Jo “Blondie” Marshall - Old Wounds and Cut Durasteel
Jo Marshall
((Waste Outfall, Northern Perimeter, Lavigne Outpost))
A gruelling two-hour slog of hiking and holding position eventually deposited the trio at the ridge's base, where the hillside spat out a forgotten piece of infrastructure. The conduit looked like a rushed afterthought from the outpost's initial build, a circular maw of duranium stretching nearly two meters wide and choked with a throat of ice. Below it, the runoff had spent months carving a jagged, dark wound into the earth as it bled down the slope.
However, when face to face — nose to nose, near enough — with the frozen outflow pipe, Jo scrunched up her nose for an entirely different reason than anybody would have bet on.
No smell, nor any organic matter, or even the grease slick of the unspeakable. Even the best matter recyclers from an outpost found it difficult to break down everything in a Cardassian diet.
Marshall: Can you get any readings off it? If this is the way in, can we even get it open?
Spelvan flicked out a tricorder and scanned the pipe, the chimes and chirps of the thing lighting up the twilight evening.
Spelvan: I believe this is a stormwater drainage pipe, not waste infrastructure.
Kovar moved in close and laid his hand to the thick ice, assessing it to see if they could break through it, maybe. Reading it the way someone did a wall they wanted to be on the other side of. She was as sure as Red was insane, however, that their stolen schematics had labelled the pipe as the waste outfall. It wasn't like their blueprints to be wrong, but then again, it wasn't like they got the right information all the time either.
Kovar: Interesting, and unexpected given our intel on this installation.
Spelvan: It must be mislabelled on our maps... perhaps on purpose by the Cardassians themselves, or intel was given incorrect information.
Kovar: Either option is of concern, because that means that our intel concerning the interior may also be useless. In other words, ::he looked at the two with sardonic smirk:: a perfectly normal mission.
Marshall: 'Perfectly normal' sounds about right. ::She huffed through her nose, blowing vapour about her in the cold air.:: Of all the things to mislabel, why a waste outfall? Who is daft enough to go climbing through one of them?
She let that sit exactly long enough.
Marshall: Don't answer that.
Spelvan: In any case, I believe the ice blockage is mostly concentrated at the opening. We could loosen it with a low-setting phaser blast, though we would need to be careful to not create too much noise while doing so.
Kovar: I can confirm that. I would approximate that the ice build-up only goes in about two feet. After that, it appears to only be a slick surface. So, we need to be careful. We could carve a hole into it large enough to crawl into.
Marshall: Alright, let's do it. See what you can clear out. I'll keep lookout, ::she glanced at the blue-eyed, white-haired Vulcan,:: and Ghost here can keep an eye on the depth. Slow and quiet.
Kovar: Well, as they say, there is no time like the present.
While Kovar set to work on the pipe, Jo took up a position with her weapon out of its holster and sitting comfortably in her grip. Cardassian patrols didn't come out this far, according to their intelligence, which had just been wrong about the pipe. Their sensor net had taken a savaging when the True Maquis attack had ripped through their pallets, which were likely still cooling off under the snow.
Her eyes settled on the ice-covered darkness sweeping out in front of them. The hillside ran away from her, white and blue and a little endless, beautiful in an indifferent kind of way, of places where death was within a fraction. Lavigne had seemed like a perfect place to set up for either side until it wasn't. How much longer the Occupation was going to drag on for was anyone's guess. Cardassians weren't for leaving, and the True Maquis were handing them their backside on a platter in a more direct way than the Maquis ever had.
There was, she thought, something obscene about how well it was working.
Finally, the soft sound of a stream flowed, and Jo looked back to see Kovar breaking through a thinner section of the ice with the heel of his disruptor. The trio stood back and peered into the dark tunnel, now flowing freely with water up to the sole edge of their boots.
Marshall: That's our door. ::She holstered her weapon and rolled her shoulder until the joint gave up complaining.:: Nicely done, Solder.
Spelvan: Response
Kovar: Knock knock. Let’s see who’s home.
Their boots crunched in the meltwater and ice at the entrance to the drainpipe. Feeling for her light stick, Jo attached it to her belt as the green illuminated the interior. Clean as anything, as if nothing had taken up the chance before the winter had set in to use it for shelter.
Marshall: Six months of winter on a rock like this, and not so much as a nest in it.
Spelvan: Response
One hand on the wall, her boots found what purchase the ice would give and mostly declined to. The water ran thankfully shallow and steady in the pit of the pipe, and the sound of it filled the tunnel. The light stick threw her shadow long ahead, and the echo only compounded with the cold chill running through the pipe's infrastructure. Cold water coming from the outpost, or cold water from the mountain. Either way, the chill tempted her skin into goosebumps beneath her layers and ran up her spine like a rat up a… well, a drainpipe.
Forty metres up, the light fell onto mounting brackets. Six of them ringed around the pipe at even spacing, holding onto precisely jack.
Marshall: Somebody took the grille out. ::Holding up the light stick, she ran it along the edge, inspecting the sheared bolts.:: And they didn't do it in a hurry.
Spelvan / Kovar: Response
Marshall: Begs the question: was this someone's way out, or way in?
Spelvan / Kovar: Response
A little further up ahead, two shallow grooves ran up the centre of the pipe, parallel, little more than a hand's width apart. Green light pooled around them as Jo crouched down to get a better look, and thought about the yard of neat rows and sheeting weighted at the corners. Thirty, Intel had said.
Marshall: What do you think this was for?
Spelvan / Kovar: Response
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Jo “Blondie” Marshall
Cell Second of the Skarbek
The Maquis
G239304JM0