Posted by Lieutenant William Hampton (Chief Engineering Officer) in Side Sim- Babel Project- Weapons/ Research Lab
It was 0100 hours on Leviathan, most of the senior staff had retired to their quarters, and the ship was on a skeleton crew. This left very few crewman to walk the corridors of deck 16. If any did traverse that part of the ship, they would observe that the Weapons and Research lab on that deck was locked. Behind the sealed door was the ship’s Chief Engineer. 0100 hours was the perfect time for Hampton to get some real work done.

His heavy degree of mistrust for the rest of the crew, particularly those from the RTF division, had led to his current predicament. Hampton understood that on their own, the starfleet side of the crew was overwhelming outmatched by their counterparts. Increasingly, as Hampton read through the ships crew manifest, he noted the most critical positions were not in the hands of his captain, who, compared to the rest of his colleagues, he had placed a reasonable amount of trust in. Instead, the resident borg had control of the ship when dealing with ARU activities, which would be most of the meetings. The XO trill, who was second in command, had been involved with the ARU before this posting. The Betazoid Counselor who could read minds was a member of the RTF who also happened to command a weapon that had lethal capabilities. The Doctor, Kastil was some sort of monster on her own, and Hampton had no idea what to expect from her, he couldn’t be sure she wasn’t a spy either. And most recently he had learned the Captain had his own yeomen. A position which he believed was nothing more than a ruse for a shadow agent to monitor the captain and keep him in line, although he could not prove it.

Indeed, this ship was crawling with potential enemies, and not being a member of security, Hampton felt vulnerable. However, he did have one edge over all of them, his mind and his ability to solve problems. The Counselor had told him to make a weapon to disable the KAI-9 uni, and he would, along with a weapon to neutralize most of his potential opponents. The robot dog’s weakness was easy enough, Hampton had already designed the blue prints to a small emp grenade, that would not effect organic material, but would overloard the unit’s internal data core, and cause the unit’s programming to be erased, thus rendering the bot a hollow robotic shell. He smiled at himself as he began assembling the parts and building the device. He picked up his padd and put the KAI-9 unit’s name on a new list under the file name BABEL PROJECT. Hampton hummed as he worked, building weapons was his passion, and despite the late hours of the morning, he could not help but have a juvenile energy and excitement build inside him as he worked. “Tick tock tick tock.” He hummed through a grin. “Your mechanized life is on the clock.” He hoped he would never have to use the grenade, but, he wanted to badly.

Lt. William Hampton- CE

OOC: Some really great character-building going on here. Hampton is certainly intriguing!

IC: Across the corridor, in the machine shop, shipyard engineers Copper and Clark were replicating another batch of self-sealing stem bolts, ready for tomorrow’s repairs.

“Man, we sure as hell drew the short straw, being left onboard this ship,” Copper moaned, as he held a stem bolt up to the overhead light and inspected it for imperfections.

Across from him, punching commands into the replicator itself, Clark laughed. “Quit complaining, will you? For the first time in our lives, we might actually get to see some proper action, instead of being locked away on the base the whole time.”

“Action?” Copper spat back, incredulously. “Remember the time that thing they had captive at the base escaped and melted five engineers into the deck before they could catch it again? Remember Windows’s face? How it was six days before someone could prise his eyeball out of the grating and he was just there, watching us, the whole time? If that’s your idea of action then I’d rather be without it, thanks.”

Clark shook his head, then removed another bolt from the replicator and tossed it at Copper, missing the other’s left ear by a fraction of an inch.

“Hey! Careful with those things!”

But Clark had already turned away from his colleague, his gaze directed out of the machine shop and across the passageway onto a different door, underneath which a thin sliver of light was breaking out into the gloom.

“He in there, still?”

Copper shrugged and kept his own attention firmly on the metal bolt between his fingers.

But Clark’s curiosity had not yet been sated and his questioning of the other continued. “What do you make of him? Lt Hampton, I mean?”

With a clatter, the stem-bolt hit the deck at Copper’s feet. Almost instantaneously, the man was up and over to the open door of the machine shop, where he closed and then sealed it before turning back to Clark and lowering his own voice to barely a whisper.
“I’ve heard that he’s making shock collars in there. For the crew to wear. Heard that’s how he keeps them all in line. You don’t move quickly or efficiently enough, then…zaaap!”

Clark laughed and once more studied their now closed door, as if his eyes could penetrate the metal and gaze still into the corridor beyond. “That’s ridiculous, Copper!”

The two men lapsed into silence, the only evidence of their continuing presence the clank of stem bolts into the replicator and then, via Copper, into their packing cases. Until after five minutes had passed, Clark could no longer contain his thoughts within his own head and finished his sentence aloud. “Isn’t it?”

• NEs Copper and Clark