If An Eye Offend Thee

Posted on Wed Apr 17th, 2019 @ 12:31pm by Lieutenant Commander Mnhei'sahe Dox & Commander Rita Paris & Lieutenant Commander Thex sh'Zoarhi & Lieutenant Asa Dael & Az'Prel & Baroness 2nd Class Schwein von Alcott

Mission: Detours
Location: USS Hera, Deck 11, Holodeck 3
Timeline: 2396
Tags: Pirates of the Crab Nebula part 2

Continued from 'Pirates of the Crab Nebula'...

Peering around the docking bay, Rita Paris fished around in her brief ruffled petticoats to withdraw her phaser from beneath her skirt. Securing it in her right hand with the cutlass in her left, she prepared to commando her way across what ought to be a familiar design for her.

"I can get us to the bridge." Pointing, she indicated "Fore, aft. Access ladders are over here, stay together, stay sharp. Let's go."

Following close behind, Dox made sure Asa was between her and Commander Paris as she sheathed her other blade to make the climb.

"We have to cross these cargo bays first, which is a lot of open ground. If we take a turbolift they can shut us down and keep us there until they redirect us to the brig on Deck 7. They can't seal the access ladder hatches unless the computer senses decompression though- that's a hardwired sensor into each one of those hatches. And somehow in all of the modifications to this old girl, I'll bet she hasn'r replaced those hatches. Let's go- fast, stay low, shoot to stun, assuming our phasers will work."

That was when a green disruptor bolt whizzed by, followed by a few more. "Well, if theirs work... move and fire people, let's go!"

An idea struck Asa and the doctor called to von Alcott, “Does she use any kind of privacy fields? Activating a privacy field in an area where we are not may serve as a distraction. If we make it look like we accidentally tripped a sensor of some kind elsewhere on the ship, it may buy us a bit less notice.”

"Privacy fields? No, but there are smuggling panels with sensor scramblers in several of the walls. If the sim is set up as her ship is..." Schwein punched in a code at one of the wall comm panels and lo and behold, it triggered several wall panels to slide aside revealing that instead of the normal support and power systems, smuggling compartments big enough to hold several people each had been installed. "The scramblers are at either side, ja?"

Firing at the pirates who were working up a charge, Paris called out orders. Miss Dox, Miss Az'Prel, buy us some time, please. Doc, Thex, let's move, access ladders are across the cargo bay, double-time!" Paris took off in a jog, leading from the front, firing her phaser as she did so. It wasn't terribly accurate, but offered cover fire.

"Aye, Commander." Dox replied as she pulled out one blade and the phaser from her hip as she moved to engage the attackers to give the team time to do its job. "Miss Az'Prel, let's do this."

The displaced Vulcan popped one of the sensor scramblers and pulled a power cell out of the comm panel, wiring them together before tucking the makeshift device into her belt. After that, she picked up one of the discarded pirate weapons by the blade and almost casually tossed it, flipping it through the air so that it lodged itself in the chest of a puffer-fish faced pirate, nailing him to the wall. "I'm with you, Miss Dox, but I will need a ranged weapon for maximum effectiveness." Having said that, she picked up another of the discarded weapons and prepared to throw it.

Holstering her phaser for a moment, Dox unsheathed her second blade as she eyed an oncoming horde of pirates, the lead brandishing a large disruptor. "One moment, Miss Az'Prel."

With a loud cry, Dox ran towards the lead Pirate as it raised it's disruptor to fire. But before it could, she crossed her twin blades in front of her slicing off the creatures arm, disruptor in hand. As it fell, she picked it up and tossed it across the room towards Az'Prel, hand still attached."Hnaev!! Sorry. Thought the hand would have let go. Ew!"

"Thank you for the hand," replied Az'Prel, not even skipping a beat as she removed the offending appendage, assumed a kata stance with the disruptor and her sword, and started firing into the group of pirates, each shot hitting a lethal spot as she performed a dance of death, moving closer to them with each stance change.

Moving alongside Rita and Thex, Asa called out, “Lurker, 9 O’Clock!” as a previously unseen foe rose from a hiding spot well concealed in one corner of the room. Lacking a weapon, Asa did the only thing they could think to do and reached into their med bag, grabbing the heaviest vial in the bag (one that contained compressed plasma for emergency transfusions) and threw it with all their strength at the head of the would-be attacker. The vial hit the enemy directly in the forehead, and although it did not knock him out, the assailant was stunned….which was only compounded by the vial beginning to leak and a spray of pinkish compressed plasma exploding on his face and torso.

"Ugly way to die..." Paris muttered.

The ladders were, unsurprisingly, exactly where the Constitution-Class expert remembered them being, and Paris promptly shot a pirate attempting to climb down to assault the invaders. Scrambling up the ladder with practiced ease, Paris confirmed that the deck above was clear before sliding back down to Deck 6. “Come on, people, no time to dawdle! Up the gangway, let’s go go go! Miss Dox, you are in the lead, Miss Az’Prel, you have rearguard. Doc, Thex, let’s go!”

As she barked orders, Paris was still staying low and maintaining suppressing fire, her phaser set on stun.

Following orders, Dox sheathed her blades and holstered her phaser and quickly scrambled up in the lead. As soon as she was clear, she pulled her phaser back out to join Paris in covering the rest of the team.

Wasting no time, Asa followed Dox up the ladder, staying close to her heels.

“Thex! Stop kicking that man and get up the ladder!” Paris ordered, eager to get to the higher decks where very few opponents would be able to get at them. But if they dallied here to long, the pirates would tumble to their plan and ambush them on the upper decks.

Schwein was up the ladder as well, still scanning with her cybernetic eye. "Ze code here looks wrong... Almost like..." With a scream of pain, the silver-haired pirate clutched at her eye and collapsed to the deck. "Ach... Visual virus... Did not expect that..."

As soon as Schwein had screamed, Asa was running to her at a trot. Dropping to one knee, the doctor scanned quickly, looking for the virus impacting the Baroness.

“That’s…..nasty,” Dael concluded, “This thing has been outlawed in every civilized system. The virus attacks cybernetic components and then go on to attack the nerves connected to the device. This,” Asa said, injecting a hypo into von Alcott’s thigh muscle, “Is a nerve pain blocker. The meds needed to erase the virus are in Sickbay, for all the good that will do us right now. Long and short of it, the more you use the eye, the faster this will progress. I highly recommend limited use of your cybernetic eye until we can get you to Sickbay and get this taken care of. I’m sorry, Schwein, I didn’t think to carry curatives to a virus originally designed to fight the Borg.”

Crouching over Schwein's position to keep her friends covered, Dox looked at Schwein's eye, then up to Commander Paris with a concerned look but said nothing. This was exactly what the two women had discussed concerns over in their secret planning meetings: That the Captain's mother could use the cybernetics of the Baronesses against Enalia.

"That iz ok, Herr Doktor... Zis only proves... How dangerous zis woman iz..." Once Asa was done, Schwein flipped her eyepatch back down to at least limit the input to her cybernetics a bit and did her best to stand up, albeit shakily and leaning on a wall, clearly still in considerable pain. "We must press on, ja?"

Grabbing the silver-tressed space pirate under the arms, Paris got under the woman, hanging the shorter woman’s arms over her neck and shoulders as she carried von Alcott on her back. “Nobody gets left behind, Baroness,” Paris grunted as she bore the woman’s weight. Holstering her phaser and cutlass, the courageous commander began to climb. “Up the ladder, here we go… you just hang on and we’ll get you through this.”

In the meantime, Az'Prel had finished off the last of the pirates on the deck below them and had made it up the ladder, her armor splattered with fish guts. "Rear guard reporting in. Lower deck clear and ready to proceed."

"Bring up the rear, Miss Az'Prel, with my compliments. Miss Dox, advance and secure the next deck, if you please," Paris remained calm, adapting to the situation as it developed. Flexible in mind and spirit, this was one of her greatest strengths- the ability to change course and continue toward the destination, replotting as the course required, and keeping her crew moving.

Taking point as ordered, Dox put her phaser handle in her mouth as she began pressing up the ladder to the next deck. As soon as she was within a ring of the top, she grabbed her phaser and held it to the ready in anticipation of an ambush.

Even on a holodeck, holographic pirates simulated breathing, so the red-headed Romulan with exceptional hearing paused to listen. A slight smirk went across her face as she picked up the sounds of shuffling and breathing from the deck above.

She could see the ceiling of the next deck, and had a fix on where the attackers were standing and stole a play from Lieutenant Sonak's book. Setting her phaser on a wide beam of high intensity, she sprayed the ceiling in a wave above where the ambush was going to come from, sending a bursting wave of instantly liquified durasteel raining down towards the pirates.

Instantly, she reset for stun as she heard the pirates cry out and rolled up onto the deck, opening fire on the small grouping, stunning them as they continued to try and rub off the Sparks. "All clear, Commander!" she called down the ladder.

Hauling up the ladder, Paris was surprised that the space pirate on her back was more lightweight than she had imagined. Somehow she assumed the Baroness would be heavier than she herself, but she was surprisingly lightweight. Arriving at the next deck, Paris ensured that the landing party was still together, and nodded. “Continue, Miss Dox, until we reach Deck 2. Then we’ll make our plan to storm the bridge.”

"Aye, Commander." Dox replied as she continued up to the next deck with the team close behind her. Listening again, she this time heard nothing but that silence made her nervous. Even uncorrupted by an evil Pirate queen, the Holodeck simulations learned in combat mode and she decided on a different tactic this time in case these pirates were just not breathing on the next deck up. But to her surprise, Deck three was clear as she leaned in ready to fire, her head just barely peaking in.

Still, it didn't feel right and the red-headed Romulan desperately wished she was wearing her EVA armor with her HUD display to let her know if anything was down either side of the Jefferies tube stretching out port and starboard into darkness. Instead, she decided to trust her gut which told her this was too easy.

"Commander, I need your phaser for a second. I need to test a hunch here." Dox leaned back down with an outstretched hand.

A hand came up, holding an old Type 2 pistol-style phaser by the detachable Type 1 phaser of its day, the handle protruding upward towards the Lieutenant’s outstretched hand. This was not a moment to be tossing phasers about, and Paris was oddly safety-conscious at times.

Taking a breath, with a phaser set on medium spread but high power, the anxious Lieutenant brought her feet up on the higher rungs and rested her back against the top of the interior of the hatch, just below its lip as she released her breath. Pushing with her strong legs, she slid quickly up the top of the hatch opening like a red-headed Whack-A-Mole, firing with a phaser down both ends of the darkened Jefferies tubes.

The light flared down the tubes flashing brightly as, in both directions, the beams stunned small groups of fish-faced pirates waiting in the darkness like snipers. The sound of multiple targets hitting the deck plating of the tubes let Dox know the coast was clear as she handed the phaser back down. "Okay. One more deck to go, Commander."

“Perfect. Let’s regroup on Deck 2,” Paris replied, insuring that the ships surgeon and the chief engineer preceded her up the ladder, even as the enigmatic Az’prel covered their rear. Once all of the landing party were assembled on Deck 2, the curvaceous commander laid the injured Baroness down on the deck as she stretched and considered her options.

“Well, using the turnbolift shaft is a possibility, as we could pry the doors open and assault from there… but I suspect they’d be expecting that. By now they know we’re coming up through the access ladders, but that just means they’ll be ready to fire if we come out that hatch. In this particular case, working with what we’ve got…” Paris' mind raced as she reviewed their assets and considered what could be done with the materials at hand.

A moment later, the door to the hatchway access on the bridge of the Miranda class opened, with a number of phasers trained upon it. No one was there, however, save for one gold-clad arm flinging a single small object onto the bridge. It was an old-style phaser, of the era before even the Miranda class starships… an old-school phaser which was whining and cycling louder and louder until the overload it had been set for reached it’s zenith, and the phaser exploded on the bridge.

As it did so, a mob of angry pirates poured onto the bridge to assault the stunned and injured pirates, engaging them in swordplay and phaser fire.

Leading the charge was Az'Prel, their mirror universe refugee. She rolled in, shanked one pirate through the rear with her sword while firing her liberated disruptor in the face of another, pulled free the sword of the shanked pirate, flipped that sword through the air into a third pirate, hopped up onto the bridge rail so she could kick another pirate in the face, stepped off the back of the command chair to land on the helm controls like some sort of superhero, and put another disruptor bolt in the forehead of the last moving pirate.

Surveying the remains of the bridge, the Vulcan woman found a suspicious chest in the command chair but otherwise it looked normal enough to her eyes. "Bridge is clear of hostiles, Commander. One suspicious package found."

“Well done, Miss Az'Prel. Please do me the courtesy of inspection and analysis, if you will," Paris replied as she climbed out of the hatchway onto the bridge, the Baroness borne on her back. “Let us assume this is a bomb, at the very least an anti-personnel device,” Paris called. Bereft of any technology to do anything else with, and with the Baroness’ medical tricorder out of the loop, Rita was getting the hang of this asinine pirate thing, and starting to see how it worked. “This being holographic I cannot imagine that it will give us any clues, but let’s operate on an assumption of a trap.”

With a nod, Az'Prel shot the lock off with her disruptor, then crouched to the side with one of the pirate swords, carefully lifting the lid away from everyone else. It didn't immediately turn into a door like the last pile of treasure and nothing bad popped out immediately, so the Vulcan woman peered inside, opening the lid the rest of the way.

Which was when the cruel laughter of a woman that sounded like an older version of Enalia began.

Inside was a chibi plush of Arenara Artan laughing at them sitting on top of a pile of gold, wearing a white pirate outfit complete with gold brocade and a silk cape. Inside was also a note.

'Congratulations on getting through this, my daughter's little piggy. Just because you survived this little trap though, don't expect to survive the Tribunal. I have other ways of dealing with you.'

"I am beginning to get a real disdain for this woman," Rita Paris muttered. "Computer, freeze program."

The computer obliged, the sounds and displays of the modernized bridge paused, and Paris looked around with satisfaction. "Perhaps in her vanity she's left us something to find."

Tapping the ancient Starfleet delta on her chest, Paris called out. "Paris to Chief Clemens. I want an intel team in Holodeck 3 for analysis, please. We're going to see if she left us any clues as to her systems, the layout of her bridge. She might just have been vain enough to give us a look around. Let's see if we can't turn that to our advantage."

Schwein pointed out one of the stations along the port side wall as she leaned against the bridge railing, looking like she was about to fall over. "There. That's her boarding controls. Next to it is her internal shield systems. Ja, this is her bridge."

Az'Prel noticed something as well and headed over to a station decked out in chrome and red metals on the starboard side. "She has an agony suppression field system." Turning back to Commander Paris, there was something in the Vulcan's eyes. Not quite fear, but something close to it. "The Terran Empire of my universe was experimenting with this technology. It can turn any pair of forcefields in close proximity into an agony booth."

"Nouhha..." Dox muttered under her breath at Az'Prel's words and the implications of it as she stepped over to help her fellow Baroness as needed.

"Baroness... she wasn't planning on you surviving this. Is any of what she did here actionable in the tribunal? Evidence that can strengthen the Captain's case? I mean, she actively tried to assassinate you." Dox asked.

Schwein shook her head, nearly falling over when it made her dizzy. As she steadied herself, she answered. "Under ze Tribunal, no... After it, ja... Zis is... a dangerous time to be without a crew as threats like zis may be made during ze proceedings. Ze weaker crews are likely to claim to side with us but vote with her in the end because of zis. Ze Prinzessin has forbidden such acts... For obvious reasons... But ze Queen ignores her in this. Az do ze first class Baronesses."

Putting it together in her head, Commander Paris stumbled across an uncomfortable question. "Baroness, pardon the bluntness of my question, but your tricorder- is it modular in nature or uniquely hardwired?"

"It was installed at the compound before I met ze Prinzessin. Ze interface goes deep into mein occipital lobe. I know of no other like it." The Baroness looked over at Rita curiously.

"See, that's a problem," Paris looked pained at the topic, but pressed on, however unwillingly. "Because we know for a fact your cybernetics have been compromised, Baroness. We need to find a way to clear them of any influence. Otherwise, I hate to say it, but you're a security risk. For all we know you're transmitting as we speak. Which we'll bend ops and science to determining. Baroness, I assume you have some antivirus software of your own as well?"

"Ja, on mein ship," the pirate replied, realization dawning on her. "Which could also be compromised. I suggest you quarantine me until I can be cleared."

"Stay here, we'll have Science and Intel cooperate to get you cleared and see if we can identify what she's using. meanwhile, if you'd be a guide to the intel teams on what we're seeing here it would be appreciated, Baroness. Doc, make her comfortable if you would, and we'll get to work. Baroness, we'll wait until you're cleared then you can lead the sweep team onto your ship." Looking over at the makeshift agony booth, Rita Paris shook her head.

"Quite the dislike for this woman..."