Commander Jo Marshall - Tell Starfleet I Want Hazard Pay
Jo Marshall
((Weapons Platform — Time Index: Early 2367))
A deafening klaxon split the air in a raw, metallic blare, loud enough to rattle teeth and bounce off the polished black walls in shrieking echoes. Red light strobed in time with the siren, casting the chamber in pulses of emergency and inevitability. Through gritted teeth and the sensation her brain was about to split in two, Jo frantically pushed data like a dam about to burst into the processing unit.
Marshall: ::Yelling over the noise,:: Give me one opening—just one, Johnson, you son of a—
Reynolds: ::Also bellowing over the cacophony,:: I’ve almost got the forcefield down, but you’ll have to be quick—there are backup circuits in here.
Gnaxac: ::nodding:: Read-d-dy when you are!
Marshall: No time like the present!
Apt in many more ways than Jo wanted to account for, there and then. She hammered details hard into the tricorder like a woman possessed—fingers drilling, sweat stinging her eyes. The keys and subsequent board itself took a beating as ream after ream of out of sequence, malaligned, fractured and bloody data stream poured through it, the thing practically steaming from overuse. Corrupted, fragmented, mangled, blood-soaked data with belts and whistles on. She gritted her teeth, jaw aching from brute force and desperation, funnelled like trying to decode a scream mid-battle.
Reynolds: Someone get those transporter amplifiers down, we’ll have to move quickly when this is done!
She didn't need telling twice.
Gnaxac clambered out of the deck plate hole just as the forcefield—shimmering in light, glitching and broken—disappeared like someone had flicked a super heavy and incredibly expensive switch. It didn't, however, remove any of the cacophony as the systems underfoot and overhead and in the surrounding walls built to their deadly crescendo. Every fiber of Jo's being felt the edge of existence come close enough to touch as the klaxon blared and the whine of subsystems falling into place only intensified.
Then, Gnaxac gave a brief but monumental thumbs up, looking like a bloody miracle.
Gnaxac: D-d-done!
Marshall: Thank fu–-
Reynolds: Now!
One final button press and the weapons platform was swallowed in a flurry of blue, shimmering, transporter light, and a familiar tug in her stomach as her atoms disintegrated, and then—
((Cockpit, USS Kahnrah — Time Index: Early 2367))
—silence. Sweet, blessed, golden, silence.
Almost. Her ears were still ringing, the pain in her jaw hadn't gone anywhere, and her eyes felt like they'd seen enough data to last her several lifetimes from there until the end of days. Post-catastrophe ringing. The kind she could really live with. Pulled out at the tremendous last second by their emergency lifeline. She ran a hand over her sweat-sticky forehead and into her hairline, trying her best to get her breathing under control before hyperventilation set in for good.
Gnaxac exhaled like he'd just survived an opera sung directly into his brain.
Gnaxac: D-d-did we win?
Reynolds: Response
Blue eyes stared out of the screen as the red alert ghosts flashed behind her eyes.
Light filled the viewscreen.
A sudden, violent and cascading flash blazed from the platform's remains—white-hot and filled with furious rage, expanding at impossible speed. The weapons platform exploded in a coronal blossom of fire, timeline-bending mistakes, and debris, like a sun being born backwards. Systems flickered. Jo grabbed a strut overhead, her instincts kicking in as the inertial dampeners lagged behind. Metal screamed.
Marshall: Oh, sh—BRACE!
Reynolds / Gnaxac: Response
The shockwave hit. The Kahnrah lurched as the force slammed into it in a brutal, concussive punch to the figurative gut that sent sparks flying from overhead panels and threw Jo hard, ribs first, into the console edge. Panels groaned in protest as alarms howled to life again, shrill and panicked.
Marshall: Inertial dampeners offline! We're spinning!
Reynolds / Gnaxac: Response
The shuttlecraft rolled, pitched, twisted violently as space became a smear of stars. Remnants of the weapons platform blasted outwards. Nausea rose in her throat, pain bloomed through her abdomen, and her teeth grit against the pull of gravity. Jo slammed her first into the emergency stabilisers on the Operations console and shouted out.
Marshall: Come on, hold together!
Reynolds / Gnaxac: Response