Saturday July 3rd, 2021
Lieutenant Commander Ezekiel “Zeke” Pride Flight Controller
Lieutenant Elli-Navine Chief Engineer
Lieutenant Alexander Artopolis Chief Medical Officer
Lieutenant Scott McIntyre Chief Tactical/Security Officer
Podcast: To Boldly Roll The (Mis)Adventures of the USS Potemkin
(this report 781 words)
TBR#014 = 97mins ~5,820 wds
As the Potemkin nears the completion of her repairs the Away team once again find themselves upon the surface of the Moon. This time chasing Romulan energy signatures. They beam down to a clearing within a dense forest to discover a set of stone plinths which bare the etchings of alien pictograms. The universal translator struggles with translating the images, ultimately giving up and resorting to the Potemkin’s main computer to try the brute force approach.
Whether it was the presence of the away team or coincidence they might never knew, but whatever the reason a Romulan scout ship decloaks and lands just meters away. The ships registry puts the ship in service during the Dominion War, in fact she was reported missing during the closing months.
As the ship decloaked their tricorder recorded a power reading from the stone plinths, they glowed bright iridescent blues. But they also picked up a signal from aboard the scoutship with matching signature. Before any real plan could be formed a firefight ensued.
Romulan and Reman soldiers started to fire upon them. The fight seemed to draw on for hours. Both sides trading fire, the Romulan and Reman’s firing to kill, the intrepid away team firing with their Phasers set on stun. In fact, it took mere minutes, and ended with a disruptor exploding and killing or wounding most of them.
After checking the state of the of their attackers the away team head on into the scoutship, they discover a ‘backdoor’ which the crew had used to escape detection. Stasis tubes are also found, their occupants recently released, indicating that their attackers were only minutes before asleep.
The ship isn’t large, not within. They quickly found the source of the power readings. A forcefield housing a slowly spinning keystone, every few moments blindingly bright blue arcs of energy struck the inside of the forcefield. They were quick to deduce that with each strike power was being transferred from the field to the ship. It was also linked at the quantum level to the stone plinths outside, with each strike a tiny amount of power was being absorbed and stored within the stones.
They investigated the ship and discovered a set of coordinates, the inner most planet of the system. Before they went there though they worked to bring the forcefield down, once that was done, they took the key stone to the ‘keyhole’ set into the floor of the large stone platform. Placing the keystone in the glyphs started to glow once more, this time though they stayed lit, and a small device rose from the top of the nearest plinth. Elli reached forward and grasped it, getting a message in her mind. “Use this information with great care”.
Unsure of what to make of this but having the device. The device looked very much like an isolinear chip, but with almost 100 times the normal storage capacity. She pocketed the chip, in the meantime Pride was speaking with Pax, they were speaking about the Romulan ship, the chip and what to do about both. A runabout with a crew of engineers and science officers would be dispatched to investigate the scoutship and the stones in greater detail while the Atalanta would be sent to pick them up and take them on to the first planet in the system.
Speeding in system was nothing new, they passed a few other worlds but as they approached the inner planet they realised; for the first time just how, close it was to the systems star. The leading hemisphere of the small world was completely bathed in superheated plasma as it ploughed through the chromosphere. As Pride piloted the Atalanta closer the other hemisphere came into view.
As stunning a site as a moon swimming through the nuclear fire of a star was, this topped that. Dozens of giant and active engines could be seen from thousands of kilometres away. Each one bigger than Earth Spacedock and each with sporting a flaming tail ten thousand kilometres long, and combined were clearly counteracting the drag from the planet being too close to the star.
And the knocks kept on coming. In a polar orbit, skirting the line of star fire was a tiny Ad hoc space station. Very old but created from technology that wouldn’t have looked out of place in Earth early space program. The hail the away team was now receiving was coming from that station.
A Romulan Commander, by the name of Ael expressed her gratitude at seeing friendly faces. She explained that her ship had been brought here by a freak accident, and then half her small crew had mutinied and stranded them here!