Shuttleport (Part 2 of 3)

Posted on 31 Jan 2017 @ 6:51am by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius & Commander Aren Ban & Commander Allyndra illm Warraquim & Ensign Miraj Derani & Senior Chief Petty Officer Martin Caine (KIA)
Edited on on 31 Jan 2017 @ 6:52am

2,721 words; about a 14 minute read

Mission: Episode 13 - Rogue
Location: Kreanus Colony - Deck 1, Hangar Bay
Timeline: MD 06 - 1015 hrs

Previously, on Shuttleport (Part 1)...

Almost right on cue, a man stepped toward the edge of the railing and peered down at the commotion on the lower level. He took quick notice of the pink head of hair standing next to the maintenance chief and waved. "Hey kid!" Lamar yelled down to get her attention as soon as he recognized her.

Miraj's emotional state was up and down like a yoyo. She had bounced with excitement the moment he'd said yes he had a Bird-of-Prey, dropped to a pout less than half a second later when he told her she couldn't fly it. But when she saw Lamar, she was right back up again. She whirled round to see who had called her name. "Lamar?! You're alive?!"

And Now, the Continuation...

[ON]

"Yeah, barely. Spent two days EVA piggybacked to one of the Klingon warships before they finally found me," he laughed. It had been a pretty wild idea at the time, but when Galileo's shuttlebay had started to decompress while he was still in it, he knew his only hope of escape was to suit up and eject himself and hope for the best. "Com'mon up," he motioned, pointing to the nearby life.

She didn't wait to be asked twice, trotting to the lift and setting it to raise her up to the next level. There she gave the man a hug. "I'm so glad you made it." the happiness left her face, his survival just underlined the fact that the one person she wanted to survive, hadn't. "Plenty didn't."

He was a bit surprised by the sudden hug, but happily returned it and squeezed her small frame tight against his. He listened to her voice turn somber. "I know...," he admitted. "All we can do is say a prayer for them, now. It's good to see you too," he tried to comfort.

"You'll have to tell me everything once we're done here." she gave him a last quick squeeze and stood back. "don't want to interrupt the bosun again." she flicked mischievous eyes at Jonas below. "He might have us kissing the gunners daughter for any more swinging the lead."

Lamar looked to where Miraj was indicating, down to maintenance chief on the main deck. "Who, Jonas?" the warrant officer laughed a bit and shook his head. "He's not so bad once you get used to him. Hell, he's been letting me work on all these shuttles as long as I show up to work on time. Did you know he used to be a lieutenant commander in Starfleet?"

She shook her head. "How'd he end up here?" One thing she'd learnt about Kreanus was that it was populated by the people who had ended up on the wrong side of history, from the biggest stories down to the tiny dramas.

"I think he was former-Maquis," Lamar said with a bit of uncertainty. "He didn't tell me a lot about it but he mentioned some pretty big gripes with Starfleet and the way they treated the Federation colonies along the Cardiassian DMZ a few years back."

"Before my time." Indeed, Miraj's birth was, indirectly, a result of the actions that led up to the establishment of the DMZ. Anyone inside the DMZ had ended up as the bad guys, regardless of the truth. "Sucks to be him."

Allyndra was a bit taken aback by the response she had gotten. Maybe she should just take a long walk on the surface for all the good that she seemed to be doing. Then Lamar showed up. They had not been an item for a bit and she wondered if he knew about Eelim or not. Well it certainly seemed that he had managed a miraculous escape and it also seemed that perhaps he and the chief pilot where a bit more then friends. She waited a moment and then said, "Hello Lamar, I am glad you made it."

Lamar looked down and saw Allyndra's distinctive wings and curvy frame. She looked as good as ever from his vantage point, and most importantly, she appeared to be healthy. The sight of her alive and well brought a smile to his face and he waved down to her. "Ma'am," he said to her with a subtle wink before looking down to the maintenance chief. "Jonas, can she come up? I know her...she's okay, I promise," he called down.

The reunion seemed to continue and Jonas rolled his eyes once again. So far almost fifteen minuted had been wasted and at this point he was losing his patience. "Fine. It's your head if she screws up, Lamar," he called back, then motioned for Warraquim to join the other two on the upper level.

Allyndra made her way up and when she got up she gave him a hug. "You look good, and seemed to have landed on your feet."

Like he'd done with Miraj, he returned the hug and squeezed Warraquim tightly. "Thanks, you don't look too bad yourself. All things considered," he added with a light chuckle to try and brighten the mood. "It was sort of blessing that I was in the shuttlebay when the Gal started to lose structural integrity. One of the Klingon cruisers was nice enough to give me a lift," he grinned.

Allyndra loved the strong arms and she laughed lightly as he brushed off just getting a lift. "Well they forgot all about me in the pods. Guess when I set off the beacons all at once they figured they had left someone behind." She sighed. "Well I suppose you should put me to work before that man blows a gasket and it looks to me like you a Miraj need a bit of catching up." She nodded toward the pilot, "She has been amazing, hurt and yet helped me out."

"I bet I can find a few things for both of you to help with," he winked, then motioned for both of them to follow him towards the craft he was working on.

Aren watched the exchange briefly. He wanted to interject, and the commander inside of him wanted to, even if this was in effect Jonas' operation. He had his own job to do and didn't need him looking over his shoulder to make sure he was playing nice with his people. He would do it or he wouldn't, and if he didn't then Aren would get involved. Aren turned to leave the hangar.

The Trill's attempted departure didn't go unnoticed by the observant maintenance chief. "Hey!" Jonas called out when he saw Ban heading for the exit. "Shift's not over. We got work to do and I need you to supervise this one," he pointed over to where Caine had wandered.

Aren turned back and quirked an eyebrow. He had had no intention of staying, nor had he even been assigned. He had only wanted take an opportunity to see some of the crew. After a moment he nodded, rolling up the sleeves of his uniform. "Very well," he walked over to Caine, "Alright chief looks like we have some work to do." He said motioning for Caine to follow him. He turned his attention back to Jonas. "You said the Ferengi shuttle needs to be fixed. What seems to be the problem?" He asked not trying insult the Kreanus chief, but rather intrigued by him.

Caine moved to join Commander Ban, he might have been willing to openly ignore somebody called chief seeing as chief was lower than senior chief in his military point of view but an officer trumped that so he followed away from his interests toward the boring Ferengi pod.

"The INS is fried and needs to be replaced," Jonas began, ticking off various issues on his fingers, "the deuterium filters are clogged, the forward deflector array is out of alignment, and there's about two-hundred microfractures along the nacelle housings. Some of it's easy to fix but just takes a bit of time; the other stuff like the INS and fuel filters will need to be scrapped from another shuttle," he explained, then pointed to another nearby Ferengi shuttle of different classification several spots down the row. This one was in decidedly worse visual shape than the one Jonas had just assigned them to work on.

"You can take the parts you need from that one over there. Everything should be compatible, and if it's not, you'll need to rig up an adapter or some sort of interface," the maintenance chief continued. "Think you can handle it?"

Aren nodded. "I can." He turned to Martin. "Chief, I need you pull damaged deuterium filters from the one that we are fixing and start work on the micro-fractures. I will start gathering the parts we need." He said before turning to the parts ship. He shook his head an almost smiled, it was going to feel good to get his hands dirty.

Aren crawled into the engineering space in the parts ship and was appalled at its state. While it was obvious that it was in the process of being parted out, the least they could do is keep it relatively clean. Rubbish and refuse was everywhere and coolant was leaking from some where. "I just hope that the coolant leak isn't damaging that filter." He said to himself as he pulled out a hydrospanner and a rag and got to work taking about the containment system that would allow him to get to the filter that he needed.

Martin found the exterior controls for partially scraped Ferengi pod and made his way inside to the panels muttering to himself about what did people think he was an engineer. Though he muttered it it was good to be working on stuff that was of interest to him. In a few minutes he had the filters out and was bringing them back to the pod they were fixing and started to get it ready to open the shuttles filters.

"I think we should make sure that we pull the oxygen and CO2 scrubbers as well, or what ever system that Ferengi use in place of what we use. Considering the condition this bird is in, we might find a newer and better set in the old shuttle." Aren offered as he continued to work on pulling out the rest of the assembly that was containing the fuel filters.

Martin finished replacing the filters and as he was about to leave the inside he decided to check the oxygen filters. After about ten minutes to find them after taking almost half the internals apart to get in there he found the corresponding filters almost pristine on the salvaged shuttle, he replaced them.

Aren helped Martin pull the filters from the damaged shuttle. He had been dreading working on the INS and knew that he had to get that fixed before they could realign the deflector dish.

Martin finally got to the wielding. He stopped and said "Commander there is so little of the real metal left. It is almost like they need to go steal themselves a new Ferengi pod, so they can have it and start using this one as salvage. If I do too much wielding on this, the entire shell is hoping to shake it's self loose."

Aren nodded. "You might be able to cut out a piece of the other ship and replace it, almost make a patch over it. It doesn't have to look pretty it just needs to work." He said as he finally got to work on the INS. After having pulled both the project and scrap shuttles, he went to work replacing it. However, it wasn't just the INS that was fried on the project shuttle. It looked like what ever had damaged the INS had also called a feed back that not only caused the alignment problem in the deflector, but also fried the primary navigation console. He shook his head. It was more work that he was going to have to do, at least the Ferengi equivalent of the LCARS was still intact and just needed some new components for inside the console. "Senior chief. I need to head back to the scrap shuttle for a moment. I need to pull some more parts." He said as he made his way to the scrap shuttle.

"I'll be here banging on this scrap metal till you get back sir." Martin said with a quite smile to himself. He got the piece nicely shaped to fit as a patch over the area he was repairing. He was happy but he didn't have time or the tools to fabricate a new part. So started wielding it in place as the commander returned.

Aren returned with a box full of parts. He crawled back into the shuttle, but not before looking at Martin's work and telling him good job. He spent the better part of an hour and a half replacing the components to the navigational console as well as replacing and re-calibrating the INS. He sat back and wiped off some carbon scoring from his hands and face. "Hey senior chief. I think we might be ready for a small scale power test. When you are ready, I went you to connect shore power to the shuttle, keep the warp core offline, just connect the shuttle to the colony."

"Probably a good idea. We don't want something exploding and blowing my patch job off." Martin said as he finished a twenty minute wielding job. "Okay going internal sir maybe you should be outside when I start this bucket of bolts." He headed to the pod internal systems. He sat in the secondary control chair so he could see Commander Ban easier.

Aren nodded. "Not a bad suggestion senior chief, you may begin when ready." Aren said, as he watched the chief began his patch job. It didn't take to long and luckily there were no issues. "Ok, looks good. Now that you connected the shore power, lets power up the ship. Slowly, system by system." He said as he made his way back inside and began typing in some commands on the external computer.

"Powering up now sir." The INS came online and the console showed that the only problem now was the deflector array. The filters started working with a gentle hum, there was a gentle pop and he immediately shut the power off. "Deflector array is next on the list commander and that is top of the must happen now. If I had powered up mains power the pod may have exploded on the spot probably taking you me and half a dozen of the shuttles with us."

Aren shook his head. "Maybe, but I don't think so chief, the mains look good, I just want to wait to power up the warp core after we finish everything. Its easier to disconnect the ship from shore power in the event of an issue that it is to disengage the warp core connections. " He shrugged. "But that is either here nor there, it looks like everything is running optimally. Let me crawl back under here and start tinkering with the array. I want you to watch both the power output and resonance frequencies. I don't want to get zapped, and it will be easier to get it in spec if I have someone calling out the numbers." He said as he started crawling underneath the navigation console. "Start calling them when ready."

Martin started the shore power again and it hummed nicely peacefully this time. The array numbers started coming up and he called them for each quarter starting at half until it got to full strength. "That's optimal Commander Ban." He said quickly for a stop with a gentle tap to his thigh for good measure.

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

Cmdr Allyndra illm Warraquim
Chief Medical and Second Officer
USS Galileo

Ensign Miraj Derani
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Galileo

CWO2 Lamar Darius
Support Craft Pilot
USS Galileo
[PNPC Ko'raH]

SCPO Martin Caine
Chief of the Boat (CoB)
USS Galileo

CMDR Aren Ban
First Officer
USS Galileo

Jonas
Shuttlebay Operator
Kreanus Colony
[PNPC Ko'rah]

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