Bridge access

Posted on Thu Jan 14th, 2016 @ 1:02am by Commander Bertrand Cuprum

Mission: If I told you...
Location: Station Bridge

The Jeffereies tubes were cramped, but zombie free. Nurse Chance was able to lead the two Intel officers up and along to the operations command deck. The tube they were in ended in a ventilation grate. Through it the trio could observe he command station. There were at least four zombies wandering, seemingly aimlessly in the large room.

"As soon as we take this grate off, we'll attract their attention," Chance supplied. "Our phasers on kill will only put them down for a short time. How do you want to do this?"

"Very simple" Kevin said, reaching behind him and pulling out a hunting dagger. He looked at Karadis and said "Two for you and two for me?"

"Fat chance you'll get two down!" Karadis replied, smiling.

"Is that a challenge?" asked, a smirk on his face.

At that point Karadis reached behind her and took out her own hunting dagger, and kicking in the grating shouted "Nope, just a fact!"

With a guttural cry, she leaped out of the ventilation shaft and ran at the nearest zombie. Kevin was right behind her, an unholy cry coming from his own throat.

He reached the nearest zombie, and coming at it from behind, grabbed the head, tore it back, and placed the hunting knife by the jugular vein. With frightening speed he pulled the blade back across the throat and with a rounded hand motion pushed the blade in deep. There was a ripping sound and that of snapping vertebrate. With a utteral shout, Kevin held the severed head up in the air, then threw it at the nearest wall.

Karadis meantime had reached the first of the zombies she was after and without missing a stride cut the blade of her own hunting knife across the zombies throat. The zombie reacted slowly, starting to turn, but then it's head began lolling to one side and the body began to fall. As it hit the floor, the head rolled to the side.

Kevin by now had reached his second zombie and took no chances, he followed Karadis move and cut the throat of the zombie as he went past. The zombie didn't have time to react, the head just fell. Looking round, Kevin wanted to make sure Karadis was ok.

He needn't have worried, she was already hacking her second zombies head off, no pity, no remorse, just clinical killing.

It was all over in moments, and when it was done, both Kevin and Karadis made sure the zombie bodies weren't moving before the turned back to the ventilation shaft. "That's how we want to do this Chase!"

Chase dropped from the shaft scolding, "You do realize the contagion is passed by fluid contact, don't you? Now that you have drenched yourself and the room in blood."

Kevin called Karadis over, and both he and his assistant stood before Chase.

"Karadis, how much blood do you have on you?" Kevin asked.

"None Sir" was her simple reply. Kevin double checked her, to make sure that it was definitely the case, and it was.

"And how much blood do I have on me?" he asked her. Karadis walked around her boss, checking him thoroughly, before replying "None whatsoever Lieutenant."

"Thank you Chief" Kevin replied.

He looked at Chase and said "No matter what you think, check your facts before making any accusations Nurse!"

Chase moved to the engineering station, "I can get the cure happening from here, but we don't have much time. Do whatever it is you came here to do."

He gestured to one of the heads. It was blinking and rolling its eyes. Apparently decapitation was not enough to stop whatever this was.

"The contagion replaces the neural pathways, which is part of the reason a stun beam won't work. The brain is no longer stored in the head, but distributed through the body. You need to burn them, and that releases the contagion to the air."

"Who the bloody hell do you think you're talking to Nurse?" Kevin replied "I don't recall you being part of my SFI squad and I don't recall you being at my brief from the joint Admiralty/SFI commission before I came on this mission. You do what you need to, my orders are for something else, am I quite clear?"

Chase didn't seemed fussed by the tirade, "I think I am the ranking officer remaining from the original station crew. That means you need my pass codes to get anything secret or encrypted. Am I quite clear?

Kevin turned to Karadis "We don't have time for this bollocks, if he causes any trouble, deck him, ok?"

Karadis turned and glared at Chase and slowly replied "Oh...yes Sir Lieutenant, understood...perfectly..."

The lighting suddenly change to red and panels around the room lit up. A Klaxon sounded, accompanied by a computerized voice, "Self Destruct initiated. T minus 10 minutes."

Chase turned to the two Intel officers, "We all have our orders, sir. Tell me what info I can help you find in the remaining time, then you need to get it, and your team, off the station."

"Suicide is a cowards way out" Kevin replied, nonplussed at the self-destruct sequence being initiated "and don't tell me it's the only way you can contain this situation, that's a defeatist talking."

Chase was not going to be baited, "And when you get Smith back to your ship, you tell him that I said to nail the bastard to the wall, yes?"

"You tell him Mr Chase, I'm not your courier" Kevin replied.

He turned to Karadis "Red Alpha, code six, try and get out of the computer what you can, then we leave this coward to his fate."

Karadis nodded, then moved over to the command console some ten feet away. She entered a series of codes, and as firewall's started to come down she sang "One, two, three O'clock four O'clock rock, five, six, seven O'clock, eight O'clock rock..."

Kevin looked at Chase and said "Do you think we'd come here not trying to get as much as we can on what you were doing here?"

"Lieutenant, we've hit a snag" Karadis said.

"Don't tell me that there's inbuilt safeties....Karadis?" Kevin asked.

"I'm trying to get into the mainframe now" Karadis replied "but I'm getting locked out of key area's, but I can get a reference to an Admiral Gates, and the USS Cosmos apparently...." she paused and looked at Kevin.

"The USS Cosmos apparently doing what Karadis?" Kevin asked impatiently.

"...bringing live and sentient samples for testing to this station Sir" Karadis finished.

"Experimentation!" Kevin said, an edge of horror in his voice.

He turned his gaze to Chase and said "Intel may have not known much about this place, and most of what you've been doing, ,but, now that I know some of it, you can bet your arse HQ will know soon enough, and they'll begin to join the dots!"

Karadis approached Kevin with the info PADD she had used to download what she could from the mainframe computer, and handed it to him "I got what I could, but there's encrypted files that I couldn't begin to try and unlock, let alone download."

"Thank you Chief" Kevin said, then turned once again to Chase. Taking his phaser out, he held it to the Nurses temple and said "I ought to kill you where you stand you coward..."

"It would be a waste of the power pack" Karadis said.

Kevin smirked at the comment, then lowered the phaser "You're correct once again Chief, better to leave this traitor to his last dying thoughts. Go down with the ship and all that bollocks, eh Chase? You disgust me!" he finished, almost spitting out the last couple of words.

He gestured to Karadis he was going back into the ventilation shaft "Home James?"

"Home Sir" Kardis replied, a warped smile on her face.

They both climbed into the shaft and within a short period of time were back in the corridor they'd left a short time before with the rest of the away team, Smith included.

Chase waited for them to go. There was no point trying to explain to them. He looked down at the gash on his leg where the blood spatter from the fight had hit him. He was glad they would make it off, and get the information about the experimentation here back to Smith and the rest of SFI.

He, Chase, couldn't go back. He was already a dead man as soon as the blood had hit him. He had been given orders to eradicate the R47W and any evidence of its research. That's what the Destruct would do.