by Rada Dengar
80507.23
After Not Quite Alone
-=USS Zenith=-
80507.23
After Not Quite Alone
-=USS Zenith=-
As Rada stared in awe at the Zenith’s Primary Electroplasma conduit hub with isolinear reorrienter in a Rankton James alignment he couldn’t help but think of Wren.
It wasn’t that they were at all similar. Rada was almost certain that Wren would object if he attempted to pump fatal amounts of electricity through her body and that even if she agreed to it she’d just not be able to conduct the energy in a manner satisfactory to Starfleet’s efficiency specifications.
The conduit, on the other hand, wouldn’t look anywhere near as good in a dress.
He suddenly shook his head in an attempt to snap himself out of it because though thinking of Wren made him smile he’d been having very similar thoughts seven years ago when he missed the fact that an experiment he was in the middle of running was heated beyond recommended safety limits. Luckily the resulting explosion was captured within a containment field and so many people were distracted by it that their own experiments over heated and so they all agreed to say the temperature gauges were faulty.
*Come on Rada,* he told himself. *You know full well that this needs your full concentration. You can’t keep thinking about her laugh, her smile, that way her hair seems to swing in the breeze that isn’t there, the way...No, stop.* He shook himself out of it again.
The thing was that he’d been thinking about Wren a lot lately. He’d spent far too much time during the recent shore leave working on the ship’s systems rather than spending it with her. Whenever she wasn’t around he missed her and he’d started to see her face everywhere he looked; in the glow of warp core, the twinkling patterns in stars and even the picture of her he had in his office.
Such thoughts were a welcome distraction from the reality of the situation he was in now. He was in the Zenith’s main Engineering section, their disturbingly large and empty main Engineering section, and currently attempting to override the automatic security lockout so he could confirm that it had nothing useful to tell him.
He’d tried every trick he knew, from tampering with the sensory systems to make the ship think he had clearance, to replacing the entire isolinear control system to make the ship stop thinking for a while. He didn’t understand why Starfleet taught him about these fatal flaws in their security systems if they were just going to build new models without them; if they were just going to fix every weakness they found then by rights they should be required to teach him about the ones they hadn’t found yet.
He’d been trapped on his back for the better part of an hour while halfway into a wall trying his hardest not to touch some particularly powerful electrical systems mere millimetres from his face, a position which after a while became pretty comfortable, and he was really starting to question whether this was a good idea.
The only way left to do what he needed required him to crack the most sophisticated security cipher ever realised in the galaxy which their greatest minds had dedicated life times to developing and which he’d heard rumours had been the first such code to be officially designated uncrackable in the millenniums of the existence of the ancient cipher cracking masters of the Filter nebula.
Luckily, the Zenith’s Chief Engineer hadn’t thrown out the piece of paper he’d written it on yet. So that was why Rada was currently stuck trying to use this cipher to manually plant a false record telling the computer that it’d activated the lockout twice and so had to turn it off once in order for it to work; something which made perfect sense to a computer.
When he’d first beamed on board he’d sworn to himself that he wouldn’t do this. It was almost certainly illegal, it was most definitely dangerous in and of itself and the best case scenario was that he succeeded in accessing their top security system and then he’d almost certainly be immediately thrown on a ship, sedated and when he woke up he’d be halfway through an undercover mission to hack into the information network of the Romulan Imperial Guard. Only then would he be able to point out that he couldn’t actually read Romulan. They’d be captured, tortured and possibly ripped apart limb from limb and he refused to risk it. Then he realised he’d have to be one to tell Admiral Lassiter why he couldn’t access the systems which may well hold the key to saving her son and so here he was.
The Romulan threat included, doing this was probably still the safest option because at least it included the chance to getting quickly off of this ship. He absolutely did not believe they should be here. A ship much larger and more powerful than their own appears to have been powerless to defend itself against whatever either took or simply obliterated the crew so they thought they’d let them have a go at it.
The best analogy he could think of was when a dog has eaten your cat so you throw it a much smaller cat in the hopes that when this cat reaches the stomach it can locate the first cat and take its tail in his mouth then really dig in its claws and scale up the dog’s throat carrying that first cat along with it.
It’s then a simple matter of the small cat forcing open the dog’s jaw and then jumping out of its mouth with the other cat dragging along behind it. Ideally when both of these partially digested cats reach the ground the dog should be left feeling so sick at the look of them that it doesn’t simply eat them again. He didn’t expect that anyone actually thought it’d work, but at least after feeding the dog two cats it’d be unlikely to be hungry for a while.
Yes, that was definitely the best analogy he could come up with.
Thankfully he realised as he keyed in the final adjustment that at least whatever part of the cat he constituted, that part would be a little bit further from the dog’s mouth soon. Still on his back, he was able to twist his elbows around enough to use them to crawl very slowly out of the hole in the wall. As he finally emerged free he couldn’t help but wonder how he’d explain the fact that the first thing he did after coming on board the flagship was to cut out a chunk of its wall. One good thing about the seeming inevitability of their deaths was that he probably wouldn’t have to.
“Okay,” he said in an exhausted tone to the security escort he’d been given as he pulled himself up to something close to a sitting position, “try it now.”
The misanthropic large man ambled lazily over to a console and slowly input a simple series of commands. With a sigh he let his hand drop down to his side and admitted “Yeah, it’s working now.”
“Anything good?” Rada asked with a groan as he attempted to drag himself up.
The large man just shrugged and replied “It’s just a bunch of numbers.” which was security speak for ‘I’m not an Engineer’.
Rada was an Engineer and as much as it pained him to do so after almost an hour trapped in his previous position; he realised he had to stand up. He fought through the pain and was soon very grateful to be vertical.
While Rada tried to force his legs to be steady the security officer glanced at him, then back at the numbers as if to hint to Rada that was where he should be heading. A wobbly walk over there and a couple of looks from the security officer that questioned if there was something wrong with him later and Rada was standing by the console.
He keyed through the output, mostly predictable but there was something very interesting “Their beta three coefficient is much higher than it should be,” Rada curiously declared as he leant in to get a better look at the number as if there must be something wrong with his eyes.
“Is that good?” the large man asked indifferently.
“Sort of,” Rada replied unsurely, pausing a moment to think before concluding “I’m now sure a dog’s been here.”
The large man just rubbed his chin and nodded “Okay then.”
Lt. Commander Rada Dengar
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012