The Winter Festival (Part 3)

Posted on 21 Mar 2014 @ 11:25pm by Lieutenant Olsam Mott & Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius

2,316 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Episode 05 - Solstice
Location: Starfleet HQ - Shuttlecraft Complex
Timeline: MD 04 - 1500 hrs

[ ON ]

The shuttlebay was filthy. Maybe not by Starfleet standards, but by Starfleet Medical standards it looked like a bomb of filth had gone off. He'd already counted three specks of dust since walking into the expansive room, and who knew what was hiding behind those cargo containers and shuttlecraft.

He hadn't thought to check the personnel manifest ahead of time to see what the Master Warrant Officer in charge of auxiliary craft looked like so the blue officer just stood in the middle of the shuttlebay and looked around at all the personnel. He couldn't possibly look anymore out of place, particularly with his sciences division uniform.

"Helloooo?" Olsam said. He clamped his mouth shut hearing the echo. Looking from side to side, a grin crept on his face. This was fun. "Hello-o-o-o... Olsam-olsam-olsam..."

Hidden beneath Galileo's large Waverider shuttlecraft, Vincenzo, Lamar was on his back laying on a maintenance dolly while he conducted some routine checks of the shuttle's conventional thruster assembly. He had his headphones in while he worked, but a series of strange sounds managed to make their way through the music and into his ears. Curiously, he pulled out one of the ear buds and cocked his head. What the hell is an 'olsam'? he wondered, then pushed himself out from beneath the shuttle and climbed to his feet.

Looking around the expansive bay, his eyes settled on a blue-collared Bolian who was rather easy to spot. It wasn't often that medical or science personnel visited a shuttle complex, and so he picked up his toolkit, clipped it to his belt, and wandered over to the man. "Hello, sir," he said politely to the junior lieutenant. "Was that you I just heard?". Lamar's face, hands, and uniform were all grungy and covered in synthetic grease, and he wiped his palms clean on his dark uniform pants.

"I don't know," Olsam replied, asking rhetorically, "what did you hear?"

With some hesitation, he held his hand out for introduction. He'd noticed Lamar wiped his hands clean, but he knew all manner of grit and grime would still be there. He'd just have to sterilize his hands when he got back to Sickbay...and his uniform, boots, pips, undergarments....

"Hi, I'm Dr. Olsam Mott. I'm the new ACMO. Just call me Olsam, or Dr. Olsam," he said cheerily, looking around Lamar to the Waverider shuttle craft behind him. "Do you fly that thing?"

Lamar shook the man's blue hand and introduced himself. "Lamar Darius, chief support craft pilot. Good to meet you, Olsam. I think I might have seen you around the HQ the past couple days." He thought the man looked familiar, possibly from Galileo's change-of-command ceremony or from some other place. He wasn't 100% sure.

Motioning back towards the large Waverider, Lamar nodded. "Affirmative. I can pilot most classes of support craft," he answered, then cleared his throat and briefly changed the subject. "So, what brings you here to the shuttle complex?"

"My feet," Olsam replied flatly, looking around. "Although I did use the ground transport from Medical, too. It would've been a long walk otherwise."

"...What?" Lamar couldn't tell if the man was being serious or not.

"Oh," Olsam said, bringing his attention back to Lamar. "Well, you see, when I'm not on a starship I live in a little village called Crecy-la-Chapelle just outside of Paris and I've been living there for many years so I like to think I'm very well known and for years and years and years I've been trying to get appointed to the Winter Festival Planning Committee because it's pretty much the most important and prestigious event in the village and I think I have a lot of really wonderful ideas to bring to the table like inviting the Federation President, I don't really know why no one has thought of that before because he's just a few kilometers away, and anyway this year the mayor and the village council finally appointed me to the committee and I'm its chairperson so I kind of have to take a very large and leading role, you see, so I decided that we should illuminate the whole village which isn't really as much as it seems because it's kinda small but anyway I want to illuminate the whole village with these radiation-reactive bio-luminescent bacteria and I need a pilot to help me and I was told that you were the best auxiliary craft pilot on the Galileo so I need a favor."

The Bolian took several deep breaths, having nearly de-oxygenated himself, and began to go from purple to a healthier shade of blue.

Lamar barely caught half of what the man had just said, and raised his eyebrows as he attempted to sort through the myriad of information which had just been verbally thrown in his direction. "Sorry, I didn't catch all that. Something about illumination and radioactive bacteria?" Had he heard that right?

"Yes, I'm gonna spray the village with a radiation-reactive bio-luminescent bacteria to make it pretty during the festival, and I need a pilot to fly over the village to release the radiation burst at the time," Olsam said, then looked startled when he realized he'd just given a succinct summation of his earlier monologue. "Oh. I guess I coulda just said that, huh?"

This was probably the strangest request Lamar had ever received during his short piloting career, and he while he didn't necessarily mind doing a flyover, he was cautious about dropping bacteria on people. Was that even legal? Or safe?

"Well...sure, I can do a couple flyovers if you like. But I have a couple questions about the bacteria. And the radiation. Is it safe? I mean, dropping radioactive bacteria on a village seems a bit...odd...maybe dangerous. Why not use some old-school magnesium flares?" he asked.

Olsam let out a big, long belly laugh that eventually trickled off when he realized Lamar was being serious. "Oh. Well. I don't think the mayor would like the magnesium flares. They might burn something down. They once tried to have a bonfire at the festival five years ago, and it burned down a whole orchard. So... Fire is kinda taboo."

He gave a long pause, trying to recall the other questions. "Oh! I'm going to spray the bacteria onto buildings and lampposts and the like on the ground myself. And then when you fly over, you'll release a burst of radiation that the bacteria can absorb and then emit back as a beautiful soft white glow. It's perfectly safe if we use a low-level alpha radiation burst. I'll go around and kill off the bacteria the next morning. Don't worry, Lieutenant Kohl and I worked it all out!"

Now that Olsam mentioned it, the flares were probably not the best idea exactly for the reason he stated. It wouldn't look good on either of their records if they got caught accidentally burning down a village during shore leave. "Yeah, you're probably right," Lamar conceded, then shrugged and gave the man a nod. "Bacteria it is, then. You're the scientist so if you say it's safe, let do it," he winked.

Lamar unclipped his PADD from his belt and began to tap away at it and look at some data. "When were you thinking of heading out? I don't have any flight plans logged so we can leave whenever you want." He motioned over his shoulder to Waverider. "We can take Vincenzo if you're okay with that...it'll give me a chance to do a flight performance review of the craft."

"Well, the festival isn't for several days," Olsam said, pulling out his own PADD to confirm dates. "It'll take me awhile to modify and disperse the bacteria, and then it would be good if we could time the radiation burst with the opening ceremonies at 1900 hours. But maybe we could do a test run? I can configure the deflector array while we're in-flight to see if it will work as planned."

"That could work. What mode are you going to use to disperse your special germs? I'm guessing we can't just drop a canister out of the rear hatch...or can we?" Lamar asked.

Olsam scratched his bald head. "Well, we could, but the dispersal pattern probably wouldn't look very nice. I was gonna just modify a fire suppression unit and spray it from the ground. That way I can control the dispersal for the effect I want. I wonder if I need a permit..." The Bolian looked off into the distance, going over municipal ordinances in his head.

Lamar wondered the same thing and hoped the lieutenant wasn't going to get him in trouble for violating any village ordinances. "What altitude are you going to need for the flyover?" Low-level flying was inherently riskier especially at night, and it would directly impact their flight path. The more information Olsam could give him, the better prepared they would be.

"Well, I think to get the appropriate concentration of radiation, we'd have to fly at around 150 meters. I don't think you'd hit anything, right? I mean, don't fly through Paris that low... But Crecy-la-Chapelle doesn't have any big buildings. Except the Belfry, but that's nowhere near 150 meters."

"Hmm...that doesn't sound too bad, I think I can manage it," the support craft pilot answered with a slight nod of consideration. "Are you going to want just a simple flyover, or do you want a performance demonstration too? I can turn and burn for a little if you really want to impress the folks on the ground..." he added with a mischievous grin.

"'Turn and burn'?" Olsam repeated, looking alarmed. "You mean like crash the shuttle? Oh, that doesn't seem very safe. And the captain already doesn't like me, what will he say if I was complicit in crashing a shuttle?"

Lamar shook his head and held up his hand to indicate the incorrect translation of the idiom. "No, no...I mean perform some aerobatic maneuvers. Us pilots call it 'turning and burning' because we're burning deuterium from the engines while banking and rolling the craft at the same time," he clarified. "Trust me, I don't want to crash anymore than you."

"Oooh, I get it," Olsam lied. "So, sure. You can turn and burn! Can you make the exhaust different colors? Ooo, and maybe fire the phasers a couple of times. Does that thing have a torpedo launcher on it?" He leaned to the side, looking at the craft behind Lamar.

"Uhh...yeah I guess we could do some of that..." Lamar hesitantly answered while thinking about the myriad of modifications he would need to perform to the shuttlecraft, specifically to the exhaust manifolds. "It's a pretty heavy custom job but I can probably get it done if you don't mind helping me and getting your hands greasy. And no, there's no internal torpedo launchers but we could fit a temporary external micro-launcher to the bottom of the hull," he proposed.

Olsam looked more than a little hesitant about "getting his hands greasy." In fact, he even looked down at his hands mournfully. They weren't the delicate instruments of a surgeon's hands, but still... Oh, the things he did for the village! "Okay, I think I can help. Will the torpedo launcher be able to launch...uh, not torpedoes? I don't know anything about explosives. Can they be loaded with firework things or something?"

"It's a specialized launcher so it can only fire compatible ordinance," the pilot informed him. "Specifically micro-torpedoes. But the torpedoes can be modified. A lot of celebratory functions use antimatter fireworks and it isn't hard to acquire those types of warheads."

Acquiring warheads sounded incredibly dangerous, and definitely not like something Olsam Mott should be involved with. His track record with weapons was mixed, going from somewhere near completely disastrous to slightly less than disastrous. "Um. Where do I get specialized warheads? Can I talk to someone in SecTac? I dunno any of those people... Or, do they just have them out on the street? I think I saw a fireworks shop once in the city. They probably carry standard issue Starfleet micro-torpedoes with modified celebratory antimatter warheads, right?"

Lamar laughed and adamantly shook his head. "That's a negative...at least I hope not. Any type of warhead should be regulated by local officials, especially antimatter ones." It was painfully apparent that Olsam wasn't the most familiar person with weaponry, but then again, he worked in the medical science field so it was to be expected.

"Good news is that we can get pretty much any type of ordinance we need from Starfleet. I'd just have to fill out a requisition form then send it to the munitions officer on duty. Shouldn't take too long," he explained to the Bolian.

"Oh, perfect! Just perfect. It will be the grandest festival the Federation has ever seen," Olsam's eyes had seemed to glaze over as he stared into the distance beyond the warrant officer. Snapping back to reality he rubbed his hands together enthusiastically. "Okay! So, when do I need to get my hands greasy? And is it absolutely necessarily? Will I need a surgical gown?"

A practical joke suddenly seemed appropriate to Lamar, therefore he nodded seriously at the question. "We're going to be getting very dirty so a gown is a good idea. We can meet later tonight and perform some surgery on the shuttle." He chuckled to himself inside his head at the thought of Mott showing up in medical garbs to for maintenance work. "2200 hours. Bring some gloves too. And a facemask."

[OFF]

--

MWO Lamar Darius
Chief Support Craft Pilot
USS Galileo
[PNPC - Saalm]

&

Lieutenant Olsam Mott, M.D.
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo

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