Cold Station 31 (Part 3 of 3)

Posted on 23 Aug 2022 @ 6:15pm by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Lamar Darius & Commander Scarlet Blake & Commander Allyndra illm Warraquim & Lieutenant JG Sofie Ullswater & Ensign Amanda Turell & Petty Officer 2nd Class Donald Andrews & Petty Officer 3rd Class Constantin Vansen
Edited on on 23 Aug 2022 @ 6:18pm

4,194 words; about a 21 minute read

Mission: Episode 18 - Cold Station 31
Location: Cold Station 31 - Level 3, Main Engineering
Timeline: MD 10, 0745 hrs

Previously, on Cold Station 31 (Part 2)...

Slipping out of the tube Donald quickly joined the formation adding his light to penetrate the darkness. "Ooh that's a bit nippy." He remarked.

Vansen looked around as he came out, frowning as he looked around. His eyes went to Donald and he made a face, but the cold didn't bother him that much yet.

Finally reaching the bottom Amanda crawled out of the tube, she felt the chill but it wasn't bothering her as much as the small ache that was forming in her shoulder. "Last man." She called out, letting Blake know everyone was out and ready to move on.

And Now, the Continuation...

[ON]

The deepest level of the cold station was eerily quiet. No sound - mechanical or organic - could be discerned by humanoid ears except for the soft crunch of icy crystals beneath the away team's boots as then started to walk forward on the half-frozen deck plating. The main corridor was configured similar to that of the habitation level two decks above, with multiple sealed doors lining the sides of the walls. The air felt heavy for some strange reason; cold yet humid.

Taking a deep breath, Blake clenched her jaw and set her shoulders firmly as she took a step forward. She kept her weapon and torch lifted as she forced herself to keep moving toward the reactor room at the end of the corridor, even if every instinct told her it was a terrible idea.

"Commander be careful. I am getting some sort of life signs but there is a lot of interference. I can not tell what it might be." Allyndra held the medical tricorder out. She did not feel brave but knew that with the poor light she might have a slight advantage. "Also, let me come up to be with you. Compound eyes are much more sensitive to movement, even in this environment."

Blake hesitated for a moment; it went against her instinct to have the two officers that were highest in the chain of command together at the front of the team in a potentially dangerous situation. "And your hearing?"

"As good as yours or anyone else in this party." Allyndra moved the tricorder around. "There are life signs behind these structures, but not clear enough with the interference to make out what. I suggest if we are going to get power on, let's not delay. Standing here in the cold and dark is not good."

Within the dark and frozen atmosphere of the research facility's lower level, several of the away team's flashlights cast luminescence across the double doors at the end of the main corridor. They were Starfleet in nature, revealed by traditional signage which read '3012 - Main Engineering'. The first digit denoted the station's vertical level while the last three referenced its compass position in relation to the rest of the structure. Ice crystallization had formed on the doors' surfaces which reflected light back at the new explorers.

At the front of the away team, Darius gave a hand signal for the others to hold position while he personally approached and inspected the entrance. He holstered his phaser as he walked closer then ran his wrist flashlight up and down the crevices of the door's seals. His attention focused on the middle portion where the two segments joined, specifically noting metallic bubbling protruding from the seam. "Phaser weld. From the inside," he relayed to the others. "Like the one we saw back up on the first level..."

Blake held back the threatening sigh at the way her stomach sank with the words. She motioned for Amanda to join them, glancing across the group. "We have to get in," she said bluntly. She knew that the madness they'd found in the last sealed room had to be haunting them at the prospect of another welded door. But they didn't have an option. They were at a complete dead end without power.

Master welder Darius, on the job again, Darius rolled his eyes to himself. This time, he tried not to think about what might be on the opposite side of the door. Sometimes pure ignorance and denial was a more comforting mental state than curiosity and horror-filled speculation. He pulled his phaser, reconfigured its power setting, then stood to one side of the double-doors and started from the top. His bright orange phaser beam illuminated the dark corridor and loudly hissed as it started to cut through the alloy's seams.

Though she carried several spare power packs Amanda decided not to drain her rifles current one any more so as she moved into position to help Darius cut through the next doorway she drew her Type II and started at the bottom.

When both the conn officer and security officer finished their work, they each took one side of the door and started to pry them apart. Several lurches in the manual hydraulic mechanisms halted their progress but they soon managed to push the doors to the station's engineering bay fully open. Several of the away team's flashlight then shined inside of the large room. The deuterium reactor core at the rear of the chamber was obviously offline and not emitting any sound, vibrations or light source. Every console was dark, with several in emergency power standby modes. The temperature was slightly warmer than in the main corridor but still chilly, and the familiar smell of decaying flesh revived itself.

Vansen took a deeper breath despite the smell, frowning as he walked around. Slowly, he explored the outer edges, walking carefully. He took a moment, the light going over a console. He glanced at Andrews before he knelt, checking under the console. "Some of these have fused together," he said, but more to himself, the light shining on the tools scattered on the ground. He picked one up and got up, moving to the backup console for the deuterium reactor, which was not far from the entrance. A good little spot, in case something went horribly wrong. Which...it sort of had here, he guessed. A part of him warned him, a whisper in his head of ghost stories from the dark. Power off for a reason. He pushed it aside, kneeling there to crack the panel open. He did a quick check before his fingers moved, closing his eyes after a moment. "There..." he stood and moved to the console. "Andrews, see if you can get some life in the consoles..." he got the one he was working on back online, albeit slowly. He was getting error messages as well, missing logs...but looking at it, it looked like a manual shut down.

"This one is completely busted." Donald said, he'd already began checking over the various consoles, several of them were totally non functional. "Might have something with this one." He added before unshouldering his engineering kit and disappearing underneath the console. Several loud clunks could be heard as he worked including one immediately followed by a loud grunt, the console flickered on and off several times before it eventually steadied. "Power transfer system by the looks of it, primary and secondary EPS systems are intact, if we can get the core online we shouldn't have much trouble getting primary systems powered up."

Vansen looked over at Andrews, frowning before he looked down at the console. It felt wrong. It all felt wrong here now. "Understood," he said, aloud, for Andrews to hear.

"Andrews, let me give you a hand there." Ullswater's voice was cut through the moment not betraying at all the puddle of fear that was taking over her mind. Maybe if she could make herself useful she could sharpen up a bit. The ensign moved to kneel down beside the engineer. She hoped the lack of light in the room would hide from the others just how much her hands were shaking.

"Thanks Ensign." Donald said as the woman slipped in beside her.

Members of the Starfleet away team moved further into main engineering and surveyed the aft areas of the bay. The scent of death increased the deeper they went until a large pool of blood was spotted on the ground. It appeared fresh, still pooling and not completely dried. One of the puddles shimmered as a droplet from above added to its collection and created a small ripple.

Blake very literally held her breath as she caught the movement, moving closer to the edge of the gruesome pool. The hackles on the back of her neck lifted as she saw the amount, and a shiver of adrenaline ran through her as she realised the impossibility of blood dripping down from such a height. Bracing herself, she turned her flashlight upwards, before forcing herself to look up.

Allyndra had her tricorder pointed upward as the movement caught her attention.

The engineering bay's ceiling was tall, roughly two decks high and contained several overhanging pylons. It was difficult to discern anything within its dark shadows but the first officer's flashlight beam trained itself on a terrifying spectacle. Two arm appendages of a humanoid body appeared to be dangling from the rafters, attached to a full torso which had been severed at the waist. There was no functional epidermis present -- the body had been skinned. Only dark red muscles, arteries and white tendons and bone remained. Another drop of blood from one of its limp fingers free-fell and landed on Blake's cheek.

Blake's eyes closed with an instinctive flinch as it hit her, the recoil running through her entire body. Forcing her eyes back open, she stared with disbelief at what she was seeing. Her stomach turned, but then clenched tightly as her whole body prepared for flight or fight.

Allyndra knew that she probably shouldn't and it was obvious that the being was most likely long deceased. There was enough room and she snapped her wings open. It would be tight flying but she could hover upward. "Keep eyes and scanners open!" She moved upward to examine the body more closely.

Blake covered her hand with the blue sleeve of her poloneck and scrubbed the blood from her cheek with one, firm movement. She lifted her torch and directed it towards the body to give the doctor more light, but she kept her gaze on Warraquim rather than the bloody, fleshy mess.

Near the ceiling where Galileo's winged chief medical officer hovered, the lifeless corpse could now be examined in full. It had seemingly been perfectly skinned, if such a diagnosis existed. No visible signs of mutilation were present and the morbid exposed musculature appeared intact. The deceased person's eyes were bloodshot and clouded, revealing the time of death to be somewhat recent. Yet the most fascinating and bizarre element pertained to his or hers' severed waist and lower legs. Its lower torso was - somehow - directly embedded into the ceiling bulkhead itself, as if a fusing between organic and inorganic compounds had occurred.

She used the tricorder but mostly it told her what she could already determine with her own eyes. This flaying had been carefully done. She didn't like being up here in the dark with the corpse but maybe an answer or two. Allyndra's head almost was brushing the ceiling and she examined the lower area. It was unclear if the torso had been stuck to the ceiling or almost had been a bad transport and gotten fused to the ceiling. She decided not to stick around. There was nothing more to do.

She dropped coming to rest easily. "Commander. Fairly recent, skinned in almost a medical manner. I can not quite figure if the torso is stuck to the ceiling or if it was almost like a bad transport. Considering how recent it must have taken place I suggest that whatever did it may not be far off."

It wasn't what Blake had wanted to hear. She shook her head, looking around with a frown, casting her light in the direction of the consoles. "Where's that power?" she demanded, her voice sharper with urgency.

Vansen ignored the body, looking over at Andrews. "Let's...do a repair, get the power back on. Come help me with the main console..." he headed closer to the reactor, but kept to the edges of the room, avoiding the body. Once at the console he knelt, frowning as his knees made contact with something. He shone a light and swore. "There's isolinear chips all over the floor, be careful where you step," he called out to Andrews. "Let's repair this console, slot them in again and see if we can get the reactor online." He put his tricorder out, but to scan for radiation. If there was a spike, he wanted to know, and he didn't trust the sensors in the room. Actually, he trusted nothing in the room. It was a cursed place, a tomb.

Donald carefully headed over to help Vansen trying not to crush or further scatter any of the isolinear chips, he knelt down by the pile of chips and began to sort through them. "This would be so much easier if we had better light." He murmered as he worked, having to use his torch to check each isolinear chips very small sequencing numbers was going to make this take so much longer than it would normally.

Vansen moved over to him, kneeling to help him. He glanced at Donald's face, studying the Engineer. "When we start her up...the second anything seems odd, we shut her down again," he whispered, shaking his head. "They must have shut it all down for a reason, and right now I am getting all sorts of weird...feelings about this place."

"Don't be saying that Constantin, most of us are worried enough as it is." Donald rolled over onto his back and shuffled under the console some more to reach the furthest panel. "They certainly made a mess of shutting it down."

Ullswater pulled out a particularly mangled chip and holding it in the torchlight gave a long hard look at it "You can say that again. Not even sure how you mess something up quite this badly. They were in a rush, or it could be that the person who did this was unfamiliar with these systems." She was putting about as much effort into monitoring and adjusting her tone as she was with putting in the repair works. Something she had long ago learned was that keeping her voice calm and happy helped keep herself feeling that way. "Not all the chips are in good enough shape to be slotted, we're just going to have to hope none of the ones we've lost are too critical."

"We could do a patch," Vansen said after a moment, hesitant. "Some of these slots are redundancies, but the computer is expecting something there. Doesn't even have to read it, just...something there." He suggested, looking over at Ullswater and then Donald. "We could salvage something from the consoles that are irreparably damaged?"

"Yes, right, of course." A little of the mask dropped from Ullswater's voice as she pulled herself up from under the console. "I'll take a look." She knew what came next, she'd have to scan the room for a moment, find another candidate console to salvage from. It sounds easy but she knew that in the act she'd see whatever it was the other officers were looking at on the other side of the room. She tried to swallow down the fear and she turned to see what there was to see.

She saw the puddle, she saw Blake and Warraquim, something dripped from the ceiling. Don't look up Sofie, whatever you do just don't look up.

"This one," Ullswater walked stiffly over to one of the other consoles. She hadn't looked up. "Never going to work again." She didn't want to speculate on exactly what had been done to the terminal in front of her but whatever had happened it wasn't something that anyone could feasibly think of repairing. "How many are we going to need?" She called out as she opened up the rather dented panel under the console.

Vansen looked inside, his eyes going over it quickly. "Seven!" he called out, shaking his head. A miracle it was only seven. "Maybe take ten just in case?"

Ullswater pried off the panel revealing rows of mostly undamaged chips "Give me a minute or two. Some of these are damaged too." The ensign started to sift through the rows, picking out only the ones that looked intact.

"You got it, boss," Vansen said lightly, falling into a little bit of a pattern. He could pretend it was just an issue, and ignore the rest of the things around him. Just pretend everything was fine. He put his torch down, to illuminate the console a little better.

A moment passed in near silence as Ullswater collected the chips. Silence punctuated solely by another couple of drips, sounding out in the cavernous engineering room from where the senior officers were standing. Each time another drop landed in the puddle the sound of it sent a shiver down Ullswater's spine. She wanted to call out and create conversation with the others but given all they'd seen so far today it was hard for her to try and think of anything reassuring to say. So she just worked in the near silence until she had collected the needed chips.

"Here," Ullswater said upon reaching the others again "I got fifteen, you know, just to be as safe as possible." She handed them down to where Andrews was working before once again crouching down herself to work on the console. "Right, let's get this thing powered back up."

Donald took several of the chips from Sofie and set about replacing them into the board, after a few minutes he shuffled out from underneath the console enough he could see Constantin and Sofies faces. "I think we're good, I'll stay down here to keep an eye out, you get firing her up."

Ullswater vocalised a small affirmation before turning back towards the scene at the other end of Engineering. "Commander Blake, Commander Warraquim." The ensign's voice was startlingly loud, filling the cavernous room and cutting through the quiet that she and the others had been working through "We have the main reactor console fixed up as best we can. We'd be ready to make an attempt at reinitialising main power on your orders."

"Do it," Blake nodded, moving over to be closer to them, casting her light across a console that had seen better days. Maybe Vansen was right, maybe it had been powered down for a reason. Although 'reason' didn't seem to play much of a part in what they'd witnessed so far.

Allyndra would be glad for at least more heat. The body being where it was bothered her. Would heat and or light attract something. “I am taking to the air to observe better. Whatever did this perhaps attracted to heat or light. Be on the alert please!”

Vansen let out a breath, nodding to Ullswater and Andrews. "Andrews, as the engineer..." he motioned for him to start it, even as he went to monitor it. The more eyes, the better.

"Alright." Donald said, he got up and stepped around to the front of the console. "Here goes nothing." and tapped the button to initiate the start up sequence.

A soft hum reverberated through the deck plating in the engineering bay. The deuterium flow conduits flickered online then stabilized, casting the dark room in apricot hues. Primary fuel routed to the main bulbous reactors where the three of them stacked atop each other in a similar configuration to a warp core assembly. The plasma manifolds were next to come online and started to glow with indigo pulses. All non-damaged consoles nearby flickered to life, along with overhead lighting in all the adjacent alcoves.

"Plasma temperatures are look close to normal, and seem to be successfully exhausting." With her tricorder out Ullswater did her best to monitor the start up process. She wasn't an engineer and she was sure that despite having rank she was probably the least qualified of the three of them to start up a reactor. "Vansen, take a look at the deuterium flow, it seems off to me."

Vansen frowned, nodding as he let out a breath. "It's slow, I am going to boost it. Keep an eye on the exhaust plasma temperature, they might spike too quickly for the containment to handle," he said, moving his fingers over the controls. "Come on, darling...slowly now..."

"Don't boost it yet," Donald called out. "Check the deuterium tank temperature, it's that cold in here the deuterium may be too slushy, turn the regulators up a little."

"Alright," Vansen nodded, looking at the temperature. "How much up? I'm struggling even to get a read on it..." he said, and shook his head with a frown.

"Bump it up another 5c, should be enough." Donald said, too cold deuterium could interfere with the flow rate, not enough to prevent the reactor from powering up but it would hamper reaction speed limiting its power generation

Vansen nodded, doing as told, taking a deeper breath. "Increasing temperature by five degrees celcius," he said, glancing towards Andrews. He was a good engineer, so he trusted him.

"Looks good," Donald replied. "Give it a minute or so, the flow rate will improve."

Vansen nodded, frowning as he watched it. He suddenly chuckled, nodding. "There we go. Good call, Andrews," he said, looking over at the other man.

Ullswater nodded in the directions of Vansen and Andrews, thankful for having others around who really knew what they were doing. "Good job, both of you." There was a little triumph in her voice, they'd done it, with power restored things could start making sense again. The ensign turned in the direction of Blake "Commander we now have main power partia-" She'd looked up... In the flickering half light of the reactor and rebooting consoles she saw for the first time the flayed figure at the centre of Engineering's ceiling. What had just been a moment of triumph evaporated as Sofie felt her last meal starting to churn inside her. "I'm about to throw up." She managed as a quiet murmur before turning away from the others.

"Eyes down, Ensign," Blake advised firmly, turning her torch off as she glanced around quickly, blinking with the pulsing light. "Focus on your work," she moved up closer to look down over her shoulder at the console, as if to make her point.

Inside Cold Station 31, the main power relays and EPS conduits quickly transferred energy from the humming fusion reactors to the entirety of the facility. Consoles and ambient lighting across all three levels flickered then powered up with soft reverberations. All previously-sealed doors and compartment entrances not welded by a phaser unlocked while life support re-engaged to stabilize the oxygen supply and local temperature. Suddenly, several nearby terminals begin flashing critical red cautions which were accompanied by an audible alert.

"WARNING," notified the automated computer voice, "primary generators exceeding safe power output."

Vansen swore, shaking his head as he started to run a diagnostic on it, but also decided to do a manual check of the lines. It helped sometimes, and he saw the issue there. "We got a runaway power cascade in progress, Andrews! Can't tell what is causing it..." he looked at the diagnostic results coming in. "And neither does the computer by the looks of it."

Additional crimson caution lights continued to light up across all of the engineering consoles at a rapid pace. Within seconds, the room was drowned in red alert strobes. Something was terribly wrong. The station's computer gave a single, final warning which began to repeat. "WARNING. Unknown anomaly detected."

A distressed and guttural voice suddenly spoke, originating from the room's ceiling where there were no Galileo crew members or CS31 personnel present. At least, not alive. The cloudy decomposing eyes of the skinned corpse came to life then started to turn red. Its arms and fingers twitched and its torso slowly started to descend. Intestines stretched from its severed lower body to serve as an anchor to the overhead bulkhead, still seemingly fused into the station's metal infrastructure. It's voice rumbled then echoed across the room.

"...What...have you...Done!!?!"

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

CMDR Scarlet Blake
First Officer
USS Galileo-A

PO3 Constantin Vansen
Operations Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Rice]

Ensign Amanda Turell
Security Officer
USS Galileo-A
[Pnpc Mimi]

PO2 Donald Andrews
Engineering Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Mimi]

CMDR Allyndra illm Warraquim
Second and Chief Medical Officer
USS Galileo-A

LCDR Marisa Sandoval
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo-A

CWO3 Lamar Darius
Conn Officer
USS Galileo-A
[PNPC Saalm]

ENS Sofie Ullswater
Science Officer
USS Galileo-A

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