klazons, Intruders detected.

"Shit," Emni remarked, closing the channel without ceremony.

"I think you're right about that," Sovaan said, pulling out his phaser and dropping into a defensive position. "I have a bad feeling about this."

And now…

The klaxons continued to ring, lights flashing across the space throwing shadows as the lighting flashed red then white then red again.

"Balsam, Smith, we need any information we can get from this place. Data, logs, you name it. If you can get to it, make it portable and get it quick." she directed moving opposite of Sovaan to cover her team members still standing at the console.

As she spoke the random piles of drones began to shift around the room--the deactivated drones they had passed in various states of disrepair apparently responding to either the return of power to the station or the alarm that had sounded. Rounded chromed sides reflected the red warning lights ominously. Slowly and methodically the machines scanned the room and its occupants.

They reached Pell first, a beam scanning the Betazoid from head to foot from several feet away before the tip of the drone--clearly the mining laser--centered on Cas and began to glow red.

"Pell!" Emni yelled.

Cas had only just entered the room after a relatively uneventful survey of the rooms on either side of the corridor. Nothing momentous to report but to him, he found everything equally interesting, it had been worth the time spent. The control room was coming alive, pushing back the gloom of a dead installation, and he started toward the nearest console. A mining installation would have data. Klingon, he thought, as he looked at the console. Interesting.

Someone called his name and he turned, automatically, a smile on his lips that shifted, contorted into a rictus of pain as the mining laser hit him squarely in the chest. Pain blossomed along his nerve endings, white hot, all-consuming. He lurched awkwardly to the side and felt himself stumbling backward. Something hit him again and then there was only pain. Pain that drowned out the thoughts and emotions of those around him. Pain that left him wholly alone in his mind. He felt bereft. Lost in a a sea of pain and when his body fell, no longer under his control, it almost seemed a mercy to surrender. By the time his head hit the deck plate, he was already unconscious.

Several thoughts flew through Emni's mind at once. The first, and most obvious, being that she needed to get to Pell. That, however, was quickly followed by an urgent concern at keeping Smith and Balsam safe so they could do the work of getting data out of the systems. And then, of course, they needed to figure out how to get Kodak down to them. She was no longer sure that she could find a way to bring him down safely.

"Sovaan, cover Balsam and Smith," she called, making a ducking run across the space toward Pell. She chided herself inwardly for not bringing a proper med kit with her.

The drone that had hit Pell had lost interest quickly once its victim was downed. Still, to be safe, Emni drew her phaser, thumbing the levels up well past stun and sighting along her arm. With a twitch of her fingers the red beam lanced outward, hitting the machine squarely and burning a deep red bowl into it. A moment later it dropped to the ground. She quickly aimed at two more, hoping to take them out before the could draw attention to herself. Two more round devices fell.

A fourth began to turn, it's laser hitting the console behind which she had started to drag Pell. Out of instinct her hand flew over her head as sparks flew.

"Ok, Cas," she said quietly as she waited for the next blast of the the laser. "Let's get a look at what we're dealing with.

Noah was trying not to panic. He was trying very, very hard not to panic. But watching a person go down in what looked like some kind of forced plasma or particle drill stilled him. "Raft on the ocean, raft on the ocean," he whispered loudly to himself. He was tunnel visioning on a language he didn't even understand. He had his orders. Take the data. Take what data? How much data? What data? Noah wasn't even sure what he was looking for, let alone how to find it in Klingon.

Sizzle. Thunk.

Sizzle. Thunk.

Phaser fire and a metallic clang against nonporous asteroidal aggregates. Noah sensed that two more of those drones had been downed. And who knew how close they were. His trembling fingers were fumbling- they skipped over the latch of his kit once, twice- on the third they caught and he opened it. Half his tools spilled out. But his fingers found what he wanted when he yanked the whole case around to rest against his stomach. He pulled out a PADD and two small interface chips, like isolinear sets.

He powered on the PADD first, shakily, his dark eyes shifting back to see how things were going. "Computer, initiate perimeter scan of the f-following dataport and replicate an interface." Noah ducked down and fingered around for an open port. He found it, his eyes on his bloodied knuckle from before. Noah pushed one of the isolinear-like devices to the dataport and twisted. It latched.

With a flinch from a near miss that threw powdered rock up from between his legs, Noah was sputtering and blind for a moment.

Gloved hands grappled onto Noah, "I'm getting too old for this shit," and shifted him out of the line of fire before palming a phaser and obliterating the offending drone. "You alright, kid?" James asked, turning his attention away from the swarm to the Midshipman.

Noah was rattled and with a grunt, he nodded, "I'm-I'm... Kay, I'm okay..." he said as trembling hands got back to work.

"Good, focus on your training. Download what you can easily get," turning back to the console, the Chief Engineer had his own task to complete. "These old Klingon systems weren't known for their expert encryption techniques," He said, generally to no one, but it could have been meant for Noah to hear. A few more taps and a smile crept onto his face, "Watch this."

The tannoy once again popped to life, "Initiating drone update." For a moment, the drones faltered as they processed their update before once again advancing on their targets. It seemed Smith's update had failed to stop them, and then the one nearest James shifted and fired, obliterating another drone. "Ah, that ought to do it," James smiled as the drones' focus turned away from the away team.

Sovaan downed two drones and fired on a third, then paused as he saw the update take effect. "Well, son of a bitch," he breathed, running a hand through his hair. "Why stop there?" He stepped out from his cover and snapped off a few more shots, barely bothering to aim. "Like fish in a barrel."

As the drones had turned on each other and Sovaan began to make swift work of them, Noah was shallow-breathing his way through his routines. He's pulled his interphase and then, with the configured head, he had his PADD and cord in. His fingers were fast and fluttering as his system translated the Klingon interface into something he understood. "D-downloading, I've got the download going. I'm taking the wh-whole database,"

Emni rose from where she was crouched next to Pell. He was, blessedly, still breathing, although in urgent need of medical care for his burns. A not insignificant portion of the uniform on his chest had been burned away, the edges fusing quickly to the burn site. The only positive that Emni could reach for was that the drone hadn’t hit him in the exact spot twice and that the mining laser had, seemingly, cauterized the wound. She was certain there was more damage than what she could see, but at the least he wasn’t bleeding. For the second time in a matter of minutes she felt a pang of guilt at the shift in her position. Had she been thinking like a medical officer on an away mission she might have been better prepared.

Reluctantly she made her way over to Smith and Balsam, nodding to Sovaan who seemed to be more than happy to pick off the remaining drones in the room. It was only a moment later before the last of them hit the floor.

“Good work,” she said, taking in the whole group. “Mr. Balsam, how much time do you need?” she asked.

The flustered cadet was swiping fingers through windows while he hunched over data and in some notion of false protection, "M-minutes... this system is old. R-really old. The PADD has to do all the c-computing legwork."

Emni nodded. “Ok.”

It was then that she heard the fresh sizzle and thunk of a drone being downed by Sovaan’s phaser. She turned quickly, facing the arch through which they had come to find a veritable cloud of drones floating eerily toward them. The first in the line had been downed by Sovaan, but the rest seemed unphased and equally uninterested in attacking each other.

“Mr. Smith?” Emni said, his name a question on her tongue.

For a long eerily quiet moment the only sound in the room was the strange whir of the drones moving through the space and the breathing of the away team over the comm. Scanning beams bathed the room as Emni counted.

10.

16.

23.

Twenty-three drones. It seemed to her as though everyone held their breath, and then one of the scanning beams ran down Emni from tip to toe and the mining laser at the tip of the drone began to glow red.

“Everyone, cover!” she shouted before the room dissolved into chaos.

Sovaan pulled the engineers behind him to cover them, then snapped off a few more shots, dodging some along the way. "Guess the fish broke out of the barrel."

Emni hit the floor, but wasn’t fast enough to entirely escape the cutting beam of the laser. A bright white pain seared across her vision as the lance of red from the drone cut across her shoulder cutting a shallow line.

Scrambling, she half crawled half ran around a console, phaser at the ready and shooting before she ducked out of sight. The drones had already begun to modulate, though, and the drone in question seemed entirely undeterred.

“They’re adjusting,” she called over the comm to anyone who would listen. She thumbed her phaser, modulating the frequency and fired again, this time hitting true and dropping the drone where it floated.

Sovaan watched what she was doing and followed, routinely remodulating after every four or five shots.

Breathing heavily from another round of shooting, Emni ducked back into the protection of the console she was using as a shield. As she did so, the Captain’s voice came across the comm.

Kodak to Away Team. Emni, we're currently under attack by drones throughout the ship. They've been systematically knocking our people unconscious and damaging some of our key systems. Some of the larger drones are trying to cut their way into the Sojo. We're working to take some of them out but I don't know how long it'll be until we're overrun up here. Tell me you're faring better than we are?

Emni blanched. Drones on the asteroid she could see, but drones attacking the ship. "I wish I could, sir,” she responded, “we're facing the same drones down here. Mr. Balsam is pulling down the logs here, and we're holding them off, but we don't seem to have an immediate way to stop them. Sir..."

Emni hesitated, not certain how the Captain would respond to her assessment of the situation. "You can't come down here sir, it's too dangerous. But..."

A drone had found its way to the side of the console, interrupting her message. Thumbing the phaser’s controls almost by muscle memory she narrowed in and fired, a sizzle and thunk giving her at least the small satisfaction of temporary safety.

"We still need your DNA and the puzzle sphere," she continued, chancing a glance over to the alcove they had been looking at earlier.

"Emni, hang tight. We're working on that particular problem right now."

And then the comm went dead.

"I'm b-building the database... putting it through the UT now..." Noah reported as he hunched in a sit almost under the console, his knees up and spread. The cindered surface of the ferrous floor where the drone had fired at him was pitted and smoldering with a rich iron tang. "Ih-it's having trouble... it's Klingon alphabet but the language is.. is I guess a Mo-Mokai dialect... a-and Reegrunion loan-words."

Emni peered around the side of her console, glancing at Pell first, to confirm that the man was being entirely left alone by the drones. It was a small mercy, but a welcome one.

"Mr. Smith," Emni called as she craned her neck to try to get a better look at the three men across the room form her. She used the man's name as a question as much to prompt an update as to get his attention.

Smith's voice responded across the comm. "Still working on it."

Emni frowned, torn on what to do next. She had a downed officer and two working on a problem that was actively attempting to harm them. And she was crouching behind a console doing... what...? The feeling of helplessness that accompanied that realization was frustrating and so she made a snap decision. Crawling out from behind the opposite side of her console she took quick stock of the drones. Several more had made their way into the room almost giving the impression of a swarm of overly large insects, or a flock of particularly angry birds. The space between herself and Pell wasn't insurmountable, but it was without cover. Still, if she couldn't do anything else, she could get the scientist back to the ship for treatment.

Before she could do anything, though, the golden sprites of the transporter appeared in the midst of the drone cloud, depositing the small spherical puzzle box and a hypo spray into the middle of the room. Emni held her breath, watching to see if the drones would react to the introduction of something new, but the transporter didn't seem to set off any alarm bells for them. They ignored the items entirely.

Making the requisite motion to open a channel to the Sojourner she spoke. "t'Nai to Kodak," she began, voice steady even as she crouched to stay out of the drones' line of sight. "We have the puzzle sphere and hypo," she paused then torn between immediately retrieving it and getting what they needed and getting Pell back to the ship. She simply wasn't sure he'd be in any better shape on board, though she had to assume that Sickbay was at least, for the moment, still functional. "We have injured down here," she reported her tone clearly concerned. "Chaali, can you lock on to Pell's signature and beam him directly to Sickbay?"

Locking on. Chaali's voice echoed across her comm.

"Understood, Lieutenant. I'll confirm with Dr. Ryan Walsh."

Switching rapidly, she initiated another comm, this time to Kennedy hoping that he was, indeed, in Sickbay.

"Dr. Ryan Walsh, this is Lieutenant t’Nai," she said, her voice informing the comm where to direct her. "You have incoming wounded from the away team. Lieutenant Pell is down."

One of the drones chose that moment to come investigate Pell, running its scanning beam over him as Emni rapidly shuffled further behind the small console next to where he lay. Thumbing her phaser once again she aimed, setting the beam to modulate as she went. The sizzle and thunk of the downed drone confirming that she had hit her mark.

She turned back to the comm, "Two hits to his chest from close proximity by one of the drone lasers. He’s unconscious, but stable enough for transport. The wound appears to be cauterized on the outside, but haven’t been able to ascertain if he’s experienced any internal damage."

Sickbay and myself acknowledge, Lieutenant. We are waiting are standing by for Mr. Pell, I will make the preparations for his arrival on our end. Emni let out a small sigh of relief at the sound of Kennedy's voice, glad to know that Sickbay--so recently her responsibility--was up and functional with a CMO in the room.

"I’m contacting Lieutenant Chaali to initiate transport now," she advised. "Stand by."

Standing by, came the simple response.

"t'Nai to Chaali, we're ready when you are," she advised before letting out a long breath.

Chaali to Away Team. Energizing. Chaali replied calmly.

From next to her Pell dissolved into the golden light of the transporter beam. Emni let out a breath she didn't realize she had been holding.

Her comm crackled again as Kennedy's voice echoed across the channel. Away Team, advising you that we have received Mister Pell. We are working on him now, Doctor Ryan Walsh out.

The relief she felt was palpable, but with one less immediate worry Emni knew she had work to attend to... and quickly. The puzzle sphere and hypo still sat in the middle of the room, undisturbed by the cluster of drones floating over it. Thinking quickly she re-opened the comm for the away team.

"Mr. Sovaan," she called across to him. "I'm going to go for the puzzle sphere, but I could use some cover. Be ready on my mark," she advised and then she counted down in her head 3... 2... 1... "Mark," she said out loud, diving across the floor, her boots more impediment than help in this moment. The asteroid's artificial gravity had resumed and the boots felt heavy, making her slow. Still, she scrambled forward, snatching the puzzle ball before half rolling and half crawling to where the other three officers were working.

"Acknowledged," Sovaan said, then swung his arm around at the mark and continued firing.

"Status Mr. Balsam? Mr. Smith?" she asked, as she moved behind them both placing the sphere into the small depression of the metal obelisk.

Noah prickled with anxiety, his upper lip stinging while his pits felt like they were streaming in summer heat. He kept his focus on the data while his mind was terrified he was going to die in a fiery hot stream of energy on this rock. "It's bad!" He called out unusually clearly in his adenoidal young voice. And that was an understatement. He was having to reformat and rewrite directories and search for drivers that didn't even match data exchange protocols. He heard the sizzling of phasers- or energy beams- and could feel his hands quaking. "It's my ocean.... it's my ocean..." he chanted to himself as his fingers drew spirals, lines and quick jabs at data.

As she listened, she fiddled with the hypo, examining the interface in front of her. To the right of the slot for the puzzle sphere was a long arm with an arm extended over it, needle-like blade suspended over the arm. She knew from talking with the Captain that this thing, upon having his arm present, had extended downward, pricking him. The blood in the hypo's vial was surely enough... he hadn't been bleeding profusely... but she still wasn't sure how the device picked up the blood to identify its owner.

Finally, she removed the vial and uncapped it, holding it underneath the needle and dipping it lightly into the red viscous liquid. She held it there a moment, waiting for something to happen, but nothing did. Frowning she withdrew the vial and examined the arm. It was specifically laid out so that someone could place their own arm onto it. Perhaps there was a weight sensor? Or some other trigger to indicate the presence of a person rather than something other. Carefully, she pulled her hand free of her glove, pushing the sleeve of her suit up as best she could. She couldn't think of a good way to manage the blood, so she tipped a small amount onto her own wrist, making sure it didn't go far before settling her own arm in position.

This did elicit the right response, the needle came down, jabbing her quickly just below the wrist. Drops of green blood welled up mingling with the red.

A distinctly mechanical voice rang out from the obelisk then. Chameloid bearer not detected, it advised a red light flaring on the interface in warning.

She withdrew her arm quickly, pulling down the sleeve of her suit to hide some of the gore. There was no time to do anything about it now.

Sovaan paused. "That did...something. Sir, the drones have started pulling away from us! Heading your way...I'll keep trying to thin the herd a bit."

A laser shot forth, creating a divot in the floor next to her and making her jump. She whirled, wrist aching as she did, and dove for the next nearest console. Breathing heavily from the sudden rush of adrenaline and exertion she spoke into the shared comm of the group.

"Mr. Balsam? Mr. Smith? How much more time?"

"I've got it!" Balsam cried out. He flinched at the drone shot, ducking and covered from the shower of asteroidal debris the thing threw up, and then shakily got back to his interface. His quaking hand pushed his commbadge, "Buh-Balsam to Sojourner. Initiate the f-following code sequence on EM Band Alpha-Alpha Quad Phi at 3300 Mhz. Wa'. Wa' bej. Ja'bej. Ios. Ch-chorgh. Chorgh. Wa'bej." He lowered his PADD, "That will designate you as a friendly entity to the drones!"

To be continued...

=/\= A Mission Post By =/\=

Lieutenant Emni t'Nai
Acting Executive Officer

Lieutenant James Smith
Acting Chief Engineer

Lieutenant Sovaan
Chief Security Officer

Lieutenant Cassian Pell
Chief Science Officer

Midshipman Noah Balsam
Computer Systems Specialist

With guest appearances by...

Captain Bjorn Kodak

Lieutenant JG Chaali

Lieutenant JG Kennedy Ryan Walsh