Coward....or Courageous

[Asyle 0]

This log takes place during the boarding attack, just as Victria, Tandaris, and Marius are defending Main Engineering.

 

She was scared, and flashbacks to when the Bogandry had boarded the Pakled ship of her captivity, gave her the courage to overcome her fears, and gave her an idea.

 

Victria, fangs bared, was leading her security forces against the Blood Warriors. Tandaris and Marius were preoccupied with the shields and power systems. She knew that this was the time to prove herself, as an engineer, as a loyal Federation officer. Yes, she knew that the Captain would have to be faced, when he learned of her disobeying orders to have security escort her at all times. But there was something wrong with the shields, and Tandaris had ordered her to monitor them, and keep them at 100%.

 

She knew the 19^th deck and it's waste management was just 4 decks below, from her first assignment. Before, she had lived in the spaces between the decks and the hull when she had first come aboard the Excaliber, crawling in the spaces created where the curve of the hull and the flat decks provided enough room for her. She had done the same on her Pakled ship, and had surprised her victims from underneath, dispatching them with ease.

 

What bothered her was something she had seen on one of the hull plates around the umbilical support on Deck 19, where the shield's graviton emitters were affixed. She learned from monitoring them what hardware was involved, and this one little item didn't appear on any of the shield's diagrams.

 

So behind a console where no one saw her amid all of the confusion, she lifted a deck plate, and crawled, squeezed, and slithered her way into the space between the decks. She had a few basic tools with her in her pockets, just an old style screwdriver, a penlight, and a small needle-nose plier. Security had deemed any advanced tools too dangerous for her to have. Making her way to the hull was difficult, and with the sounds of battle around her, frightening her even more than the darkness. But she was determined to make a difference, determined to show her chief and captain her bravery, loyalty, and intelligence, and prayed for their favorable judgment of her actions.

 

It took but a minute to make it back to where she had seen the item inconspicuously attached to the power and control conduits for the graviton emitters of the shields on deck 19, between the waste management systems and the umbilical support structures. No bigger than the tracking pellet implanted in the back of her neck, it did have six legs gripping it to the conduit, which made it look like it could crawl. A red light blinked slowly at one end of its 'body' while a blue light flickered at what seemed to be a slow and random rate.

 

Watching it for a minute while she caught her breath from worming her way down from engineering, she wondered what the function of this item could be? Was her idea a good one, or did she just ensure that she was going to be summarily dismissed and have her future destroyed? What if this item was supposed to be there, one of the engineering modifications by Tandaris or Marcus not documented, and just not part of the specs she had seen about the shield systems? Could she be making things worse?

As she was studying this item, trying to decide how to remove it, the red light started to glow solidly, and blue light began to flicker intensely. Then the ship was hit with fire from the Cult Raider, and the blue light went out while she could feel their beam rattle the Excaliber ship. The shield generators were humming with power as their graviton emiters pumped out their massive energy in a futile attempt to block the weird beam now striking the ship. The power flows stopped, the blue light started to flicker again at its slow pace, and the red light lowered its intensity, back to how it looked when she first saw it.

 

Now she knew her idea was right! The only way to transport through shields was to encase a transporter beam within a weapons beam that had the frequency of the shields it was being fired at! And this little piece of technology must be a spy transmitter which crawled into place! She used her screwdriver and pliers to pry it off the conduit. As soon as she did, the little legs started moving about. All of the lights on it went out.

 

Holding it with her pliers, with the legs of the spy transmitter flailing about, she knew she couldn't crawl back to engineering with only one hand. So she tore off the rest of her sleeve, which had gotten ripped anyway as she had made her way under the decks and around the hull. As she pulled the sleeve down her arm, she tied a knot to encapsulate the spy transmitter and still its legs with one-hand, using her teeth while her other hand kept the spy transmitter firmly gripped in her pliers. Once she was sure it wasn't going to be able to get out quickly, she released the pliers. Now with both hands free, she tied a few more knots around the transmitter, put it in her pocket, and headed back to deck 15….

 

….and the consequences of her actions from abandoning her post during a red alert. As glad as she was that she had seemingly found out how the beam was getting through the shields, she would have to admit it when she presented her findings and the spy transmitter. To her, the choice of letting these 'men' continue to invade 'her' ship was far, far worse.

Edited November 16, 2008 by Asyle