1090: To Plan and Not to Plan

by Tam Elton (as told by Rada Dengar)
100526.2100
After Plans and Duty

-=Deck Seven, USS Serendipity=-

As they watched Kellyn and the doctor at work before them, Tam turned towards the only person there he wasn’t required to significantly crane his neck to look in the eye.

“Do you think they’ve made it?”

Arie’s eyes didn’t leave her mother as she watched every movement of her hand as if trying to memorise every command she entered for fear she might have to repeat this all herself some time in the future something were to happen. She couldn’t help but question whether her mother should really be up and about and to feel like if only she knew a little more about engineering, if she’d studied a little harder, then she could be the one to be doing this.

“My mother believes Lieutenant Sterling and Ensign Cristiane possess the skills necessary to be successful. That is evidence enough to me that they will be.”

Tam’s immediate reaction was to want to ask Arie what would happen if she were wrong and they failed, however he realised as soon as he’d opened his mouth what her response would have to be, so he closed it having thought better of asking. If they failed then they would be dead.

Tam had for a very long time, ever since his mother had told him stories about the man she claimed was his father, wished to be a Starfleet Officer when he was older. In the mind of a child that meant more than anything else to do the ‘exciting parts’ where you risked your life for your ship and the Federation. Of course in a child’s fantasies this was a simple thing where you got to charge in and be brave and strong, always knowing what to do, then everyone walked out alive in the end. It was only now as he realised how little he really knew what to do that he began to question how certain it was that any of them would survive this. Though he had known of death before, this realisation that he could soon be seeing it made it feel like it was just a new introduction to his life. Now the exciting parts were not so exciting anymore.

“We should ask if we can help again,” he muttered quietly, his eyes falling to the floor, as if it were not something he wished to do but something he felt he should nonetheless.

“My mother and Doctor McKay are aware of our offer. They will request our assistance if they require it.”

“I guess you’re right.”

Tam looked now specifically at his feet, caring not to be reminded any further of everything Kellyn was doing with the computer terminal that he couldn’t understand. He slowly lifted all but the heel of his left foot off the ground then put it down. He then repeated the same procedure with the right, watching with the attention as if it were truly captivating to behold but with the melancholy almost lost look on his fact that seemed to say that he had far more meaningful things on his mind.

If there was one thing Tam was undeniably good at it was asking questions. He had asked his mother questions about his father until he had more detail about the man, albeit he now knew mostly erroneous, than most sons would about fathers they’d known their entire life.

He’s always been nothing if not bold in asking these questions as well. His mother always said he’d gotten that from her and that she could never resist asking questions even when those she asked might not easily find an answer. She’d also laughed and said it got her into trouble on occasion. In this moment Tam could strongly understand the trouble that questions could cause even if he had no idea why his mother had been laughing. For fear of the answer he truly did not wish to ask this question now.

“Arie,” he asked softly, still looking down to his feet until the last possible second before he glanced upwards to see her reaction. “Do you think we’re going to die here?”

-=Deck Seven: USS Serendipity=-

Dane and Trev had split up and that was the first part of the plan that Dane hadn’t liked. Under normal circumstances he’d have complained quite loudly about this plan although that was difficult now because this time he came up with it.

The plan was quite simple. Of course some of the best plans in history had been simple. On the other hand so were the plans for a wingless aeroplane and that would have just ran straight off the cliff.

Here he was, a mere twenty metres from where the enemy agents were bound to be, attempting to set up the distraction for Trev. The hallway where the two enemy agents could be found intersected with two others. The first was the one he was in now which was on the opposite end to the agents’ location. Trev would soon be in the second which intersected with the hallway the agents were in at the door to access the computer core.

Dane held a tricorder in his hand and tight against the wall beside him. With his knowledge of the ship’s security codes and some other knowledge he really shouldn’t possess yet, he was supposed to rig the nearest of the wall interfaces in the hallway that the agents currently occupied to overload. If he did his job right it would quietly screech a lot for a few moments, the agents would come in to investigate, and then the interface would explode in a blaze of blinding sparks which made the agents wonder why they’d been stupid enough to walk towards it in the first place. Meanwhile Trev would be able to slip in behind them, simple.

Unfortunately, this tricorder seemed to have other ideas and seemed intent on ensuring that he instigated a minor change in the details of his plan in that instead of an exploding interface it would be a loudly cursing Terran and then the sound of a tricorder smashing into a thousand different pieces that attracted the agents’ attention.

By the fourth time the tricorder refused to put through what should have been a perfectly valid set of commands Dane’s fingers had gone from just pressing the controls to threateningly poking at them as if warning the machine to listen very carefully to what he was saying.

Unfortunately, this damn tricorder seemed quite suicidal.

Then it was too late anyway.

“Do you hear that?” Dane heard one of the agents say to the other from around the corner.

Then he heard footsteps. They were approaching him, or more correctly one of them was. That meant the other was just going to remain where he was until he spotted Trev. That meant Dane would have to do something even riskier, even more stupid, than the plan he had already.

He quickly rounded the corner.

“Hey, I’m lost.” Dane found himself confronted by two truly unhappy and almost ‘Tubman sized’ agents. “Would you be able to show me to the confinement areas?”

The expression on each of their faces suggested they were not the helpful ‘navigation guide’ variety of enemy agents.

-=Sickbay, USS Serendipity=-


Kellyn and the Doctor had stopped working now, evidently satisfied with how the message they’d been working on turned out and realising that by Dane and Trev’s own schedule they had to send it off even if they weren’t. However with how weakened Kellyn appeared to be from the exertion Arie was for now far more worried about her than the fate of this ship.

“That should do it,” Kellyn announced, as she quite distressingly did something Arie had rarely known her to do except when her health was really bad, and let herself practically flop into one of the sickbay chairs the second she didn’t need to stand anymore.

An unfortunate result of twenty-fourth century holographic emotional advancements was that she could see Doctor McKay agreed they should be worried. Soon she was by her mother’s side, though for now Tam held back as he knew there was nothing he could do for any of them right now. He hated not knowing what to do.

When Kellyn had overheard just a small part of his previous conversation with Arie she had immediately requested their help with bringing over some tools they might need. Though unsurprisingly they hadn’t needed them, when Tam realised how much time he’d spent not thinking of their possible deaths while he’d done the task he’d appreciated the request.

Yet as he saw how much Arie cared for her mother, things told to him far more through his Betazoid blood than his Vulcan side, he immediately began again to think of his own mother and the possibility that he might never see her again.

Quickly he realised he just had to make sure of something and he moved towards the rest of the group as fast as his legs would take him.

“Excuse me, Commander,” he said, having to look upward to see Kellyn’s face even with her sitting down, “but the bridge is supposed to be heavily occupied. How do we know the message will get to the right person?”

Though Arie clearly seemed not to understand why Tam would wish to bother her mother now with such a request Kellyn could appreciate the curiosity.

“The computer registers identification from our combadges on the terminal we’re using. I’ve sent the message to the terminal of one person I’m sure will still be on the bridge,” Kellyn said softly before she was forced to stop to let out an extremely unhealthy cough. Tam instinctively went to move towards her, but again he found there was nothing he could do, and then eventually Kellyn assured him she was alright with the most convincing smile she could. “It’ll definitely get to the right person.”

-=Main Bridge, USS Serendipity=-

TC hated this.

He had in his mind devised already several dozen ways that Peterson could be incapacitated, injured or even killed and that was just with his bare hands. Unfortunately none of them got rid of the phasers Brody had trained on the ship at the same time and so instead he was forced to wait. Well, to wait and to plan; though admittedly many of those plans were just several dozen more methods he could use.

Right now there was far too much he didn’t know. He didn’t know Ashton Ledbetter’s true loyalties or what he was doing on the other ship. He didn’t know that state of his Captain. He barely even knew the state of the Sera.

Blane was not an easy man to make edgy; the general rule was that if you could tell he was worried in any given situation then you should probably just save yourself the time and start screaming in terror right now. However if there was one thing that could make a man with his special ops background edgy it was being stuck without information. That was when he couldn’t know the consequences of his actions and in spec ops that almost always meant the unexpected death of somebody you knew. That was really the only thing that had let him hold back this far.

He wasn’t likely to get anymore information here either. He was a prisoner on his own bridge. Peterson had quite correctly decided that he should keep TC where he could see him but to ensure he was himself entirely out TC’s arms length. So he’d stuck him at a locked science console at the front of the bridge while Peterson had the audacity to sit in the Captain’s chair.

TC had noted however that he always stood up before talking with Brody. That was no surprise. It was probably something he didn’t even realise he was doing. Sitting in that chair gave you power in the eyes of your subordinates. Yet it made you responsible for your own failures in the eyes of your superiors. That cowardice which ruled when Peterson chose to sit and stand told TC pretty much all he needed to know about the man.

Now as he saw the message which appeared on that very station Peterson had thought he would be taking TC out of the way by placing him at, Blane realised that if he was to provide the requested distraction then he would need to put this knowledge to use.

Quickly TC span around in his chair and then stood up, immediately drawing the attention of all eyes and several weapons on the bridge.

“What do you think you’re doing? I told you to sit down,’ Peterson scoffed with irritation from his stolen chair.

TC simply remained exactly where he was and spoke a word that made Peterson visibly flinch for all the force with which it was spoken.

“No.”

“What do you mean ‘no’?” Peterson asked incredulously, though Blane’s glare made it hard for him to be so certain that he really held all the cards here as he felt he should.

“I demand to talk to someone who outranks you.”

“You’re in no place to be making demands.” Peterson scowled.

“I have information which reveals a flaw in the Poseidon’s operation. Either you connect me to someone who can actually do something with it…:

“Or what?” Peterson cut him off but TC just ignored him.

“Or I’m going to continue not to comply with your orders and you’ll have to kill me.” Peterson gave an amused look as if to say ‘fine by me’. “Then when the ship shuts down because I couldn’t warn them, who do you think gets the blame?”

The amused look quickly disserted Peterson’s face and he stuttered for a moment before pretending to be turning his attention away from TC.

“You know what? Fine,” he said, attempting to sound like he didn’t care about this issue anymore, before he turned to the communications officer. “Hail the Poseidon.”

The officer did as requested but when the bridge appeared they found that neither Brody nor Denise could be found there.

-=Deck Seven, USS Serendipity=-


Trev knew he had to do something.

Peering around the corner once more he observed than Dane’s plan to distract the agents had somewhat changed. In fact one of the agents had Dane in a rather threatening grip whereby the man’s arm appeared to be being forced into Dane’s neck which in turn was forced into the wall behind him.

“I’m just going to ask this one more time,” the large man said very sternly. “How did you get out of the containment areas?”

Even if Dane had been able to give a satisfying answer, with the evident force on his windpipe Trev didn’t believe he could have managed to speak it anyway. However neither of the two men who now crowded around Dane seemed intent to accept that and Dane didn’t look like he’d last long enough to change their minds.

Unfortunately, this meant Trev didn’t have time to get help or any sort of weapon. One of the things he’d not kept in his bag of tools had been a laser welder which could have come in very handy in this situation. In fact of the few tools he’d seen fit to bring with him the Hydrospanner would be most useful in a fight and so in spite of every engineering rule about how you should treat the tools of the trade he now held that in his hand like a small and rather unimpressive club.

He was a field medic which made him qualified to repair wounds. When it came to inflicting them he was not so skilled. Sure, he was a halfway decent shot with a paintball gun, but one of the great advantages of paintball was that unless they really didn’t like losing the other person was not generally armed with a phaser.

Still, this was the best plan he had. Granted, he’d also felt he had a pretty good plan when it came to wooing Vol Tryst. Then rather than just playing hard to get the man seemed to prefer impossible to get and to have made it less a game and more a calling. In fact the closest Trev had come to success with that plan so far was almost ending up with Steele. She was not his type, for far more reasons than just the obvious.

Charging in and attempting to knock out one guard was however the only plan he had and so he inhaled deeply, attempting to prepare himself when he only had one shot at this.

“Okay,” he said quietly to himself. “Count of three. One…two…three”

Trev immediately rounded the corner.

Only he wasn’t able to get more than a metre before he was suddenly overcome by a loud high-pitched noise like screaming that was so loud it forced him to slap his hands over his ears as the agents did so as well which meant releasing Dane.

As he fell to the ground Dane brought his hands to cover his eyes, leading Trev to do the same, before a wave of blinding sparks erupted along from the interfaces that lined the walls and the agents screamed in pain as they now covered their eyes as well.

Dane quickly took the opportunity to slip out past the agents as they were otherwise occupied, still covering his eyes to protect them from any wayward sparks that may remain.

As he squeezed past he found his skills from his former life more than his current life being useful as he managed to extract the man’s phaser from its holster without the man realising he was doing it. Then as soon as he was clear and sure that the sparks were finished falling Dane turned around and in two quick shots of the weapon stunned the enemy agents to the ground.

Then as he looked out over the mess of a situation that had just been created, back to Trev, and back to the many wall interfaces that had chosen now to overload when he’d only wanted one, he could only manage to wheeze out four words past his aching throat.

“Now it goddamn works.”

Tam Elton
Civilian Crew
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
As told by Rada Dengar