Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft - Containment Breach
Carter Schimpff
(( Underground Tunnels - Kurtûl III ))
The inoculations were prepared, though whether they’d actually save anyone depended strongly on a series of variables Roy had neither the time nor the emotional capacity to examine in detail at the moment.
Exposure duration, radiation density, proximity, tissue susceptibility – the list ran on, and the short version was simpler: they all needed prophylaxis, and they all needed distance.
Most of all, they needed some dose of luck, though Roy had learned never to say that particular word aloud while in uniform.
He had just raised his hypospray toward Captain MacKenzie’s arm when she stepped forward, extending that arm toward the Nasciak scientist in a clear show of good faith.
Good move, Cap.
He turned the hypospray into his own arm instead and pressed the trigger. The hiss that followed was small – the alarm immediately after was decidedly not.
Without warning, a cacophonous scream erupted around them, bouncing off stone and metal until the facility itself seemed to be shrieking. Red warning lights snapped to life overhead, flashing in pulses. Alarms like that rarely meant anything good, particularly when something like thalaron radiation was involved.
MacKenzie: I'm reading a massive spike in thalaron generation...
Roy’s tricorder was in his hand almost as quickly as MacKenzie’s. The hair along the back of his neck rose as the readings resolved. The hair along the nape of his neck rose as the readings resolved. The radiation curve was climbing, insidious, like a wave gathering to crash over all of them.
Jaran: Treatments are all administered. No excuse to hang around here, though.
Bancroft: If I’m interpreting these readings correctly, it looks like there may be a containment breach as well.
He looked up from his tricorder toward Dota Eos, the unspoken question written plainly on his face: are y’all seeing the same thing?
Eos: Response
MacKenzie: We've got to hurry. You said we need to head through these doors?
Dr. Jaran completed packing their medkit, then consulted their tricorder.
Jaran: The radiation seems to have its source somewhere below us. The corridor through there slants up, so it's the best option to get some distance.
Roy tracked the tunnel geometry against the radiation gradient. Jira was right – down meant closer to the source. Up meant distance, and in this case distance was the only treatment he could reliably prescribe.
Bancroft: Dr. Jaran is right. There’s no use in getting to the source to stop it – our prophylaxis won’t save us that close to the radiation. We should try and find a control center.
Eos: Response
Captain MacKenzie closed her tricorder and drew her phaser. Roy kept his tricorder in hand.
MacKenzie: Let's go.
Starfleet and Nasciak moved together – perhaps not as allies, but as two groups of people who had discovered, to their mutual irritation, that death had no interest in jurisdictional disputes.
Cole: Sir, General order 15, I’m going to have to insist I go first.
Bancroft: ::under his breath, mostly to himself:: I thought General Order 15 was a myth…
He looked to the body next to him, expecting to see Dr. Jaran. Instead, he found himself looking at Dota Bundara Eos.
Of course.
Because if anyone in the tunnel were going to overhear his muttered commentary about Starfleet’s rules and regulations, it would be the Nasciak legal war-spire for whom citing Federation law seemed to come as easily as breathing did to anyone else.
Eos: Response
MacKenzie made a gesture that left little room for interpretation, its meaning admirably clear:
Move. Now.
Jaran: Ok, the three rules of scary radiation: time, distance, and shielding. We limit the time we're exposed, we put the most distance we can in between us and the source, and we put anything we can between us and the source.
Cole: Good reminder. And call out if you see anyone suffering from the more psychological side effects. ::to herself:: I don’t need to revisit that individual crisis anytime soon.
Roy flashed Jira a quick grin as they moved. It wasn’t amusement, precisely. More like a professional reflex.
Bancroft: Time and distance being our prime allies in the case of thalaron radiation.
Shielding, on the other hand, was more akin to the cousin nobody particularly liked, who promised to bring potato salad to the family picnic and showed up three hours late, drunk and empty-handed.
Eos: Response
Jaran: ::huffing slightly from the exertion:: Correct. Thalaron radiation isn't easily shielded against. The usual suspects don't do the trick.
Cole: I’ve heard stories, nasty stuff, not to be trifled with ::beat, inhale:: My father had a strange sense of what was appropriate bedtime stories.
MacKenzie: ::breathing steadily:: Rest assured, Lieutenant - whatever stories you were told, the reality is far worse…
Roy huffed once, then his tricorder trilled. A decision point appeared on the map ahead: a split in the corridor. Left dipped downward, stairs vanishing into a region where the radiation gradient thickened. Right sloped up, away from the source, though not far enough to make Roy comfortable.
Bancroft: Split in the corridor coming up. Stay to the right – up and away.
Eos: Response
At the split, everyone bypassed the stairs to the left and continued up the gentle slope to the right.
Jaran: Well, not necessarily. Thalaron radiation also has a relatively short effective range. Assuming we don't get trapped anywhere, we should be able to outrun it.
They turned a corner and – naturally – there was a sealed door. The universe had a sense of humor, though Roy was beginning to suspect it was rather a malicious one. The panel beside the door was dark and unresponsive.
Jaran: Umm as I was saying, if we don't get trapped, we'll probably be ok? Anyone have a key for this?
Cole: ::looking back to the group:: Anyone have a knife or a flat tool?
MacKenzie: ::flatly:: I left my bat'leth at home…
Roy patted himself down.
It was an absurd action, and he knew it was absurd. There was no reason to believe he had replicated a knife, strapped it to his person, forgotten about it, and only now discovered that he’d become the sort of medical officer who carried tactical cutlery into abandoned underground facilities.
Finding no surprise knife, he dropped to one knee, his phaser rifle slung across his back, and opened his medkit.
Bancroft: ::muttering to himself:: Protoplaser… not unless the door has a delicate capillary problem… hypospray… regenerative mesh, definitely not…
Eos/Jaran: Response
Cole: Thank you, Dota Bundara Eos.
Roy looked up to see Cole already fiddling with the panel – clearly she’d gotten what she needed from someone else. He snapped the medkit closed and stood back up.
Cole: Thanks.
MacKenzie: Can you get it open?
Bancroft: ::sardonically:: Without explosives please, Natasha.
Eos/Jaran: Response
Cole worked quickly, disemboweling the innards of the panel’s now-exposed enclosure. She held two exposed wires up, then touched them together.
The door’s mechanism groaned. The door moved…
…about six inches. It was the sort of gap that was useful, if one were a particularly determined ferret.
Cole: Here, can someone hold these wires together, and someone help me pull these doors apart further.
MacKenzie stepped forward and took the wires from Cole.
MacKenzie: ::muttering:: What do I have to lose? Radiation or electrocution…
Roy moved forward to aid Natasha, putting his shoulder into the edge of the door.
Bancroft: ::grunting:: Just so long as it isn’t the cold vacuum of space, ma’am.
Eos/Cole/Jaran: Response
The door resisted them stubbornly, retracting half an inch at a time, each gain purchased with sweat and awkward leverage.
Out of the corner of his eye, Roy saw Captain MacKenzie cock her head. Rarely a favorable sign.
Then, abruptly, the door was gone.
It slid away so quickly that Roy’s shoulder, having already committed itself to the honorable cause of applying force, continued forward with all the dignity of a sack of laundry tossed down a staircase.
Physics, kinetics, and his own misplaced momentum conspired beautifully. He stumbled, then smacked his face against the jamb where the door had vanished, then dropped to one knee.
MacKenzie: I think I missed my calling.
He rose to his feet, gingerly dabbing two fingers against his cheek then studying them – good, no blood. Merely a bruised ego.
Bancroft: ::dryly:: In fairness, Captain, I think we loosened it for you.
Eos/Cole/Jaran: Response
Captain MacKenzie extended a finger pointing through the now-open door.
MacKenzie: Lieutenant, I seem to recall you wanting to take point... Let's get a move on before we're all liquidated.
Through the door they all went, Cole in the lead. Roy left his phaser rifle slung across his back. There were more than enough weapons in the group, and the threat most likely to kill them now – disassembly at the subatomic level – wasn’t something one could shoot into compliance.
He stepped through the threshold and found himself inside what appeared to be a control room, the rough utility of the cold corridor giving way to consoles arranged in deliberate arcs. The light was sickly and elegant – a combination he’d come to associate with civilizations that preferred their interfaces mysterious and their ethics negotiable.
At the center of the room, a large holographic projection hung above a circular dais. A column of green light rose within the projection, massive and pulsing, surrounded by brighter containment rings that crisscrossed one another like luminous sutures around a wound.
Roy aimed his tricorder at the hologram, shouting over the klaxon.
Bancroft: I think this might be the control room for the thalaron generator.
Eos/Cole/Jaran: Response
He moved swiftly to the console nearest the holo-projection, set his tricorder atop it, and initiated an interface between the two. The first few seconds produced nothing but hostile syntax – then the systems finally connected.
The first thing Roy did was silence the damned alarm. The sudden absence felt almost physically violent, and his ears rang loudly.
Bancroft: Yes – according to this console, the generator is located tens of meters below us – I’m betting that’s the radiation source we detected earlier.
Eos/Cole/Jaran/MacKenzie: Response
He tapped several commands into his tricorder, waited for it to translate those commands through the console, then read the results.
Bancroft: It’s active, and increasing in power, but– ::frowning:: I don’t understand. The radiation this generator is producing is… thinned. Like it’s been diluted somehow. Still very dangerous, but not immediately fatal.
He shook his head once, scowling at his tricorder as though it were intentionally being vague about things, then looked up at Dota Eos and her scientist. He took a half step to one side, intentionally making space for another body at the console, then motioned to them with an open hand.
Eos/Cole/Jaran/MacKenzie: Response
A flashing icon in the upper left corner of the console caught his eye, though Roy resisted the impulse to touch it. Instead, he scanned it with his tricorder.
‘Warning: Containment Breach’
He tapped the icon.
A facility schematic appeared, jagged and incomplete, but coherent enough to follow. A red pulse marked a section approximately three hundred meters away.
Bancroft: We found the source of the containment breach. About three hundred meters away from us, in some place called labeled here as Genetic Research Lab zero-two. It looks like the local systems are trying to contain it with forcefields.
Eos/Cole/Jaran/MacKenzie: Response
TAG/TBC!
===
Lieutenant JG Roy Bancroft
Assistant Chief Medical Officer
USS Artemis-A
A240205RB1