A Museum Trip

Posted on Sat Mar 28th, 2020 @ 10:11am by Captain Michelle Bartlett & Lieutenant JG Sandra Garcia & Cadet Senior Grade Brady Macleod & Commander Rostra Tang & Lieutenant Commander T'se & Lieutenant Cor Cordale & Lieutenant Commander Shaille Levine

Mission: Present In The Past
Location: Bridge, UES Nelson
Timeline: Just after last JP

(OOC: Add anyone else ya want!)

The bridge of the ship was almost completely dark. It had been well preserved, back to the time it had last ever been used, anyway. Clear signs of a battle were still everywhere as collapsed bulkheads laid around, and shorted consoles and knocked over chairs littered it. Even a few bodies well preserved at this point due to power failure and lack of life support. In its day, it probably was a sight to behold, full of a crew keeping it maintained and operational. It was still very much a typical Starfleet bridge, even if the Federation hadn't quite been born yet.

Today? It's just a sight. A relic of a bygone era that nobody could yet explain how it ended up in the Delta Quadrant of all places. At least former Admiral Janeway might not feel so bad...

The soft hum of a transporter beam could be heard amid the stone cold silence of the bridge as the away team arrived on the old vessel's command centre. In another second, the away team materialized.

Brady looked around at the remnants, turning on his flashlight. "Barely a touchpad in sight. Was a whole other world back then."

Shaille walked across to the nearest console, running her fingers over it carefully. "I saw a ship like this when I was a kid," she said with a shake of her head. "A museum back on Earth. We got to walk through a holographic representation of a bridge, almost like this, but to actually touch it..." She turned back to the rest of the team, an almost awestruck expression on her face. "Seriously, aren't you amazed at the fact that we're standing here? In a piece of history so far away from where it belongs? So many questions..." She shook her head as she realised that Brady and Corinne were both looking at her with rather amused expressions on her face. "Well clearly you two have no sense of history," she pouted inside her EV helmet before turning her attention to Rostra. "There are definite power sources that are still active on the ship. I'd suggest we start making our way toward them. Maybe we can get a computer online somewhere and find out what happened to this crew."

"I'm a bit... bewildered." Brady said. "Does this thing even have a computer or do they just use carrier pigeons?" he added with a smirk. "I kid. I kid." he said. "Assuming nothing has changed in 2 centuries, there has to be some kind of an auxiliary control station we can access. Somewhere."

"It's odd that only the life support was detected running. And yet all other power is gone. I'll bring enough on to at least do lights and consoles... Why did they never try and return home?" Garcia asked.

"Hundreds of years ago no one even knew this part of space existed," Shaille replied quietly. "They must have ended up here by accident, i mean, a ship like this was barely capable of leaving our solar system let alone the entire quadrant. They would have been so isolated. Even if they had managed to maintain maximum warp for the rest of their known lives, they would never have made it even close to getting back to Earth." She shook her head. "I don't think we should mess with power from up here, we should go find out what's going on in the rest of the ship before we touch anything."

"Agreed. Ma'am, did you find anything that looked like it might be an engine room?" Brady asked Lieutenant Garcia

"Back on the ship? No. And truth be told, I'm not even sure where the engine room would have been on a ship this size. She put her hands down on the dusty command chair before realizing there was something in it.. A body. She let out an audible gasp.. "What the hell was that?"

Brady obliged and shone his light towards the chair. "Gold stripes on the shoulders... Looks like a security, engineering, or ops officer...With Captain's Pips?"

Shaille turned up the brightness of her flashlight and directed it at the seat. "Command," she said quietly to Brady, silently crossing herself. "Command used to wear gold." Turning the brighter light around the bridge, more bodies came into view. Obviously deceased, thought the below freezing temperatures of space and the lack of oxygen and bacteria meant that the bodies were remarkably well preserved. "We'd need an autopsy to be sure, but I'd hazard a guess that they died from exposure," she said quietly before turning to Rostra. "Commander, do we want to have a body sent back to the ship for medical to take a look at?"

Rostra was expecting something, but not this. She was expecting to meet people, to converse with them, and to welcome them to the future. What she got... were bodies. The pair knelt down a bit to be slightly closer to the command body, "Be at peace, explorer." she whispered softly, odd to see someone as well versed in science taking a moment to be religious. She stood up to her full heights, and turned to Shaille, "Full quarantine in effect. That goes double for us." a pause, to realize what she just said. "You know what I mean. We don't know the cause of death for them, and for all we..."

"... know, it could be a contagion. While I doubt it would be able to survive all this time without a live host, assuming they've been here as long as you're all guessing..."

"... I'd still rather err on the side of caution. Prep the most intact body for transit back, and inform the sickbay crew what to expect, and what's expected." she offered.

"Understood Commander," Shaille replied. The prep took only a few moments, a short conversation with sickbay and then the body was transported to an isolation lab for autopsy. With that task complete, She turned back toward Rostra. "I recommend we establish a link between a tricorder and one of the science labs. The ship's computer could more easily process any telemetry we have and would be more readily able to identify any particular threats, especially if there is a biohazard threat that we can't detect."

Rostra gave a pair of nods, "A sound plan. Contact them and make the connection, just be sure to account for any interference from the nebula."

"I'm going to bring power on slowly... We're in EV suits so we shouldn't need life support, and the odds anyone is alive except in those little pockets I'm still detecting is faint. I'm going to bring on the tertiary power supply. Enough to access a computer and shed some light, but that's about it... Then we can maybe figure out where engineering is and get a power transfer between us and the Wellington." Garcia replied. "Cadet, I think the engineering station looks like it might be behind you just looking at the readouts. Try and ignore the bodies and let's try and get this thing humming. Or whatever might be left of this thing. What do you suppose happened?" she asked in general to the rest of the team.

"No struggle or bodily harm, or structural damage. Rules out a boarding party. Short of a nebular flare, I don't think it's radiation or cosmic particles." Rostra started.

"Though..." her twin picked up, "It's possible that whatever event brought them halfway across the galaxy might have played a part in their current status."

"They must have been awful scared." Brady said. "So far away and possibly never even knowing it. Tertiary backup is online. Glad to see Federation technology hasn't changed in who knows how many years." he added as the lights flickered and then came on to half strength. He was startled by the dim bridge, looking decrepit, unkept... Like it had been through hell and back.. "I guess even in those days, the Captain always went down with the ship." he said as he looked where Captain Hawthorne had been sitting... When Garcia bumped into Captain Hawthorne's remains, a piece of paper had come loose. A quaint oddity even for the 22nd Century. Why write something on paper?

"That's odd." Garcia said. "It's just... a word. I'm also having a hard time accessing the main computer." she added before an alert went off.

"Warning: All ship functions have been deactivated. Please enter set access code to gain access." the voice called out.

"Access code? On a dead ship? You've gotta be KIDDING!" Brady said, getting a bit irritated.

"Maybe that's the access code?" Shaille said, indicating to the piece of paper that had been retrieved. "I mean, it couldn't hurt to try right? What's the worst that could happen? We accidentally initiate a self destruct sequence? Did these old ships even have self destruct?" She pondered, curiouser and curiouser.

"Indeed." T'se conducted an active scan of the bridge compartment with her tricorder. "United Earth Ships of this era were not equipped with a self-destruct mode as we would recognize it comparable to our own. However, the capability to create a controlled implosion of the ships warp and power distribution systems was possible under specific conditions." The Vulcan operations officer approached Shaille and Brady. "It is doubtful that the access code to reinitiate ship functions was limited to a single word; however, we may be able to bypass such a requirement by resetting the ship's computer."

"Just a matter of getting the computer unlocked." Garcia said, looking around the bridge... "And find Engineering. And figure out why there's pockets of life support on the ship."

"Sounds like quite the laundry list,." Brady replied.

"Well, I don't know about y'all, but I'm interested in the life support," Shaille replied easily. "I vote we go find one of these pockets first and see what secrets we can uncover there. The way the pockets are isolated, I don't think they're random or accidental. I think whatever we find there is going to be our biggest clue."

"I think you're probably right, ma'am." Brady replied. "Lieutenant, I think i found the engine room." he added, turning to Cor. "Think we can make it down via a Jefferies Tube?"

"IF they have tubes, yeah. Just gotta shimmy my tail down the right pipe. Sheesh, makes me sound more like a plumber than an engineer. Let's see what we can do." Cordale said with a smirk, "I mean, might make due to stick to the hallways so we don't get all kinds of lost."

T'se gestured to the starboard egress, "According to my preliminary scans of the ship's interior layout, this exit leads to a turbolift bypass corridor which descends to b-deck." She explained, offering it as an alternative to the confined interior of the jefferies tube. "The stairs appear to be intact, and would provide greater maneuverability for our EV suits compared to the confinements of the bulkhead crawlspaces." T'se confirmed after taking another look at her tricorder.

"There we go, stairs it is!" Shaille grinned at Cor. "Time to work off all those coffees and cakes on Dalacar huh?"

Turning her attention back to T'se, she nodded slightly. "Lead the way Commander."

"I prefer to think of it as more of me to cuddle." the Thux said with a chuckle, reaching down to pinch his gut to check. Loose skin over a well maintained physique. Perfection. Though, that broke when he turned his attention back to T'se. "Allow me to get the door." and he started looking for the manual override.

Barring that, his prosthetic limb would certainly suffice to help force open the door.

"Thank you, Lieutenant, your assistance is appreciated." T'se replied sincerely, stepping aside so as to allow the Thux Chief Engineer room enough to maneuver.

"I'll hang on to this piece of paper." Brady replied. "In case it is something important. They must have hoped they'd be found a lot sooner than a few centuries later."

"Good, I don't want to get blown up because your dumb ass didn't pick up the access code to stop the self destruct sequence you'll likely accidentally trip," Shaille quipped teasingly as they entered the stairway and began their descent.

The Away Team's wrist beacons cut beams of light through the thick darkness permeating the stairwell, shadows retreating from the illumination. "I have always found it fascinating, the Human predilection for speculating." T'se remarked as she began to descend the stairs, the magnetic sole of either boot clanking against the metal-grated steps. "We do not know what the crew may or may not have been thinking at the time of their demise; to dwell on a limitless number of possible emotional reactions would be counterproductive, Cadet." The Vulcan Operations Officer was not unkind in her statement; if anything, she hoped her words would in some way calm Macleod, whom she had detected a nearly imperceptible waver in the canter of his voice. "Focus, rather, on what we do know, which is what?"

"We know this ship is out of juice." Cordale called up, "We know this ship is ancient, and a long way from home in every sense of the word. Whatever threw her across the cosmos weren't kind and weren't gentle." he ran down the list of the obvious first, running his hand along the walls as he spoke. "She's been quiet for a long time, dead and silent in the water as it were. We may need to bring some outside power sources over and see if we can rig up a filter to get her going. A core that's been dead this long, and this old... starting her up again may do more harm than good." He had a peculiar accent, from a city long gone that he'd never seen, but it didn't make him harder to understand. It gave punctuation to his speech.

Cordale paused for a moment, flexing the fingers in his prosthetic limb, "We're gonna find the logs of this relic. As we get closer to the end, they're gonna get frantic. Panicked. That's where we're going to find the ghosts of this ship, but we owe it to 'em to listen."

"Welp... On we go!" Garcia said... Now to see what we were dealing with.

=/\= END TRANSMISSION

Commander Rostra Tang
Executive Officer
USS Wellington

Lieutenant Commander T'se
Chief Operations Officer
USS Wellington

Lieutenant Cor Cordale
Chief Engineer
USS Wellington

Lieutenant Shaille Levine
Chief of Security
USS Wellington

Lieutenant JG Sandra Garcia
Operations Officer
USS Wellington

Cadet Sr Grade Brady Macleod
Engineer
USS Wellington