Marine Captain Kansz JoNz - Age Before Beauty
Kansz JoNz
OOC: I looked it up, and the “Marine Captain” rank can be shortened to “Captain” in general situations. As always, Captain Lia Rouiancet is the real deal and JoNz is still very much her junior. - M >^..^<
Marine Captain Kansz JoNz - Age Before Beauty
(( USS Ardent, Main Sickbay ))
As the situation stood, the away team was fielding more questions than answers. The Ardent crew had aged, as had their ship, that much was certain. Unfortunately, that was the only thing that was certain at the moment, and Captain JoNz was beginning to feel the pressure. The Cait knew that this wasn’t a real mission or situation, but she still wanted to succeed within the holo-deck scenario.
With the direct path to the medical section a no go, Lahl, Boran and JoNz had traversed a coolant line - thank goodness the plasma hadn’t fired up and fried them all - in order to access the main medical bay. Once there, they were informed by medical staff and Commodore Paulson that the Ardent CO and CMO had both passed on, leaving Paulson in command.
Now, the team set to questioning the Commodore and the Medical staff.
Hence, more questions than answers…
Chief Nurse: That’s right, unfortunately. The Captain has passed away, along with the CMO.
Lahl: I’m sorry for your losses.
Boran: I'm very sorry. May their pagh find peace.
JoNz: Is there any indication of what is causing this premature aging? And I’ve noticed that the aging appears to be sporadic, and not at all progressing at the same rate among individuals.
Lahl: I wonder if the ship protected certain parts of the crew more than others, and that’s caused the differences in aging.
Boran: Commander, your theory might actually track with some weird telemetry I pulled in the coolant line. ::Boran took a cautious half-step toward Lahl:: I just want to run a baseline check on Sickbay’s local nodes first, to make sure the ambient field isn't giving my tricorder false positives.
JoNz: I can honestly understand a phenomenon affecting the crew, as they’re organic. But, for whatever happened to alter the ship itself…
Lahl: Well, now that we’re here at Sickbay, I’ll get into the ship’s computers and see where they were.
Boran: Marine Captain, permission to run a passive sweep of the room's hardware?
JoNz: Granted.
Lahl: Ok, well… huh.
Boran: Found anything useful, Commander?
Lahl: Well, there was a phenomenon, but we don’t have much more information than that at the moment.
Boran: I'm gonna take a wild guess and say looking at the hull stress from the bridge down to here, I think it's safe to say whatever hit the Ardent, it hit her in a wildly uneven spread.
JoNz: Agreed.
Lahl: It’s possible that going in reverse would reverse the aging, but it also could just accelerate it again. Do we know what the medical staff have found?
Boran: Commander, before we test that... can you check my math on this? ::Boran turned their tricorder screen toward Lahl, pointing a prosthetic finger at a jagged, plateaued red line.:: That bone-dry coolant trunk we just walked through? The conduit geometry down there inadvertently created a focused chronotron stream. The local time-flow inside that specific pipe spiked to an exponential factor of about ten thousand.
The Marine officer attempted to follow the engineering geek speak, but if she concentrated any harder, she was going to pull a muscle; therefore, JoNz followed along as best she could.
Boran: The coolant didn't leak out, sir. Under a gradient that fast, the chemical compound simply reached the absolute end of its molecular lifespan in seconds. It aged to death. If the ship is sitting inside a sheared temporal gradient like that, throwing the engines into reverse blindly might drag the slow zones right across the high-friction pockets.
JoNz: And that would not be an ideal outcome. Shh’Vasta!
Lahl: Well, hm… that’s unfortunate.
Kansz nodded her agreement, though stayed silent as she didn't want to interrupt anyone.
Lahl: Response
The Chief Nurse took a moment to lean against the biobed, her strength ebbing, before she spoke again.
Chief Nurse: The crewmen working the exterior hull sensors and the ones running the high-voltage diagnostic consoles aged almost instantly. The ones sitting in the mess hall or asleep in their quarters barely aged ten years.
Boran: Marine Captain, Commander Lahl, check the overhead conduit.
The Captain did as she was told. Using the tactical tricorder built into the forearm of her EVA suit, she scanned the overhead access conduit.
Lahl: Response
Boran: The high-voltage consoles run directly off the primary Electro-Plasma System. If the chronotrons are using the ship's own plasma grid as a carrier wave then…
Kanz did a second scan as Boran explained regarding the chronotrons, to confirm what the first scan had actually shown her. The Cait frowned behind the clear faceplate of her suit.
Boran: Marine Captain, Commander...I think we have a radioactive problem. Look at the bio-bed heaters.
JoNz angled her arm in order to scan the innards and circuitry of the bio-bed scanners, the cold dread of what she was seeing on the tactical recorder settling right on her heart.
Lahl: Response
JoNz: The rads are way elevated…this is what caused the crew to age and the ship to start dying.
The statement hung there for a second and the beeping and whirring of various medical equipment seemed to be much louder. JoNz’s thoughts went into a tailspin as she automatically started thinking of tactical options.
Lahl/Boran: Response
JoNz: The ship may be a lost cause, but I’m not giving up on the crew. How can we negate the radiation that they’ve absorbed? What are our options?
Lahl/Boran: Response
Hands on hips, drawing herself up to all five foot three of her height, the Cait looked ready to take on the invisible threat herself.
Lahl/Boran: Response
(Tags/TBC!)