To Boldly Roll The (Mis)Adventures of the USS Potemkin

Saturday 18 June 2021 – 1800hrs ~ 2100hrs GMT

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 1194 words)
TBR#012 = 89mins ~5,340 wds

Two weeks have past, the stranded away team wonders how long they will be upon this world. Did the Potemkin get off a mayday before being destroyed? If so, who will hear it and when. Would they be a future mission for a future Starfleet ship, investigating what happened to them?

Their training kicked in, they made a safe and secure location within the crashed ship. Setting up the best shelter they could; even using the Argo to explore a little more of what they thought would be their new home.

But by the grace of the gods a bright ‘warp’ flash was seen, followed shortly by the arrival of shuttles in the sky. The captain’s voice pipped through their communication badges announcing the arrival of the Potemkin. A sleek, shiny type 11 shuttlecraft pitched through the cloudless sky coming to touch down with the grace of an experienced pilot in a flurry of dust.

Needless to say, the once stranded away team a little happy that their ship and friends had survived the battle, and that they had returned. They learnt that other shuttle teams were investigating other escape landings across the planet.

They are treated in sickbay, mostly for their wounds, minor as they were but also to ensure they had not caught any local bugs. While they are checked they are caught up, the deputy chief medical officer told them how they had managed to jump to warp at the last moment. They had fled to a nearby system’s Oort cloud where they could affect repairs to the shields primary systems. They knew they would be of no match for the ship that attacked them if they did not repair.

The good news was that the ships crew had managed to repair most of the primary systems, and the engineers had configured the warp field to work with just one engine. Their shields, weapons and power relays had been brought back online. The bad news was that almost 10% of the Potemkin’s crew, 61 people had died, every one of the away team had known someone who had died.

In an effort to stay off the coming grief Pax orders them to take a pair of runabouts out to the space station they had read about on the crashed ship, they were to investigate, and maybe recover more information about the strange happening here in this system. Taking a runabout and the ships sole Delta Flyer the intrepid crew speed their way towards the outer system. Their first look at the station reminded them of a wheel in space, two struts were the only inconsistencies. One pierces the wheel while the other stuck out. It was here that they parked the Delta, they took EVA suits to cross the void to the airlock, mostly coz their sensors strongly suggested that there was no air inside.

The room they entered had but a single small heater, powered by a battery size micro pocket universe. In essence a solar system size universe contained within a device the size of a D sized battery. It could have enough power to run the Potemkin for more than a year, even at warp speeds.

With Elli intent upon the device, they moved on towards one of the sections that jutted out from the station proper. Even though they knew there was no power to the station they have gravity and as they approached the section a hole appeared. Their ever-fearless tactical officer, McIntyre stepped out into the hole and experienced a very strange effect. The gravity followed the 90 degrees turn down into the section. Within were 6 structures, they looked like a miniature warp core. Only the glass like materials were orange, not glowing… just orange. Elli scanned them and discovered that the technology was very much like the small ‘battery’ Elli had now claimed as her own.

Each of these warp core like devices once held a pocket universe. All are depleted, the devices having long since burnt their way through the artificially created universes held within. The away team found no way to create new universes to power the station. Interesting but beyond taking scans there was nothing here for them. So, they moved on to their next point of interest, the bridge. Well control room but that is splitting hairs.

The control room was pretty like any other they might have seen, consoles with chairs, large windows. At each of the chairs was the dead bodies of aliens, the same species of those found in the crashed ship. The doctor discovered that they had all died from exposure to vacuum and cold, the station had turned off life support and vented the station to save power, to protect the station components from damage. Only this time people had been within and had died. The time of death had been during the time the away team had been stranded on the moon.

The realisation that they had died, while the Potemkin had been in the system was not easy to deal with. Elli brought one of the stations online and they discovered the purpose of this station. Using dark energy, they were using the station to tap into other universes to draw energy from them, a little from many universes. Instead of creating and using pocket universes they would use a device like this one to access. The possibilities of using such a device to generate power are endless. It would literally be unlimited power. However, there was a downside. The station logs showed that the moment the started to tap into the quantum foam of other universes the process created deadly exotic energy that if ignored could permeate through subspace destroying all organic matter in ‘real’ space as it passes. It would kill all organic life in the milky way inside of a week, and possibility the universe inside of a few centuries.

The away team were horrified at this, a good reason for the station to be abandoned, but why was it not dismantled and with it being so close to Romulan space it could not be allowed to remain. They quickly brought Pax up to speed and he agreed, it must be destroyed, but the Potemkin was still in no condition to help them. They would need to use the weapons on their runabouts to do the job.

Before they returned, they searched the bodies for clues, McIntyre discovered a few personal computing devices, much like a Federation pad. This confirmed what they had already discovered. The people who had died here were the grandchildren of the crew left behind by the ‘crashed’ ship 50 years before. He also found a working weapon, it used gravitons to create a ‘force’ pulse. He took that with him as the away team beamed back to the delta flyer. It took just a few more minutes to move the runabouts into position. Then, with precise torpedo and missile strikes they destroyed the station, ensuring that all the key components and datacores were destroyed beyond repair. They couldn’t afford to allow this kind of technology to fall into the hands of… well anyone really!