Saving Avian Bacon

Posted on Tue Jun 15th, 2021 @ 10:02pm by Captain Kelly O'Connor & Lieutenant Glenn Radars & Lieutenant JG Cara Ross & Lieutenant JG John Adams

1,192 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Mission 8 - A Blast from the Past
Location: America
Timeline: 2296/03/12 0730

The avian ship started its warp engines again. They were not fast. The ship barely approached 1.5, but O'Connor knew for this new species that this would be an achievement. O'Connor ordered Frankley, "Follow that ship."

"Aye ma'am," Frankley acknowledged. Oh, he enjoyed a good game of cat and mouse... Well... Bird. He cracked his neck in preparation and got to tapping on his console, making one hell of an about turn and following in hot pursuit, almost riding their tail.

In following the ship, America was led to a small star system. The central star was an orange dwarf star. It was surrounded by six planets, none of which were larger than the size of 1.5 earths. While O'Connor was not romantic about space, something about the area seemed lonely to her. The avian ship started heading at impulse towards the second planet, when the ship started broadcasting emergency signals, stating that its heat shields were not functioning.

O'Connor immediately cursed. "Shit!" Faced with a choice on first contact of either saving a ship or letting them die was far from desirable. And, since this was a first contact, and warp was achieved, it was questionable whether the Prime Directive would let them interfere because no formal relations had been established and it seemed likely that the Romulans had changed the evolution of this species.

"Captain," Adams, against his better judgement, decided to speak up. "since they have sent out a distress call, we are obligated to respond."

"Under normal circumstances, Adams, that is not necessarily true. The Prime Directive bars interference when there are natural consequences of a species actions, even if that includes extinction. However, here, I believe that this species has been corrupted, so we are permitted to interfere and repair," O'Connor reminded her security officer. "Options, people."

"Warp capable species, they spoke to us first," Cara pointed out, backing John up. "As far as the Prime Directive goes, I agree with you ma'am. We're in the clear. We just need to triage the situation." Easier said than done, "I'll start a new set of scans, see if we can narrow the issue." Scans that would be mirrored down to other departments in the ship.

"Ey up Captain" Came the call from Engineering over the comm channel. "So, you want to save that ship?" he asked simply. "Wait, this might be better if you could see me..."

A few seconds later, a little box appeared in the top right corner of the viewscreen showing the Lieutenant's face. Instead of lazing around, he was sat upright at the main center engineering console. His whole demeanour had changed, he seemed to be motivated and serious for once. "I have a way to save that ship."

O'Connor looked quizzically at her lazy Chief Engineer, wondering what overtook him. "I'm listening. Get to the point, Radars. Time is running out."

He held up a hand. "Listen. From these scans, she's far too fragile to grab with a tractor beam. She'll break up and even maybe explode if we grab her." He paused a second to push a few buttons on his console. "I'm taking the warp coils offline and diverting warp power to the dorsal shield array. Take us down after that ship, but get us underneath them."

"You want us to act as a landing pad for their ship?" O'Connor asked astonished. "Can we do that, Frankley?"

"It's not impossible but we'd have to completely match their speed and gradually slow it down," Frankley replied after a moment, "it may scratch up the paintwork, mind."

"Whats a few scratches here and there when it comes to lives" Glenn replied. "I've 'softened' the shields just between the Nacelles. Catch them there to avoid structural damage. Then we can use our RCS thrusters and impulse engines to 'gently' lift themup out of the atmosphere. But it'll take some fancy flying" he explained.

"Do it!" O'Connor ordered. Time was running out. The avian species would burn up without immediate action and doing this would be better than doing nothing. If it failed, O'Connor prayed that the avian species would not blame them. That would be her luck. The Romulans would probably claim that she shot them down. "And don't fail," she added.

Easier said than done, indeed. Hunched over her console, the blue light of the sensor hood flaring around Cara's eyes, the redhead started feeding data about the star, the ship, every blip in local space to the ships computer, parsing it and sending updates to Helm. She'd trust Radar's to know his own work when it came to the ships shields.

"Shields are ready." Radars reported. "We're now essentially a flying landing pad"

"Radars, I hope that you have a plan to get that ship down on the surface. After all, we cannot very well land America down there," O'Connor reminded the engineer.

"Well, you can land" Radars responded. "However you just won't be able to take off again very easily" he replied. A smile stretched across his face. "This ain't no Excelsior, this bucket of bolts would break apart on impact. So instead, I'm going to do this..."

Drawing power from the secondary systems he dumped it into the ventral thrusters. "Take us up!" he ordered simply. "Full lateral thrusters now, along with the impulse engines we should break free of the atmosphere... hopefully... maybe..."

"You just know how to fill me with confidence," O'Connor shot back. Even if this worked, what were they going to do with a ship on their proverbial back? It was not as if the ship could be beamed down to the planet. Could it?

Helm heard engineering and lifted the two ships shakily back into space.

O'Connor ordered Adams, "Go greet our guests. Take them by the route that shows them the least technology to some quarters and then I want you and all of my Chiefs of Staff in the meeting room in ten minutes."

"Aye captain." John started to the trubolift. Just as he was about to enter, he gave Cara a wink. While the lift was heading to the main docking port, he came up with a route that wouldn't show the 'guest' much of the workings of the ship. When he reached the docking port, 2 armed security officers were there to greet him. One gave Adams a phase pistol and holster.
And with that, he nodded to the security officer to open the airlock.

Sitting back in her seat, Cara swept a hand over her brow. It wasn't like she'd been the one piloting the ship, or adjusting the power flow to the shields in real time. She'd just ran a bunch of scans. And yet there was a wave of relief and exhaustion, manifesting in a small smile to Adams, as things seemed to settle down slightly. Not that she had all that much time to relax.

Triggering a macro to have the ships internal sensors route all the information they could about their new guests to her console, and mirroring it down to medical, the redhead readied herself for what she imagined would be the preliminaries of a first contact meeting.

 

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