Blow Out"
By: Keighlee Alexi, Engineer , [NPC]
Maxine Lucinda Tapert, Computer Specialist, [PC]
Taylor , Marine , [NPC]

Stardate: 58209.16 0215

==Tachyon Statino TR-35==

Keighlee sat up in her bunk as the alert klaxon sounded.

"What the...?"

She threw off her covers and stood up as Max dropped down next to her from her bunk.

"Are we under attack?" she asked as Maxine leaned against the bulkhead next to the room console. She keyed in some things and the klaxon went silent. Maxine continued to probe the console for information.

"What's going on?"

"A bloody Red Alert was sent by Command," Maxine answered.

Suddenly the station shuttered and rocked and a loud explosion sounded from engineering. In the darkness Keighlee found herself sprawled out on the deck. Slowly red lighting replaced the darkness.

"Roight.... This can't be good," Max rubbed her butt where it had bumped against the bunk as she reached out a hand to help Keighlee up. "We need to find out wot t'bloddy 'ell is going on."

Keighlee and Max stepped out into the walkway and climbed the steps.

"Grav Plates are failing." said Keighlee with an air of concern. She stopped and peered over the railing to the dark abyss of the stairwell. She could see smoke and flickering shadows cast in orange light.

"Something is on fire," her cheeks quirked as she swallowed nervously.

"Let me know what's going on," she said turning and descending. As she made the turn past the first flight, she looked back up at Max, "I'll be down here."

"Oh roight, just go down where all t'bloody smoke an' creepy stuff is," Maxine peered over the edge and watched as Keighlee started down.

==Operations Deck==

The viewscreen energized and a fragmented image of a man blurred with static appeared. "TR 35, come in, TR 35 come in."

The image froze and flickered out. It returned a moment later, "All stations. Be advised. TR 30 was attacked with an impulse weapon. Seven stations are offline from cascade failure. Starfleet Command has deployed 7 patrol vessels to scan until the stations are back online. "

"Bloody 'ell," Max grumbled as she slipped into the communications seat and began working the controls. "TR 35 Reporting in," Max responded. "We are on alert Command, and are monitoring the area. We will attempt repairs at this end."

"Acknowledged TR 35."

==Engineering Deck==

By the time Keighlee arrived at the bottom of the stairs, the fire suppression system had extinguished the blaze leaving puddles of melted optical data conduits.

She surveyed the damage with her tricorder. After a few minutes Maxine joined her. She listened as Max explained what happened.

"This is good right?" she responded with an optimistic voice. "Right? I mean, the Zion can just waltz right on in now."

"Not with seven patrol vessels crawling around scanning the area," Max answered. "We need to fix our bloody cascade "failure" so they'll go away."

Keighlee's shoulders slumped. "I don't know..." she said meekly biting timidly at a thumbnail as she continued to visually survey. "...the accelerator matrix is completely fused and the ionization chamber is cracked. There aren't any redundancies here, and, and... all our work is gone," she said eying the melted pile of optical patch cables.

"Then we'll work around it," Maxine told her. "We don't need the bloody thing to be fully operational, Keighlee. We just need to make it LOOK like it's fixed enough so the patrol ships will go somewhere else. *Then* the Zion can slip through."

Taylor move thought he station toward the command deck. On his way, he noticed that his strides were getting longer. He rounded the corner and entered to ops center and went directly to the tactical display. Taylor uttered a common Bajoran as he noticed several Federation ships moving toward the general vicinity. He tapped his comm badge, "Engineering, what is our status and...are we losing gravitational control?"

"Yes Sir," answered Keighlee. "You'd better come down here."

"I'm on my way." Taylor sighed as he headed toward engineering. They were less than a day away from completing their portion of the mission. We do not need this now, he thought as he almost floated down a bank of stairs.

"Tell me about it," he said as me walked into engineering.

"Its a mess Sir. Whatever they did to TR-30 caused a cascade failure. It overloaded the field generator and blew out some main components. All our work is gone Sir. The Zion is going to fly into a trap now Sir."

"Ensign," said Taylor, "We are 20 hours from completing our mission. We are not going to fail. Not after all we have done to get here."

Taylor's eyes connected with hers. "Chief Silvio selected you for this mission. Do you wonder why?" Taylor did not let her answer but kept on going, "It is because he knew you could handle whatever happened."

"But this is...."

Taylor bent down and picked up a sonic wrench and made his way over to eh open access panel where she was working. "How does this thing work anyway?" Shoving the wrench into the middle of the whole mess he prepared to activate the wrench.

"Whoa, whoa Sir," she said with a nervous chuckle as she took the Marine's large hand in both of hers, "you don't want to do that Sir. Uhm, that's uh..no.."

She looked up at him as he backed away, releasing her hold on his hand. She nervously wiped away a bead of sweat from her forehead, leaving behind a smudge of soot instead. "Sorry Sir, that's ... uhm..." she continued to stammer.

Taylor flashed her a smile and handed her the tool. "Perhaps you want to do this?"

She took the spanner from him and sighed, "Yes Sir."

It was a daunting task. Keighlee, after stabilizing the rest of the system to restore the gravplating, disassembled all the main components of the system which experienced the surge and laid them neatly out on the deck.

Now, she faced the mammoth ionization chamber. There wasn't a grav winch on the station, and even all the marines on board would never be able to lift the device from its mount.

With her hands on her hips, she after pondering the situation for several minutes. She turned and opened a utility locker and pulled out a pair of grav boots and put them on.

She accessed the environmental control console and turned down the gravplating in engineering to five percent of normal gravity. The magnetic boots were awkward as she walked clumsily toward the chamber.

With all her strength she managed to lift the chamber off its mount and on to the deck. Fortunately, the chamber did not crack any further.

She grabbed a tricorder and crawled inside. It was a tight fit but once in side she sit up inside its spherical structure.

The tricorder revealed crack was significant, but she could see it was there before and previously mended.

"Huh."

She called out, "oh Maxxie?"

"What'cha need, Keighlee?" Max answered promptly as she stepped into Engineering. "Whoa..." she grabbed hold of the bulkhead as she started to float a little.

"Can you bring me the molecular fuser from the equipment bay and about a square meter of poly-mesh from the storage bay?"

"The... Roight. Molecular Fuser and a square meter of poly mesh. I'll get it roight away," the computer hacker answered. "You know the bloody gravity's down t'almost nothin' in here, roight?" she asked as she pushed off and made it to the equipment bay in several, quite graceful, leaps.

"I know," she replied. Her voice was ethereal and and reverberated from inside the chamber.

Keighlee cleaned the plasma residue buildup from the walls around the cracked area. It was filthy.

Before too long Max's head appeared at the opening of the chamber. "'Ere y'be," Max slid the fuser and the poly-mesh in where Keighlee could reach it.

Keighlee unrolled the mesh and laid it over the top of the crack. On the lowest setting she waved the fuser over it until it began to sink into the chamber itself.

She smiled at her handy work. It turned out pretty good. She recollected what Silvio had taught her, 'a good fusion weld with polymesh will be as strong as it was before.'

And she certainly had practice during the Battle of Pacifica. The Zion had taken a pretty good beating.

"All done," she called out as she pushed the welder out and squeezed out behind it.

Maxie moved the welder out of the way, giving Keighlee the room she needed to get out. "Looks good..." she peered inside and then smiled at the engineer.

Smears and smudges of bluish plasma residue covered Keighlee from head to toe.

Max quirked a brow. "Trying to disguise yourself as a bloody Andorian, ey?" she chuckled.

Keighlee wiped her palm across her forehead and looked at the blue smudge. She sighed.

"Can you help me lift this back on the mount?"

"Sure," Max nodded.

Together they lifted the device back into place.

Once everything was back where it should be, Max restored the gravity to normal. "Much better," she nodded and stepped over to help Keighlee.

As Keighlee refitted the retaining collar on its manifold fitting, Maxine replaced burned out controllers and isoliner chips.

Next, Keighlee looked at the accelerator matrix. Keying in the maintenance code, the large device slid out like a drawer. She hefted it up and pushed it out of its holder and onto the floor where it crashed with a thud, causing a few tiny parts to scatter about.

"Junk." she muttered in Bajoran.

She walked toward the storage bay. She needed to improvise a way to bi-pass the component. If she was lucky, she'd get 60% efficiency without the accelerator. Enough perhaps to keep the patrols away.

As she searched through the chaos for conduit, she spied an antideutierum sublimator. 'Its practically the same thing,' she thought to herself, 'just opposite.' She sat down at a console and studied the schematic.

Satisfied, she lifted the device from its bin and carried it to the workbench. Removing the casing she proceeded to invert the plasma signalers removed the harmonic waveguide and replaced it with the correctly tuned one which she salvaged from the accelerator matrix.

When she was finished, she grabbed some conduit fittings and installed her makeshift device in place of the junk still sitting on the floor. Albeit she made good use of it to stand on as she connected the fittings in the back of the device.

Her make shift device lacked a containment field, it would flood the lower deck with tachyon emissions. Forty five units would induce radiation sickness.

She was tightening the last conductor when Max came up from behind.

"Y'going to turn that thing on and see if it works?" Max asked.

"Its safer to activate it from the bridge," said Keighlee.

"Roight... Let's go then," Max nodded.

They climbed the stairs until they reached the top. She sat down at the engineering console and brought the tachyon system online.

She felt a little reckless, but ran the system up to 220 percent.

"Jumpin' Capellian Powercats!" she exclaimed. The thermal dissipation system was handling the load and the output was thunderous without wasting energy on the containment field around the accelerator matrix.

"Wow.. This will really keep the bad guys out." said Keighlee. She turned and looked Max blankly, "oh, wait. That's us."

Max laughed and winked at her.

Suddenly they received a hail.

Keighlee activated the Comm. It was Grid Command.

"TR 35 here, Sir." said Keighlee meekly.

"You are operational?"

"Yes Sir."

"Your output is too high, you are overloading your systems!"

"No Sir, operational parameters are within normal limits."

The man on the viewer had a puzzled look on his face.

"Sir, I had to make some modifications to the Accelerator Matrix but everything is inside of operational limits."

The man paused and smirked.

"I don't know how you did it," he took a deep breath, "and I probably don't want to know," he said shaking his head, "but good job. Can you adjust the field density output to compensate for TR 33 and TR 34?"

"Yes Sir, I believe so."

"Commendable Lieutenant. This will be duly noted in your service record. I'm certain this will result in a commendation."

"Yes Sir. That would be nice Sir. TR 35 out."

Keighlee sat back and folded her arms across her chest and smiled.

"You're going t'get a Federation commendation... That'll look nice on your record," Max smirked and then turned a bit more serious. "Good work though, 'e's roight about that."

Keighlee smiled at the compliment, "and good work to you too!" She replied as she double checked her power utilization curves and then turned to Max. "Okay, let's turn up the alternate Tachyon grid and call it a night."

"Roight," Max nodded and her fingers moved over the console. "Just be a couple of moments.... Annnddd... Done," she smiled at Keighlee.