"Hide and Seek"

[Kansas 0]

03.12.09

USS Agincourt NCC-81762

“Hide and Seek”

 

Commander Kansas JoNs wrinkled her tawny colored nose and pushed down the desire welling in her throat to cough.

 

The blood from the resulting whack her nose and muzzle had taken when she had gone down during one of the hits to the main bridge had clotted, but every once in a while she could taste the copper tinge in the back of her throat or smell it within her nostrils and nasal cavity. It was a minor assault on her senses of taste and smell, but JoNs used it to her advantage to keep her focus on the here and now.

 

The feline executive officer and the two senior engineering officers that she had tapped to accompany her over to the captured and tractored Breen vessel moved with systematic caution down the main corridor of the ship, but they had not yet encountered another living being.

 

It was disconcerting to say the least.

 

The Caitian Ex Oh felt exposed and vulnerable, but maintained her composure. It would certainly not do to be jumping at shadows (no pun intended or toward the ‘Courts resident energy being) or to conclusions. Still, it was like an outdoor musical concert held during the aestival season; the hours leading up to the event were filled with a quiet tension, and the surrounding air grew more electrically charged as the event drew nearer to the point of launch.

 

Something was going to break the quiet tension that had settled on the recycled air of the Breen ship – it was just a matter of when and who.

 

She swept the phaser rifle that she gripped in both paws from side to side, sighting down the scope attached to the weapon as it magnified the targeting through line of sight; no warm bodies showed on the infrared sensor embedded in the scope, only the superheated sparks emanating from the damaged entry panel inset into a nearby bulkhead. The doorway that the panel controlled was currently half open and dented, and the supply room contained beyond the entry way threshold was in semi-darkness.

 

The interior physical evidence of the recent ship to ship space battle this Breen ship engaged in with the ‘Court was very noticeable however; a blown out corridor console here or scorched deck plating there, and the air was thick with the smell of fried wiring and leaking coolant fluid or oil.

 

The Ferengi combatant ship had been summarily taken out and blown apart during the skirmish, and Kansas had picked up some random murmurings from the bluegill officers manning the primary and secondary science consoles on the Agincourts bridge that some sort of Romulan data stream had been downloaded from the Ferengi ship just prior to the ships destruction. So, that left this Breen ship and crew as the next best available choice for some answers about what was going on.

 

The Breen ship was a scout frigate class, and so the internal configuration and design was not overly large; there was the possibility that there was a skeleton crew in hiding somewhere on board, or the ship had been remotely controlled from the main bridge or from another location within the quadrant. Either way, the boarding party would need to access or breach the main bridge control area in order to find suspects, or find the answers as to why this ship and her crew had taken to attacking the local colonies in the area with their former partner ship.

 

The felinoid officer glanced over her shoulder and made eye contact first with Lieutenant Murray, who she had assigned to the rear guard, and then with Lieutenant Commander Kassem who maintained the middle position. Both of the senior engineering officers were also equipped with the standard issue phaser rifles which they held at the ready.

 

Keeping her double pawed grip on her rifle, she raised the business end of her weapon slightly in the air waved it in a one arc twirl pattern and then pointed off to the left with it.

 

Both engineers silently acknowledged the order with a curt nod, and then the small boarding team moved forward into the offshoot access corridor that Kansas had indicated with her actions. She wanted to get the team out of the main corridor access area and into the smaller network of maintenance access corridors that would led them to the main hull section of the Breen ship. Sometimes a side entry pattern worked just as well and if not better then the direct entry approach.

 

The team continued moving forward silently in a standard tactical formation, alert and not knowing what or who they would find as they moved closer and closer to the section of the ship where the main bridge was located.