Power Play

Posted on Jun 05, 2014 @ 7:27am by Commander Jacob Crichton
Edited on on Jun 05, 2014 @ 7:30am

Mission: All Our Yesterdays

= Power Play =

(cont'd from "Dead Ship, Short Bus")

LOCATION: USS CENTURY
SCENE: Bridge
STARDATE: [2.14] 0531.2136

Jake reached into his toolkit and pulled out a flux coupler. As he started to poke around inside the exocomp’s innards, Stonn began to move around the deck, looking at the corpses. He didn’t touch them, but several times he leaned in close so that he could get a better look.
Jake glanced over at him.

“You looking for someone, Commander?” he asked.

“Not looking,” Stonn said, turning to Jake. “But I have found them, nonetheless.”

“You *recognize* these guys?”

“Not all of them,” said Stonn. “But the officers stationed at Operations and Tactical are familiar. Neither of them should be here.”

“Maybe they got reassigned,” Jake shrugged.

“Unlikely,” Stonn said. He pointed to the Ops officer. “He was discharged and imprisoned after I exposed his involvement in a smuggling ring that was funneling weapons to the Exchange.”

Stonn then turned, and pointed at the Tactical officer.

“And he was reported killed in a transporter malfunction while on leave.”

“Transporter malfunction?” Jake snorted. “That’s like saying butterflies killed him.”

“It is statistically unlikely, but plausible.”

“’Unlikely’ is in understatement,” said Jake. “There are a couple million transports every day in the Federation. And there are what, maybe five transporter accidents reported a year?”

“Perhaps there were only four that year,” Stonn said. “I must point out that this is still speculation. Their injuries make positive identification impossible without a detailed examination.”

“What about the big guy?” Jake said, pointing at the admiral’s corpse with his thumb. “You recognize him?”

“He is not familiar,” said Stonn.

“You think he’s a real admiral?”

Stonn raised an eyebrow. “What do you mean?”

“Well, that guy’s supposed to be in jail, that guy’s supposed to be dead…” Jake said. “Or, *was* supposed to be dead, I guess, before he actually died here. So maybe Mr. Big over there isn’t where he’s supposed to be either.”

“A logical conclusion, but I remind you our data may be faulty,” said Stonn.

Jake had taken a hyperspanner from his toolkit and was prodding it inside the exocomp’s chassis. After a moment, the lights on the outside of the device glowed faintly to life for a moment, and the unit made a series of rapid, shrill beeps.

“Still a spark of life left in him,” Jake said with a grin.

“I remind you, that device is not alive, Mr. Crichton.”

“Figure of speech,” Jake said, rolling his eyes. “I thought it was totally dead, but it must have gone into hibernation, saved back some of its power in the event it could be reactivated.”

“Why would it do that?”

“A total power loss might wipe its memory,” Jake shrugged. “Maybe it knows something it wants to remember, like what went wrong with the ship, or how to fix it. Maybe it’s been waiting for someone like us to come along and turn it back on.”

Jake looked down at the exocomp, smiling at it with genuine wonder.

“This one’s a survivor,” he said.

“You are anthropomorphizing the machine,” Stonn said. “The exocomp was following its programming. Without cause to do so, the machine would surely have worked until it suffered total power failure, as did its counterparts.”

“So he’s a little unconventional,” Jake shrugged. “Work smart, not hard, I always say.”

The lights on the exocomp suddenly blinked once, then began to fade. The beeps began to lower in pitch, eventually becoming a dull buzz, and then a series of sputtering, squelching sounds that sounded almost plaintive.

“No! No no no no no!” Jake said. He let go the exocomp, letting it float in the air before him, and grabbed a power pack from off of his environment suit. He quickly opened the pack with his spanner, and then began working at its interior.

“What is it, Commander?” Stonn asked.

“He’s running on fumes,” Jake said quickly. “I need to get him attached to an external power source before he shuts down, but these power packs aren’t designed for exocomps. I plug it into him incorrectly, it’ll fry his circuits.”

Jake worked fast, rerouting the energy-exchange pathways in the interior of the power pack. The exocomp was suspended in air before him, slowly rotating, its lights just barely still glowing. Jake finally finished with the pack, snapped it closed, then grabbed for the exocomp. He delicately inserted the pack into the machine’s chassis, fixing it in place with the spanner, then activated the pack.

The exocomp’s tinny cries trailed off in a buzz that slowly faded, and its lights flickered once and faded into darkness.

Jake sighed. “Damn.”

“You were not in time,” Stonn said.

“No,” Jake said, frowning at the Vulcan. “I didn’t move fast enough. I know.”

“It was not a rebuke,” Stonn said. “You are not in command of this mission, you did not set our speed and course, and you had no way of knowing this device would be here. You did your best with your available time and resources.”

“I guess,” Jake said.

“And I remind you, Commander,” Stonn continued, “It is only a machine.”

“Yeah,” Jake said. He sighed again. “Well, I guess we can salvage what we can from their memorybanks. If there’s any left, it might give us an idea of-”

The exocomp’s exterior lights suddenly flared to life, so bright against the pitch darkness of the bridge that Jake had to close his eyes. It made a series of rapid beeps that reminded Jake of a tittering laugh, and as Jake watched it stopped slowly spinning in midair and righted itself, and its lights faded back to normal.

“He’s alive!” Jake said. He was grinning again.

“*It* is *reactivated*,” Stonn corrected him.

“That doesn’t have nearly the same punch to it,” Jake laughed. “Hey there, little fella. Look at you! Good as new, huh? Guess you don’t die so easy, do you?”

The exocomp beeped twice. It descended to the floor of the bridge, next to the access panel it had been sitting in front of when Jake had discovered it, and beeped twice again.

“What is it, boy?” Jake asked.

“The device does not seem able to open this panel,” Stonn said. “Perhaps it is waiting for us to do it.”

“I can see why,” Jake said, leaning over as best he could in his environment suit to inspect the seal on the access panel. “This hatch is maintenance access, it leads to the exterior of the ship. If the bridge was ordered sealed- if they were trying to prevent decompression, say- this panel would be locked down. He wouldn’t be able to override the seal on his own, it might put the bridge crew in danger.”

“So it was attempting to access the ship’s exterior,” Stonn said. “Why?”

“Well, the turbolift doors were shut until we pried them open,” Jake said. “Maybe he was trying to reach another part of the ship? Or maybe there’s something out there that needs to be fixed?”

The exocomp beeped twice again. Jake thought it sounded almost impatient.

“In a minute, ya little cockroach,” Jake said to the machine. “We’re talking.”

“There is still no power to the bridge,” Stonn observed. “Without it, we will not be able to open this panel either.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing I brought more than one power pack,” Jake said. He knelt as best as he could in front of the hatch (which was no small feat in zero-gravity) and pulled another power pack off his belt. He took his hyperspanner and opened a panel to access the relay that powered the hatch, and was surprised when the exocomp suddenly floated forward towards his hand. A tiny metal claw had materialized at the machine’s nose, and it seemed to reach greedily for the power pack in Jake’s hand.

Jake swatted the claw away.

“Don’t be greedy,” he said. “I just gave you one.”

But the exocomp seemed insistent, the tiny claw reaching for the pack again. Jake engaged in a brief tug of war with the device, which started to beep at him again (the tone of the beep had remained unchanged, but Jake could swear that now it sounded angry), and finally Jake let go. The exocomp took the power pack and moved to the exposed power relay. As Jake watched, the exocomp lowered the powerpack into the panel until it clicked into place. Then, the tiny claw shimmered away, and was replaced with a tool that looked like a smaller version of Jake’s own spanner. It connected the pack and activated it, and suddenly the hatch slid open, revealing an access tunnel that descended into the floor beneath the bridge, with ladder rungs mounted into the side of the tunnel.

Without hesitation, the exocomp floated down the tube, quickly swallowed up by the pitch darkness so that only it’s blinking exterior lights were visible as it descended the shaft.

Jake blinked. “Well, he’s bossy but at least he gets results,” he said.

“We should follow the device,” Stonn said. “It may know of a way to restore power to the bridge.”

“And it might need our help,” Jake said. He stepped down into the hatch, grabbed the rungs, and began to descend. Stonn followed right behind.

============================
Shawn Putnam
a.k.a.
Jacob Crichton
Commander
USS DISCOVERY