Problems & Solutions

Posted on Fri Sep 11th, 2015 @ 3:15pm by Enlisted Cadet Jasmine [P: Steiner] & Cadet Senior Grade Errowyn St. Cloud & Cadet Senior Grade Tim Sutherland

Mission: The Wainwright's Cadets
Location: Various Locations [USS Wainwright]
Timeline: After "From Bad To Worse"

[ON]

Cadet Jasmine looked at the console readouts. Nothing made sense. "Cyber worm?" She lit up her wrist Padd, broadcasting from her local device rather than utilizing ship's central communications. =/Jasmine to crew, central systems are compromised. I recommend switching all vital systems to manual override.\= With that, she dashed off to the life support nexes to begin unplugging control links.

"Sutherland! You have bridge!" Errowyn took off after shoving the door open to get off the bridge. She looked down the barely lit turbo lift shaft and got vertigo, "whooooaaa.." Softly to herself as she stepped back from the open door. "I can do this, I can do this ....." She sat down, saying the mantra over and over as she edged herself over the edge into the lift shaft.

Cadet Jasmine managed to force open the powerless sliding doors to a room housing a fusion battery. Using a force spanner, she detached the ship's control line and then plugged an hardwired circuit into the socket. The non-software computer program brought the battery to active state and maintained stable power output. She then plastered a similarly hardwired security nodule to the casing to catch possible sabotage attempting penetration. "On to the next one."

Errowyn made her way down the turbo lift shaft to the next level below the bridge, struggled with the lift doors and flopped out onto the deck. "Whew!" She laid there getting her wits back under control. After a minute, she stood up and scampered off to see how much progress was being made and to pitch in if necessary.

Sutherland was pulling up as many readouts and power settings as he could on the bridge. Something wasn't right, but he couldn't put a finger on it. He couldn't find a root cause for any of the outages, but everything was definitely out. He cursed silently, waiting on confirmations from the rest of his crew to come back. Cadet crews were easy, they said.

Cadet Jasmine sat staring at the solid wall of blinking red lights. Absolutely nothing that the crew had tried was working. Simple system failures should be easy to rectify. They all knew how to do it. She could only arrive at one conclusion, "This must be some kind of cyber attack."

Whoever was behind the attempt to capture USS Wainwright, Ferengi, Sojourners, Orion Syndicate, privateers, it didn't matter. The critical task was to regain control of the ship under manual overrides before the saboteurs could board the ship and neutralize the crew. The quickest, surest way to do what was to knock out computer networking nodes. Running where there was gravity and leaping through weightlessness, Jasmine plunged into the machinery spaces. With a heavily insulated force wrench, she did what all the training manuals warned against doing. She crossed power streams. Crossing the streams is bad. One by one, computer nodes ruptured in spectacular showers of sparks.

Errowyn eyes widen as the gravity failed and she floated off the deck towards the ceiling. "Oh great! What will go wrong now?" Then the lights failed, plunging the corridor into darkness. "By that Sacred! I was kidding!" She yelled out as she bumped her head against the ceiling. "Ouch!" She floated in absolute darkness waiting for the emergency lighting to flicker on, but never did.

Hearing noises throughout the ship and magnified by the darkness, some one was going to pay in spades. She got herself moving along the ceiling and then wham! The unexpected gravity pocket caught her unawares. The trip to the deck was quick to send her sprawling undignified in the darkness. "okay you can do this" She murmured as she painfully stood up. She took a couple of steps, right into the corridors wall. "oof! someones gonna die for sure!" Once orientated, she kept one hand running along the wall and stepped back into the null gravity zone she had just vacated. "Crap! I'm never gonna get things done!"

Cadet Jasmine kept an eye on the wrist diagnostic holodisplay. "Good... no active scans." She concluded that whoever was sabotaging the ship wouldn't be aware that the ship's automatics were systematically being crippled, or who was causing it.

"Can anyone access one of the emergency terminals?" Sutherland asked from his corner of the weightless bridge. His eyes were slowly adjusting to the darkness and he could make out shapes again, but not by much. "If the emergency lights are off, that means life support is too. The terminals are on a separate power source, though, and should let us take a look at what's going on if we can boot them," He offered.

"Will someone get me a light!" Errowyn wailed out from her spot floating. At least she still touched the corridors wall. Forcing herself back into the area that had gravity. At least this time the fall wasn't so bad. She continued along the corridor, being alert for null gravity spots. Soon she ran into some of the other cadets. "Finally! Damage report and give me a flashlight, please."

Errowyn received the flashlight as she listened to the report. Damage was pretty much the same all over the ship. Now the computers were becoming non-operational. "Oh crap! We gotta go protect the CC.! Prevent it from crashing!" the activating her combadge, =/= "XO! Activate the emergency beacon for help! Computers are crashing! Get Comm's butt in gear to get help." =/=

Having severed enough of the ship's spinal columns to protect vital systems, Cadet Jasmine reviewed her training. "Engineering can deal with propulsion and defences." It would be taxing for the crew to manage this large of a ship on manual control, but the cyber-attack would now be neutralized. She tapped at her wrist radio, "Jasmine to command... awaiting instructions."

Errowyn smiled at least communications still worked when she heard Jasmine voice coming from her commbadge. "Get the lights back on again. Cadet Jazz."

"Aye, Ma'am. Am on it." The Shokirian fetched a disaster sachel from Life Support cabinets. She then hurried through corridors, running or floating as gravity dictated. Like ancient newspaper kids on bikes, she hurled a small sphere into each important work area and hallway section. 24th Century refinements of ancient chemical glow sticks, these orbs stuck fast to bulkheads and glowed into brilliant light. This would take a while to distribute them all, but this method was cyber-proof.

[OFF]

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Cadet Senior Grade Errowyn St. Cloud
Cadet Senior Grade Tim Sutherland
Enlisted Cadet Jasmine

USS Wainwright - Starbase 332
Pegasus Fleet