SD241908 The Hour Between

Posted on 19 Aug 2019 @ 2:50am by Lieutenant Talrian Bran
Edited on on 19 Aug 2019 @ 2:52am

2,345 words; about a 12 minute read

Mission: Tyr's Hand
Location: Bridge - Security Station
Timeline: following High, No Very High Temperatures

Talrian stepped off the turbolift, assured that it was working properly, and crossed to the security station on the bridge. He wore a pair of tactical duty pants with his sidearm in a drop holster and the tight fighting underlayer to the combat armor he wore when he first went to the shuttle bay, expecting to be off on his mission.

Now that he was delayed because of Fleeter ineptitude, he was trying to find ways to maximize efficiency once they were underway. To that end he put on the pants as a consolation because he had no problem with just the tight, form fitting underlayer. The armor, rifle and pack were stored in a locker in the shuttle bay, waiting for their departure.

He'd come from the arboretum where the telepaths were busy working on discovering what they could with their abilities. He left the corpsman to oversee them medically. Talrian found out was Petty Officer 3rd Class Trapper Kawolski - the brother to a security warrant officer on this same ship. Which made it easier for Talrian to start pushing the kid toward emergency medicine rather than just glorified nurse duties in Medical.

Once they got underway, however, Talrian was no longer necessary. Cindreth knew what he wanted and would keep them in line and focused. To be completely honest with himself, he was extremely uncomfortable around so many Betazoids. Too many dark haired, dark eyed men sitting around reminded Bran of what he lost and was forbidden from regaining. Not just from the symbiote commission on Trill but by Talrian as well. The idea of the former lover confused Talrian. He felt the deep grief as if it were the other man that died and not Bran. He wanted to move past the grief but he wasn't there yet and it'd been some years since he and Bran were joined.

Instead, he made his way to the Bridge to begin doing what he could. He had a more comprehensive list of missing crew - three of which he already found as they never left the ship. Various excuses came to him from the three but it came down to the Incident. They were sent to Medical for evaluation and then to report to their various commands.

Which left just under a quarter of the crew missing. Despite the Captain's earlier remarks, Talrian was sure they would be found on the planet. Hopefully they would be found alive. But as they sat here, wasting time on the ineptitude of the Ops chief - her overly cautious estimates and need to double check everything - made him question how many were already dead. A fair number more were probably prisoners of some faction of the worldwide war below - these would be waiting execution as enemy spies or combatants.

Worse case scenario, he had to remind himself, some would defect to a faction believing it was their greatest chance for survival. His first priority was still to find them and bring them home. If there were defections or other violations of general orders, then Talrian would deal with them after they were returned to the ship.

He sat at the station, ignoring the remainder of the bridge. He could have tried his office, but again he knew the bridge consoles were operational and he wasn't sure about his office. He hadn't been there since before the Incident but he had reports of damage across the ship. Plus, he would be better able to compile up the moment data while on the bridge. At least while his hour grace period was still counting down.

"Damned pollution," he muttered as brought up the ship's scanners. His first thought was to begin scanning the planet for non-Terran lifeforms. World War Three was long before Terran's first official contact with an alien species - before Zephram Cochrane's first warp flight caught the attention of a passing Vulcan ship. Therefore, any non-Terran lifeform on the planet below should - therefore - belong to crew of the Odin. Finding the Terran's was going to be much more difficult. Until the end of this war, the planet's population stood somewhere near nine or ten billion. Finding a relatively miniscule portion of those not from this time period then was going to be extremely difficult.

Even the telepaths didn't have hope for being able to distinguish the time tossed Terran thoughts from those of this time. But, even the unreliable scanners at the moment were being bounced off the planet's vastly polluted atmosphere. Add in the nuclear weapons also used in this conflict and it made it dicey to discover anything even if the sensors were fully functional.

He slapped the console as he sat back, folding his arms across his chest and glowering at the display screens. Yeah, if they had all the time in the galaxy they could start the extremely long scan for quantum signatures - that would be definitive in determining this period's inhabitants from those belonging to the Odin. But, at the moment, he couldn't even discover if the quantum siganture of the planet was the same as from their own timeline. In order for anything they do here to be affective of the future, it would have to be an alternate timeline, one where they arrived and made those changes. A quantum signature scan would verify if they were in their own timeline or an alternate dimension. But their scanners weren't operational for even that.

"Dammit," he muttered, leaning forward with elbows on the desk and face covered. "There has to be a way." Rubbing his forehead, he looked at the displays again. To say his frustration was growing was an understatement. This was not his area of expertise! He was trained for combat - for being down there and tracking people down the old fashioned way. There he either ended their threat or rescued them from the threat. But this was not something he was trained to do! The two months of security training they sent him too just before they posted him here on the Odin could not be enough. He was sure that everyone on the crew knew that if they had a real Fleeter security chief then he'd know the system well enough to have already found the solution to the problem of how to find the missing crew.

But he wasn't a Fleeter security chief! No matter how much Command wanted to blow smoke up the collective Starfleet ass he would never be as good as someone who wanted to do this job, who was trained from the day they entered Starfleet to do this job.

Not even having all the resources and knowledge of Major Bran to draw on helped him. His former host was a Marine as well. A Marine's Marine. He had covered security duties throughout his career but even the Major didn't have that much experience. Now here he was, his first assignment in Security and he was going to lose crew. Not because he couldn't protect them from some outside threat but because he just wasn't good enough to know what he was doing!

He leaned back as far as the station's chair would allow while glaring at the screen, as if it were the computer's fault that he didn't know what parameters to give it in order to narrow down their search field. As if it were the computer's fault the Terrans overpopulated their planet to the point where pollution of the atmosphere and a world war were inevitable.

The excitment he held for seeing living history faded the more he realized how difficult that history was making his job. His limited skills that weren't enough to get him even a start. How many would die, then, because Command decided punishing him was worth more than their lives. If they sent him as a Marine, his duty and course of action would be clear. But he wasn't. He was security and...

...and he wasn't good enough for what they needed.

He slapped the console again, wanting to take out his frustration with his own ineptitude.

"Lieutenant?" a voice said slightly behind him.

"What?" he growled as he turned, seeing a young enlisted security officer standing behind him. Immediately he regretted his shortness. The young man didn't deserve to bear the brunt of Talrian's recognition of his lack of ability to do what was necessary. Not an unwillingness but an actual lack of knowledge.

"Warrant Kawolski is trying to find you, sir," the enlisted man said. Talrian wanted to recall his name. He'd gone through the files of all his department and the name was on the tip of his tongue, it just couldn't make the divide between memory and speech. "There's something about limited cargo space and the gear you wanted loaded?"

"Of course there is," Talrian grumbled. He tapped his chest out of sheer habit, going to activate his combadge and open a communication channel with his department's warrant officer. He actually made the gesture a second time, acting out of habit when he didn't hear the telltale chirp of the badge activating and opening the communication channel. Glancing down at the underlayer shirt conforming to the curves of his torso he remembered his commbadge was on the chestplate of his armor. He'd forgotten to remove it and put it on his shirt when he stored his gear.

Cindreth, he thought to his Betazoid security officer, Let Warrant Kawolski know I'm on my way back to the cargo bay to deal with his issue.

Aye, sir, Cindreth answered. Talrian felt the Betazoid contact shift as he switched his mental vocal cords to direct the conversation to Kawolski. Ops needed to do something to shield the communication system from this type of breakdown. Didn't anyone think about how vital communications were in situations like this? So very important that a communicator was built into the symbol of their service, into the very badge that identified them as Starfleet. So much so that if the Captain realized he wasn't wearing his commbadge he could be brought up on charges for being out of uniform.

More so than just what he was wearing now, which he felt he could justify. But commbadges were so vital to identification of their place in Starfleet that -

"Oh, holy hell!" he exhaled as he realized just what was missing before him. The commbadges!

He shot foward, his fingers flying over the keys as he split the panels. In one information and spec sheets for the commbadges were being compiled while in the other he began inputting parameters for the computer. Silicone, gold, fullertene, beryllium. They were all substances found on Earth during this time period, but not in the very specific crystalline lattice that comprised their commbadges. Add in the microfilaments and other structure needed for communications and translation and it could very well be what he was looking for - a method to distinguish a handful of displaced Terrans from the native billions.

"You need to input the specific signature from the lattice here," the enlisted man said pointing from one panel to the next. "Then combine that with the specific scanner request that you're looking for - in this case metallurgical - and cross index that to the core scan index and that should do it." By the time he finished explaining, the enlisted pretty much took over programming the scanners while Talrian scooted back. "Sir," the enlisted said as he stood straight and just then realized how he basically shoved his CO aside to do the job for him.

"No, no problem at all," Talrian said, glancing at the younger man while waiting for the results of their instructions to the computer.

"Unable to complete scan," the computer said, it's matrician voice calm and soothing, as if it were beginning to read a bedtime story rather than tell them their efforts were wasted. "Too much pollutants and debris in the upper atmosphere for scanners to penetrate."

"But if they were fully operational again or -" he stopped. The shuttle could do it. Once they dipped into the lower atmosphere, the shuttle's onboard systems should be able to perform the requested scans. He packaged the scanner profile and sent the instructions to the shuttle systems.

"Good job," Talrian said as he shoved the seat away from the console and stood. His hand went to check the seat of the sidearm in the holster, another natural habit from years of going about armed. He faced his enlisted officer for several moments, long enough for the enlisted man to look concerned. "Would you write up an idiot proof guide on what you just did and deliver it to my inbox?" Talrian felt only slightly embarassed to ask an enlisted subordinate to teach him how to do parts of his job, but his sense of duty to the ship and crew easily outweighed any embarrassment.

The enlisted officer let out a smile, mostly of relief, but nodded eagerly. "Certainly, Lieutenant," he said, "I even know a few other tricks that I'll throw in there if that's okay with you."

"Anything that teaches me how to be competent at what I'm supposed to be doing will be welcome," Talrian said, moving back toward the turbolift to head back to the cargo bay. If the damned Ops chief was trying to throw weight around regarding mission equipment then there would be another problem and, with his irritation with her not completely dissapated, he was sure it wasn't going to end well again.

He rubbed his left chest where the missing combadge should reside. It was so simple, why didn't he think about combadges as the solution right away? That didn't matter, he felt he might actually have some good news to report to the captain - that he believed he significantly increased their chances of finding their missing crew while minimizing the time it would take to find them.

 

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