Cut Free
Posted on Tue Dec 27th, 2022 @ 8:21am by Rear Admiral Yoshi Minawara & Captain Ewan Darrow & Lieutenant Njalia Sayffier & Lieutenant Rufus Marocain
Mission:
Between Realities
Location: Bridge
2896 words - 5.8 OF Standard Post Measure
There is an eerie calmness the befalls a ship right before the crew knows something dramatic is going to happen. As the normal moving about stops and the corridors fall quiet, there is the last sensation of time slowing. People are stuck watching chronometers instead of stations. The entire outer edge of the Vesta sealed off, large physical doors sliding shut. Starfleet had enough experience with emergency force fields failing, and there was something reassuring about the physical representation of safety being shown. Security personnel and Marines alike had spent the last thirty minutes crawling over every room, checking and double checking each space to make sure that they were sealed completely. Jefferies tubes were locked shut, and people huddled in their safe spaces. All of this left deck two as the outermost deck occupied, and even then it was just the bridge itself. Yoshi had long since abandoned any pretense of working at the pool table and was now seated in the operations chair, having pushed Lieutenant Sayffier to the Engineering station.
The zero hour came, and even had five minutes extra tacked onto the end. But the time was up and the Vesta needed to move. "Rufus?" A final check from the Commodore to the helmsman, making sure everything was one hundred percent settled into place. He glanced back at Ewan, who'd since returned to the bridge, and nodded. "And you buckle yourself in, you come back with another concussion Alison will kill me." Spinning back to face the console, he let out a breath, slow and long.
Ewan nodded as he moved to the centre seat of the bridge and sat down, pulling the hidden seatbelt out as he did. Once secure and his mug magnetically attached to the floor beside him he began tapping away at the displays built into the armrest. "All bulkheads read sealed, anyone who isnt in a safe spot now should know to shelter as best as possible. Medical teams have been dispersed throughout the ship in the safe rooms for ease of access as well. Guess we're now or never."
"As ready as we'll ever be," Rufus replied with a nod.
"Njalia, reroute power from weapons to inertial dampeners and the structural integrity field, I imagine we'll need it," he said, beginning to key in the sequence. The system was primed to remove the feedback loop, like releasing the anchor on an old sailing ship. Though this would be less like the anchor was pulled in, and more like the chains had snapped in the stress.
The Andorian nodded, all reserve power was queued and ready for the task at hand.
A bosun's whistle echoed out from the ship's comms, the last final warning anyone would get before they were set free. "On your mark Rufus."
After a last check of his system readouts, Rufus flexed his fingers and wiggled slightly, resettling himself at helm like a concert pianist. Anyone watching closely would see his nostrils flare, an instinctive reflex on entering dangerous territory though the dangers here could not be caught by scent, but otherwise he was poised and as deceptively calm as his ambush predator ancestors just before springing into the chase. He leaned forward, taking a last steadying breath. "Mark."
It was smoother than Yoshi had expected. No smooth, but smoother. The ship lurched forward, the field that kept it in space coming free like a snapped elastic band. Instictfully the man reached for the reaction control system to correct - a part from his days testing the prototype. He caught himself, moving instead to the field controller, and beginning to manually entering the commands to have it refocus. Outside the ship they were clearly moving, but time and space are odd beasts, and the computer read out erratic real-space locations as the Vesta moved it's echo across other realities in slightly different places. One hand danced across to the left, closer to Rufus, and fired off a series of subspace eddies and the projected path so that Rufus could dodge them. Hitting one in this state would be the same as an old sea ship hitting a storm swell, violent and shaken. The other, which he was more focused on began keying in to try and separate themselves from the anomaly they'd created by using the various systems to cut the ties at each level.
"First severance coming now," he said, barely above normal talking volume. There was a deep shudder through the core of the ship, and a layer of the altered reality snapped free of the ship. The erradic readout changed, and stabilized for a moment, before returning to its uncertain state. It was working. "New eddies forming, sending the data to you now."
"Got them," Rufus responded, tongue tip showing briefly at the front of his muzzle as he concentrated on the seemingly random patterns of invisible energies rendered on his console. His hands played along the controls, weaving between eddies, countering turbulence. It some ways it was like being a pup pilot, swinging his flitter through whirling thermals above the Grakny volcanic pools on a dare. Of course, a one-man flitter was a lot more maneuverable than a Vesta class starship, and right now, given what he was playing against the power differential wasn't necessarily in his favor. In fact, he had one eye on available power and the threshold of the anomaly, ready to correct when the shock of separation hit.
"Separation in 3... 2... 1!" The shock hit, shaking the ship through succeeding bifurcations and rebounds from chaotically interacting waves. The helmsman's fingers nearly clawed the console as he fought to compensate, practically willing the ship through the transition. "Through!" he called, and sucked a breath, though a short one since they were still far from clearing sailing.
"Minimal damage from the separation, no reports of injuries," Ewan said as he tapped away on his armrest. He patted the armrest after lightly, speaking quietly, "You can handle this, I know you can. We built you to stand up to anything this reality or any other can throw at you." It seemed foolish to speak to a ship to some, but to an engineer and one that helped build a ship, Ewan's attachment to the Vesta was one that few would understand. The old girl could handle it, and she would.
At that moment nonstationary instabilities spurted from around hole they'd punched, enveloping the ship. "Hold onto your tails!" Rufus yelled, as he jink hard.
Njalia dumped power into the integrity and dampeners, she did not like how quickly the reserves were draining. She held on tight, hoping that the shaking would knock free an idea of where to find more power.
There was a massive slam as the ship leapt right, then back left and suddenly dropped from underneath them all but overpowering the ship's extensive array of inertial dampeners. The sudden movement caught them all off guard and despite the extensive safety features and seatbelts, they were all thrown around in their seats. Limbs went flying if the owners hadn't done their best to secure them before, arms flailed, legs kicked. Ewan himself had not been ready for the sudden drop and he smacked himself hard in the face before his legs had kicked sideways, hard, catching his poor mug in the side.
Despite its magnetic mounting, the force at which it had been kicked and the ship's own momentum had caused the magnet to fail. With the assist from gravity, the mug went sailing to the right impacting with force on the, coincidentally, damage control panel causing it to smash and partially embed into the monitor. The mug was deformed causing the lid to come loose and tea to spill everywhere. "For fucks sake," Ewan moaned as his face began to throb from the hit and his foot from impacting the solid metal mug.
"Space and time are doing enough, could you not put more holes in my ship?" Yoshi said, the dry sarcasm of it all an old engineers coping mechanism. His hands danced across the controls as he keyed in the next phase. They were moving now, and to his credit Rufus was the master at the helm, but that meant things got truly tricky now. As they began to shed more and more realities, starting with those furthest removed from their own, and shrinking closer and closer to their own correct one. It would be horrifying for anyone not from their reality, pulled at the atomic level as they were likely violently ripped back to their correct timeline. The Vesta lurched aggressively, her bow dipping in the slipstream and threatening to rock herself to bits. "We have some kind of anchor holding us in place, something is firmly locked here with us that shouldn't be," he called over the sound of klaxons and alarms. "Ewan, Njalia, find it!" He rushed to stabilize the calculations and reduce some of the strain.
"Rufus, bring us four degrees to port, point eight degrees down," he said, not even looking to the helm as he did. "We're going to counteract the interdimensional sheer. Throttle back to just above the quantum slipstream envelop and prepare for maximum quantum slipstream on my command. Engineering," he said, pushing the console's comms button. "We're going to need all available power the the quantum slipstream drive, interial dampeners and the deflector dish. The math says we can survive for forty minutes without life support." Breathable air was no good if you were ripped apart at the subatomic level.
Having had split second more to prepare as he saw and adjusted to counter the wild fluctuations in space-time, Rufus had been able to brace a little better than most of the bridge crew, but he'd still been thrown around - claws had dug into the soles of boots as tried to brace and a trip to medbay to check the pain stabbing his lower back was in the (hopefully) near future. A slight whine might have escaped when that had first hit, but Kainan stoicism quickly reasserted as he focused on the far more immediate problem of keeping the ship from being torn to shreds.
"Four degrees port, point eight ventral," Rufus repeated as he adjusted heading and throttled back to the bare minimum to hold quantum slipstream. "Ready for max slipstream on your mark."
Njalia grinned as the magnetic claps in her boots held her firm. "Captain, permission to do something extremely risky for more power." She had already rerouted the life support power to stabilization but it was not looking like enough. She had set up a program to strip the power off the containment fields of the torpedoes dropping them to the minimal safe maintenance level. It was a surprising amount of power and violated about seven safety protocols and was mind-bogglingly risky in the current situation but the options were limited and getting more so by the second.
Yoshi's eyes jumped to the systems readouts, and watched as the ship's hull shudders, with stress levels spiking briefly into the red. "Do it," he replied, keying changed into the deflector to begin shedding more of the stress while they figured out what the hold up was.
With the Captain's permission, Njalia was able to override the safety protocols and system locks and drain the energy from the containment systems into the general reserve; it was not as quick of a process as she would like but the energy levels pulled up, briefly, from red to amber, before the ongoing usage again dropped them back into red. But hopefully that would be enough.
Something gave. Yoshi watched it happen, in real time, as somewhere the final bit that was holding the ship in place heaved away and the tendrils of some distant time and place bucked itself free. Or more accurately, any remaining connections to said place likely came undone. If there was anyone displaced left on the ship, they were likely out of luck as the Vesta righted herself into reality. He quickly punched in the coordinates for Esquimalt Station, feeding the slipstream calculations into the computer, as he began to push the engine to it's max. The drive was rated for quantum slipstream velocities up to a factor of five. With all the energy trapped in system, there was no telling what would happen. "Now Rufus!"
Rufus slammed the QSD to max with the speed of a hound leaping for a hare, his full attention simultaneously thrown into on keeping the ship from being sent spinning off into colliding whorls of turbulent space-time created by the shock of their breakaway Vesta shuddered and bucked, systems straining, and the helmshound sent a silent prayer to whatever deities in any part of the multiverse watched over starships as power levels fluctuated while the hull temperature rose under drags forces previously unimaginable outside the realm of extremely theoretical physics. Alerts and damage reports echoed around him, keen ears noting only the essential as he fought an increasingly unresponsive helm.
"Port engine's breaching!" Cut through the others just as the ship slammed into the barrier with a bone wrenching jolt. For a moment it seemed as though hundreds of perspectives ripped across his vision, glimpses of all the lives his most adjacent alternative selves were living - piloting a test fighter, fleeing Borg, covered in wrestling pups, tracking Jem'Hadr, crawling from wreckage, hunting with his pack...
And then in an instant, it was gone. He blinked, then their position and looked over at Yoshi, a smile curling the corners of his lips. "Sir, I think we're through."
Hundreds of light-years away Captain Kai Penner sat in the centre chair for Esquimalt Station, watching the coming and goings of things. It had been a quiet night, and while they were up earlier than most, it had given them a chance to get ahead of the station reports about upgrades. The last of the minor fleet yards were complete, and the new dry dock system was just coming online. All the traffic had been transports bringing bits and pieces that were missing, as well as supplies to ensure stations work could be seamless. Currently two large dilthium transports were offloading supplies into the station's own stores to ensure steady operation and fuel capacity for at least the next three years. All was calm.
A chirp caught the attention of the Captain, as well as the Ops Chief manning the station. "We're detecting a slipstream tunnel Captain," the Warrant dutifully reported, before his brow furrowed. "Something isn't right, I am measuring an approach velocity of... eight? There's no ship in the fleet capable of that speed." He turned from his station to where the Captain was now standing.
"On screen Warrant," they said, eyes squinted. To the 'north' of the station, a display came to life, showcasing a point in space, overlaid with readouts of the bits invisible to the naked eye. High levels of quantum activity were causing particle scattering, and even a bit of reality twisting. The sudden flash of blue that came with a Quantum Slipstream-to-Real Space transition came, and the briefly distorted image of the USS Vesta appeared. As sensors were able to correct the image, the state of things became more apparent. Plasma trailed behind the nacelles, the port of which was clearly breached and dumping high levels of radiation from it. The ventral radiator was bright red, bits tinged white where the heat had melted through the duranium and was trailing liquid hull as it went. All leading edges looked like they had re-entry burns, as the extreme velocities must have overwhelmed the deflectors ability to deal with the subspace "winds" caused by hyper-luminal particles. Reports started to come in immediately. She was venting atmosphere from both cargo bays where the doors had started to give and emergency force fields to the exterior had clearly failed. "Get me and internal reading!" Penner called, stepping towards the large central console space that made up the CIC's holotable. "Hail them,"
"No need Captain, they're hailing us."
The communication coming through, the extreme heat of the Vesta's hull was scattering the array - and array which was probably also damaged. "Vesta to Esquimalt. We are going to need a tow. Impulse engines are fried and I don't know if we even have reactionary thrusters left," came the voice of Commodore Minawara. "I'm betting we have injuries that will need tending, but transporters are offline, and life support is minimal."
"I think we can do that for you Vesta," Captain Penner said, heaving a sigh of relief. Last thing they'd wanted was a ghost ship arriving. "I'm looking forward to the story sir, we'll get you in a berth." Already a swarm of worker bee drones were descending upon the Vesta, streams of liquid nitrogen being sprayed close enough to help cool without cracking the hull. tugs approached the stricken ship and began to gently pull her towards the station, as other bees fired off precision cutting tools to stem the leaking plasma and radiation from the nacelles. She was going to need a lot of work, but she'd be in space soon enough.
