5
It was 1000 hours on the second day that the USS Hunter was
spending in the Chin’Toka system when her small army of engineers,
armed with all the necessary tools to remove the warhead from
whichever ship proved to have an operational or reparable deflector
assembly, stood ready for a hard day’s labour. Everyone hoped that
they would be lucky enough to find that one of the closer vessels
would be salvageable. The teams that had to travel out to the
farthest vessels went first. They started out from the shuttlebay,
stepping out through the atmospheric forcefield into the vacuum of
space. They crawled out to the edge of the remnants of the saucer
that concealed their vessel. Taking a visual aim on the area of space
that contained their target vessel they pushed off into the debris
field only using short, controlled bursts from the manoeuvring jets
on their environment suits to alter their trajectory as necessary to
avoid a large price of debris, or a hulk that was once a beautiful
and mighty starship, and to maintain their velocity. It was difficult
and tiring work for the engineering teams, as well as slow going, as
they were crawling across the devastated hulls as much as possible
both to conserve propellant and to remain as hidden as possible. Just
before they moved from one vessel to another they performed a quick
tricorder scan of the debris field to ensure that no enemy vessels
were about.
It took just over an hour for the perimeter teams to travel the
full five hundred kilometres out to their target vessels. Given the
same return time, or a little longer depending on fatigue, the three
hour oxygen supply in their environment suits would be almost gone by
the time that they got back if they took too long to search the ship,
and/or remove the warhead. Almost as soon as they got their the bad
news began to filter back to the Hunter .
The three outermost vessels were utterly useless. They had been
incapacitated by the Breen energy dissipater weapon. Not one single
system aboard the vessel had the slightest erg of power in it. Even
the independently powered hand phasers that were in the storage
lockers that were checked when the engineering teams boarded them
were drained of all their energy. There was nothing that could be
salvaged from them and one team member was carrying an injury on the
return trip. Crewman Richmond had tripped while crawling over the
hull of a Romulan Warbird and broken his left arm in two places and
twisted his right ankle. The fall had also opened a small tear in his
environment suit when he caught it on a jagged outcropping of hull
where a Cardassian torpedo had penetrated the ship’s outer plating
which was rendered as fragile as an eggshell with no power to its
Structural Integrity Field, or its shields. The relentless Cardassian
fire ravaged the helpless Romulan vessel killing all on board. The
leak in Richmond’s suit was not immediately life threatening in and
of itself, but coupled with his injuries the leak and the distance he
had to travel back would tax the young engineer’s strength to its
very limit.
The two mid-range ships were not in much better shape. They had
some salvageable parts but their warheads had been damaged either by
weapons fire or by drifting into another ship and were beyond repair.
The two teams gathered what they could from Lieutenant Granger’s
wish-list that he had generated before they had set out. It was a
list of spares that the teams were to look for as a secondary option
should the warhead prove of no value. Things like plasma relays, bioneural
gel packs and any power-packs that contained any energy at all
in them were on the list. Hope was fading fast on board the Hunter
that the search teams would find a salvageable deflector assembly as
the time ticked slowly along. All they could do was wait. Wait and
hope and pray to God, or the Prophets or whatever deity was in one’s
faith for help.
To Be Continued...
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