Star Trek: Dominion - Part 3

3

Repairing a battle-damaged Starship is no mean feat. Generally

a veritable army of engineers equipped with environment suits, Work

Bees and a Starbase or Spacedock are required. However, the crew of

the Hunter had none of these available to them. They were armed with

a small engineering crew, a few damage control teams and every spare

hand that was available. That meant that everyone except those in

Sickbay or on the bridge, who were conducting their own repairs while

watching for signs they'd been detected, were helping the repair

effort.

Eight hours after settling into her hiding place the Hunter

still lay hidden within the saucer of the devastated Galaxy-class

ship. Most of her systems had been patched up and the Engineering

crews had managed to coax the impulse engines up to half power. Warp

velocity was out of the question without their navigational deflector

which they had lost when they had dispatched the Cardassian warship

when they jettisoned the warhead during, what seemed at the time, a

suicidal run.

Sensors had been partially restored and the few passive scans

they managed to sneak had revealed a terrifying picture. The

Federation Alliance fleet had withdrawn from the system and was

limping back to Deep Space 9 leaving the crew of the Hunter

effectively stranded. She could move and partially fight at the

moment but she could not go to warp speed and crawling at impulse

speed back to DS9 would take years. Years in which they would be

vulnerable to Dominion attack because they were now behind enemy

lines.

A few hours later the Chief Engineer, Lieutenant Granger, using

a bit of ingenuity and a lot of luck, managed to procure some

replacement parts for their damaged systems from the damaged saucer

they were hiding in. Rather than use the transporter, which could

have been detected by the enemy, he and a few volunteers had ventured

out into the saucer in environment suits armed with some hand-held

cutting torches and wrenches. It was exhausting and time-consuming

work but, in the end, their efforts were rewarded when they returned

to the ship and managed to get the salvaged equipment installed to

find 99% of it compatible and, more importantly, functional.

Within twenty-four hours of going into hiding with minimal

systems, the USS Hunter had most of her major systems restored to

within operational limits. Life support was functioning normally.

Engines were ready to be restarted at a moment’s notice. Shields had

been restored to 65% whilst weapons were fully operational but they

had to use manual targeting. Full sensors had also been restored and

their passive scans had revealed something that, although initially

horrific, could prove to be a life-line to the crew of the Hunter.

The wreckage of several destroyed Defiant-class vessels littered the

battlefield within several hundred kilometres of the Hunter’s current

position. It would mean several Away Teams to inspect the wreckage

one by one in the hope that a warhead could be retrieved. This all

depended on several things: avoiding the almost inevitable Dominion

patrols, which they had been fortunate enough so far to have evaded;

finding a ship that had not been hit by a Breen energy dissipater for

that warhead would be every bit as useless to them as their own one

would have been right at that moment. The final component to the plan

was down to prayer and fortune, which so far had been their constant

companion.

To Be Continued....