Burns

Posted on May 26, 2015 @ 9:03pm by Commander Jacob Crichton
Edited on on May 26, 2015 @ 9:03pm

Mission: The Lights of Hyperion

= Burns =

(cont'd from "Captivity")



LOCATION: USS PHOENIX

SCENE: Marine Armory

STARATE: [2.15] 0526.1510



Jake frowned at the twisted, blackened remains of the interior of the blast-shielded locker. A jagged lump of debris sat on its side at the corner of the locker, the remains of the plasma mine. Jake gently picked up the material with a set on tongs. He held it up, twisting it around to examine it from all angles. It wasn't recognizable as a mine anymore, but there was enough of it left that Jake might be able to find out what had caused the thing to go off.



Kassandra Thytos stood behind him, leaning against another set of lockers with her arms folded across her chest. She wasn't looking directly at him, but Jake had spent enough time with the marine to have gotten a sense of when she was paying attention.



"I'm tellin' ya, Jake," Kass said, "...if that thing had gone off anywhere on the ship but in this room, we'd be looking at serious damage. Probably casualties, too."



"Thank god for good ol' fashioned Starfleet engineering," Jake said, rapping the blast-shielded locker with his knuckles.



"So what are we thinking here?" Kass asked. "Sabotage?"



Jake turned to look at her and quirked an eyebrow. "Are you saying some of the refugees could have gotten in here somehow?"



"No chance," Kass shook her head. "But I saw something before that mine went off. Right around the time that Vulcan lady started to lose her shit."



Jake nodded. "The orb?"



"Something," Kass said. "Whatever it was, it made my sensor-net go haywire. And the next thing you know that mine's in there cooking."



"What do you think it was?"



"How the hell should I know?" Kass asked. "You're the friggin' genius."



Jake thought about it. He looked down at the twisted remains of the plasma mine, then around the armory itself.



"There are certain kinds of energy pulses that could trigger a mine," he said. "I suppose they could mess with your sensor nets too. But whoever it was would have had to get awfully close to set it off. This armory is shielded, to prevent someone from doing something exactly like this."



"Maybe they shut off the shields," Kass offered. Jake shook his head.

"No," he said. "It's the room itself, it's constructed to absorb energy pulses. Anything strong enough to get around it would have blasted its way through the armory door. They would have had to be *in* the room to set it off."



"I already told you, nobody's been in here but us," Kass said firmly.



"Hmm," Jake said. "Maybe they got in another way."



"How?"



Jake's mind flashed back to the lightshow he'd seen in engineering. Whatever it had been, it had simply appeared and vanished, leaving no traces except elevated levels of radiation. The warp core was the most heavily energy-shielded section of the entire ship. If whatever it was had been able to slip into the core, it would have had an easy time bypassing the energy-shielding of the armory.



Jake pulled out his tricorder and began to scan the room. Following a signal, he stepped over to the wall near the lockers. A large, greenish stain had appeared on the wall, like an ink blot with ragged edges. Whatever had created it had literally burned itself into the wall, leaving behind telltale traces of beta radiation. Jake scanned the burn, then examined his readout.



"These are the same readings we detected in the warp core," he said.



"You're saying that lightshow thing is back?" asked Kass. "And it's been mucking around in *my* armory?"



"It's not just that," Jake said, turning to point the tricorder at her. "You've been dosed by radiation, Major."



Kass looked down at herself. "I have?"



"Whatever that thing was, it's radioactive," Jake said. "It must have fried the circuits of that plasma mine, and given everyone in the room a dose of radiation."



"Is my hair gonna fall out or something?"



Jake examined his tricorder again. "We need to get you into sickbay," he said. "It's not a lethal dose, but we need to get it treated. You and everyone who was in here when the incident occurred."



"*Again*?" Kass complained. "Sickbay's the only place I ever seem to visit anymore."



"It's important, Kass," Jake said. "We need to get this treated before it does any permanent damage."



Kass frowned, but eventually agreed.



=[/\]=



SCENE: Brig



The interior of Montoya's cell was badly burned, covered in the same hideous green smear that Jake had seen in the armory. Lt. Cindy Rochemonte was running scans with her own tricorder, the only engineer on hand as Jake was busy in the armory and the rest of the team was slogging through their ever-growing list of work orders.



[[Crichton to Rochemonte.]]



Cindy looked up from her tricoder and activated her comm-badge. "Rochemonte here."



[[I just took a look at the armory,]] said Jake. [[It looks like a beta-radiation pulse is what activated the plasma mine. It also dosed everyone in the room, I just sent Major Thytos to sickbay for treatment.]]



"I hope she's okay," Cindy lied.



[[She'll be fine,]] Jake said. [[How are things on your end?]]



"There's burns all throughout the interior of the cell," Cindy reported. "All showing traces of radioactvitiy."



[[I found some similar burns in the armory.]]



"All ship's components are working fine," Cindy said, frowning at her tricorder screen. "Except for the ones damaged in the explosion, and none of those could have been the *cause* of it. Jake, things don't just *blow up* on starships. There's got to be a reason."



[[Check the readings against what we recorded earlier in the warp core,]] Jake said. [[According to Dalziel, there was no lightshow this time, just the explosion, but everything else seems to fit the pattern.]]



Cindy reconfigured her scan, and once again waved her tricorder over the burnt walls of the brig. The readings were similar to the radiation they'd seen in the warp core, but there were enough variations presents that Cindy couldn't confirm a complete match.



"The readings are different," Cindy said. "I'm reading a slight variance in the waveform frequency, less than 1%."



[[Not much, but significant enough to be noticeable.]]



"Radiation pulses originating from an unknown source," Cindy said, closing her tricorder. She frowned at the destroyed walls of Montoya's cell as she rolled the problem over and over in her mind. Radiation couldn't just *appear* out of nowhere, and starships had all kinds of energy shielding to prevent external radiation from bleeding in to sensitive areas of the ship.



[[None of this started until the ship entered the Hyperion Expanse,]] Jake said. [[I'm going to talk to Captain Kane. Something's definitely going on aboard this ship, and we need to get on the same page with it before someone gets seriously hurt.]]



"I'll compile my readings and get them over to you," Cindy said.



[[Thanks, Specs. Crichton out.]]



Cindy turned to look again at the walls of the cell. Montoya had been in there when whatever-it-was had exploded. Cindy hadn't heard much about Montoya's condition, but judging from the walls of this cell, she could imagine how bad it could have been. If there was an explosion like this somewhere else, like on the bridge, or even somewhere densely populated like the cargo bays... Cindy shuddered to think at the damage it could do.



Until they could find out what these things were, and what was causing them, the whole ship was in serious danger.



=[/\]=



NRPG: Not as long as I was originally thinking but I ran out of time. I should have a post with Chaucer out in another day or so to make up the difference.

JEROME: No need to wait for my Chaucer post, you can go ahead. ;-)



Shawn Putnam

a.k.a.

Jake Crichton

Chief Engineering Officer

USS PHOENIX