The Six Weeks

Posted on Wed Nov 1, 2017 @ 2:07am by Lieutenant Nicole Anderson & Fleet Captain Rhea Kennit & Lieutenant Penelope Naroot & Lieutenant Cassandra Kennings & Lieutenant Arashi Tanaka Mr.

3,946 words; about a 20 minute read

Mission: Dīvide et Impera ~ Chapter One: Sending Out An S.O.S
Location: Various

Day 1:

“We’re docked!” Nicole said, marching out of her office. “Get all the containers ready and gear stowed. We’re going to have engineers in here within an hour, so I want everything pristine before they tromp through and make a sodding mess!” The damage to the ship had been severe, and they had pulled into the nearest Starbase at full limp.

Medtechs and nurses were running pell mell along the corridors and throughout Sickbay, finishing the laborious task of securing experiments, cataloging and preserving samples and in general putting away everything on a Starship that’s going to be put away for an extended period of time.

Nicole had secured her lab, which, blessedly, had remained largely unaffected, and had put in it all of the samples that were dangerous and/or delicate, as well as everything from the morgue she didn’t want any curious eyes spying. Who knew what would happen while they were away?

As her staff moved fast, she walked out of Sickbay, bag in hand and moved to the turbolift, calling for a car. As the doors opened, she stepped inside next to Penny who had a tool kit in each hand.

“Deck two,” Nicole said, looking Penny over. “Getting geared up for the furlough?”

“Furlough for you, overtime for us,” Penny said. “I just finished docking, now I’m on my way down to Engineering. Commander Torres needs me to do his laundry.”

Nicole blinked. “Do you mean he has a ‘laundry list for you?” she said.

“Yeah that’s how he phrased it,” Penny said.

“Doesn’t mean what you think it means,” Nicole said.

“Good, I was getting worried,” Penny said, nodding sagely.

“Well, best of luck,” Nicole said. “I’ve got Sickbay cleared ahead of schedule, so I’m going to meet up with K’Vegh.”

“Your Klingon friend from the Ommadawn?” Penny said.

“Yes. I’ll tell him you say hello.” The lift doors opened and Nicole stepped out, heading for Environmental Controls.

“I’ll be here,” Penny said as the doors closed.

Nicole stepped into Environmental Controls to go over final checks as the ship’s systems synched with the station, happy to be winding down her shift.

Day 2:

Growing up in a rural, farming community in Kansas, Cassandra was used to the simple life, but she still knew how to appreciate the comforts of living on a starship. However, one luxury she couldn’t do without in either scenario was having a comfortable bed and a hot bath. Those two things could combat any stress of the day that she had to endure. After having enjoyed a long bath after finishing up her final to-do list, she was sound asleep, dreaming of her fiance, and home.

That’s when the singing began.

They're sailing for England
Oh! What a shame!
Someone is after our island again!
We'll let them have it...
Oh, yes we will!
But maybe they won't want it when they get the bill!

Cassandra’s eyes snapped open and she groaned, rolling over. “Oh, Lord…”

For we wrote the story of the old brigades.
We know the glory of yesterday's parades!
We'll sell them Blighty yard by yard!
They'll buy it from the old Home Guard!
They will!
They'll buy it from the old Home Guard!

Cassandra sighed and got out of her bed and threw on a robe.

Call out the navy, call out the ranks
Call out the air force, call out the tanks.
From the cliffs of Dover call up the gulls
And don't forget the loyal territorials!

Cass walked out into her living room and found exactly what she expected: Nicole draped across an armchair, glass in hand and singing at the top of her lungs.

But, who's digging in here? Who will defend
Every inch of England no matter what they send?
Who's standing firm in our own front yard?
The soldiers of the old home guard
That's Who!
The soldiers of the old home guard!

Cassandra came around to stand in front of her impromptu guest and folded her arms, waiting until Nicole finally looked up at her.

“Cassie!” Nicole shouted, lurching to her feet awkwardly, throwing her arms around Cassandra and giving her a kiss. “How are you, Cassie Lassie?” She stepped back and frowned. “We need to call you that more often. Why don’t we call you that?”

“Because I don’t like it,” Cass said, matter-of-factly. “You’re drunk.”

“I am not,” Nicole said, indignantly. “I’m merely drunk.” She giggled hard. “Went on the lash a bit.”

“Well, I’m glad you enjoyed yourself,” Cassandra said. “I wouldn’t mind if you did it quieter however.”

“I will be as loud as I wish in my own quarters,” Nicole said, loftily.

“Which would be fine, but these are my quarters,” Cass said.

Nicole finally looked around at her surroundings. “Oh, that explains things,” she said. She dropped down onto Cassandra’s couch and put her feet up. “Your couch is more comfortable than mine,” she said.

“Luck of the draw,” Cass sighed, sitting down.

Her tone cut through the fog in Nicole’s brain. “What’s wrong?”

Cass took a deep breath. “I’m glad you are finally enjoying yourself. You have friends here, and a good life. I’m happy knowing my job is done here. But now I miss home, my life and Richard. And I am facing the prospect that I may not see him for a long time, if ever.”

“You worry too much,” Nicole said, oblivious to irony. “We’ll be fine. Everyone’s working on it. They’ll figure it out.”

“I tell myself that,” Cassandra said. “But still, sometimes it helps to talk about how I feel about it. It’s not easy trying to fit into this role. My function on this ship isn’t that concrete, and unless something else comes along, I don’t know how I’m going to keep being of service to--” she paused at the sound of snoring.

Cass shook her head, grabbed a blanket from her armchair and draped it over Nicole before going back to bed.

Day 3:

Nicole sat in her office, the lights off, enjoying the silence. She could hear the blood coursing through her veins and the sound of her heart beating. The hiss of the hypospray as it pressed against her head was deafening. She hated hangovers.

She heard someone stomping through Sickbay and start pulling at machinery. She had every intention of chewing them out, but at that moment, lifting her head off of her desk was too great a task. Instead she suffered as they tore through Sickbay, going through storage bins and accessing the computer. Finally there was some silence, but after some time a thundering knock was at the door. “Hey, you okay?”

“Shhh,” Nicole said. “Quiet, Penny, quiet.”

“I’m here to work on Sickbay’s systems,” Penny whispered.

“Alone?” Nicole said, confused.

Penny shrugged. “Commander Torres said he’d take advantage of me.”

“Again, not what that sounds like,” Nicole sighed, sitting back.

“I’m working around the clock,” Penny said. “Pretty much a one-woman team. The joy of the Ops position is I’m his utility player. I haven’t been bored since we docked.”

“Lucky you,” Nicole said. “Just don’t be so loud going through Sickbay, all right?”

Penny looked at her, momentarily confused, but shrugged. “You got it,” she said, saluting and heading back out to Sickbay.

Nicole sat back in her chair and closed her eyes, letting her head throb peacefully.

Day 14:

Nicole pulled the cortical scanners off of Arashi's forehead and placed them in the tray next to her. She nodded to the nurse, who instructed the biobed to bring the patient to consciousness while Nicole scanned him carefully. His vitals remained stable, and his brainwaves were steady.

"Arashi," Nicole said, "can you hear me?"

"Yeah, Doc, I can hear you," Arashi said, slowly. "Can you fill me in on what happened? All I can remember is fighting some lumbering brute of an alien and now I am waking up here." Arashi said rubbing his temple. "Is the ship okay? What about the captain? The crew?" Arashi suddenly had so many questions that he asked, his mind going a mile a minute. He had to will himself to be calm.

"Deep breath, Mister Tanaka," Nicole said, sternly. "The ship escaped, the crew is recovering, and you were very brave, and supremely stupid to challenge three of the intruders like that." She ran her tricorder over him. "Given the weapons they had at their disposal, you're lucky a severe concussion was all you received."

"Well it is my job to protect the ship. Can't just stop because the enemy is more powerful than I am. Though I will admit that I should have thought it through." He said after taking a deep breath. "Where are we? I am not on the ship so I assume that we are on a starbase."

"Right now, you're in the infirmary at Starbase Celayur. I insisted on being the one to wake you, so that you'd have a relatively familiar face. It's been about two weeks since your surgery so you're going to feel weak for a couple more days while your muscles get back to full strength. You'll need some physical therapy to make sure all your motor functions are in order, but if you don't over exert yourself, you should be back to full condition in a month or less."

Arashi listened to the doctor and sighed. He knew that this would be hard work but he wanted to get back to his duties "Really...A month?" He said, a bit frustrated at his predicament. "Anyways, I am glad for the familiar face, though I would like to get back to work soon."

"Given that the ship won't be leaving for that long, you won't miss out on anything, I promise."

"All right then, doc. Just let me know what I need to do and I will do it." Arashi said. He tried to flex his arms as if to confirm what the doctor said. He couldn't even lift his arm for more than a few seconds. As the doc said, he would feel weak for a couple days but he wasn't as worried about that.

Day 18:

Sickbay’s patients had been moved to the station’s infirmary, and even though Nicole wasn’t, technically, on duty, as their doctor she’d pestered the station’s chief surgeon till he allowed her to at least check in on her patients. She walked up to the private wards and keyed in her authorization code. As the door opened she heard someone say “about time” and steeled herself, walking inside. “Captain,” she said, coming around the privacy curtain. “Feeling better?”

A loud clang accompanied a sharp, powerful jerk of the Captain’s left arm, the security cuff attached to her wrist jerking the motion to a sharp halt, and bending the bed rail it was attached to as Captain Kennit answered in dangerously soft voice, “No.”

“That isn’t good,” Nicole said, frowning. She looked at the biobed’s readings, then put her bag on a nearby side table and pulled out her tricorder, scanning the Captain slowly. “You’re not healing properly. Your organic systems can’t keep up with the damage to your cybernetics like we’d hoped,” she said. “I’m sorry, but we can’t avoid it any longer. You’re going to have to be hooked up to a regeneration alcove.

Slowly pushing herself to a sitting position, the Captain gave another hard, clearly agitated jerk of her restrained wrist. Another loud clank accompanied another noticeable bend in the bed rail. “Why am I restrained.. this is pointless there are no Borg ship’s active, there’s no captive ship with regeneration alcoves aboard and even if there was the moment I connect.. bad things happen..”

“As it so happens, one of the reasons we came to this starbase is because their medical facilities have one. It was integrated after we repatriated several former drones,” Nicole said. “It’ll be another two days, but after that you should feel completely recovered.” She pursed her lips and fixed the Captain with a glare of her own. "And the reason you are chained to this bed is, if you recall, the last time I performed life-or-death surgery on you, you stupidly decided to walk to my office. I warned the infirmary you may try that again. Now, are you willing to cooperate and regenerate?"

Kennit slowly shook her head. “If it means getting this fucking thing off my arm then fine..”

Nicole eyed her carefully and tapped her tricorder, sending a signal to the restraints, which deactivated and opened with a "click." She stepped up and helped the Captain sit up carefully. "Go slow," she said. "It's just us here. I had the infirmary cleared for the next ten minutes, so no one's going to find out you're mortal."

Shaking slightly just from the minimal effort required to sit up fully, the Captain answered, “Yeah? How do you plan to get me to this alcove when I can barely manage to sit up on my own?”

Nicole put the Captain's arm over her shoulder and pulled her legs off the bed, taking the bulk of the other woman's weight on her and thanked Providence for her strength. She gritted her teeth and grunted as they began to take shuffling steps towards the isolation chamber that had the alcove.

"Remind me to create a dietary plan for you when we're back on board," Nicole grunted as she lifted the Captain into the alcove and moved her into position.

“Bitch bitch bitch..” Kennit answered, her voice somewhat breathless. “First you nag at me to eat...now you nag at me that you think I eat too much. Won’t change the metal in me...adds a number of kilos you know.” Her words dropped off, her body moving with a sudden fluid motion as the alcove activated upon sensing her proximity. Standing straight, she shifted back slightly and brought her left hand up to rest without conscious thought into a narrow depression on the alcove. Connections in her hand extended into the Borg device, and Kennit’s eyes briefly seemed to darken to midnight black before her eyelids closed and she stood silent and still while the alcove began to scan her body, reading the current status of her implants, assessing and initiating multiple repair protocols.

"And sweet dreams," Nicole said with a sigh of relief, scanning the Captain with her tricorder. The alcove was performing normally and the Captain's vitals were already beginning to level off. She shook her head, marveling at the efficiency of Borg medical tech, and at the direction the Federation seemed to be headed, and walked out of the infirmary, ready for two days of peace and quiet.

Day 27:

“I know you’re tired, we’re both tired, but if you’ll just cooperate--don’t take that tone with me!” Penny’s voice echoed out from the computer core. “No, I’m not being unreasonable, you are! I’ve checked, and rechecked and I can’t find it, so you’d better either tell me, or start behaving!”

Nicole walked inside, curious to see who could get Penny so worked up, but was surprised to see no on else in the room. “Penny?”

“You have been--oh...hey Nic,” Penny said, sitting back and sighing. “Stupid, uppity, arrogant Mr. Engineering Computer here thinks he’s too good to tell me what’s bugging him.”

“I see,” Nicole said, dramatically giving Penny a wide berth. “And you’re solution when the computer doesn’t do what you want is to yell at it?”

“That’s always been your solution with me,” Penny chided.

“Touche,” Nicole said. “What’s going on with it?”

“I’m trying to get the power transfer systems aligned now that the station engineers have cleared out, but there’s a variance and I can’t find it and the stupid computer,” she said, giving the console a small kick, “keeps acting like it’s all fine and dandy.”

“And you’re convinced it isn’t?”

“It’s technically within tolerance, but I know Commander Torres will want everything as close to new as possible once the repair crews are out. I spent six hours straight last night cleaning up computer code and trying to smooth out all the patch jobs they’ve already put into it. They are beyond sloppy in their programming”

“Lucky Commander Torres has an Ops officer who doesn’t need sleep,” Nicole said.

“Yeah,” Penny said. “He’s been griping about the station’s Engineers for the last few weeks and I can see why. They’re overlooking a LOT of errors. I snuck back on board to see what I could hammer out.”

“How many is a lot?” Nicole said.

“Like, a few dozen,” Penny said. “I’m going to be writing a few letters to S.C.E. when we get out of this. I’ve been sneaking through the ship so they won’t notice me fixing stuff, but it’s still going to be a huge task for our people to clean up the mess when they leave. I swear it’s like they want the ship to break down”

“Keep me posted on that,” Nicole said. “Anything I should be aware of in Sickbay?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t gotten there yet,” Penny said. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t walk in on the Engineers while they’re there. They get...weird.”

“Weird?” Nicole repeated.

“Well when one group caught me in Environmental Control, one offered to ‘call my mommy for me’,” Penny huffed, “another offered to take me to dinner, another offered to skip dinner, and another pretty much said he’d marry me on the spot when he saw I was fixing things.”

Nicole snorted. “Noted.”

“So why are you here?” Penny said.

Nicole leaned against the offending console and folded her arms. “I’d come to see if you wanted to go have dinner and have some fun.”

“Really?” Penny said.

“Yeah. The station has a good bar, so I’m told. Let’s have a pint, hustle some dom jot and chat up the stationers."

"Sounds fun," Penny said. "Give me an hour and I'll take a couple hours to join you if I can get this wrinkled out."

"All right," Nicole said. "And if yelling doesn't work, you can always through something at it." She gave Penny a friendly cuff to the shoulder and left her to her battle.


Day 39:

Nicole walked into the physical therapy lab in the infirmary and nodded in approval. "And how are we feeling today, Mister Tanaka?" she said, happy to see him walking steadily, if stiffly, along the railed path.

Arashi was doing the best that he could as he had been at this all morning. "Fine if you consider fatigue good." He said with a grumpy lilt to his voice. He wasn't trying to be rude or anything but his muscles were aching and he wanted a nap. He felt like such a baby at the moment but he continued to walk, still a bit stiff but moving as well as he could.

"For what it's worth, you're doing well," Nicole said. "I know it's tiring now, but a few more days and you'll loosen up and begin walking normally. In a week or so you'll be jogging." She scanned him as he walked and nodded. "Doing very well, but I think you'd best take a kip on a bench before you fall down."

Arashi limped to a seat and sat down. "I would prefer to take on a herd of targ than this." He said with a slight grunt as he sat down. He laughed at his own joke. "I wonder how I got that injury that you had to do surgery on. I don't remember any weapons that the aliens had that would do something that would knock me out and injure me so badly." Honestly, Arashi was glad that he survived. He was sure that all his ancestors would shame him if he had died on his first mission.

“As I understand it, you got lucky. They were distracted and only knocked you into the wall,” Nicole said, scanning him. “So consider yourself fortunate.” She closed her tricorder and put it in her bag. “In the meantime, we’ll get you back to your quarters for a nap, and a long sonic shower, and you’ll feel right as rain.”

She patted him on the shoulder and motioned for the attendant on duty to take over and help him to his quarters. He was on a long road to recovery, but he was almost to the end.

Day 41:

The current members of the Delta Quadrant’s Triumvirate didn’t have opportunity to meet often, but the atmosphere when they arrived overrode any urges for catching up on old times.

“We have a problem,” the Third said, sitting down.

“I’ll assume you mean other than our being stranded across the galaxy,” the Second said, also sitting down.

“And worth calling this meeting in person,” the First said, sitting as well.

“We have an agent on board,” Third said, “part of Blackhawk’s group.” The Third paused to let that sink in, while the other two straightened in their chairs.

“You’re sure?” First said.

“Positive,” Third said. “Someone has been accessing restricted files, attempting to gain access to the labs and other secure areas and my personal effects.”

“What were they looking for?” First said.

“Evidently something in my collection. Most likely my sample case. They also tried looking at the classified medical records of the crew. They want to know who they’re dealing with.”

“Perfect timing,” Second said. “The ship’s in drydock and most of the crew is gone, security is low.”

“There have been ‘glitches’ in the system as they conduct repairs. I’m guessing that’s evidence of the agent’s tampering,” Third added.

“This is sounding like what happened with Benson,” First said.

“Exactly,” Third said, perhaps a bit harsher than needed. “I want to nip this in the bud before we have more deaths on our hands.”

“How long will it take to flush him or her out?” First said, looking to Second.

Second sighed and sat back. “At least six weeks. It will take time for me to map out all the pieces and construct the game. Once I do, we’ll put everything in motion.”

“The Victoryships out tomorrow. They’re going to get in the crossfire.” First said.

“I’ll do my best to keep them safe,” Second said. “But it may get dicey.”

The first nodded. “Do what you have to. Right now, nothing else takes priority over stopping that agent. If there are operatives in the Delta Quadrant, I don’t want them getting any kind of foothold. If you capture the person, find out what they know and who they’re working with.

The Second and Third nodded, and they all stood and walked out of the room, their course set.


Nicole Anderson
CMO

Cassandra Sanders
Ship's Counselor

Penny Naroot
Ops/Helm Officer

R. Katrijn Kennit
Captain

Arashi Tanaka
Liutenant JG
Security
USS Victory

 

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