Rescue Plan (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on 25 Oct 2013 @ 11:24am by Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Ensign S'Ranna T'Srrr'Kharh & Lieutenant Asahi Kita & Alexander Iella & Lieutenant Commander Dea Mialin & Chief Warrant Officer 3 Alexion Wylde & Chief Petty Officer K8 Yellow & Chief Warrant Officer 2 Riley Cameron & Petty Officer 1st Class Rhyan Davies

2,789 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Episode 04 - Exodus
Location: USS Galileo - Deck 1, Conference Room
Timeline: MD 06 - 1110 hrs

[ON]

Snuggled warmly in between her bed sheets, Lirha let out a sleepy yawn and rolled over onto her back as her eyes fluttered open. Her bedroom was dimly lit, the only light coming in being the soft blue hue from the nebula outside the window. Several long moments passed while she began to recall her recent memories, including her time spent in sickbay two days ago. She glanced around her room for any sign of Siren or Nesh, then glanced at the chronometer and realized they were probably in the middle of their mid-day duty shift.

She yawned again and slowly sat up on the bed. A wave a fatigue washed over her but she took a deep breath and tried to shake the sensation from her body while remembering the Akkadian doctor who had told her it would take some time for her body to adjust following the trauma of nanoprobe assimilation. Gingerly and cautiously, she rose out of her bed and made her way to the nearby replicator. "Water, cold." she mumbled, then hastily took the cup with a shaky hand when it materialized and drank its contents all at once.

Slipping a loose T-shirt over her head, she wandered out into her living room, sat down at her desk's computer and activated it with a light tap of her green finger. A wave of damage reports, casualty lists, personal messages, and activity logs sat unread in her inbox, and she began the methodical task of attempting to skim through all of the contents. It had been a while since she had been updated on Galileo's status and the information in front of her would no doubt be useful. Almost thirty minutes passed while she reviewed the most critical data, then she moved on to the slew of personal messages waiting for her.

Her eyes froze when she suddenly saw a communique from her XO on the screen. File Download//Holliday//Encryption_Alpha_1_Level_10//Saalm//Delivery Confirmed. Lirha clicked on the icon and began to read the message, her eyes becoming wet and tears streaming from her eyes by the time she was done with it. She had always been very fond of John, and reading his last words and testament were too much for her to bear. Sinking her head into her hands, she began to sob.


Fifteen Minutes Later...

Lirha sniffled and wiped the wetness from her eyes while leaning back in her chair and staring idly at the carpet beneath her feet. A range of painful emotions still flooded through her, but she managed to look back at the screen one last time. Strangely, she suddenly noticed a small indicator at the bottom of John's message which indicated an attached file. Curious to know what it contained, she opened it and began to view the contents.

It was quite a large file, one which contained a plethora of tactical data regarding the Borg including but not limited to anti-Borg combat procedures, recommended weaponry, Borg vulnerabilities, and most surprisingly, schematics for something which appeared to be a "personnel cloak" designed by Starfleet's Engineering Corps to mask the biosignatures of non-Borg humanoids. John had apparently been very busy planning for an encounter with the enemy, and he had gone into great tactical depth with his schemes.

It was at that moment when Lirha decided with finality that she would get both John and her other abducted crew back by all means necessary. And she was going to do it right now. There was no sense in letting his data go to waste, and she rose from her chair and quickly slipped into her uniform before heading out of her room towards the bridge. "Saalm to Mialin, Iella, Engineering, and Sickbay...please meet me in the conference room at once."

At the moment Dea was the senior ranking officer on the bridge. With an away team down on the surface that left her in charge. Relieved to hear Saalm's voice her attention shifted to S'Ranna briefly, "You have the bridge." WIth that she left the bridge then headed immediately to the Conference room.

"Yes, Lieutenant," S'Ranna acknowledged. Drifting in orbit there was no call for her at the helm, so she strode up to the command level and folded her paws behind her back. The command was a solely notional one - she was an Ensign and would not Captain her own ship for many years - but there was always a certain pride that came with being left in charge, and her posture - ears proudly erect, tail swishing purposefully, ears sharp and focussed - reflected that.

Alex rubbed his hands on his jeans as he walked into the conference room. They were covered in soot from ripping broken equipment out of the mess halls. "Good to see you on your feet Captain." Alex said with a somber nod as he took a seat.

Cameron was truly shattered - he had spent the past several hours wandering around Jeffries tube after Jeffries tube, surrounded on every deck by drones apparently watching his every move, whilst trying to make at least basic repairs to Galileo's primary systems. With a yawn he collapsed into the chair and waited for their captain.

Asahi had a spanner stuck in his mouth and a hand deep in the guts of a console as the announcement was given. How he ended up being elected, but he soon found himself hurrying into the conference room. Plopping himself down next to Cameron (who thankfully looked like an engineer), who he acknowledged with a quick nod, he frowned at the others in the room. He was still so new, all of these faces would have been forgotten in the chaos. Hopefully he'd at least remember the important ones.

Holding a small pile of PADDs in front of her chest like she was trying to hide behind them, Rhyan slipped into the room and took up a place behind the short man she recognized both from Engineering and from the Venture. He may be short, but Rhyan was shorter, and could at least pretend to hide behind him as she tried to stay out of the way of the larger group of people.

Alexion Wylde was rolling his sleeves down as he moved through to them with a stern frown that spoke of the concentration he'd been keeping for the past...well, days now. He always worked in Sickbay with his sleeves rolled firmly up to his elbows, an old habit that he'd picked up from his first years as a doctor. No one wanted grubby sleeves near a wound. Or blood near their jacket.

Lirha looked around at the assembled crew members. She gave them all a polite nod, happy to them alive and well. "Thank you for coming." she began, then moved to the wall's LCARS console and activated it.

"I wish this meeting was under better circumstances but we have some work to do, and quickly. I have made a decision....we are going to retrieve our assimilated crew members, which means sending away teams aboard the cube." she turned to the monitor and queued up the display of John's tactical data and the schematics for the personnel cloak which he had obtained.

"Before our XO was captured, he was very busy deriving a way for us to combat the Borg, and he was able to send me this file and these engineering schematics for a new type of biosignature 'cloak' which he obtained from Starfleet's Engineering Corps." she paused and looked at the Engineers assembled. "Is it possible to use this data to manufacture the devices for use?"

Dea had taken a seat upon entering. Very relieved to see her commanding officer back in action. At the moment Dea didn't say anything she just listened to Saalm's briefing.

Alex looked over at the Engineers before looking back over at the Captain. "Well... I've been out of the engineering circle for about three years now, but if the specs I'm seeing are good... it's completely possible. The question is if it would work, I've seen stuff like this before that's failed every time. Since it's new tech, it's going to have inherent instability."

"Aye you might be right, but these designs look pretty solid to me." The Scottish warrant officer piped up - picking up a PADD and immediately downloading the information from the larger screen onto his personal device. The designs were definitely advanced, and they shared some similarity with other Starfleet devices.

"These look like something I've seen before - something in the Voyager database about personal cloaks designed to hide a subject from the Borg - I think they were developed by the Handles or the Hansens or something along those lines - I'm rubbish with names,."

Flipping through a few more pages on the PADD, he eventually found what he was looking for, a top level overview schematic of the interior of the device.

"From these notes it looks like they're designed to block a subject's bio-electrical signature by hiding it within an electrostatic shell - nothing gets out so there's nothing for the Borg drones to pick up - problem is they've seen this technology before in a slightly different configuration so it probably won't be good for more than a few hours worth of work - then they'll see straight through it."

"It's doable. Very doable." Asahi was no good at following along, already setting his own PADD down and looking over on Cameron's screen. "... A few hours might be all we need, but we should set up a precaution if they detect us beforehand, or if something shorts out. Solid design or not, any instability should be taken into account." Snatching up his own PADD from the table, he flipped through the pages. "We'll need a sort of robot or drone with low-tech that can be rigged up with both biosignature and 'cloak,' or at least just the biosignature. Something we can carry around without encumbering us too much... like... a glorified remote controlled helicopter or something. We won't have to control it, just wind it up and let it go in the opposite direction we're running in. Doesn't even have to be for very long, but long enough for us to get the hell out of dodge."

He eyed the Captain sheepishly. She was in charge, right? "It might not have been exactly what you were after, but if we're going to dive in there, we don't want to lose more people down there." He was probably thinking two steps ahead before even asking if there were other precautions, as always.

"Aye that's not a bad idea" Riley pulled up his own PADD, analysing the data and thinking on the idea of some sort of decoy.

"We could use a microprobe - you know, like they use in First Contact surveys - it already has a cloaking device inside it so that it doesn't scare the natives - it wouldn't be much effort to modify that to be our decoy - add a few bio-feedback emitters and we could make the Borg think there was a whole cloaked away team on the other side of the cube!"

For the first time Dea spoke up. Her attention directed at Lirha, "Even if this method can be considered a viable option, things are not that straight forward. We're being watched by the inhabitants of the planet our away team just went down to. They made it clear we are being tested to determine our fate. These same beings control the Borg in this cloud."

Kate was a little late in arriving, as she had been in the Transporter Room overseeing the Away Team. She crept in as inconspicuouly as it was possible for an arachnid crustacean to. She held her antennae in the distinctive position of apology, which any familiar with the intricacies of Nasat decorum would understand. The room was full of lively debate, which she did not always enjoy: with her thick accent, words flavoured with physical cues that many did not pick up on, and inability to inject emotion into her speech, she did not always do well at getting her point across in group discussions. Studying the diagrams and readouts, she quickly brought herself up to speed with the plans, however: she had no deficiency when it came to technical knowledge.

Lirha took notice of K8 Yellow's arrival then looked into Dea's blue eyes and took a deep breath. She had pondered that same problem earlier in her quarters while reviewing the bridge logs of their encounter with the alien hologram. "I understand the situation, as well as the danger." she admitted, absentmindedly rubbing her sore neck where it had been injected by tubules several days ago. "But I will not sit here and do nothing while our crew and possibly other members of Venture's crew remain aboard the cube as..." she shuddered at the thought, "assimilated drones."

She sighed and looked down at the carpet before looking back up at Galileo's current 2XO. "I know this plan has a high level of risk, but we cannot idly wait and expect for a miracle to occur. We owe it to our captured friends to bring them back to our ship, alive and well. If our engineers can make this technology work, then we will execute the plan."

"Let me be clear I never said we should just leave our crew or Venture's over there. That is not my intention with that comment. However we'd be failing them if I didn't mention the other part of our current situation," Dea responded. After talking with the aliens she didn't trust them but she also couldn't just ignore the fact they were being watched.

Lirha rubbed her green forehead and closed her eyes for a moment, trying her best to keep her frustrations from boiling over. "Noted." she simply replied. "If our engineers are successful with implementing this biosignature cloak, then no one should be able to detect us. This species could no doubt have destroyed us by now, which leads me to believe they are not as irrational as they might seem. Regardless, we will get our crew back, and we will do it now." she ordered.

Welp, there was some tension Asahi should have seen coming. Up until this point, he had kept quiet... but now seemed like a great time to cut in again. "Ma'am, if I may, and I don't mean to overstep a bound here, but there is a potential possibility that the race on this planet is doing little more than 'remote controlling' the Borg. Using them as a decoy as we intend to with the microprobes-which, by the way is completely doable, the warrant officer's right. Both cloak and decoy-rigging are within our capabilities. As dangerous as the Borg are, it's not them we have to worry about."

Pausing, Asahi folded his arms against his chest. "Without knowing exactly what technology this race is using to control the Borg, of all things, we can't exactly underestimate-or overestimate-what they're capable of. But there isn't much time to speculate about it..." At this point, he was more talking himself through the situation. The solution would pop up. "... But they do have to be transmitting something in order to control the Borg and know what the Borg are doing. So, if we could get into that and fiddle with it so that they don't think anything's wrong with the Borg while we're snooping about, it would at least buy us some time to get in and out of there."

The captain raised her eyebrows at the gold-collared man and tilted her head to the side with curiosity. "And how do we make that happen?" she asked, her eyes glancing across the assembled staff in front of her. Right now she wasn't interested in obstacles or roadblocks, she was only concerned with solutions.

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

CAPT Lirha Saalm
Commanding Officer
USS Galileo

WO Riley Cameron
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo
pNPC John Holliday

LT. JR Grade Asahi Kita
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

ENS S'Ranna T'Srrr'Kharh
Flight Control Officer
USS Galileo

CPO K8 Yellow
Transporter Chief
USS Galileo
[NPC - T'Srrr'Kharh]

WO Alexion Wylde
Doctor
USS Galileo
[PNPC - Scarlet Blake]

Alexander Iella
Chef and Engineer
USS Galileo

LT Dea Mialin
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Galileo

PO1 Rhyan Davies
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo
PNPC Jacrux

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