Dark Nebula -- The Voyage Back

Posted on Saturday, 25 April 2020 - 10:48am by Commander Soral & Lieutenant JG Yolen * & Lieutenant Ryan Rose MD & Lieutenant T'Lanna Vali & Lieutenant Raith Kolani & Lieutenant Alex Kingsley
Edited on on Saturday, 25 April 2020 - 10:48am

Mission: Operation: Overdrive
Location: Shuttle Craft
Timeline: 2393

{ON}

Yolen was the first to wake. He bolted up looking around the shuttle. His mind raced to make sense of things but the screaming alarms got his attention. He unlocked the helm control and flew the shuttle just outside the nebula.

Calling all stop he picked up a tricorder and started tending to his fellow crew members. Alex was the first. He pressed a hypo to her neck that would send some adrenaline through her, just enough to wake her.

There was a brief moment before she woke with a start, eyes wide before reality kicked in and she remembered where they were. The wormholes! The flash of lightning! A million questions were fighting to be voiced as her gaze focused on Yolen and then swept as much of the interior as she could see. “What happened?” She asked as she climbed to her feet.

T’Lanna woke with a scream, looking round for Raith as did so. Seeing he was there and no sign of Borg she lay back where she was and gave herself a few moments to calm down.

Sam came awake, but was unwilling to open her eyes for a moment. Once she did, she was so relieved to find herself back on the shuttle and not stuck in that dream, she found herself overcome with tears. She tried to remain quiet and tucked away at the back of the shuttle.

Yolen sat back glad everyone was coming to. "We're just out of the nebula. We were hit with a wave of sorts." He closed his eyes. "Is everyone alright?"

T’Lanna groaned. “Depends on how you define alright” She slowly moved herself up off the floor to the nearest seat, resting her head in her hands. “My brain is trying to get out of my head.”

He sighed offering T'Lanna a hand to her seat. "I hear you. We just went through a Heminal Helix and we're damned lucky."

“Did anyone else have....nightmares?” T’Lanna looked at Raith who was still out for the count. “Is Raith okay?”

"He is fine. He should come around soon. Denobula has notes on these. They are systems that have a dense population of wormholes most unstable. They are triggered and once they are they open in a Helix pattern. Those were not nightmares. We were hit by Temporal wave. It can take you to the future, past or even an alternate reality where two timelines cross."

Alex said nothing as she sat, deciding to focus on something more concrete. “A lot of systems are offline,” she observed.

"Yeah." Yolen said. "We need to send out a distress call to the ship."

T’Lanna sat lost in the thought of what Yolen had said. “Not the past...Maybe the future or an alternate reality...” She stood albeit a little wobbly and moved across to Raith. “Raith, can you hear me?”

Raith cried out as he sat forward with a start, straight away looking at his hands and checking his face to make sure that the nightmare had not come true. He breathed a sigh of relief as he found that he hadn't been turned into a Borg Drone. He looked around at Yolen and said: "I'm not a Drone, thank goodness for that!"

After taking a moment to calm down, Raith looked back at T'Lanna and for a moment, felt very unsure about her after what he had experienced inside what seemed to have been a nightmare of horrific proportions for him. "Are you ok? How is everyone?" he asked her.

“I’m so-so” T’Lanna offered a more relieved smile seeing Raith awake. “I think we all had quite a rough time.”

Yolen spun around. "I just ran a diagnostic on the engines. We can't engage." Since Alex was in charge he turned to her. "I would suggest we get a distress call out to the ship and perhaps get everyone medically checked out sir."

“Working on it,” Alex promised as she moved towards the back of the shuttle, pausing to tentatively test if the force field Yolen had put in place was still active. Yet her fingertips met no resistance. There was no nothing. Priorities, she reminded herself. She knelt, prying open a panel and surveying the overloaded circuits now laid bare. No reason to panic. Not even with a dead drone at your back.

Rummaging around she found an engineering kit, prying it open before getting to work. “There is an extra medical kit back here - Sam wasn’t it? If you feel up to it, please scan every one to make sure they are as well as we can be. Begin with Lt. Kolani and go from there.”

Sam sniffled, and ran a hand across her nose, then took a deep breath. "Ok. Scan. I can do that." With a direct order and purpose, Sam seemed to do a bit better. She did a basic medical scan, starting with Lieutenant Kolani, then making her way around to the rest as the group discussed.

Yolen noted the downed force filed. He pulled a phaser out and walked to the back. He sat down next to Alex keeping an eye on the dead drone. "Just in case. I like the way you look now. No sense in the drone trying to change that."

“You charmer you,” Alex whispered lightly as she worked.

“It’s okay” T’Lanna walked to the rear still massaging her temples. “She’s quite dead, if she wasn’t she wouldn’t be lying there she’d be on her feet threatening to assimilate us!” She sighed before giving the female Borg a curious look. “Actually I may be able to use any surviving nannites for myself. I can keep them in a powered downstate, and reprogram them for my own use if I ever need them. I’m sure Chief Eyelaya will find all this fascinating.”

“We can explore that option later,” Alex said firmly. She understood curiosity, even a morbid one, yet a confined shuttle didn’t give them many options if a random ‘good idea’ went badly wrong. If the drone did not present a puzzle then she have been beamed back out into space - if they had transporters to do it of course. Reaching into the confined space she frowned, concentrating as she attempted to circumvent the damage.

"I don't think anybody is seriously hurt." Sam had finished her scans.

Raith worked away at his console in since, glad that he was ok for now. He tried to focus as he gathered the data that the sensors had picked up whilst they were out. He was also happy that the Shuttle was in one piece and rather glad that his modifications had left them with some power to play with. Whilst his nightmare had seemed so real, there were questions he needed answers to and he would ask them when they returned to the Fontana.

A panel began to emit a high pitched sound. Yolen ran back and his hands flew over the panel. "Incoming vessel!"

Moving to join Yolen, Kingsley frowned, “friendly I hope...”

Yolen slammed his hand on the panel. "We have no sensors. We should hail them." He looked to Alex who was technically in charge."

“We only have the distress signal,” Kingsley pointed out. “Comms are fried. If they are friendly ... how is your Morse code, flyboy?”

Yolen actually laughed. "Not very good. I can write SOS using a pencil though..."

Before she could respond the shuttle came about to the front view port. "It's one of ours!" Yolen said with a little more relief then he'd hoped.

Raith let out a sigh of relief as he heard that the approaching ship was another shuttle from the Fontana. Having already gone through the ordeal of the nightmare and find out how much of a beating this shuttle had taken even with the additions he'd made, he noted to make sure that for any future away mission, he doubled up on the extra's where possible.

"Thank god that ye located us, I'm not ready for a return trip back into the Heminal Helix again," he admitted. He looked around at what they did have, to see if there was a way to contact the other shuttle, trying to think of an idea that would help them. He got up from the co-pilots seat and went over to check the status of the various power generators he had brought on board as spares.

Checking them over, he was happy to find one of them still had around fifty per cent of its storage still intact. He went over to one of the panels on the wall above him and pulled out a tricorder, opening it up and linking a cable from the tricorder to the power generator. Once he ran a through checks on the tricorders systems he looked up.

"One Morse Code Generator... its a little ad-hoc but the power generator will be pushing plenty of output through the tricorder...if anyone wants to give it a try, we should be able to get a message over to the other shuttle, due to its proximity," he offered.

T’Lanna had sat herself down ready for the ride back but she was finding it hard to get her mind off the Borg drone and the nightmare vision she’d seen.

Communications, it turns out, wasn't needed. One of the ensigns from the other shuttle beamed back and soon with all the minds working together they'd rigged a tow. The trip back was a tad bumpy but they did get back. Soral had been there to greet the crew. He'd ordered rest for everyone before any information was to be analyzed. He'd told each person how they had done the Fontana proud and ordered the drone put in stasis. They now just had to wait for the CO to return and they would be on their way. He however couldn't wait to get his hands on the data from the readings. It was the part of him that was still the scientist. It had bee a difficult mission but very fruitful.

{OFF:}

Lt T’Lanna Vali
Psychologist

Samantha Rose
yeoman

Lt. jg Raith Kolani
Operations Officer

Lt. Alex Kingsley
Chief Science Officer

Lt. JG Yolen
Helms Officer