Once Upon A Time In Hell

Posted on Mon Oct 16th, 2017 @ 1:33am by Captain Rueben Gregnol & Jeassaho Kea (*)

Mission: Mission 4 - Combustion
Location: SS Mary Rose - Cargo Bay
Timeline: MD 01 :: 06:00
1710 words - 3.4 OF Standard Post Measure

Once upon a time, the cargo bay aboard the SS Mary Rose had been a grey, grey world of cargo crate drabness. Stack upon stack, row upon row. There was no less glamorous compartment on a starship than the cargo bay. On this night, the cargo bay had been consumed by a battle between darkness and the light. Unlike the fairy tales of old, the side of light --in this battle-- was battling on the side of death. From the passageway, there appeared to be nothing left inside the cargo bay but a blinding inferno within, and black smoke billowing out into the passageway. The smoke parted momentarily, as the environmental systems fought against the roiling heat, revealing the hippy form of Draia Theroh. Her favourite magenta jumpsuit was webbed with straps clinging an over-sized damage-control pack to her back. The distinctly Cardassian ridges on her face were mostly hidden by a jury-rigged helmet she'd stolen from an environmental suit and secured over her head to keep herself breathing despite the smoke. Standing there in the face of the flames and the blissful heat, she nervously muttered, "Someone finally set the life-support to the Cardassian settings."

In her brief time aboard-ship, Draia had spent her days losing her way from one deck to another. She had gone for her medical check-up in the dining mess; she had gone searching for torpedoes in the jacuzzi. When the alarms had first rung out, Draia had known down to her toes that she had no time to waste in the bussard collectors tonight. She knew where to find the engineering control room, and so she had gone to engineering first. The automated diagnostic sensor readouts had told her that the force-field emitters inside the cargo bay were in poor shape. As far as Draia could tell, they were offline and burned out. That meant standard fire fighting --by starving the fire of oxygen within a forcefield-- was out of the question.

In the end, it hadn't been very difficult for Draia to find her way to the cargo bay. Follow that smoke! Striding into the cargo bay, Draia yanked a nozzled hose from the side of her damage control pack and waved it in front of her like a talisman. She could hear other voices from within -- she heard Jeassaho say, "Good cause I didn't want you to have to hold your breath," and "Little help?"; followed by Braeden saying, "Glad you brought me along now are you?". With a rough jab at the toggle, Draia swung her hose between her hands, blasting fire-retardant foam in a halo around her. Draia screamed out, "Suppressing fiiiiiiire," as she did so.

The fire-retardant foam never landed anywhere near any open flame. Rather, the sky figuratively opened up, and fire-retardant powder snowed down on the cargo bay, turning it into a hellish Christmas Village in an instant. Draia's jaw dropped and she simply stood at the threshold, watching in awe as the inferno died down. "I didn't know it could do that..." she admitted softly, only to herself. She stood there until every last smolder was out. She stood there while the Captain checked on his fire-fighting crew, and she stood there while Braden moved past her to exit the cargo bay; dumbfounded, Draia's only movement was to wipe the white mist from her helmet's face plate occasionally. Instead, she was stood there studying the bulkheads, trying to understand how such an archaic fire-suppression system actually worked.

Jeassaho turned as she felt the Chief Engineer join the small party by herself. "Draia... it's out." She murmured softly as she ripped off the heavy mask. The normally bright Betazoid looked pale and out of breath.

Taking tentative steps towards Jeassaho, Draia gently asked, "Are you... alive?" In Draia's past career --in Starfleet and as a miner, both-- she had encountered ghosts repeatedly. Ghosts (or non-corporeal lifeforms as the Fedders liked to call them) were a reality of the modern universe. Even though she hadn't worked with Jeassaho for long, there was a slight dread in Draia's timbre. She hoped Jeassaho wasn't a ghost.

"She better bloody not be." The Captain muttered looking at Draia in an intense way. He didn't look at all like his usual self at all, normally he was mellowed out, but in the overall, he looked angry and ready for business.

"Bridge... fire is out," Jeassaho repeated to them just to make sure they heard stuffing her helmet half on to do so. It was an awkward moment before she looked at Draia and shrugged, she muttered something at Rueben in a language that was harsh before she turned her full attention from the man who looked angry to the woman who looked unsure. "I am alive." She assured moving to strip out some of the heavy equipment she had strapped to herself. "Hot and bothered but alive."

Similarly, Draia loosened the latches on her helmet and yanked it off her head. She tossed it aside for now, casually. She supposed it wouldn't prove any more of a mess than the cargo bay had become, not to mention the smoke-damaged corridor. Shaking her dark hair out, Draia took the three steps it took to cross the threshold into the burned out bay. Looking up, she asked, "How did that happen?" with a health mixture of horror and awe in her tone. Most anyone would think Draia was talking about the cause of the fire. A Betazoid might just detect Draia was actually curious about the mechanics of the archaic fire-suppression system.

"Old system from when this was a Starfleet Vessel over a hundred years ago," Jeassaho said catching her drift as she wiped a hand across her forehead feeling weak now that the adrenaline was wearing thin. Rueben stepped forward and offered the woman a bottle of water looking at her with a healthy mixture of anger and admiration. "Thank you." She murmured taking the bottle.

Despite Draia's feverish curiosity of a few days earlier, Draia's attention was drawn entirely to the cargo bay, rather than the significant looks between Jeassaho and the Cap'n. "What was the source of the fire?" she asked, sweeping an arm towards the blackened mess of the cargo bay.

"Not a clue but it was coming from the cargo," Jeassaho said downing the water bottle. She was soaked with sweat and felt dehydrated but she knew he job wasn't over yet.

"We will start an investigation once things have cooled a little." The Captain didn't want to think about the evidence that has been lost when the powder like substance had been used. He would rather have a ship and his crew alive but the Security Officer inside of him wasn't happy.

Swiping her fingers across the interface of an asymmetrically-designed tricorder, Draia was conducting a pressing investigation of her own. "Based on the reports coming back from the automated diagnostics," Draia advised the Captain, "your fire fighting efforts were effective in one regard. I'm detecting no damage to Mary Rose's superstructure; no risk of a breach through the skin of the ship."

The older man nodded at the Engineer looking at Jeassaho and then Draia. That was the best news he had heard since waking up to alarms. "Da... good," Rueben said moving to look at the cargo bay a little more and see if anything could be saved. "Be careful on the floor. It's unstable." He advised stopping dead as he saw the hole in the deck.

Moving --and then halting-- by the Captain's side, Draia started to say, "Let me... uh..." She trailed off. Initially, she wanted to start disassembling the damaged sections of deckplating adjoining the hole in the floor, but she supposed that was a job and a half. Following the Captain's gaze, she supposed that would be a job for another day. They had a fire to investigate and (hopefully) cargo to rescue first. Stabbing at her tricorder to access the ship's systems, Draia corrected: "Let me see about reinforcing the deck from below with some forcefield origami."

"It's a moveable floor," Jeassaho called out as she moved to lean against something so she could recover from the exhaustion something like the event she had just been a part of.

"This is that Cargo bay?" Reuben frowned. The sickening feeling of know it was 'that cargo bay' brought him. Barton had purchased this ship because the Cargo bay on Decks six and seven could be moved to allow the Cargo bay below to accomadate big things. "The floor moves to allow Deck Seven to be used to store bigger items." Reuben explained if she didn't know what they meant.

Looking up from her tricorder, Draia said, "I think... Uh..." --She shrugged helplessly-- "I think I'm more worried about people and things falling through to the deck below?" She turned her eyes down quickly to continue her fiddling with the forcefield projectors on the deck below.

"It will be my first repair," Jeassaho assured quickly. "But it needs to cool down first... Maybe we get some food into us and then we can investigate and check everythign." It seemed logical to her.

Pivoting her head to watch the reactions of Reuben and Jeassaho, respectively, Draia allowed an expression of begrudging agreement to cross her face. "As much as I hate to leave a job half-done," she said, "I also hate not eating."

"It needs to cool down," Jeassaho said by swaying the argument. She needed breakfast herself. She needed to have something in her stomach if she was working from 03:30 till whenever.

"Kitchen has prepared stuff," Reuben said simply going further into the cargo bay to inspect his ship. The food wouldn't be much choice but it was something edible to sustain.

"I only have one menu demand..." Draia added drolly, as she followed Reuben back into the burned out cargo bay. She looked around and the blackened and fire-retardant-splashed bulkheads. Then she looked at Reuben, "No smoked meat."

OFF::

Rueben Gregnol
Captain
SS Mary Rose

Lieutenant Commander (LOA) Jeassaho Kea
Engineer
SS Mary Rose

Draia Theroh
Chief Engineer
SS Mary Rose