Day in the Office

Posted on Mon Sep 14th, 2020 @ 6:41pm by Lieutenant Commander Shylow Vitari

Mission: Welcome Aboard!
Location: Bridge

Odd encounters aside, Lieutenant Commander VItari’s wild ride through the soft veins of the ships jefferies tubes had been uneventful. This had meant two very distinct things, firstly she was aware just how little she had been active over the last few months, the soft strains of her exertion up and around the LIberty while not at the point of taking its toll, was most definitely telling her about her upcoming training routines in small details. And secondly, she had alot of time to think.

It wasn’t that Vitari had many reservations about ‘thinking,’ it was more that she rarely let her head drift into idle thoughts, preferring to find something to focus on. In this case she simply did not know enough about what it was that she was going into to formulate much plan or strategy and other than a long hallway there was not a whole lot to draw her attention.

Instead her thoughts wandered around in little circles like excited ponies kicking through the fields of her imagination and memory. As she got older, she mused, she really had picked up alot to muse about. Unfinished conversations with people who were no longer there, missions that had not quite sat right in their objective. Secrets that no one else would ever know. The sound of a cell bed creaking as she nursed the damage done to her; illusionary and real in the same instant.

She froze a moment, a stretched out infinity within her mind that lasted the barest fraction of a second, something only the most aware would have seen in the break of her crawling stride before she resumed.

Some thoughts, she decided, were not worth the effort. Instead, she began mentally reconstruct what she thought she knew of the bridge of a sovereign class starship. Loosely speaking it should follow a standard format and in theory the jefferies hatch should be under one of the outer ring consoles. If she was quiet then there was a reasonable chance that she could open the hatch and get a peek across at least some of the room before she needed to shimmy out.

Taking a mental inventory of what she had on person, she decided that as long as the sensors were behaving themselves and there was only two in the room, provided they had not set up anything too odd she should be able to disable them in short order.

VItari’s hand found empty air for a heartbeat before she grabbed the supporting rung at the ladders end, her eyes glancing down the corridor with a bemused shake of her head; she was definitely getting old, she surely would have never zoned out like that before... no, she mused, she probably would have just started tinkering with something destructive instead.

Shaking her head she clambered into the final passageway, reassuring herself in the near silent hum as she charged the light shielding encasing per specialised piece of kit. She wasn’t sure how she had ever survived without the heavily tweaked combat orientated EV suit, and given some of her close calls, she wasn’t sure she wanted to test it either. Rather than dwell on it, she slipped up to the small floor level panel and input a command code to soft release it.

She spent a few moments holding it in place before easing it gently out of the way, peering through the expanding slit as she scanned the room.

Nothing? She pondered, weighing up her options before she blithely stuck her head through the portal from engineering to main deck. Her little corner was apparently unoccupied, so she began the slow process of silently extracting herself, one arm slipping through before the slow wriggle on her back into the carpeted luxury of an actual deck.

It was precisely that moment in which she heard a cough, and a grunt. Almost directly above her. Her breath caught in her throat as she waited two painful seconds for any sounds of alertness before she exhaled for what felt to be an hour and resumed the glacial process of pressing herself without a sound into the main room.

Once she found herself, near fetal behind the second console she peeked curiously around, the occasional shuffles and grunts from beside her told a story of someone painfully bored on the other side, and the utter lack of any socialisation suggested at least, that someone was elsewhere.

Deciding it would be best to take it as she found it, the encased officer shifted her feed beneath herself and stood, poised to strike as she came face to face with the Orion mercenary, apparently so engrossed in whatever he had been trying to do he had let himself be so oblivious to her extract just beneath his gaze. His eyes widened in shock as he froze while his mental faculties attempted to catch up with the appearance of the black clad humanoid before him; and then he slumped slowly backwards, two darts protruding as though from nowhere from the exposed skin of his throat.

Not wasting any time, Vitari scanned the room, checking behind the primary and tertiary consoles before she frowned. At no point had she considered that the sensors would have added phantom sources, but where could he have gone.

She tapped at the finger guard of her light pistol as she ran through her options before checking as to what the pirate had been so caught up with. The officer couldn’t help but laugh at the irony as she scanned, seemingly the bridge crew had become concerned at the utter lack of communication from... anyone at all and begun trying to contact their own ship, only to find that their dampeners were preventing even that, even as she scanned she saw a number of attempts to circumvent the effect being projected upon them simply to get some kind of status update. She tapped to initialise the next attempt he had so thoughtfully written for her, in the vague hope it might bait them into removing the field for a bit at least when she heard the soft hiss of a door opening.

The armored agent immediately pivoted, half rolling as she heard a startled shout, her weapon arm blocked by the same console which had covered her entrance as a disruptor grazed the shielding at her shoulder. Shaking her head, Vitari put off berating herself just yet, the second irony of the same cursed console coming to bite its user as she snapped a peek to the pulsing scorch of another shot flicking past her.

A glance at her read out suggested she could take a couple of hits, assuming it hadn’t been a glancing or low powdered shot. Not the most reliable of assumptions. Instead she reached down, hefting the weight of his fallen comrade almost entirely with the suits onboard servos, waiting a moment she lifted him before her, feeling the impact microseconds before the retort of a disruptor rifle, nearly being lifted with the force as she let the limp body be carried to the side, she leapt forward into a roll before her gauntleted fist spearing out into what she hoped was a midriff.

Rather than a stomach, however, she found a thigh, the firm impact twisting her foe before he stabilised and struck down with the butt of his rifle, her forearm blocking the blow aimed at her head as she swept leg across his, kicking them out from under him as she spun the rifle in his hands, rotating it with his fall till he hit the ground with a wheezing grunt followed by the discharge of his firearm one more time, and silence.

Standing, she noted the lack of movement with a brief shake of her head before tapping her communicator, breaking the isolation field upon it as she took up guard against further intrusion to the command deck, “Bridge clear, Captain,” she declared over the airways in the vague hope that it would, a, work and b, that the Captain had taken her communicator with her in the first place.