Trespassing
Posted on Mon Nov 19th, 2018 @ 10:41am by Lieutenant Commander Kiril Nevin & Gunnery Sergeant Roderik Kos & Captain Jeanette Armitage & Lieutenant Isaiah Zelaney
Edited on on Mon Nov 19th, 2018 @ 11:26am
4,355 words; about a 22 minute read
Mission:
S1E2: Half Past Dead
Location: Shuttle Orpheus, Approaching The USS Eros
Timeline: MD 2
The wreck of the USS Eros was dark on their approach.
Even on a trajectory that would see it slam into the star in six months time, the bright orb of New Far Florence's sun did little to illuminate the ship. It high lighted jagged cracks in the hull, places where hull plates had been torn outwards or sheared apart. If you squinted the damage even looked recoverable, as though a rugged team of Starfleet's finest could get her underway in a minute or two.
"Good thing we brought the EV suits..." Armitage said, eyeing the sensor display on the middle of the shuttle's control board. "No atmosphere on board, everything's in a deep freeze."
She turned her chair around to face the rest of the boarding party.
"This is your show, but that's my ship out there," she said, eyeing them. "So...what do we do first?"
Nevin leaned over the pilot's seat, his back turned to the woman speaking. "Well, we're going to have to board the ship, I think," he said, rolling his eyes. "Lieutenant Zork, bring us in nice and slow, we don't want to upset anything."
The Ferengi nodded.
Nevin turned and looked at Rodi. "Ready?" he asked the man.
The last clips locked Rodi's helmet to his EVA battlesuit. Strengthened plates of energy dispersing material functioned as his body armor, a sling attached his phaser rifle to his suit. He gave the lieutenant a silent nod.
"To face unimaginable horror and gruesome death, I'm sure he is," Armitage said, getting up from her chair and securing the AI core housing to her suit's waist pouch. "Look, we're away from Commander Criminal Negligence. There is no shame in phoning this one in, heading back to the Phantom and sending this region of space into the cosmic vacuum cleaner. Nothing good will come of anything in this system. Want proof, look out the window at the Excaliber class starship. It was a near kilometre of duratanium and Titanium-B armour plating. It's now a floating art installation on the futility of existence."
She eyed them all.
"I am on board for exploring, but I want you to think long and hard about the saner course of action here,"
Using his thumb, Rodi pushed his face plate up, the tactical data disappearing from his sight. "Not my place to question orders. Only here to bring everyone back again alive." Rodi replied as he gave the cyborg captain a level look.
Nevin looked at the woman, suddenly distrust started to seep into his mind. "I'm sure we'll be fine," Nevin said. "Our job is dangerous but necessary for the safety of the Federation. What would it say about us if we shirk our responsibilities?"
"That we'd live to fight another day," she said with a sigh before picking up her helmet and donning it. Green tell tales on the suit's computer told her the suit was airtight. "I'd suggest beaming us as close to the computer core as possible. Its where I was found by the recovery team, it stands to reason it'll be the most well-preserved site. We should assume Clock Maker's are present, but given we've not been sublimated yet there must be a pattern threshold we have to breach to go from vaguely interesting to outright delicious."
"Zork, do as the Captain suggested. Bring us in close, but try not to get too close. We don't want to endanger the shuttle." Nevin stepped away from the group towards the transporter pad. "Everyone have what they need?" he asked, clasping the final seal on his suit.
Using the same thumb, Rodi slid his faceplate back into place. A hint of a hiss informed him of the airlock around it. His HUD showed him the status of his suit, biological information about himself, and the status of his weapons. But still he took the short phaserrifle to his hip and checked the charge indicator before holding it in a comfortable ready position.
The transporter released them into the stark monochrome of darkness illuminated by suit helmet lights. Deck and bulkhead were cast in perfect clarity, revealing a relatively plain and utilitarian corridor endemic to a dozen Starfleet design specs. Along one wall the LCAR's display terminal had cracked, spilling the liquid crystal matrix out into the void like glittering coral.
"Welcome to the USS Eros. Don't touch anything shiny, it's probably a Clock Maker that'll try to eat you. If you see a body, don't touch it: it's probably a Clock Maker that's waiting to eat you. It's probably best to limit your interactions with three-dimensional reality to a bare minimum. Think quiet thoughts." Armitage said. After a moment, pointing a gloved finger along the curve of the corridor. "Computer core's this way. Let's be quick about this."
The click of the magnetic boots felt comforting to Rodi after rematerializing. His rifle snapped up as he scanned the corridors. Sadness filled his heart at the sight, but was quickly covered by resolve. "I'm taking point, captain." The marine said over the open group channel, moving forward as fast he could on magnetic shoes.
Nevin rolled his eyes but didn't bother to argue with the man. For an enlisted jarhead, he sure did think highly of himself. Nevin wasn't even sure if the man could count to eleven without taking his shoes off. "Stay close," he said to Armitage and Zelaney as he flipped open the built-in tricorder on his wrist. "It looks like the forcefields are still active. We should have breathable air in here."
"Is that a wise idea, Lieutenant?" Isaiah asked with a horrified look as Nevin moved to remove his helmet.
"They let you on a field team with questions like that in the chamber?" Armitage said, tapping her helmet and allowing it to fold back into the neck of her suit. She sniffed the air, her breath coming out in frozen little clouds. "Smell's like home. And if there was a Clock Maker here we'd be dead or worse."
She eyed the corridor and stepped towards a door marked with plasma welds where industrial cutters had torn it open. Beyond the door was the computer core, a dark space with flickering emergency beacons running on the last field watt's in their storage cells.
"I'd set up the portable power packs into the core at the T3 and H7 interlocks. That is," she said looking at Rodi and his 'not quite a tank suit'. "If you don't want to run a risk assessment first?"
"Risk extremely high. Assessment done." Rodi said dryly through the suit speakers. He felt very disinclined to take off his helmet, something about damaged hulls and explosive decompression. His helmet lights shone into the darkened room, preceding him as his rifle light swept around. His HUD pumped up the dispersed light to show the room in a way that was close to normal. "Room seems clear."
"Let's keep assuming it's not," Armitage said and eyed Nevin and Isaiah. "I'd rather not spend more time here than necessary."
Isaiah got to work setting up the portable power packs exactly where the Captain indicated they should go. His eyes glanced around the room, always keeping an eye out for...well, he wasn't quite sure what to look for. But being alert was never a bad thing.
"The Computer Core looks intact and safe," he said, his voice eerily calm for the situation.
"Okay, plug in the power packs and the portable black box," Armitage said and reached into a pouch on her suits belt. She plucked a small isoliner wafer from within. "My command key, should open all the files for download."
It didn't awaken upon the arrival of the away team. It didn't sleep. It was simply an Awareness, connected via gluon quantum entanglement to a vast repository of knowledge and experience. Like a fly caught in the web, the small bubble of cold air at the heart of the Eros rang with rising temperatures. These were minuscule changes, and the resulting vibrations were small enough to be utterly beyond the sensing of anything but a machine. But the Awareness was a machine designed to notice these small things. It noticed the vibrations through the shattered metal skeleton of the starship. It felt the growing heat given off by a single breath of air. But it was not consciously aware of what was causing these changes: the Awareness was not sentient. Sentience was a danger to the grand design, and should always be treat as a primary threat.
So the Awareness passed the data along the to the main hub of communication and execution buried in the crust of Planet 1, amid the atomic furnaces constructing the exotic matter latticework needed for the next phase of expansion. And then the Awareness waited. It had done this before and could wait for millennia and longer until instructions were provided. Within a single second of communicating these findings to the central hub buried within Planet 1, instructions were received. The Awareness was disabled, discarded. It was no longer required. Instead, the Central Awareness at the heart of Planet 1 ran through the catalogued experiences of the biological entities it had recently subsumed. In those terrible moments of captured thought, consciousness returned to the colonists of New Far Florence and the crew of the Eros. Like many biologicals, the effects of transcription did not leave behind coherent neural simulations. This one spun in thoughts of small mammals it had helped raise. This was screamed incoherently, begging for a death that would never come. This one could not understand what was happening and desperately wanted its progenitor.
Then the Central Awareness found what it was looking for. This pattern was firmer, and there others like it. It could piece together a working threat response from these neural patterns. The Central Awareness began to simulate the application of a mosaic consciousness, limited sentience faculties of course. It was a complex task, making a mind capable of performing the task with a high degree of skill and effectiveness without also providing the means necessary to gain self-awareness. This process took three seconds.
The Soldier awoke on the Eros. In the cold. In the vacuum. Surrounded by the death of a starship.
The Soldier had a mission to fulfil.
A horrible howling noise echoed from the combadges of the away team as they continued their work, and Armitage winced as she slapped at her combadge. She eyed Rodi as he reached up and gestured her helmet to enclose her head once more.
"That wasn't interference," she said coldly.
The marine nodded, his eyes scanning the room again. "El-tee, we should head back to the Phantom." Rodi said over the team channel.
"I've almost got it," Isaiah said, not looking up from the screen he was working on.
Glancing around Nevin tapped the button that closed the helmet on his suit. "Let's give him a few more moments," Nevin said, "But let's keep an eye out, eh?"
"Famous last words." the marine grumbled before stepping to the door. From within the doorway he swept his head from left to right, his rifle tracking with him from his shoulder.
"No need to worry." Isaiah took a step back as the lights blinked on the computer core and a small whir could be heard as it came to life. He smiled and put his hands on his hips as he turned to the group. "You're welcome," he said with a grin.
"Stop glad handing yourself and perform the crash download now," Armitage barked as more howling warbled up and down the scale, sounding for all the world like a pack of demonic hounds on the hunt. "This is how it started on the Eros. Comm's malfunctions, and then people started dying. The only reliable comm's report I ever got from the lower decks before everything went to shit was-"
"Its eating us."
The voice echoed from their combdages, a buzz of different voices. It might have seemed similar to the Borg, a chorus of voices speaking as one. But this was a collection of words and sounds stitched together to form meaning and context.
"Why are the forcefields working-"
"-rally on deck five, if we can react secondary engineering-"
"-Midlothian, what's going on!"
"-Containment breach in science lab 3-"
The voices were coming together to quickly to draw out a meaning. They became a wailing sound, a wall of noise surrounding the away team.
A shiver ran down Nevin's spine as his body clenched in fear. He'd never heard anything like this before and he certainly wasn't prepared for it.
"What are you?" Armitage shouted into the noise, her voice betraying no emotion.
"Response. Stimulil requires action to mitigate."
And then a new sound. Not a noise from a combadge, or a voice from hell itself. It rattled the walls of the computer core chamber, it shook the bones of the away team.
KNOCK.
KNOCK.
KNOCK.
"Pack it up. We're leaving." Rodi said, "They're here." The marine glanced backwards, "Now."
"I need 10 more seconds," Isaiah yelled, glad he had already kicked off the download when the Computer Core came online. He hunched over his panel, nervously tapping the side as if it would hurry up the data dump.
There was a brief, brilliant sound of tearing metal and then an angry God screamed. The air that was in the computer core was suddenly incentivised to leave through a gash in the far bulkhead, a gash that grew with steady slashing strokes of scyth like claws. Through the growing hole, something familiar could be seen. Marine powered armour, a similar design to the standard issue Theta gear Rodi was riding in. But the plates didn't quite match up to where they should lock in place. They were disjointed, misaligned, as though the Marine wearing it had swollen and grown far too large to be contained by laminate carbon fibres. And where the joints didn't meet, the glossy ebony glass could be seen. It jammed one arm and its head through the gash, pulling to get through. Its nightmarish head had split open the armoured helm, forming something that looked like a cross between a hammerhead shark and medieval pole axe head.
"Stimuli acquired" the buzzing carnal choir voice stated flatly.
Rodi turned on his heels, his rifle rose automatically. The sights targetted the Clock Maker's centre mass, training and honed reflexes. The trigger was promptly squeezed, releasing several discrete highly charged nadion bursts. While firing he stepped forward to clear the doorway.
Isaiah's eyes went wide as he fell back, terrified of the creature that was clawing its way into the room. Without a second thought, he yanked the cord out of the data port and grabbed what he could, only prioritizing the data storage device he had just filled.
Nevin ran forward and grabbed Isaiah by the collar of his suit, pulling him to his feet as they started to run in the opposite direction.
"Zork, get your ass here now," Nevin said through his combadge. "Captain, find us a way out of here!"
The Clockmaker Soldier form staggered back, the ceramic diamond weave of the Marine battle rattle it had grown into absorbing the energy blasts. The weave glowed in places, showing cracks where the phaser energy had splashed over exposed Clockmaker matter. But it was soon again tearing the hull plates apart, coming for them.
Armitage turned back to the main entrance and ushered the rest through, leading the charge as the Marine held up the rear.
"We might not be able to beam off!" she said, hitting and intersection and then choosing another way apart from the one they'd used. "Zork I need you to get the shuttle on the Eros's port side. Deck 18, halfway between the saucer's neck and the main deflector. And put on an EV suit."
A scatter of static word's came back, harsh and buzzing in the ear. The corridor they sprinted down was littered with tears in the decking, or molten spots where the metal had been heated and cooled. A running battle had been fought there, and clearly, it had been lost. And then...
Stars.
Then hull was open to space, the corridor running out into it on a tongue of the exposed deck.
"Major Ognian and his men held their last stand here. Deck 18, subsection four kappa: primary lifeboat bay. Said he was going to make sure he burned the bridges after the crew evacuated," she panted in her helmet, looking out at the sea of stars before turning around. "Marine! How are we doing!"
She was fiddling with something on her belt, unpooling a length of safety tether.
Rodi's mag boots locked onto the deck solid as he glanced down. "Danger close." Rodi reported as their aggressor turned the corner to face them at deadly speeds. Taking a risky half-moment, Rodi sighted down the rifle and aimed at what seemed to be the Clockmaker's head. Recoilless blasts of charged particles hurled down at the target. "Either jump in space or pray for evac." He growled between blasts.
The Clockmaker Solder form's head snapped back as the charged particle slug slammed into it. For a moment it seemed to stagger, spiked protrusions rising from the cracks in the armor shell it wore. Then its head slowly tilted down, revealing the glowing crater of fractured black crystal.
"You heard the Marine! Mag boots off and jump for it!" Armitage shouted, hooking a tether from her suit to Nevin's. "Jump as hard as you can! When you reach full extension I'll decouple my boots and you'll pull me after you!"
Nevin jumped immediately, knowing that his skill set wouldn't be of much use in this situation.
Step after clomping step, Rodi moved backward. His rifle blasted a half dozen charges out before the HUD signaled empty. A quiet, uncouth word echoed through the marine helmet. He disengaged his boots, dropped the rifle from his hands and took his sidearm, a type two phaser in his hand. The RCS thrusters on his suit kicked in, pushing him out after the now free-floating Fleet officers he was covering, but slower. Their exit was now covered by the weaker handheld phaser, hopefully, the blasts in the chest of the Clockmaker would be enough.
Isaiah moved to the edge, a chill running down his spine as he stared into the void of space. Of all the things he'd done in life, jumping into a vacuum was not one he ever wanted to do. With a deep breath, he pushed away from the deck.
A rawr echoed through the hall as the beast watched its prey floating away. It hunched over, standing on all fours as a tendril of black mass sparked from its shoulder, shooting towards the away team.
He felt it long before he saw it, or even knew what was happening. And in a split second, Isaiah Zelaney's face hit the floor as something pulled it back to the deck. "Shit," he yelled as he tried to dig his fingers into the floor, but he was flipped onto his back quickly enough. Phaser fire launched over his body towards the creature that was pulling him closer and closer, but try as he might, nothing could halt his progress.
"Help!" he screamed, and there was a slight relief when he felt his tether being pulled from the other side. The rest of the group hadn't given up on him and was trying. But the Clockmaker soldier sprouted more tendrils and soon his entire lower half had been consumed by the unknown entity.
"HEY!" Armitage was floating off structure now, Nevin's mass pulling her along the tether as the two acted as counterweights in an action-reaction equation. She had her hand phaser out and pointed at Isaiah. "You finish the meal you fucking started assholes! hands off the new meat!"
Her shots were tightly spaced and well aimed, enough to make even a Marine smiles until they realized a Fleet officer had a weapon in their hand. The Clockmaker mass recoiled and shattered along its edges, floating off of Isaiah's lower half. The suit that had been covered was worn away to the under the cloth, revealing the honeycomb texture of the cooling mesh that kept the suit from cooking the wearer. From more raw patches, little tendrils of fluid rose up, before breaking off and spinning away.
A more telling worry was the little wisps of fog jetting from around the knee's and ankles. These were easy to miss as the suits decompression alarm went off.
With the computer specialist now free from the creature's grasp, the team pull the rope as they dragged his not-moving body across the deck until he floated off into the void with the rest of his team.
The Clockmaker Soldier staggered along the tongue of broken decking, the armored plates of the Marine combat armor it had stolen glowing from phaser blasts that should have killed a man. All it had done was regrown broken pieces of itself, and kept on coming. But now, with the group floating off into the void...it squared its shoulders, lowering itself into a jumping stance aimed right at the constellation of Starfleet EV suits.
But then it was illuminated, bathed in the light from the Orpheus's floodlights. The shuttle came around the bulk of the Eros's, its RCS thrusters peppering the void with little clouds of reaction mass. The Clockmaker stood up at seeing the shuttle hove into view, regarding it as the phaser array powered up and fired. What the Marine combat rifle had in the way of portability, the ship-mounted phaser emitter had in sheer brute force. The lance tapped the Clockmaker Soldier on the chest, and with a flash of light, it exploded into a billion tiny shards.
Armitage nearly cheered...until she saw the black pin wheeling star of another Clockmaker Soldier leaping off the upper hull of the damaged starship. It sailed through space as straight as a bullet and as blunt as a rock, its arms and legs little more than blades that reached out towards the white hull of the shuttle. Zork only felt the impact as the shuttle wheeled on its centre of gravity, RCS thrusters firing hard to keep it steady as the Clockmaker latched on, and began to dig.
And all the while, the Theta away team drifted away from both ship and shuttle, helpless but allowed to watch as more hull plates and wire were pulled free.
The automated flight system had stabilized Rodi. He was drifting towards his team, accelerating a little at a time from the reaction mass. After reseating his type two in its holster, he had reloaded his rifle and toggled the auto-aim. His suit guided his arm towards the Clock Maker Solider on the Orpheus. At this point, even a marksman like Rodi wouldn't be able to confidently make the shot, but his suit could. A dozen bolts hurled towards the Soldier, some finding a center-mass target while others left dark scorch marks on the shuttle.
With the calm, collected, and utterly authoritarian voice of the hardened veteran he was, Rodi clicked his comms open. "Team 2, this is Kos, check in."
The Clock Maker Soldier folded as the centre mass shorts found the chinks in its stolen armour. But it wasn't dead. It was like an old saying given form, the one about 'thing is ever destroyed'. The fragments flew out of the armoured shell of Marine armour, but instead of purely ballistic trajectories, they seemed to tug back around to drift towards the Eros. The shuttle began to drift now, its new sunroof bleeding a foggy cloud of O2 and other gases.
"Armitage here, and alright," the ex-starship captain said, blinking her helmet lights to gain attention. "We're drifting at about 5 meters a second. Reckon your RCS thrusters have enough delta-vee to get us some good separation? I'm not liking being in the shadow of the haunted house Marine."
Nevin, who had pulled the tether to bring Isaiah close enough for inspection, was grabbing the man's leg frantically. "Well, we're going to need an answer soon," he said through his comm system. "Isaiah's suit is leaking oxygen fast. I don't know how much longer he has. He's already passed out, though I think that was mostly from shock." Nevin looked up at Armitage, hoping she'd have an answer.
"Securing Zelaney's suit is priority one. Increasing distance priority two." Rodi replied. He secured his weapon on his armor and maneuvered towards the technical man. He looked at Nevin for a moment as he held Isaiah. Then Rodi produced a canister of emergency sealant. "Lieutenant Nevin, I advice restraining lieutenant Zelanay. The pain of this will wake him." The marine medic informed him before grabbing one limb and applying the suit sealant. The sealing material came out initially as a fine spray of droplets that connected with the open tears of the suit, and the exposed flesh. The dangerous bit of this material, and the reason it wasn't widely distributed is that if it would come into contact with exposed skin it would quickly drain out all moisture of the immediate area, turning it brittle and dead.
As the Marine worked, Armitage watched as the hull of Eros suddenly bristled with blackthorns, that shot up and out into space. Not aimed at them, she watched as the thorns arced up and away, only to be swallowed by the nova bright glare of a pair of antimatter explosions. Radiation alarms bleated in her ears from the suit's sensors, even as the flickering light of phaser fire lit up an approaching starship.
"I think our rides here," she said as the transporter beam from the Phantom grabbed a hold of them.
(No red shirts were harmed in the making of this post. A science intern was wounded, but no one lost a limb...yet. ;) )
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