Picking Up Where...

Posted on Tue Oct 3rd, 2017 @ 1:24am by Lieutenant Renee Salchin

Mission: https://wellington.pegasusfleet.site/index.php/sim/missions/id/3
Timeline: The morning of 'The Unexpected End'

Renee looked at the pieces to the collector control she had taken with her the previous day. A slight smile at the memory of what had passed between her and one of her, yes, bosses that previous evening. She banished that from her mind as she inspected the hydrogen catch filter under a electroscope, checking to make sure the grooves weren't accidental. The scratch marks, subtle though they were, proved that it was indeed deliberate. A recheck of the programming showed that even the master program for the tractor filter had been altered to the wrong specs. No electronic signature had been logged, so without expert investigation, which may or may not work, she'd never know who had done that. For the first part, there really was no way. If the ensign from the starbase had even checked it, it could be them, or someone from the ship from before, or someone who snuck on the ship, or someone still here. No way of tracking that down, either.

"Shit." She said to herself, glancing at the time. Six in the morning. She'd gotten seven hours of sleep the previous night, so she was still good to go, but she was still rather tired, and a long night ahead of her. Another smile came up, but she banished it as well. With a sigh, she replaced the piece with some of the chips and other parts she'd toted around the previous evening, inspecting them for anything and everything that could be damage, breathing a sigh of relief that they were in exquisite condition, which meant she just needed to fix the two known issues.

Some careful thought and she placed the damaged piece into a case and back into her bag. Until she got to get it to the Chief or J'Loni, she was keeping it with her. She replicated a new copy of it and inspected it under the same electroscope, making sure it was up to snuff, then hefted the bag and set off back to the portside bussard collector control room. True, it was safe to run with the secondaries, but she didn't want to keep the primary down longer than it needed to be. It took her a good ten minutes to get back to the room, didn't it take two minutes to get to Lieutenant James's quarters? She shook her head and reopened the control panel and spent fifteen minutes getting everything back in place, then settled down with a PADD to look at the programming. It definitely wasn't her forte, but she could muddle through with it.

Restoring the code was the last bit of the fix, but she ran it through a simulation just to make sure she hadn't screwed it up herself. Finally, she replaced the panel and sat back on her haunches as she made notes on her PADD, then sent the official notification of a fixed solution as she switched the backup back over to the primary. Five minutes later, she was on her way to the next task on her lift.

*** 1525 ***

She'd stopped to watch the semi-scheduled departure of the Captain's yacht for what by all rights should be a rather dull trip to the surface. Shuttles and the like were always a somewhat interesting thing to watch and the launches gave er an excuse to sit back for a moment. Wait... Did the shuttle just... Twitch? She focused her eyes on the craft, leaning towards the window a bit more and something flashed on it. Her mind raced as she tried to come up with a reason there would be a flash that didn't come from a light..

Even as she tried to troubleshoot what was more than likely a minor issue, her eyes were drawn again to the shuttle as it again seemed to stagger in space.

Then blew up.


*** 1730 ***
Tears still streaked down her cheeks as she had continued on the tasks for her day and she already felt wiped, but with only another hour left to her day, she knew she could push through it. These things needed to get done, no matter that a catastrophe had happened. "Starboard dorsal phaser capacitor." She said softly, "Enough power is getting through, just it isn't efficient enough." She scrolled through the diagnostics that had been run, "Hmmph, just a replace and relax should do it."

Spare in her carryall, she entered the tube at the closest entrance and crawled her way to the weapons power nexus and traced the power feed in the right direction and into another tube to where the capacitor bank was located. fortunately not much of a squeeze and she was there. A few minutes work and the old capacitor was out, then the new one slid right into the slot. She hit the diagnostic button on her tricorder and sat back to wait. She picked up the used capacitor and visually inspected it, mentally noting that it looked like it was brand new.

"That is interesting..." She muttered to herself, still enabling the test of the power flow and sat back for a minute while it ran, then checked the results. "And that wasn't the problem, so..." She sighed and got to work, tracing the capacitor 's power feed back to the source. It was twenty-seven panels down through a Jeffries tube to a subjunction and she pried the panel off of that one too and sat back down, shaking her head at what she saw. A screen's worth of chips, thirty-six, but for this particular junction, there should only have been twenty-one, the rest of the slots were for reroutes and damage to the panel.

She took a screen shot of the panel then, one by one, took out the chips and scanned them and notated the location. She then stopped for a few seconds more, then packed away the chips and began to extricate herself out of the junction and to the nearest corridor. A complete replacement of the chips was in order and she wanted to do an in depth analysis of them. She greeted a pair of engineers as she ducked into the engineering bay to get a replacement set of cihps.

An hour later, she'd finally finished, leaning back against the tube wall and sighing. Reflexively, she checked the time on her PADD and jerked upright. Ninteen Hundred. She had one hour before she was to meet Thomas in the lounge, and That. Just. Was. Not. Enough.Time. And there was no way she was going to miss out on this, she needed SOMETHING to get her mind off of the events of a few hours ago. Something, almost anything.

OFF:

Chief Petty Officer Renee Salchin
Engineering NCO