Where is that Humming Coming From?

Posted on Sat Jan 9th, 2021 @ 10:14am by Ka'see 'Cassie' Anderson (*) & Jasper Offermans & Chief Engineer Michael Burnstein & Laurier Cami

Mission: Mission 12 - Railway
Location: Deck 8, Corridor 11
Timeline: MD03 - 10:00
2113 words - 4.2 OF Standard Post Measure

Jasper's brow was furrowed as he ran his tricorder over one of the walls in the corridor. He paused and then began again until a smile crossed his face and he checked the PaDD he had in his left hand examining. the most recent schematic of the area and proceeded to walk a little further then stopped suddenly realizing he was just about ready to run into a redhead as she walked through the crossing corridor.

"Oh, sorry," the man muttered offering her a smile, "just trying to trace down that humming sound."

"Hmm?" Cami was distracted. After trying to spend some time with Dixoho figuring things out, she wasn't even sure where she was going. "Humming?" She took a second of silence to listen. "Oh. Oh! Yeah, what is that?" she wondered.

"If Mary Rose hadn't been upgraded so much." the man offered, "I say we had a faulty auxilary system bifurcated coupler was bad but now, I'm not sure, there wouldn't be one on this deck, would be on deck 19 near Jefferies tube C19."

Rasing the tricorder higher he cocked his head and then shook it still holding the device higher, "that's not good, temperature levels, right there is elevated 300 percent."

"Oh." Cami was mildly disinterested - still distracted by her current plight - until she processed the temperature issue. "Wait, what?" She almost snatched the tricorder to get a look for herself. "Well of course it's the coupler. Duh. That explains the backfill flow emissions in the secondary coils." She forced his arm to one side, indicating the readings from further along the bulkhead. "See?"

"you're right," Jasper replied, "the line runs straight to deck 19." He stopped lowering the tricorder, "you know what that means, we have less than twenty minutes to replace the coupler before it erupts into a thousand pieces and all the lines in between here and there."

Wow, overdramatic much? Cami thought silently to herself. "Well why are you still standing there?" she asked, almost pushing him along the corridor. "Call Engineering and tell them to shunt the flow, that'll give us an extra five or six minutes."

Jasper was already reaching for the COM link when Cami made the suggestion, "Jasper to Engineering, emergency shutdown of Auxillary power to decks eight threw nineteen. We have an overloaded coupler. I need to verify schematics of deck nineteen so I can get it replaced." He had started down the hall towards the turbolift even as he was speaking. When Jasper had finished he looked over his shoulder, "you coming, or are you going to let me have all the fun?"

Pouting a little at his nonchalance Cami scampered after him. "Oh, it's so on!" she challenged him back as the lift doors closed on them.

Jasper chuckled and then tapped His COM, "Jasper to Burnie, would you meet us on deck 19 just outside of Jefferies tube 23C."

Burnie looked up at the comm, and then at Cassie. He doubted he could get her vocal cords to do a good enough impression of his voice to respond. "Ask what they need me for," he said, almost whispering it even though the comm hadn't been tapped to respond yet.

They had been discussing how they were going to survive with the Fenris Rangers now onboard when the call came through and Cassie rolled her eyes at the request from Jaspar. He never sounded anything other than amused to her which rubbed her the wrong way sometimes professionally and socially. It was not possible to be like that all the time. “Of course.” She answered instantly moving over to when the comms united was fixed into the wall coughed a few times to clear the toast she had been eating before to pressed the button. “What is wrong?” She demanded as Burnie.

"Burnie..." Cami responded before Jasper could. Having understood the unique circumstances Cassie and Burnie were also in, it made sense that she try to keep things under control. "It's me...Dixoho..." her eyes glanced at Jasper awkwardly. "We could use an engineer's help with something."

"Fine. I will be there in a moment." Burnie's voice came from the comms unit before the connection was cut off.

Cassie and Burnie soon appeared on the deck both looking unsure and worried. They had discussed potential problems on the way. "Hello, Dixoho... Jasper. What's up?" Cassie asked hoping she sounded like Burnie enough to fool the Operations crewman. He did not use words the way she did so but no one could say that she was not trying.

Looking between the two new arrivals Jasper nodded, "I know I'm just Operations, but there's this humming I heard on deck Eight that sounds like a bad auxiliary system bifurcated coupler, He turned his attention to the form of Burnie and offered a faint smile, "should be on the other side of this hatch, if I'm right we don't have much time to switch it out."

Burnie cocked Cassie's head. Until now he hadn't really appreciated just how much more acute her hearing was. "That sounds like a bad coupler," he said, and looked Jasper. "Why didn't you say so? We could have brought the part. I guess Burnie," he looked carefully at Cassie, "will have to use an isolithic converter to bridge it while someone gets one."

Cassie looked at herself and nodded as she quickly thought about what the isolithic converter was. It was an engineering tool which could be used to unfuse engine controls. “Not seen one of those for a while.” She mused. “Why don’t you go and get the part Cassie. Me and Dixoho here can unfuse stuff as she knows about this stuff from her old life.” She hinted playing along.

"Certainly," Burnie replied in his best imitation of Cassie, and hurried off, not actually running until he was out of sight.

Jasper shook his head trying to make sense out of the situation. All three of the people, his crewmates were acting rather odd. He thought about the statement regarding Cassie's old life, he was in her old life, knew all about that life, before Marry Rose was a civilian ship, at least that's the life he thought they were referring to. There was a good deal of cross-training, especially between Ops and Engineering seeing they worked together often. Life in space was still precarious and cremates might be called upon to step in when another was lost.

"I didn't mention it, because," Jasper began his reply and then thought better of it, "never mind, we can temporarily reroute around the bad coupler but that will shut down the system in the area routed to," He opened up the plate revealing SYS controls, it will buy us a few minutes."

"Watch out for the-" Cami started, but hesitated as she realised Dixoho might not know all that much about the internal workings of the ship's systems. "The conduit shielding..." she finished, pointing unhelpfully at the plate they had already removed. Maybe it was better if she stayed quiet, lest she raised more suspicion.

Cassie levelled Cami with a look before she broke into an awkward smile, it was getting awkward remembering who was who. Burnie smiled a lot more than she did, he was jovial and liked the majority of the crew. "I get it Dixoho. Do not be such a worry.... hog." She commented as she checked for anymore conduit shielding before delving into it.

Jasper's brow furrowed as he listened to the two others, Bernie would have known the human phrase he was trying to use and Dixoho would have known more about the shielding... or at least should have. He furrowed his brow further but then let it smooth as he turned to look at Burnie, "the shielding will be neutralized when we," he stopped and then continue, "I'll let you finish this, you know better than I have."

"When we what Jasper? Finish thoughts and suggestions." Cassie asked sticking her head into the conduit so the voice that came out that was Burnie sounded more muffled than usual. It was a good excuse to sound off and she was hopeful that the operations crewman would buy it, it was exhausting trying to be Burnie when she was as far from it as possible.

"Disconnect the coupler from the upper portion of the converter," Jasper replied doing his best to try and figure out exactly what was going on. His brow furrowed again as he glanced at the group that was there.

Cassie frowned inside the panel that she currently had off, the man was growing suspicious she could just tell. He liked nothing more than an investigation into something just not right. The man was right that would be a good approach but they needed the isolithic converter first to unfuse, nothing could be done until that. “We need the isolithic converter first to unfuse but yes that would be the approach I take,” Cassie muttered doing her best impression of Burnie. It was not far off his accent and she certainly had the pitch correct now about a day of the swap.

Hurrying back with the parts, Burnie stopped running just ahead of the others - he couldn't recall having seen Cassie run, and he was pretty sure he was doing it wrong as he wasn't used managing a stride with female hips. But he practically slid into place beside his body so whatever work he did with Cassie's hands wouldn't be visible. (He needed to do some searching on comm designs; it occurred to him that something small enough to hide in or behind an ear would have saved a lot of trouble here). "I have converter here. It looked like you could use a third hand here. Let me help with getting that unfused."

“Appreciate it Cass.” Cassie as relieved when the man returned and slid into the space with her. She did not needed to shift over but she did let the man take over doing what was needed to cause trouble with everything.

"Always happy to help," Burnie said with a wink, and deftly unfused the converter and replaced the part. "I think that..." he paused, considering what Cassie might say, "...has corrected the problem."

Jasper tilted his head trying to figure out exactly what was going on. Something wasn't right but he couldn't really say what it was, "well, the humming has stopped," he offered as he glanced at his tricorder, "and it appears to have stabilized the vector-matrix." Jasper really knew enough he could help with some things, such as change out the old coupler, but he wasn't an engineer, just coss trained enough to be useful, at times anyway.

"Thank you Burnie," he began again offering a smile, "and Cassie, I didn't know you got any cross-training on this?"

"Mic... Cassie was telling me that Science was a lot more hands-on with consoles and stuff in our time." Cassie commented on thinking on how scientists had been similar to Engineers back in the 2200s. It was hard seeing how much her job had changed like a lot of different departments by the computer automation.

"Science and engineering are not so different and I have been working with..." Burnie hesitated a moment. It was weird having use his given name, "Michael on various projects for some time."

Letting a smile cross his face, Jasper consented to the explanation, "that sounds, logical enough, I guess." He chuckled and drew in a breath, "Well I gues we're done here."

Cami mirrored his smile as best she could. "Looks like things got fixed okay then." Maybe, just maybe, she'd survived playing Dix all the while.

“Me and Cassie are the dream team.” Cassie said smiling awkwardly at the pair. “Well we should be going. Lots of things to do else where.” She said hoping she sounded like Micheal. “Dixoho are you coming to the meeting?” She wondered if the woman wanted an excuse to escape.

"um, yah, lots to do," Jasper replied still trying t figure out why things seemed a bit odd, "Got to check out some supplies, I think our count might be wrong." Not really, Jasper was just trying to think of something he needed to do that actually fit his job description.

"Yes. Indeed." Burnie looked pointedly at Cassie - still a strange thing since he was looking at his own face. "We should get back to what we were working on."

Cassie nodded. “Fenris Rangers do not like to be kept waiting.” She said sounding more like Micheal than she had before. She nodded and lead the way in escaping.