Briefing on the Edge of Adventure

Posted on 16 Oct 2016 @ 9:24pm by Captain Nathan Cowell MD & Commander Korrath & Commander Paul Toddman & Lieutenant Commander Shelby Adams & Lieutenant Commander Arivek Zhuri & Lieutenant Claire Annette & Lieutenant Naomi Manera M.D., Ph.D. & Lieutenant Kina Hena MD

Mission: Prelude; Breakfast at Curmudgeon's
Location: Observation Lounge, Bridge
Timeline: MD 0: 0700 hours

Captain Nathan Cowell had called for a staff meeting in his usual impromptu manner. As with the Arizona of old, the Old Man had simply made a ship wide announcement over the comm and sat at the head of the table in the spacious observation lounge waiting for people to filter in. With them being docked, Nathan had a feeling none of the senior staff would have been all that occupied with daily business so they would arrive either in a cluster or spaced out one at a time. It didn't matter which as far as the Captain was concerned. Having never set foot into the space before, Nathan did take notice that there were two starships occupying a display case on the long wall of the room. One of them was a Prometheus-class statuette that represented the first ship to bear the name, while the second was a Sovereign-class in honor of her recommissioning. Nathan gathered that it was something of a tradition with consecutive uses of a name, since the original ship had nothing of the sort.

It was barely 30 seconds after Nathan had made the call for his senior officers to assemble when the doors on the opposite end of the observation lounge to him opened with a gentle swish. A moment later the frame of Commander Toddman holding a steel thermal mug with steam rising from it in his left hand walked through.

“Morning, sir,” Paul offered as he scanned the room for a place at the table to call his own. The decision was made for him by Cowell who gestured with his hand to the seat on his right.

“Were you standing outside that door like some damned puppy waiting to get thrown a bone?” Nathan inquired, alluding to Toddman's swift arrival.

“Not at all, Captain,” Paul answered as he sat down and placed his cup on the table, “I just happened to have stepped foot on the bridge the same moment you made your announcement.”

"Sure you did..." Nathan grumbled before taking a small sip of his beverage.

Kina arrived, having just dropped off her son at the school room. (Thankfully the teacher had been there early.) She gave the Captain a smile and nod and picked one of the chairs at random. "Good morning, sir," she said simply.

Nathan lifted the small cup he had in front of him in a manner of return greeting before taking a small sip of the liquid inside, "Mornin'."

Lt. Claire Annette entered through the opposite door, her eyes already somewhat bloodshot, making them more red than normal. She had a no-spill coffee mug in her hand to help rectify that though. As the albino took a random seat, she looked almost harsh and jagged in contrast to the uniform she was wearing. "Morning, Captain."

Capt. Cowell looked at the slightly disheveled Security officer as she slumped into her chair with ruff familiarity, "Don't seem like you're the morning type, there, Lieutenant."

Claire blinked a few times and sipped her coffee before replying, "I've just been having trouble sleeping since coming aboard, sir. New environment and all that. I should be ok once we get away from the starbase."

Nathan couldn't help but inwardly groan at the sentiment. Never in the Arizona's long history had there been a time when people could sleep well outside of a dock. The Old Man decided not to ruin her fantasy that things would only get easier, less so out of compassion and more so out of fear that if he mentioned it aloud it would probably come to pass. Cowell wasn't a fan of speaking of devils, they liked to come around...

"The coffee ought to keep you awake at least," Nathan said, "More so if you doctor it up properly like I do."

"Coffee? Nothing but espresso in this mug, sir." Claire said with a sly grin before sipping from her mug again.

Naomi was the next to walk in and in fact quite energetic, her time away from Starfleet for a while had done her good and in general she was quite excited to be serving on a ship for the first time in her career. "Morning all," she said before taking a seat at the table.

Nathan was already getting tired of saying it, so he merely raised his mug slightly in reply to the cheerful greeting and did a silent head count. He was still missing a body or two, but given his penchant for springing meetings up out of the blue, he had to be at least a little patient. Not everyone was as big an ass kisser as Toddman was.

Shelby Adams had been en-route to the shuttlebay to look over the ships compliment of shuttlecraft when the call to report to the observation lounge had come through and she diverted herself back to deck one. Eventually she entered the lounge and noticed several people already in attendance. "Good morning all," the red head smiled as she walked around the length of the table and sat in a seat near the windows.

At the far end of the room, the air shimmered and soon a holographic man was standing there. He silently took a seat at the table and waited.

Korrath stepped through the threshold of the door, moving without skipping a beat, to the empty seat on the Captains left, which was the traditional place of the Executive Officer. As he walked, he committed the Senior Staff's faces to memory and nodded to them. He silently took his seat.

When the Klingon walked in, Nathan did one last head count and frowned, "Dammit if Spots ain't always late..."

Lt. Commander Aix hurried into the briefing room, the last man in. He rushed over to the last empty chair before flashing Nathan an apologetic look. The Old Man just rolled his eyes and started the meeting. He brought up a schematic of the star system they were heading for, as well as a schematic of the nebula they would find once they got to their destination. The two images were not, however, of the same pieces of space. A few perplexed looks around the room told the Old Man that not everyone was familiar with the place they were about to go, though the look on one particular person's face told Nathan that he hadn't forgotten it even a little.

"What you're looking at, folks, is the jump off point for where we're headed. It would seem that, in their infinite wisdom, the forces deployed to the Delta Quadrant have disabled the... easy way... into that theater of operation for some reason or another most likely to do with the safety of the Federation. Word is, they wanted to stop an invasion of some kind. The who and why of it are anyone's guess, but the popular theory running around the Admiralty would be that it was the Borg," the Captain began before drawing attention to the first image on the screen.

"On the left you will see a small star system that was once part of the ancient Iconian empire. You'll notice that there are warning beacons all around this particular system. They'll tell you that there is some powerful radiation that will melt your hull off or some nonsense, and there are probes further inside of the place that do a really good job of fooling your sensors into believing that lie. Well... there isn't any dangerous radiation out there, just an Iconian gateway big enough to get a starbase lost into space if you try hard enough. That's our first stop. Once we get there, we're going to launch a probe and open it up, then fly on through. And before you panic, this isn't one of those random portals like some of the others that were found. This is a one way trip to Delta Quadrant and to our next slide..." Nathan tapped a command and the nebula became the only thing on the screen, "We'll be whisked away to this lovely little part of space that people lovingly refer to as 'Safe Haven'. The planetary system inside this nebula is a collection of dead worlds around a star that'll die eventually, but it's not going to have one of those spectacular deaths like most, the nebula will see to that. What's important about the exit point is that once we come out, we're going to have to pass through this wall of plasma and other nasty charged particles that don't exactly take kindly to people trying. It's going to take a fair amount of coordination between Ops, Conn, and Science to get out of that place without losing a few decks in the process."

Captain Cowell leaned back in his chair, "And after we do all that, we're going to have to head out into the great expanse and look for our people. We don't know where they might have gone, we don't know who did and didn't make it, and there is no telling how long it's going to take to find any of that out. It's kind of like we're playing Columbus, except someone else has already been there before and we just didn't get the memo. Now... does anyone have any questions for me about any of this before we set out?"

“I have one, Sir,” Toddman offered as he shifted from leaning back in his chair to leaning onto the polished conference table, “I'm sure this will sound silly, but how do we get back? I see nothing of a similar Iconian device in the Delta Quadrant on those schematics and we already know the transwarp conduit is gone."

"There's a sister portal on the other side, Mister Toddman," Nathan assured the man, "It simply doesn't show up because it's classified and until today, no one outside of the Admiralty knew it was there."

"So is this top secret information, not to leave this room, then?" asked Kina, curious as to how much she could tell the Medical staff.

"As of right this moment, yes, this briefing is to be kept quiet from all the relevant departments. Anyone who doesn't absolutely need the details shouldn't be given them. We can't afford to be too liberal with this 'back door' we have until we know what's going on and whether it would be safer to leave it a closely guarded secret. We've got to play this close to the chest, like it or not," Nathan explained.

Naomi opted to remain silent, this quite simply wasn't her department and she couldn't really think of anything to ask. That being said she was quite intrigued by the plan.

"So..." Paul began in an inquisitive one, "Just what sort of hostiles can we expect? I've seen what the last Arizona looked like, that was no electro-plasmic beastie of a nebula?"

"That's something you'll have to ask Temporal Investigations, and good luck getting them to tell you what happened," the Captain remarked, "Let's just say we might run into things that aren't too happy we're back and leave it at that for now. I'll tell you all about it if we ever get to the point where I can't avoid it, but for now, the less said the better.

Paul's eyes narrowed with suspicion and a touch of annoyance. But he had to accept Nathan's answer. "Fair enough, boss".

"Captain," Shelby spoke up as she held her hand up to show it was her speaking, "are we certain that the Arizona will fit through this gate. What are the dimensions of it? If it's going to be tight, I'd rather know now than at the time," the Flight Controller spoke in her quiet, hushed tone.

"We've been through it once already, granted... she was a Prometheus-class when we did it... but I didn't hear anything scrape against the hull so we ought to be fine. I wanna say they lost a starbase through it at one point, so it ain't tiny," the Old Man replied in his signature vague manner.

"What sort of stress was put on the ship?" Arivek asked, speaking up for the first time. "I'd like to review the engineering logs from the last Arizona. I want to make sure this ship is prepared."

"Hell if I know..." Nathan grumbled and tapped a few commands into his small console, "I've put in a request for sensor data, if they send it to you, great. If not... guess we'll have to play it by ear. It didn't break us apart or anything the first time around so I'm sure it'll be fine."

"I get that you survived last time, but we also don't know what we're flying into once we get through," Arivek said, continuing on the line of questioning. "If we get brought down to 50% on the journey, we may not survive what lies on the other side. It's important that Starfleet provides us that sensor data."

"Like I told Mister Toddman over there," the Old Man said as he pointed to the Operations officer, "Temporal Investigations seized most of the information and they don't play nice. I can tell you that the nebula itself is a nasty place and the way out moves and changes like a woman changes her mind. No offense to the ladies in the room. I've already made the nebula data available, but the way we went through the first time doesn't have one damn thing to do with the price of tea in China and you might as well not worry about that part. It's a new way through each and every time, which is why people don't go in there that often and why it's so well hidden and on the Q.T."

Capt. Cowell looked around at the faces in the room, "I'm not trying to keep you folks in the dark, but there's a lot about this mission that ties way too closely to events that I've been threatened into staying silent about. And while I usually don't take kindly to that sort of thing, I either go along with it or I get tossed off the bridge of my ship and I ain't about to let another ass sit in my chair out there. So like it or not, there's just some details I won't be able to share, some questions you won't get answers for, and that's just the breaks. So unless anyone has anything they want to sneak in here, we best get to work. I'm setting a goal of 0700 tomorrow morning as our departure time from Starbase One. Each department has less than twenty-four hours to have everything on the ship and stowed away. If you leave any gear adrift, that's where it's going to stay."

That sounded like as good a time as any for Claire to speak up. Setting her PaDD aside, she cleared her throat, "Captain, we're scheduled to have the last of the weapons logged in at the armory at zero six hundred but it'll take us at least twenty four hours after that to distribute them to the weapons lockers. That includes almost two hundred bladed weapons. Thankfully the station had a few caches that I was able to acquire."

"As long as they're somewhere on the ship by then, it doesn't really matter to me. You'll have about three days to get things settled before we might need to break them out. But thanks for the update," the Old Man said, looking at their Chief of Security before scanning the room again.

"Last call. Speak now or forever wish you had," Nathan announced.

The room stood silent for a long moment before the Old Man decided everyone had said their peace and was happy... or at least could live with the information passed out. The Captain rose to his feet and pushed the chair back under the table where it belonged before noticing everyone was still looking at him.

"What are you still doing here? Go on, make this boat seaworthy! Ain't no point sitting here staring at me," Nathan waved them all off to attend to the affairs they had been tasked with.