The Wreck of the Edmorn (part 1)
Posted on Sat Aug 30th, 2014 @ 12:50pm by Captain T'mpest Michaels & Commander Rylie Cattmor & Lieutenant Commander Dylan Blake & Lieutenant Commander T'kaarch
861 words; about a 4 minute read
Mission: What Dreams May Come
ON
"Commanderrr," T'kaarch purred, "sensorrrs are picking up minorrr trrraces of dilithium. I don't know yet what the cause could be, therrre arrren't any naturrral occurrrrences of it in the arrrea."
Despite being the officer on duty, especially with T'mpest in her ready room running her own checks and analyses, along with some other minor and almost disturbing thought processes that she couldn't quite pick up without probing, the call from the science station almost came as a surprise. That, and the fact that the rolling of the Caitian speech pattern got somewhat lost in the background noise that Cattmor picked up from working anywhere with the amount of personnel like the bridge. "Helm, slow to one half." She stated to the officer manning the helm, before turning back to T'kaarch. "Can you localise it, Lieutenant? Get us a heading to go on."
"They seem to be drrrifting slightly, let me find a heading forrr you." T'kaarch answered with furrowed brow, which looked somewhat odd on catfolk.
Reading from the same sensor chart Blake tracked the signal T'kaarch had identified. "They appear to be emitting from a large asteroid off our port side," he spoke up with his brow lined with thought.
"Feed the data to the helm, please, and set a course when ready." Cattmor said, fluidly working between operations and the helm in the same sentence.
The asteroid was large enough to virtually hold a geosynchronous orbit of, and filled the main view screen before they pulled it back. Mister Blake had also already pulled up the location of the signal on the surface and put it on the viewer, basically what looked like a crumpled mess of hull, with other fragments in the general vicinity.
"Judging by the largest pieces of debris the wreckage is the Edmorn," Blake announced having run the data through the ships Computer.
Cattmor's own brow crinkled slightly as she took in the information, and correlated it to the information from the mission briefing. She stood and stepped forward a few paces taking in the image from the centre of the bridge. "Lifesigns?" she asked, to no-one in particular.
Blake's lips thinned into a tight line as he consulted the sensor readings: "None," he responded tensely.
A flash of what seemed to be memory passed Cattmor's field of vision, but it wasn't a memory of hers, nor of anyone else on the bridge. It was too fast to really get any kind of handle on it but her heart skipped a beat from the briefest of images of what she could only describe as blood streaked in the air. She closed her eyes briefly before addressing the helm again, "Keep our distance, we don't want to be pulled down too; if that's what happened." She continued staring at the wreckage on the view screen for a couple more seconds until, "Commander Michaels, please report to the bridge; we've found something."
"On my way." T'mpest turned to Sammi. "Let me know if you find anything else." The pig had been sifting information from the past century to see if there were any other occurrences of missing ships or strange gas clouds, but so far had found nothing concrete.
She walked onto the bridge and addressed Rylie. "What have you found?"
"We picked this wreckage up on sensors a couple of minutes ago. It's been confirmed as the Edmorn, the first vessel that went missing from Maridius. No survivors."
"Any indication as to what caused the wreck?" T'mpest asked as she took her seat and looked over the data.
"Inconclusive." Rylie stated simply, then turned to Lieutenant Blake once more. "Can you link into their computer system, Lieutenant? Try to download any logs."
Blake's attempts were faltered at every step. "Sorry, no can do Commander. There's too much damage to create a link up."
"Is their life support still functioning?" she asked the Caitian at science.
"Life supporrrt... It seems small pockets of the ship arrre still showing up as 'habitable'," T'kaarch purred, "but that might as well just be pockets of stale airrr... We'll need a local terrrminal to know for surrre, but I have little hope forrr this ship, commanderrr." He added solemnly.
Unbeknownst as to the reason why, Cattmor was feeling increasingly uneasy about the situation, and being in the cloud. Even more so now that they had found conclusive proof that something had gone wrong with the previous expeditions. She paused slightly, practically looking through T'mpest sitting in her seat. "Away team, captain?" she asked almost fearing the answer, and focussing more on the person in the 'centre chair', while picking up clear thoughts from Mister Blake regarding his warnings about choosing the members of it more wisely from the other evening.
"I want to see what we can learn from here first," T'mpest said, glancing over at Rylie. "If we can't find anything, we can send a team over, but if we do, I'd like them in full EVA suits. Something feels odd about the crash."
(To be continued...)
Lieutenant T'kaarch
Chief Science Officer
Lieutenant Commander Rylie Cattmor
Executive Officer
Lieutenant Dylan Blake
Chief Operations Officer
Commander T'mpest Michaels
Commanding Officer
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