Act 2:
"No, you're right. Not a lot of opportunities to look at things from this perspective, at least, not without a space suit." I agreed. Roughly the size of a shuttle craft, our forward dorsal cannons stood in front of and above me.
Standing atop the saucer, at least the part that wasn't under water, was a novel experience, moreso that it was under natural gravity and I was breathing natural air. Breathing
alien air. We were the first of our race to do so and we hadn't even considered how monumental that was in our initial frenzy to right the ship.
Standing atop the hull of a three hundred five meter starship made me feel every bit the small and fragile organic being that I was, even if most of the ship was still under water. Everything below E deck was under water, leaving only the top of the saucer and the warp nacelles exposed to the sunlight.
It was a little brighter than Daeva's sun, even though it was not yet even mid day. Brighter, yet paradoxically cooler. Serine would surely know why that was if I'd cared to ask him. Though, there was a vast gulf between 'cooler' and 'cool enough' and while the thick uniform sweaters were an absolute delight in the eighteen degree interior of the ship, they were decidedly less so in direct sunlight and another ten degrees added on top of it.
Shipboard uniforms would not be used on away teams. All away teams would have clothing appropriate to the climate of the destination world. Yes, that was the best call.
Shorts, that is what the humans called them. Less formal than a skirt, less hot than full length trousers. There was no official uniform onboard the ship that incorporated them, however that did not mean I did not own any.
There were many fleet officials who would surely have balked at being both on-duty and out of uniform but if they wanted to reprimand me for it they were welcome to haul me and my ship back up into orbit to do it.
"They did the job, after a fashion. I'd like something with a little bit more punch but we don't exactly have the grid output for phasers." Serine said after we spent a good minute staring up at the pair of high caliber cannons.
I shrugged and ran my hand along the swivel mount brace, "The original plans called for phasers but we couldn't make the fuel consumption work. With a reactor big enough to power them our fuel consumption was too high. We've got the parts to build a full set of them in the cargo bay but without the power there isn't much point."
"Why?"
Serine hadn't been on the original crew, he'd originally been slated as the Captain of the
Nura, but with that ship being delayed it was decided to send him along as my number one, to give him some first hand experience out on the frontier.
But as he wasn't original crew, he wasn't there for the development of the prototype ship, the
Odyssey, and the growing pains that entailed.
"We'd already built a shield generator and phasers before we realized we weren't going to be able to power them. The shield generator was installed and the phasers put into storage. What else would we do with them? At least this way everything is all in the same place."
"I would think that as first officer, you'd have told me about this." he complained as he ran a diagnostic from his datapad. The canons traversed and elevated in a sweeping arc as the servos ran through their self test.
"I
am telling you this." I countered with what I hoped was a winning smile that didn't show too much… teeth.
He swung his eyes away from his pad and towards me, his mouth slack and half open. We locked eyes over the top of his glasses for at least thirty seconds before he blinked and resumed the diagnostic. "We can probably deliver half-c muzzle velocity with sub-caliber payloads if we use excess reactor plasma doped with a few exotic elements as a propellant."
I frowned, "That's not very specific, 'a few exotic elements.'"
"Do you really care which ones?" he asked, the smirk having returned to his features.
"Actually… no. Not that it matters at all if we can't get out of this lake. Any progress there?" I asked as I crouched down and then sat on the hull. I was tempted to lie back and sleep, given that we weren't going anywhere soon.
"Several ideas of varying degree of violent and risky. Most will probably damage the ship beyond the capacity for powered flight, let alone warp speed. If we had some antimatter and dilithium there would be a few new avenues to explore but absent them we're going to be... floating around, for a while." Serine explained with a sigh.
"Lot's of time for fishing then," I joked as I pointed out at the water in front of us, "I've never eaten a fish before."
"Wouldn't that be a treat." Serine agreed with a laugh.
I laughed as well, "Orchai, captain of our planet's first warp-capable submarine and first daeva to eat a fish."
In the distance I could hear a soft chugging, though I wasn't quite sure when it actually became apparent to me. It just sort of faded in from the background noise until it was loud enough that I stopped tuning it out.
"Sounds like machinery." Serine observed as he glanced between his datapad and the gun emplacement atop our hull.
That
was an option but one that we would hopefully be able to avoid. "Sounds like a Diesel engine, maybe eighty revolutions per minute. I don't think we've got anything to worry about."
If they were using hydrocarbons they were even worse off than we were. There were some prime directive implications as well. Though we hadn't officially adopted Starfleet's prime directive, we profited quite heavily on a breach of it after all, I still wanted to uphold it if I could.
And 'kill anyone who sees you' didn't seem to follow the spirit of the rule.
"
Janein to Orchai, we've got two contacts on sensors, a surface vessel and an aircraft. The aircraft will be on us in a few seconds."
I looked up in time to see a small dot become a big one, silently. I realized almost too late what that meant, and had my palms firmly against my ears as the pressure wave crashed into me. I could feel the blood running out of my nose, but my ear drums hadn't ruptured.
A sonic boom. Either they were trying to hurt us or they hadn't realized we were outside the hull. Maybe they were just
careless. To my right I saw Serine working his jaw up and down while he drew his sidearm. The trickle running down his jawbone told me that his ears hadn't been as lucky as mine.
Downwash blasted my face as the aircraft came down fast overhead. Landing gear came out just an instant before the craft touched down on the hull. Some kind of twin-jet VTOL craft, looked as though it was either a cargo craft or a troop transport.
I forced my hands into fists as Serine pushed past me. He was wobbling, definitely ear damage. The doctor could fix that, but we'd have to extricate ourselves from the current predicament first. If things got too rough we could probably depress the ship's cannon enough to peel the VTOL right off our hull.
They had to know that, right?
The VTOL's side door
burst outwards as a figure inside jumped into the sunlight. Serine's fingertips twitched and a moment later his sidearm was half way to the firing position. The black clad figure took a few steps forward across the hull before it took notice of the weapon being raised toward it and hesitated.
The figure swung the box it was carrying upwards towards us and Serine relaxed his grip on his side arm, releasing the weapon into a gentle overhead arc. The box, or case as it turned out to be, was emblazoned with a large red cross. A Federation standard for a medical kit.
They were trying to render
aid and wanted us to know that.
Serine leaned forward and his knees folded out from under him and he crashed into the hull a moment after his weapon. The black clad figure, which I finally realized was a human man (or at least he looked human enough) rushed the dozen or so meters to Serine's side.
When his medical kit was finally opened up I saw an array of devices that I could not even begin to speculate on the purpose of, either they were not standard starfleet issued tools, or the last hundred years had changed things in ways we hadn't anticipated.
But that wasn't what I should concern myself with.
As the man pressed what I assumed to be a hypospray to Serine's neck to administer some kind of drug, I took a knee next to them. "We're going to need to have a talk about this later."
The human spared a glance my way before he resumed work on Serine, "Yeah it seemed like it was gonna be that kinda day."
***
Captain's log, supplemental
Not a single thing since we've left space dock had gone as expected and I suppose that was what exploration is all about. My own injuries have been handled, more or less, though Serine is still in sick bay having his concussion tended to and his inner ears rebuilt.
But the ship didn't sink and with the help of a civilian tugboat we've finally pumped all of the water out of it.
We've come down in a crater lake about seventy kilometers from the civilian settlement and we're being towed to their drydock, estimated to arrive within five hours. As we're having difficulty with our subspace array, we'll be relaying this log entry through our new friends.
We're still in this, try not to worry too much.
I was back in uniform though there was something to be said about wearing fewer layers. Climate control in the ship was working properly again and with the exception of the fact that we were 'stuck' in the lake, the ship was running quite well.
Thew crew, however… The inertial compensators were down for as long as artificial gravity was and running it within a planet's own gravity was both energy intensive and prone to causing headaches. However, as a result of keeping it offline the ship kept swaying underfoot and my people were not exactly known for their sea legs.
I was no exception but I solved the problem by simply refusing to eat anything until we made port.
And what a sight that must have been, four Diesel tug boats pulling a starship through a crater lake. More aerial vehicles like the one that had buzzed us had been ferrying supplies from shore all day; power relays, screws, insulation to replace what was water damaged.
Since our technology seemed to be derived from the same source as theirs the parts were more compatible than we could have ever hoped. Any incompatibilities were typically due to their parts being more modern than our ship, rather than any fundamental differences in their design philosophy.
Our lack of creativity saved us for a change.
It was due to a lack of other pressing concerns, a status I was sure would soon change, that I was able to spare the time to find my way back down to sick bay, and our still unconscious cybernetic patient. Still in a coma, but still very much alive.
Leryl was an expected sight, though I was somewhat surprised to see the human from the civilian transport, a man I'd come to understand was a doctor named Jacobson. Xenobiology, so I supposed that made him the most qualified person we could have hoped for to attend to Serine's immediate care.
More importantly, I had learned that he was
not the pilot of the transport and so therefore I was not honor-bound to be an ass to him.
"I would have thought you'd have gone back to shore by now," I said to him in greeting as I entered the sick bay office. He was no longer wearing the black jumpsuit as before, dressed instead in a more casual slacks and collared shirt. "Seems like you've ditched the scary black jumpsuit."
He shrugged and grinned, "This seemed more comfortable, though I think I liked your previous outfit better."
I let out a half-hearted chuckle, "I suppose it was a bit more comfortable but we do have uniforms for a reason."
"Is that purpose to leave more to the imagination?"
My eyes drifted over to Leryl's and we seemed to come to the same conclusion at the same time. The human thought I was attractive. He thought I was attractive and was hitting on me.
"Jacobson was telling me that he had some ideas for getting our patient to wake up." Leryl interjected before I had a chance to formulate a response to the human's come-on.
"Right, about that." The human started. "Normally he'd spend some time in a Borg alcove to recharge his cybernetics but as you most certainly don't have one, the best solution would be to build an induction loop and recharge him like an old fashioned electric tooth brush."
"Wouldn't we be running the risk of overloading his circuitry with something that crude?" I asked with a frown as I started working over the conversion rates in my head.
"That's why we'd be ramping up the current slowly while running a scan of his head, once the implant start taking a charge they'll emit a frequency that will tell us we've been successful. As long as we play it safe I would say there's only a ten percent chance of a negative outcome."
"Those are better odds than any plan we've come up with," Leryl agreed. "I can work with Quinn to build a prototype, it should be ready by the time we've made port."
"Well, we should do it then," I said with what felt like the first truly genuine smile of the day. "Eliza should be happy to have her… well she didn't say what their relationship was, still, I'm sure she'll be happy to have him up and about."
"So it's settled!" Jacobson exclaimed. "With that out of the way I think you should have some free time, right Captain? I don't suppose you've eaten dinner yet?"
I fought off the urge to roll my eyes and shook my head instead, "I haven't eaten, I assume this is an invitation? Well, alright then."
"Fantastic, I'll call for a transport. Have you ever had perch? We're rather proud of our perch around here."
"I haven't, but I'd love to try it." I answered with the second genuine smile of the day.
First daeva to eat a fish.
. Awesome!
