Forwarded by the ASC-VSO Posted: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 21:42:10 GMT In: alt.startrek.creative From: "Jay P Hailey" Title: Star Trek: Outwardly Mobile Author: Jay P Hailey (JayPHailey@hotmail.com) Series: MISC - TNG OCs Codes: None Part: 29/339(?) Rating:[PG] Archive: Fine with me, just tell me where. Disclaimer: Paramount owns all things Star Trek. I claim Original Characters and Situations for me. Webpage HTTP://jayphailey.8m.com The Et-Tu: Episode 29 By Jay P. Hailey And Dennnis Washburn She grinned "Oh, yes. I'm sending the data to sickbay now, Captain. They should have an antidote in ten minutes." "Really?" I was shocked. It was better news than we had a right to expect. "Harrier, I'm in trouble." Li'ira said. She sounded strangled and I could hear the undertone of fear in her voice. She was on the verge of losing control. "Hang on!" I said "We'll have an antidote in ten minutes!" "I don't think I'm going to make it that long." Her voice quavered "Unless, do you think I could sedate myself?" It was a novel approach. Shooting up on away team missions was generally frowned on. "Sickbay, please advise Commander Li'ira." A nurse in Sickbay answered and talked Li'ira through a dosage of pain killers from her med-kit. Dr. Flynn was busily synthesizing the antidote. Li'ira could almost feel the Romulan ship crushing her. She focused as hard as she could but her hands still shook as she measured out the dose and applied the hypospray to her arm. Flagg had reached the airlock, but he was in such a panic by the time he got there, that he was unable to break the lockout on the door. He screamed incoherently and clawed at the doors "LET ME OUT!!" "Tee hee hee." Li'ira said. "Oops. I think I over did it." She giggled more as the drugs took effect. Now thoroughly intoxicated, Li'ira decided to continue her search for Flagg. Part of her had the vague idea that he should be stopped, but mostly she was thinking that it would be fun to get him stoned from the med-kit. "This is fun. I'm going to find Flagg and see if I can loosen him up a little bit. Tee hee!" Li'ira's earlier near hysterical claustrophobia was now reduced to a slight feeling of being constrained. Li'ira solved this by leaving her uniform behind her, one piece at a time. She left a trail in the completely wrong direction as she went in search of Flagg. We were treated to several minutes worth of Flagg's incoherent screaming panic interspersed with Li'ira humming old spacer drinking songs as she wandered, more or less randomly through the Et-Tu. She hummed them off key. "Captain, How long did you say that it would be until the antidote was ready?" Spaat said calmly. I looked at Tillean and she held up three fingers. "Three minutes." I said "Excellent. Please hurry as much as you can." Spaat said with perfect calm. "Hurry Uuuuupp!" Ensign Bruce moaned "Pleeeeeease!" With a shock I realized that the green dust had affected them, too. I turned to Stephanie "Get a quad of Security into sealed space suits and have them meet Dr. Flynn in the transporter room." Stephanie nodded to me and gave her orders into her panel. "I've got it!" Flynn shouted "I'm dosing myself now. I'll meet security in the transporter room. Have them ready to go!" Soon we could hear the second away team beaming onto the Et-Tu. Flagg's screams took on a higher pitch as he realized that they were there to stop him from getting out. "No! I've got to get out! You don't understand! They'll get me! Can't let them have me! Aiiee!" The security officers escorting the Chief Medical Officer stunned Flagg liberally. Then held his limp form down while Flynn administered the antidote. "Can we screen for that green dust with the transporters?" I asked. Tillean said "Yes, Captain." "Do it. When that's in place, beam Flagg back to the Harrier." "Aye, sir." "What is that green crap, anyway?" Tillean was excited by it "It's a clever weapon. It's an artificial piece of DNA. It would effect most humanoid species that I know of. It's designed to be adaptable to a large number of different types of DNA analogs. I'm not certain what effects that it's designed to have, but the people who made it weren't stupid. It has receptors for an artificial enzyme that will break it down. I suppose that they wanted to be able to neutralize it themselves, if necessary." "And you came up with that analysis in less than ten minutes?" "I did my bio-genetics thesis on a similar design." She saw the looks on all of our faces "It was hypothetical, of course!" -*- Later, everyone had been dosed and recovered from the effect of the green dust. Li'ira had to be detoxified from her overdose of pain killers. When she regained her sobriety, she was livid and bristled about it for quite a while. Flagg was mellowed out on sedatives of his own. The human body was not designed to run in overload mode for more than ten straight minutes. Dr. Flynn repaired all the damage to his hands and fingers from trying to force his way through the airlock door. She reported that he would need a good night's sleep and then he would be reliable. She mentioned with relish that he would be stiff and easily tired out for another two or three days. -*- "The Romulans have a dual command structure in their ships." Flagg was telling me. "The Captain and the Political Officer share command authority, although it's divided along political and operational lines, supposedly. Each officer has a mechanical key which turns a lock on the bridge. The Romulans are paranoid and work extra hard to make these keys difficult to duplicate and the locks hard to pick." "The Federation has never recovered a political officer's key. We might be able to duplicate one, but they change them faster than we could duplicate one." "If both locks are tampered with, the ship self destructs. If the Captain's key is tampered with, the command and control computers are erased, although data banks might remain. If the Political Officer's key is tampered with all data is erased from the ship's computer although the ship remains operational." "Nice guys." "Yeah, Orwell would've felt right at home." -*- A few minutes after that, we found the crew of the Et-Tu. Working on the assumption that they had been affected by the green dust, but hadn't been able to counteract it, I had the Harrier scan for debris within a thousand miles of the Romulan ship. If we found any debris it was to be scanned for organic compounds. Starship sensors are designed with certain odd blind spots. It's not in the angles they cover, or spectrums that they can see, or how fast the computers integrate the data. It's in what they are programmed to recognize. It's in the way the designers thought. We might have actually hit some of the crew of the Et-Tu while we approached on impulse power. They were dead and floating several thousand meters away from the Et-Tu. The Harrier never noticed, because organic beings don't reflect EM radiation very well. Living organic beings tend to give it off, especially in the infrared spectrum. They show up well against blank, cold space. The Harrier saw the dead Romulans as small bits of harmless space debris, not very dense and no challenge at all to the navigational deflectors. Automatic systems could easily deal with them, and did so. Now that we knew what to look for we saw them. 175 dead Romulans. It was grotesque and spooky. We found the Captain of the Et-Tu. He had the time and presence of mind to put on a space suit before leaping out of the Et-Tu. His name was Zadask. Eventually he told us the whole story. Once we found him, I sent a shuttle craft to retrieve him. He had been contaminated by the green dust and had eventually panicked inside his suit. He used up all of his air, about a four day supply and then died, and just sat in the suit for fifty years. Dr. Flynn did the post mortem and she seemed a little green when she was done. Zadask had his command key with him inside the suit. We found the Political Officer in a similar condition, except, rather than give in to the panic, he had opened his face plate and had died of vacuum exposure. He looked like an ancient mummy. He didn't have his command key with him, and we never found it. He might have disintegrated it, or he might have thrown it away from his body as he left the Et-Tu. We would never know. -*- The Captain's command key unlocked the controls of the Et-Tu and the Captain's personal computer and files. The Et-Tu erased all history, language, codes and recognition codes for the Romulan Empire. All operation and navigation records. Everything. The Et-Tu forgot everything about where she was from, and where she had been. Zadask had left his log and a fairly large data file in his cabin, where the Et-Tu's self induced lobotomy could not erase it. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.588 / Virus Database: 372 - Release Date: 2/13/2004 -- Stephen Ratliff ASC Stories Only Forwarding In the Pattern Buffer at: http//trekiverse.crosswinds.net/feed/ ASCL is a stories-only list, no discussion. Comments and feedback should be directed to alt.startrek .creative or directly to the author. Yahoo! Groups Links To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ASCL/ To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: ASCL-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/ From ???@??? 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