Another Attempt

Posted on Wed Aug 30th, 2023 @ 10:12am by Lieutenant Commander Deanna Celes & Commander Samantha Howard & Ensign Kate Kono & Ensign James Phoenix & Ensign Sarik Vaster

Mission: Damn Dirty Apes

Deanna looked at Shran, "I have created a window for us to transport. I have also prepared additional probes should you need to create additional transport windows. The probes have enough shielding to survive the EM field for roughly an hour before you have to initiate its self-destruct. We'll be able to keep in contact with you while on the surface via the probe, and if you tie in the transporters to the probe, you'll be able to transport us out with relative ease."

"Very well. Join the others in the transporter room and have Sam inform us when you are ready to beam down" Shran replied.

Deanna exited and made her way to the transporter room to meet up with the rest of the away team. Upon reaching the transporter room she saw Sam, Kate, and Phoenix already to go. "Sam, do you think we should bring an engineer?"

"It's probably a good idea" Sam agreed with a nod, checking her gear "Who do you have in mind?"

"Nobody in particular. We'll just have them send whoever is available" Deanna replied. She hit her comm badge, =^=LeFaye, this is Deanna. We need an engineer for the away mission.=^=

=^=I'll send somebody right away.=^= LeFaye replied.

LeFaye looked around engineering and considered who might be best to send. She was tempted to go herself; she hadn't been on an away mission in a while. But she was needed on the ship. "Sarik, grab your engineering kit and head get down to transporter room 2."

Kate stepped on the Pad with the rest of the crew as they gathered. She had a bag strapped across her chest and secured to her back, along with a tricorder, and a Type 2 phaser on her belt, while holding a Phaser-Rifle in her hand. With the experience of flying arrows, she made sure to pack a dermal regenerator and nano-coagulant. She also had a mesh vest that was well hidden under her Starfleet uniform that would prevent arrows from stabbing her torso from either front, side, or back; it was light weight, breathable, and totally unnoticed. She figured that if she was going to get hit anywhere, it wasn't going to be where she couldn't treat it unless of course, it was her head in which case she wouldn't have to worry at all.

Kate pulled a PADD out of her pack and set it to scan any and all signals on the planet that wouldn't be affected by the EM field. She wondered if they had any transmission capabilities or if the planet negated this and if so, she hoped to gleam a chance of understanding their culture a little better provided she wasn't being shot at by arrows and projectile weaponry. The young Asian Girl bobbed back and forth on her transporter plate and happily started humming to herself as she waited in the pad for everyone else. It was the best way for her to keep from feeling nervous.

Deanna looked at Kate on the transporter pad. "Ensign Kono, you seemed to have brought quite a bit of equipment with you for this trip. Are you concerned about something in particular?"

Kate thumbed a standby switch and leaned forward at the ready, one eyebrow up and another almost at the normal height above her dark brown eyes as a few teeth emitted from one side of her lip in a selfsure grin.

"Not a damn thing, sir." Kate replied with a cute gravily high pitched voice that wreaked of both assurance and silliness as the lights on top of her phaser blinked full yellow.

Sarik was listening to the hum of the power converters that he was adjusting and it took him a moment to process the command. One of his mothers had like to joke about him engineering by ear and it wasn't far from the truth. He could tell when the frequency was right by the sound almost as accurately as by looking at the tricorder reading.

His antennae swiveled to face LeFaye before his head turned. "Yes Ma'am." The stocky Andorian slipped his tool back into the kit and made a quick note on the repair log on his PADD before booking it to the transporter room.

He entered right as Deanna asked her question and listened intently as his took his place on the pad. It has seemed there wasn't time for him to have a briefing before going down, or there wasn't enough specific information to make one worth it. Sarik was no stranger to going into a repair with minimal idea what was needed. Too many times during the war he'd be sent to a ship with little or no damage report at all because there hadn't been time to get a full accounting before the triage crew got to work.

Deanna was the first to notice the Andorian enter. "Welcome ensign. We need an engineer just in case we come across an engineering problem. I am sure you are aware of the EM field surrounding the planet. I have created a means for us to negate it, but I'd like an engineer around should any issue arise."

Sarik's antennae curled in slightly, the only visible que he was mentally berating himself for jumping to conclusions. It was his first actual away mission in Starfleet that wasn't a simulation or training exercise. He gave her a curt nod. "Yes sir. If you figured out a workaround, I'm sure I can keep the equipment working."

Kate squinted and took one hand off he rifle to wave with two fingers in the air at the Andorian. She kept assuring herself silently that her new friends on the planet were going to be perfectly alright while at the same time, she motioned to the free spot next to her on the transportation pad.

"Alright, everyone ready?" Sam asked as she moved to the transporter platform and signaled for the rest of the team to follow. "Energize" she called for the transporter chief once everyone was in place.

The team materialized on the hilltop where Jon and Ayana had been when the others had last seen them. Deanna pulled out her tricorder and scanned in the limited fashion the EM provided. "They were here, as were some of the apes and horses. I cannot say with certainty what happened, but the most recent tracks are a pair of horses, and they head off in the distance toward the wastelands. That is one of the locales we believed Jon and Ayana might go I should add."

Shortly after he materialized James dismounted his tricorder with his left hand, and he grabbed his phaser pistol with his right hand and began scanning the immediate area starting off by turning on his heel and doing a 360-degree scan. His primary goal was to search for any immediate threats to the away team. There was nothing yet and that was a good thing.

"Tricorder readings are still limited. I can only scan to a distance of 300 ft. We'll have to be on guard" Deanna informed Sam and the others.

Sarik didn't pull out his tricorder right away, with the info that interference was limiting the range, one more point of scanning wasn't going to make a difference. Instead he glanced around, using good old optical scanning. His ears were also open and he was taking in the sounds around him. Planets were noisy and he wanted to get a baseline so that he had something to compare against. If ambient animal sounds increased or decreased it could be a sign something was approaching and that had a lot better range than their tricorders at the moment.

Kate noticed a fruit on the ground that looked like an apple.
"No way..." She whispered to herself. She let her phaser rifle dangle from its sling as she knelt down to pick it up with one hand while scanning it with the other. "... It really is! How?!" She lightly giggled to herself as she threw the apple behind her back and grabbed her phaser rifle again with a self soothing half giggle. "... Planet has apples." She shook her head. She wondered where they would start looking. Surely, in her mind, a planet with such nice things growing on it shouldn't be all that violent. Kate remembered the arrows though, but she hoped that everyone was okay.

"Apples?" Sam asked as she turned around. They looked similar enough to be sure. She turned her attention to the ground, seeing a series of hoofprints leading off in a particular direction. There were no boot prints nearby. "I'd say we start this way" she pointed in the direction the hoofprints led.

"It would appear the hoofprints lead toward that orchard in the distance, near the border of the wastelands. Exactly where we believed Jon and Ayana would head toward" Deanna said as she began walking. She picked up an apple and scanned it with her tricorder, "Interesting, these are in fact apples. Exactly the same genome as apples on Earth." She began scanning other plants in the vicinity. "Sam, take a look at this. Most of these plant species are from Earth. It is as if somebody terraformed the planet and seeded it with Earth plant life at the very least."

"It's crazy how our tricorders didn't pick this up at all the first time we came here considering how much scanning we did with the Tricorder." Kate mused. "It's almost as if, the EM field is selective with what it blocks and what it doesn't." Kate scanned around with her own tricorder and saw a multitude of new information that she specifically remembered not receiving the first trip down. "This planet sucks." She pointed to the screen in her palm, "that's what it says, right here..." She joked out of frustration.

"We did not take such a close look at things that last time we came down. You must not allow your frustrations to get the better of you ensign" Deanna replied to Kate as she continued scanning and walking towards the orchard. "Just be grateful that we have not encountered any more apes, or hostile primitives."

"It is indeed interesting how this planet mimicks Earth yet the development of the primary species is so vastly different" Sam mused as they walked through the orchard. Beyond was what looked like a wasteland with a structure in the far distance. "Well hello there" she whispered as she tried to use her tricorder to get a better understanding of what she was seeing.

James also saw the structure. He knelt down and examined the horse tracks that were in the ground and then he looked towards the structure. The tracks continued in the direction they were going, and it seemed that they lead towards the structure. "Perhaps they could be at the structure?" he asked the others as he stood back up.

"Certainly possible" Deanna mused. "I am detecting phosphorus rich soil, as well as nitrogen and magnesium. The soil is perfect for planting and would yield bountiful harvests. I am also detecting iron oxide in trace amounts, and silicon dioxide. I believe this planet, or at least parts of it were terraformed." She looked into the wastelands as she saw Julia and Phoenix scanning and saw the structure far in the distance. "We should investigate the structure commander. It may have answers to the many questions that I have, and with luck, we may also find Jon and Ayana." She looked over to Sam, "I'm going to attempt to contact the captain, update him about everything."

Sarik was following along, finally with his tricorder out. The speculation about terraforming had his interest piqued and he was sorely wishing for more specialized equipment for a geological survey. He might be trained as an engineer, but he was raised a miner. There was plenty you could tell about a terraforming process from deep crust scans, but even if he had the equipment he wasn't confident that the data would be useful with the way the interference was scattering things.

Kate stepped through what looked like a window.
"I wonder how far into the overgrown dirt this place digs down?" Kate imagined the building being here for hundreds of years. As the shards cracked and popped under her feet, she took in the stale air that circulated from the unknown depths of ancient corridors and shined a lightbar though the space to illuminate stools, tables, beakers, and bunsen burners while she stepped further in.

".... Holy mad science on a Pogostick, batman.." Kate said more to herself in amazement than to anyone in particular. "I've died and ended back up in High School again." The slender little Starfleet officer picked up a cord that went to a wall and yanked it out of a receptacle to observe the connection.

"Guys... I can't tell you how I know what this is, but this shouldn't be here." She looked at the plug. "This is a standard American 120 Volt plug that stopped existing in the early 23rd century."

As she looked around, Deanna saw signs of recent activity in this science facility. "Sam, I definitely believe someone was here recently. Perhaps you can get some medical readings that determine if it might have been Jon and Ayana or someone else. I'd like to take a few minutes taking a look at things here while you do that. Ensign Sarik, I believe you would be of assistance looking over this material, see if we can get everything up and running again."

"Yes sir." Sarik gave a quick nod and opened his engineering kit. Prewarp Human tech wasn't something he's had a lot of experience with, but he didn't imagine it would be beyond him. While he waited for his tricorder to gather more information, he started tracing cables and pipes, building a mental image of the place and trying to understand how the infrastructure was set up. "Most of this equipment seems to be intact. The cable's feeding power to this room are dead. I could try and trace them back to the power source or i could work on an interface to power them from out equipment. At the levels of power consumption the devices here use, they could be powered for a few hours off of the charge in my phaser."

Deanna scanned the area with her tricorder as well. "I am reading residual power signatures. These computers all were powered up within the last 8 hours. From the look, it appears somebody was checking each computer station, likely looking for information. I'm also reading crude solar panels that appear to be capable of 60% power return. If we can find what is keeping them from transmitting power, perhaps we can get these computers running again."

"Remember when I was talking about fuses earlier?" Kate smiled as a microexpression as she looked around but quickly looked focused as she glanced around the space with her light. "... If the AC is running, that means that some circuits are on but others are not. If you want to look around for a box on a wall somewhere, there's little black things inside them called breakers. Usually on the inside panel of the boxes, it'll be printed or written what goes to what devices..." She had a look of worry on her face when she glanced over to Sarik. "... This building looks very old. Hopefully the writing will still be on the inside of those boxes, otherwise, I hope you know how to trace circuitry with a tricorder because that's not my expertise in any century."

Deanna looked at Kate. "You sound like a time traveler with your knowledge of this antiquated technology. I thought Ensign Phoenix was the one that was an expert of late 20th and early 21st century Earth technology. Very well, we will follow your suggestion" Deanna said with a smile. She began searching around and with a bit of serendipity she found the breaker box. She opened it and saw that several of the breakers had been tripped. She began fiddling with them after a quick scan, and after a few moments of clumsily flicking at them, everything sprung to life. "Sarik, let's start looking over the computers."