6
That then left them with only two ships to search and their
teams were just arriving at them. One was the USS Victory , which had
been on the Hunter ’s port wing during the initial attack run, and was
now drifting 50 kilometres away, and the other was the USS Swiftsure
which was slightly closer in. The Victory had been blown in half by
multiple torpedo strikes directly amidships from above and below from
several Cardassian warships but she had not been hit by the energy
dissipaters. The status of the Swiftsure was largely unknown. The
Hunter ’s sensors had been off-line when she had been destroyed so it
was not known whether or not she had succumbed to Breen energy
dissipater fire. If she had, then all their hopes were pinned on the
Victory because their sole remaining shuttlepod could not carry all
40 survivors of the Hunter ’s original 73 person crew.
The Victory and Swiftsure search teams had left at the same
time to investigate the vessels. Lieutenant Granger was checking over
the Swiftsure with his tricorder. He did not look too happily at the
readout on its display screen.
“Nothing. Not a damn thing. Not one bloody system has an ounce
of juice left in it. Everything is drained. It’s just like during
World War III when the nukes went off and the EMP blast killed
anything with an electrical circuit within the blast radius,” he said
to his assistant. Rather than use his suit’s comm unit, so the crew
wouldn’t hear the defeat in his voice, he sent a message and his
tricorder readings to the Hunter . Everything now depended on the
Victory but only those on the bridge of the Hunter and Lieutenant
Granger, who had been kept informed of the search teams’ progress,
were aware of this fact.
Hovering over the wreckage of the starship that resembled his
own ship in almost every respect, except that his ship wasn’t all
‘shot to hell’ as his assistant had put it when they saw the state of
the Swiftsure , Granger said a quiet prayer and gripped the lucky
charm that he always carried inside his equipment pocket when he
performed EVAs even harder. Please God, don’t let it end like this.
Don’t let me fail my shipmates and condemn them all to death!
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