Posted by Lieutenant Miriam Cross (Chief Medical Officer) in Main Sim - Shuttle ready to launch - Destination Meteor impact

Posted by Crewman Guy Fleegman (Security Officer) in Main Sim - Shuttle ready to launch - Destination Meteor impact
[snip]

However, on visual scans within the massive crater impact they picked up a far more unusual and unexpected site. A large 200ft circular object was in the craters center. It was silver-green in tone with very artful weaving designs all over the hull surface they could see. Scans of the object revealed it wasn’t metal as the surface might at first imply but instead some kind of hard granite/marble like mixture!

‘’Wow!!’’ Cross exclaimed ‘’That thing look massive ,never seen anything like it ‘’.

Interestingly too the could pick up it was hollow and had some kind of energy generation going on that equaled almost the warp core output of the Merrimack. The signatures though did not match anything known right away in the database. Life sign scans were indeterminant, they were picking up movement of about 20-40 things inside the object but they did not seem to be artificial or organic to the sensors of the shuttle. They would have to get closer to see what more they could tell.

the movement of about 20-40 ‘things inside the object thought Guy, but he continued to remain silent.

Her scan was useless inside the shuttle ,it seemed they had to rely on the shuttle sensors ‘’Those objects are not artificial or organic yet they’re moving ‘’ the CMO turned to face the rest of the team ‘’Does anyone ever came across something similar or could offer more information?’’ .

M’Mera undid her seat buckle and moved forward to peer out the viewscreen. “Not a clue, any ssignss of sshieldss or weaponss?” She asked full of distrust.

‘’Nothing visual from here apart the disk resembling marble ‘’ Cross replied ‘’ We’re going deeper and nearer but what could those objects inside be ?’‘.

Max kept making changes based on how deep they were going. He was not expected to go this deep initially but he believed what he was doing was working. He continued to make adjustments on the fly. He was unsure what they were looking for but he hoped they would find it. He just continued flying the shuttlecraft and making the needed changes as needed.

Guy’s anxiety level was going through the roof as he watched the screen that showed a green thingy moving towards a red thingy. He thought they we’re the green thingy. This the shuttle mission should have been a breeze compared to the landing party, but here they were with unidentified aliens inside an object that clearly wasn’t a meteorite, while the CE was taking the craft down much deeper than he had planned for.

It seemed like everyone was keeping their thoughts to themselves .Cross stood up to get a better look at Lt Mullins face, non verbal cues spoke volumes .

Knowing the shuttle was descending even deeper … every pop or crack made the CMO’s heart skip a beat.

M’Mera sat down at an auxiliary station and keyed in sensors to look for any defensive or offensive capabilities. She had an itchy feeling about this strange object that was centered right between her shoulder blades. Her ears flicked worriedly.

Cross felt something tickling her face and brushed it off with her hand ,its then she realized Lt M’Mera had changed her position and was siting next to the CE at the auxiliary station ‘’Any ideas of how we should proceed ?’ the CMO asked ‘’We’re not going to achieve anything by just staring at it’‘.

Guy told himself to keep calm. Sure, the CE was taking the shuttlecraft down far deeper than he had ever planned, and sure, this was no meteorite, but some kind of ceramic space vessel full of unknown and unidentifiable creatures, possibly lethal to humans, but heck, it had been hundreds of days since the last redshirt had died on the Merrimack.

“I am rrunning sscanss forr defenssive or offenssive movement. It iss making me twitchy..” She said and her switching tail gave evidence to her feelings.

Guy suddenly remembered. These aliens looked a lot like those, still unidentified, subspace aliens that had attacked the Merrimack many years ago while it was docked at Starbase 114. It was the time that Dr. Cross had had charge of the Bridge and didn’t return fire back at them, and then was unfairly court marshalled, although completely exonerated of any wrongdoing. There had been only himself; Dr. Cross; the Communications officer, Bre Davis, who wanted to teach them Japanese and Russian; and a science Ensign, Rodney Shan; bored and alone on the Bridge, and it happened long before most of the present crew had joined. The Captain had just returned back from Nimbus III visiting his Romulan “friend,” and the space station’s own defences were conveniently ‘being repaired’ at the time of the attack. Dr. Cross was also still recovering from her terrible ordeal at the hands of the Harvesters at that time.

“Ma’am,” Guy said to M’Mera. “I think Dr. Cross and myself, may have seen these aliens before. This was years ago. They fired disrupter weapons at us and came out of no where. They had a spherical ship like this but with a triangular tail fin end on its aft quarter, with a similar number of life signs. The ship’s propulsion had an orange glow within the subspace fissure when they appeared. It was never determined what they were, or where they came from, but there is a Starfleet security file on them. All the senior crew were on Starbase 114 at a conference. The aliens blocked our Comms and failed to reply to hails. Then luckily they simply vanished, never to be seen again.”

Guy looked sheepishly at Cross, since this was where the bad blood between them had first begun, but he felt that he had to mention it now because it may save their lives, but knowing full well that Cross will hate him even more for doing so.

The CMO went ballistic! ‘’You’re contradicting yourself by saying you and I may have seen these aliens before and in the same sentence say it was never determined what they were ‘’ The CMO was trying to calm down , though she felt like slamming the security’s head ‘’ Oh and where you the one who was shouting on the bridge that we were all going to die!’’ She then turned to M’Mera, ‘’Guess we should check the library computer records about these security files if they exist’‘.

Cross sat back down, the mention of a tail fin reminded her of when they had come across a species very much like the dolphins on Earth. The Captain and Cmdr had gone to their ship in scuba diving gear and Glen had refused to let Cross be a part of the team…anyway a science officer had made them angry by saying how they resemble our dolphins.

Guy didn’t have a reply to Cross. It was true. He had insisted that Cross fire upon those aliens, and probably hadn’t been very professional, but he was trying really hard now to overcoming his phobia of dying, and he certainly didn’t want to be reported by Cross again. Cross had said at the time that her first duty was to do no harm, and she wasn’t going to fire upon them unless she really had to. And what did they do anyway, except reduce the shield strength to 75%.

“Hmmm,” M’Mera said in response as she pondered the Security Officer’s report. It didn’t give her anymore data other than what they now had. Unknown aliens. She checked her scans for offensive or defensive actions of the alien vessel. “Arre we going closserr in?” She purred more than asked.

‘’Could it be that our sensors are being disruptive by the water’s pressure ? ‘’ Cross asked ‘’ Maybe two of us would wear the suits and swim closer to it ‘’ she suggested .

“I’ll contact the Merrimack and see if this ship design matches the images the file from the ship previously encountered at Starbase 114,” Guy said. He uploaded the images they had received and made the necessary query to MABEL 2.0.

Then he turned to Dr. Cross, “I apologise unreservedly to you for everything I said on the Bridge that day, but please, we need to work together. And while we don’t know anything much about those aliens, we do know that they were small in stature, very aggressive, used disrupter weapons, and could travel inter-dimensionally. This makes them dangerous. We also have a strong suggestion, that this ship here had something to do with causing this whole planet to go dark. Even if they aren’t the same aliens, I think that fact alone is enough for extreme caution in dealing with them. That’s my view, but it is up to the COS to okay the security clearance, and the CE of course, who has been placed in charge of this mission. If I’m ordered to swim closer to it, then it is my duty to do so, and I will always do my duty.”

Cross eyes fixed on him , nodding as he spoke ‘’To be honest that time has eluded me. I don’t remember much of what happened ,so could you explain in more detail about these small ,very aggressive aliens?’’ she held her tone neutral.

He didn’t add that he always knew that he would die in some terribly and hideously awful way.

“Their ship is small, so they must be small too,” Guy replied. “And they appeared out of nowhere, began an attack without any warning, or reason. I’d say that was aggressive… but they might have just been having a bad day?”

She now lowered her eyes ‘’Sorry for my outburst earlier on but one shot of coffee liquor did not cloud my judgement while on the bridge ‘’ the female doctor said softly .

“You never knew that we were all watching you on the Bridge on the monitors, while you were in the Captain’s Ready Room that day, did you?” Guy replied. “But you probably did the right thing not to return fire on that ship. The Merrimack already has one bad mark for a First Contact against it with the Bolay ‘Dolphin-esque’ aliens, so we wouldn’t have wanted a second. And their weapons were hardly touching us anyway.”

‘’Really everyone was spying on me ! ‘’ Cross exclaimed ‘’I must bring this with the Captain ..tks tks… that is if we get back alive ‘’ she muttered as an after thought ‘’And just for the record they only fired once , for had they fired again they would have faced the wrath of Cross ‘’.

M’Mera stayed quiet letting the other two officers work out their differences, though she did listen closely when the description of the aliens came up. Inter dimensional travel? That did not sound good with aggressive aliens. She waited for the results of her scans.

‘’Any suggestions Lt ?’’ the female doctor asked M’Mera ‘’ Anything?’‘.

Max was concerned with the idea of trying to use the pressure suits and going for a swim. They might work but he would need to run some simulations but it was going to take some time while he was flying the shuttlecraft. While navigating, he started punching in some combinations of keys on the engineering console right next to where he was and waited for the simulation to run to see how the suits would handle the increased pressure rather than the lack of atmosphere which occurred in space. It was going to take some time for this to complete. He then responded to Dr Cross, “I am running some simulations on seeing how the suits will handle the very high pressure. They were not designed for high pressure but lack of pressure like what occurs in space. I would not want you to die as soon as you left the shuttle because of the pressure. I will report once I have this information. Do you have any additional data on these creatures than what was presented? I would love to run some additional data on them through to the computer to see if anything else shows up.” He waited for a response from the doctor and continued monitoring the shuttle for the pressure in place.

‘’What ! Cross exclaimed ‘’Are you saying the suits will not handle the pressure ,what if something happens and we need to get out of the shuttle with limited time’’ she asked as if the CE had an answer ‘’I cannot say much about these creatures ,perhaps our security could offer more information ‘’.

“No, sorry, that’s all I remember,” Guy said. “They disappeared again as quickly as they appeared. We never got to the bottom of ‘why’?” .

‘’Maybe they’re little guys who think big ‘’

The CMO felt helpless for not offering any information but who could blame her when during the previous mission she had been abducted and after given birth her baby was taken way never to be seen again and she had to stay silent about it.

Max thought it was interesting that there was a twist in understanding of his words. He then responded to Dr Cross, “I am not sure if they will or not yet. I would rather be safe and run some scenarios before sending you or anyone out. We are rather deep and I have not seen anyone try something like this before with the suits.” He continued navigating the shuttle craft.

Cross decided to shut her mouth ,lest she’ll distract Lt Mullins further and instead thought about the love of her life .That didn’t help either as Hunter’s words taunted her ‘’ Mark my words he’ll leave you again’‘.

Lance had pretty much kept his head down studying the sensor data and looking out of the window much like a kid in a candy store, the alien fish and then this huge weird marble in the bottom of the crater. There seemed some debate on the marble things but Lance was tuning it out as he sketched some of the fish and marble and it’s intricate design.

The CMO turned around to look at the others who were sitting at the back ‘’Anything interesting out there apart from this unidentified object ? ‘’ she asked Lance

He eventually tuned into the conversation right at the point where they were looking to go out swimming in pressure suits. He raised an eyebrow. “I’m sure there are better ways than taking a trip out in a pressure suit, can’t we sent a probe out. Use it like an ROV?” he suggested

• Guy, Sec

Cross CMO.

M’Mera shook her head at the request of a status update. “They do not sseem to be doing anything at all. Perrhapss, it is not manned and is run by automated droness. A prrobe iss a good idea actually, why don’t we send one out?”

Lt. M’Mera COS