A Bridge Too Far - Part I

Posted on Fri 7th Sep, 2012 @ 9:55am by Colonel Horatio Drake & Commander Paul Graves PsyD

1,184 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: http://sb109.sim-station.net/index.php/sim/missions/id/2
Location: USS Bretagne
Timeline: Boarding + 3 hours

ON:

Almost three hours after initially boarding the ship, Drake and Graves were nearing the end of their climb to the bridge. The Away Team had split and Meadows, meanwhile, should now have been near engineering. His goal was to get some resemblance of power back to the ship. It was odd to consider that a journey that would normally have taken a mere few minutes was now at least six hours. If anything happened... to either of the parties... there was little the other could do.

As they made the last leg of their climb on deck two, Drake went over in his mind what had happened earlier. He had ordered them to stop in the corridor because his instincts told him something was wrong... instinct over training may have been all right for a Klingon but that was not how he was trained. The personal embarrassment was only overplayed by his sense of pride that was pounding in his head like a migraine. He had never made that mistake before and he was never going to make it again. He blamed it on being out of the game for so long... for the near year's leave of absence and what he had been through in it. He thought no more of it.

The Excelsior's design was not the easiest one to negotiate and, having reached deck two, the two officers found themselves with no other option but to climb up the last deck in the turbo-lift shaft. Forcing open the doors, Drake leaned into the shaft and looked upwards; thankfully there wasn't a turbo-lift above them.

Paul had not spoken much to Drake during their climb up to the Bridge. He wanted to conserve his breath for climbing, and speech interfered with that. He had never felt a great need to fill silence with chatter, especially if it were chatter merely to fill the silence. He had suggested rest breaks a few times, when he wanted one and when he felt that Drake wanted one and had spoken with him them.

Drake was pleased with whatever he'd seen in the lift shaft leading to the Bridge--presumably the absense of a turbolift carriage blocking their way.

"It's hard to believe we're almost there," Paul said. "It feels as if we've been climbing for days."

"Indeed." The climb had certainly been a strenuous one... with the gravity offline on the Bretagne, they had needed to rely on the artificial gravity produced by their EVA suits. This was meant to increase and decrease in intensity depending on the action they were trying to perform. For instance, the gravity would increase to normal intensity if they were trying to horizontally traverse a jeffries tube but, adversely, decrease if they were trying to traverse a jeffries tube vertically.

In theory this was a fantastic system and one that should ease their traveling through a derelict ship. Of course, in actuality the system wasn't perfected and sometimes hindered their journey. Naturally, even if the system worked perfectly, trying to get through jeffries tubes in bulky EVA suits wasn't the fastest way of traveling, anyway.

"Right, well... let's get this over with." He swiped his hand over a few controls on his leg, ending the reign of terror the artificial gravity had been reaping on him. Less than a second later he pushed himself into the shaft, trying to keep as close to the wall as possible. As he rose through the huge vertical mass he could see the doors to the Bridge, less than forty metres in front of him now and getting closer.

Were the answers to this mystery going to be solved when he got there? Or were there just going to be more questions posed?

Paul likewise switched off the gravity controls on his EVA suit and carefully followed Drake into the lift shaft and up the wall to study the doors to the bridge. He looked at Drake. "Crowbar, or do you have a better idea?"

Drake smiled at the thought of them both floating there trying to prise the doors open. He double checked. Had a Counselor just made him smile? Something surely had to be wrong.

For a second he considered using the doors' manual override - but to get into the hatch required the outside panel to be working... which required power. The problem with ship designers is that they never thought outside the box.

There was only one thing for it. He reached around to the back of his belt and retrieved a magnetic locking device. Without gravity this was going to be extremely difficult. He pushed with his arms so his legs came up to his left and then activated the gravity on his boots. He was now, essentially, stuck to the wall. Sticking the maglock onto the left door, he turned it and locked it in place. Using the new-found pivoting ability from his legs, he used his body weight to pull on the maglock. Nothing. He tried again, this time moving his legs back slightly... the doors budged a tiny bit. Two more tugs and the doors were apart just enough to squeeze through.

Releasing the gravity once again, he pushed himself up and into the bridge. The second he was in, the boots were activated once again, and the phaser rifle came to eye level with the light on.

The scene struck him like something from a cheesy horror film. Bodies were scattered throughout the Bridge, most in Starfleet uniforms. The old red tunics did a good job of masking blood, but not so good a job at hiding scorch marks from energy weapon discharges.

Behind him, Paul squeezed through the barely-opened doors. He froze as he studied the tumble of bodies scattered about the bridge.

"Gods...You can see where they were hiding in cover even as they got hit." Paul shook his head at Drake. He stepped fully onto the bridge deck and knelt to examine one of the bodies, shining a light on it. "Life support has to have been down when this person died. Her remains are too well-preserved, and she's bundled up. The cold of space dehydrated her and slowed decomposition." He peered at the other corpses and pointed to one sprawled under the Engineering console. "I'd estimate that that person died first."

Drake slowly approached the figure slouched in the command chair. Was it odd that the Captain had died sitting in their chair? Shouldn't they have been somewhere else? Orchestrating an evacuation? As the torch hit the face of the unfortunate captain, he felt mildly sick. The face itself was showing initial signs of decomposition, but had then been preserved when life support when down and the ship effectively became a vacuum. It wasn't so much the state of decay that effected him... it was the expression. Horror, surprise, disbelief, anger, remorse... all these emotions seemed to play their own part in creating an animation of the CO's last horrific thoughts.

As Drake dropped the light down to her chest... he froze. The situation had suddenly got dangerous.

OFF:

 

RSS Feed