The limits of diplomacy

Posted on Fri Nov 29th, 2024 @ 5:01pm by Doctor Intharia T'Zor & Lieutenant Rune Thul & Lieutenant Alph & SubLieutenant Attania Viren & Dalek Muul & Navigator Korusca
Edited on on Thu Dec 19th, 2024 @ 1:16pm

1,938 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: DownTime [1]
Location: Shuttlebay, USS Excalibur
Timeline: 1435 MD02 - After 'Finishing the Fight'

"YOU WILL COMPLY OR THE INFORMATION WILL BE EXTRACTED!" The Object shouted, the last few words growing particularly aggressive in its already unpleasant synthetic staccato. "IDENTIFY!" The Object shuddered menacingly towards Thul as it spoke, but did not move far from it's starting point. It seemed to shake and gyrate as it spoke, some incandescent anger surged within it.

Attania felt responsible for this, but her fight or flight response had kicked in enough for her to discard the thought. She kept perfectly still, but she waited for some instruction or cue from the starfleet officers. She noticed the Asari doctor was scanning with her tricorder, but she felt too nervous to begin the process. The thing she'd woken up seemed volatile.

Intharia kept scanning, trying not to make any sudden movements. She kept a close eye on Lieutenant Thul. If the situation got hot, she was ready to deploy her biotic barrier.

“We are peaceful explorers.” Alph told the object. “We received a distress call and we are here to provide aid.”

“THEN YOU ARE IRRELEVANT. WHERE IS THE TIME LORD?” The Object shouted. It had a strange cadence that seemed to stress every syllable.

Alph looked between the others, who he did not think knew what the object was talking about either. “I am sorry but I do not know what you are referring to, perhaps if -“ He was cut off by another response from the object.

“YOU WILL TELL ME THE LOCATION OF THE TIME LORD. I WILL NOT ASK AGAIN!” It shouted.

So that's what the Commander is. A Time Lord, Rune mused as he swiftly pulled his phaser from his belt. He figured it might be better not to reply.

When after a moment nobody had responded, the object turned to face Alph. “YOUR WEAPONS ARE INFERIOR. COMMENCING INFORMATION EXTRACTION!” The longer of the object’s two arms, with the dish-like appendage on the end, extended suddenly across the room to a length far longer than seemed possible. The hemispheric appendage gripped Alph by the face. He grabbed at the arm with both hands, but was powerless to stop it as it retracted, pulling him with it.

Attania drew her phase-disruptor by instinct when the object lunged at Alph, and it took all her discipline not to fire it as it grabbed him. She watched Thul for a lead to follow.

Intharia watched with horror as the thing seized Alph, but something in the back of her mind was nagging her. Time Lord. Where had she heard that term before?

That was it, Rune fired at the arm holding Alph. He had his other hand on the handle and as the beam lanced out, he tapped at the setting buttons to play with the weapon's configurations on the fly. He reached out with his mind to the enemy to see if he could read their thoughts.

As soon as she heard a phaser activate, Attania fired a rapid trio of shots into the back of the object.

The beams aimed at the object seemed to simply vanish as they got within a few micrometers of it's surface, without any visible effect beyond a slight spatial ripple at the point of impact. A glow of lights up its manipulator arm suggested it was drawing something out of Alph, who continued to kick and struggle against it to no avail.

"EXTERMINATE!" The object shouted like it was charging into battle. It rotated 90 degrees, firing a first shot at Thul, a shrieking blue-green pulse of energy. It rotated rapidly again to target Viren behind it, let off a single shot, then turned again to face Intharia and did the same. Alph had braced himself against its base with his feet and was suspended off the floor as it moved.

Attania's livefire drill training kicked in immediately, as soon as she heard the first shot she sprinted in one direction, turning on her heel suddenly to go the other direction as she heard the shot aimed for her, avoiding it by mere centimeters. With a long stride and a rolling dive she reached cover, and began to exchange fire with the object, careful to avoid shots that might endanger Alph.

Intharia had set her tricorder to autoscan as soon as the object opened fire with its first shot and had began making her way to cover, but didn't get to where she was going in time. As she heard the shot fired at her, she instinctively turned to it and activated her biotic barrier. A dark-blue convergence of shimmering energy appeared from her outstretched palms, just as she'd been practicing with Atna. The barrier absorbed the beam, but the transfer of kinetic energy to its source threw Thari backwards into the bulkhead as the barrier dissipated. She fell winded but otherwise unharmed, scurrying quickly back to scanning from cover.

Korusca sauntered quite casually back to the runabout.

Still quite fit but not as young as he once was, that came quite as the realisation that he was probably soon reaching his limits as an active Security Chief that as the blue-green pulse from the enemy momentarily switched places with his family. His mind's eye was giving him a flashback, though it all happened in a single moment, Rune grinned as his family gave him the strength and courage to fire again just a few milliseconds before he began to dive for the floor.

Sadly, the pulse hit the phaser's beam emitter, and it literally melted as Rune dropped it as he was now just centimetres from the floor. "Crap!" He groaned as he looked at the phaser, half disfigured, as he lay there on the floor. He did make note of the shield or disruption that protected the former bronze statue from damage. It all seemed hopeless.

He did manage to see Thari get thrown backwards and hoped she was okay. Rune's mind began racing for solutions to his problem, there were rifles in the Hou Yi's rear compartment, if only he could get them.

Before the object could check on any of the first few it had fired at, its attention was drawn by Alph firing his own phaser, which similarly failed to penetrate whatever shielded the thing. He tried a few more times, aiming at different areas unsuccessfully. Finally he jammed the emitter of the phaser into the joint on the arm that connected it to the manipulator appendage which had hold of his face. He fired the phaser once more, and there was a shriek as it blasted through the arm, severing the dish, dropping Alph on the floor, free of it.

"I AM DAMAGED!" The object shouted, spinning in place for a moment before firing another shot at Alph, then turning back to the others.

Alph scrambled across the floor to where he had been when it grabbed him, deftly avoiding the object's shot and grabbing the interface to the quantum boring device they'd found in Engineering. "I require a distraction!" Alph called out to the team as he got to his feet and sought cover in one of the shuttlebay's alcoves with impressive grace and speed.

"Doing my best!" Attania responded, resetting her phase-disruptor to fire a sustained beam instead of individual bursts. She tried to aim for the damaged area on its arm, but it was difficult to get a glimpse at it when the object wasn't bombarding her general area with fire. Most if not all of its shots would have connected with her if it didn't have chunks of bulkhead to chew through instead. When openings appeared, she fired for as long as was safe, but she worried where she was covering might not hold up.

Thari wondered if she might use her biotic abilities to somehow distract the object, but she knew she was too far away to exert any effective control of anything but a light show. She stole a few glances at what her tricorder had learned so far. The readings were beyond anything she'd seen in the Starfleet databases. Realising she had no choice, she left the tricorder on the ground scanning and drew the phaser they'd assigned her for the first time. She'd had only a few brief lessons, but it was foolproof enough for her to let off an ineffective shot, before ducking for cover as the object returned fire, burning large craters in the wall she cowered behind.

Rune tapped his combadge as he raced over to cover he saw. =/\=Thul to Hou Yi, could you beam me a rifle and some charges if there is any in the back? Also without drawing attention could you see about putting a forcefield around the former Bronze statue? We don't want it to consider the flyer a threat. =/\=

The voice of the computer returned through Thul's combadge. "Type-3 phaser rifle beaming to your location. Unable to provide requested forcefield."

Well that was a pitty, Rune mused about the forcefield. Was there no one on the Hou Yi? He asked himself. He suddenly realised as the rifle materialised in his hands that they now stung along with a lot of heated pain. The pulse had burned his fingertips as they were quite red, and it got back to normal skin colour the further up one looked.

"Far out, that hurts so much!" Rune exclaimed having to shift the rifle up his forearms to not put direct pressure on the burns as he watched the battle.

Alph took one last look to see if he needed to tell anyone to move away from the area that would be affected. He moved his head back just in time, coming within centimeters of another discharge of the object's terrible weapon. "Activating quantum borer!" He announced as he hit the switch.

Suddenly, beams of light cut across the floor connecting the four rings they'd laid earlier, forming a diamond shape. As they connected, the space within the diamond seemed to warp and alter. The object rose of the ground, as if gravity had vanished. The lights on it's top flashed as though it was screaming something frantically, but with a blinding light that filled the room, the borer activated and deactivated, and the object was gone. Only the four rings remained of the space that had moments ago been consumed by roiling energies contained in a rectangle.

When all seemed clear, Alph stuck his head out. "Is everyone alright?" He called into the sudden, eery calm.

Through grunts and cringing, Rune called out. "Burned here! And that was exciting..." He said with a strained tone of sarcasm.

"Still alive. Intact, I think." Viren responded, the weight of her guilt lifting slightly as she confirmed with a few furtive glances around the damaged corner that whatever the hell that thing was had gone. She brushed some flakes of bulkhead polymer out of her hair, and sneezed once again before moving back towards the shuttlebay's central turntable.

"I'm alright. I've felt better, but I don't think I'm injured." Intharia said, striding around the corner from the cover she had found to where the others were. She grabbed her tricorder off the floor and scanned Thul's hands instinctively. "You have second and third degree burns, Lieutenant. You'd better stop by sickbay. I'll get a medkit from the runabout."

"We should join Commander Flynn on the bridge. Mr Korusca, please stay with the runabout. I believe Dr T'Zor is right Lieutenant, my emergency medical subroutines tell me you should stop by sickbay before joining us." Alph told Thul as T'Zor arrived with the medkit. Alph turned towards the exit once they finished.

RSS Feed