RP: YSS Eucharis [Mission 12.2] Interception

Engineering

Takeyu let out a small sigh of relief, then turned toward Yaichiro. "No idea whether it was us who were able to get CFS online or if the system recovered on its own, regardless engines should be working now," he then glanced back at his display before bringing up an overview of the ships damage and quickly got out of his chair.

He ran over to a kit that was stuffed near the door and picked it up. "I'll get right to work on repairing what I can, call me if you need me to take care of any specific area of the ship," he then disappeared through the maintenance hatch, since the maindoor way was blocked by a blast door as per condition one alert status.

Just then, the NMX reinforcement fleet began to arrive. The pinkish, bumpy looking ships were pouring into the system en masse. There were at least three ships heading towards Ether.

Bridge

"Move away," Hanako ordered the squadron. She was not going to throw their ships away.

Unfortunately, the NMX ships paused for a moment to start hunting for Eucharis. After all, the ship was a high value target. Ramiro saw them attempting to surround the ship and using lasers and other means to try to create a detection zone.

Bridge

Sune was grateful for the restraints in the bridge chairs keeping him secure. The collapse of the CFS and multiple power overloads was troubling.

"Damage control teams, assess damage to CFS which is priority and advise with estimate of repair time." he sent over the PA.

With the new threat he started a visual scan for anything that they might exploit to get past the laser detection. He looked to see if any of the ships they had engaged had been rendered dead in the water, if they could find something they could hid in the shadow of they could try to use that. But it was not looking promising.

Takeyu let out a frustrated sigh as he crawled through the maintenance conduit and toward the portside CFS room. He slide open the panel and looked inside, then eased himself into the room.

With his helmet on, he couldn't smell anything that would indicate a burnt system, but he didn't need to smell anything to know what was damaged.

He saw that the generator was operating as it should; but what caught his eyes was when he removed two of the panels and saw fried wiring and burnt circuits. Stuff that was easy to replace and wouldn't take him no more than a minute to accomplish.

Taking his laptop out and setting it up; he started up a diagnostic of the CFS systems to see if there was anything wrong that he couldn't readily see with his own eyes.

"Nayacesen to Bridge, portside CFS appears to be in relatively good shape. A few blown wires and some circuits, should take only a minute if not two to repair. I'll move on to starboard CFS once I'm done here," he then stopped moved his kit over to the first panel and began to work on removing and replacing the blown wires.

Ramiro watched as the main force began showing up in the system. "Uhm...Well shit, we're in a tight spot here Taisa. Moving away won't be the easiest thing." He started running through ideas in his mind, not being able to come up with much.

"Well, there's no way we're just flying out of here. We're going to need to trick them or cause some sort of distractions. The best distraction would be to use the Electronic Warfare Suite to create a fake fleet that would fold in behind the NMX group. It wouldn't distract them for long, but it would get us out of here. As far as tricking them, we could create several dozen fake Eucharis' within their detection grid and have them all scatter while meanwhile our cloaked ship could slip by. Or we could always uncloak and drift out with the clones, it really depends on if we think they'll fall for the bait."

"Damn," Hanako whispered to herself. The NMX ships moved in closer.

"Try it, Ramiro. It is better than nothing."

Just then, some of the lead NMX ships launched barrage of subspace torpedoes at them; each blossomed into a huge blue-rimmed sphere. Two of the spheres managed to make contact with the Eucharis' CFS system, causing the lights to flicker and alarms to go off as the CFS went down again.

Sparks flew in Takeyu's face as the equipment hissed and crackled in front of him.

Worse yet, a swarm of ghostly Mishhuvurthyar were closing in to board the Eucharis.

Bridge

Sune's monitor flashed with the status of the stricken gunship. He grabbed the intercom handset and dialed ship wide. "Damage Control Teams, CFS has priority. Engineering give us maximum power to the Auxiliary Engines. All Hands Prepare to repel boarders. Repeat we have Mishhu approaching the ship. Be especially alert in compartments with structural damage."

Meanwhile Sune set the anti-armor cannons to target the approaching enemy. As the cannons fired Sune watched with consternation as the blasts went through the enemy. He scanned them with more detail.

"Taisa, these mishhu seem to be able to phase, without out shields they can breach us if we can't out run them." he said looking at Hanako.

Ramiro began frantically typing in commands, intent on bringing the EWS to the edge of its limits. First he created a small fake fleet of about a dozen ships, although he didn't have time to plug in what type of ships they would be. Figuring that would distract the enemies attention he then created about a dozen copies of the Eucharis and sent them in different directions. At the same time that he created the copies he uncloaked the ship and turned the ship to start banking towards the left. Meanwhile, of the clones followed the trajectory that the ship had previously been heading.

"It's done Taisa. Hopefully they'll be distracted enough by the fleet that they will be confused by the clones and thus lose the ship in the frenzy. Just in case, I've got one final trick up my sleeve."

Ramiro quickly started working, fingers flying as he punched in code. As long as he didn't make an error then his plan would work. The idea was that whenever the first cloned Eucharis was hit then all of the other clones would dissipate and the Eucharis would re-cloak. That single remaining clone would lose engine function as if the hit had taken out the engines, thus drawing the attention of the boarding parties to the clone while the Eucharis slipped by.

Ramiro just hopped that the Warfare Suite would be able to handle all of those images being projected and having to simulate the damage to the cloned ships. Not to mention the fact that it would have to cloak the enemy's weapons fire once it hits the fake ship, since in reality the shots would just go through the clone and keep going.

Let's just pray that I didn't confuse the hell out of the computer...

The huge mass of NMX ships opened fire on the Eucharis and every copy, making sure to hit them all. The ship shuddered violently as it was hit several times, gouging deep gashes into the hull.

Takeyu had backed off from the equipment, but his hands despite being gloved were in pain from the electrical surges that he had caught when he was putting in some of the new wires at the time.

Shaking his left hand for a moment he put on his business look and started inspecting the circuitry to see what new troubles he had to contend with. "More blown wires, more blown circuits, geez... can the NMX at least give us a breather?" he shook his head at the rehectorical question and glanced over his shoulder toward the still functional generator.

Then he turned back toward the new damage and started getting to work. He pulled out the blown out wires and threw them aside, then replaced them with new ones. Connecting and splicing them in place before concentrating on the circuit boards.

Looking into his kit, he saw that while he had the circuits and spare wires to replace that which had been blown, he didn't have enough. He glanced up at the bulkheads and listened, there was the hum and erractic sound of the engines being put through their paces.

Turning his attention back he replaced several more boards in the projector system then switched off removing the burned wires and replacing those as well. Then his attention was turned over to another part of the system, this part controlled the shields and he saw that much like elsewhere in the room, blown wires and circuits galore.

"Don't worry girl," he patted the deck and started replacing those circuits and wires as well. When he was done he glanced back around the room, destroyed wires and circuit boards that he had pulled from the various systems littered the floor but he was confident those wouldn't pose any problems. Backing away from the system he had just repaired, he then walked over to another system and got to work on it.

Engineering

Yaichiro strained a bit to stay upright, feeling the ship lurch from the impacts, and gritted his teeth...they wouldn't survive like this. He used MEGAMI to contact the bridge and Junko, and start relying a damage report and orders...he didn't like giving orders on another person's ship, but it seemed necessary.

"Losing antimatter containment on the starboard containment chamber's field, coolant leak for main power lines at starboard as well. We've lost further connections to the port CFS. Damage to port Auxilury Engine. Disabling Antimatter synthesis on starboard, preparing to jettison pod.

Ramiro, get me a firing solution for jettisoning the starboard containment chamber unless the Taisa or the XO objects. If they're not so close to the Eucharis as to catch us in the blast radius, I want to jettison this thing in the way that damages as many enemy ships and potential boarders as possible! Takeda, I'm recalling you from Fire Control to technician duty since there are three others to handle that. Get that port CFS online! I'll keep trying to re-route the main power through various auxiliary lines and turn off the coolant to that line. Isolating environmental functions within affected area to prevent escape into ship's atmosphere, no personnel in coolant leak location. Auxilury engines available at 82% output starboard, 58% output port."

Yaichiro's fingers danced across the screen, trying to follow Sune's orders, amended as needed given the damage taken since he gave them, and trying to keep the situation as under control as possible. He only hoped he wasn't overstepping the bounds of his authority. Yaichiro generally hated to do so on someone else's ship...but Hanako seemed out of ideas.

Bridge

The Eucharis blinked shimmering teal as Hanako initiated a very short space fold to temporarily get them out of the enemy field of fire. Unfortunately, due to the strain on the power systems, they would not be able to charge the fold system for another jump, or use the main cannon.

"Bring us about to face the enemy. Ramiro, can you give us another illusion? This time use something convincing like the First Fleet showing up, not a bunch of copies of us," Hanako ordered.

"Bridge to Yaichiro, the anti-matter containment vessels are stuck."

Bridge

Sune was once again grateful for the restraint harness of his chair, even if it hurt having it dig into his flesh. It was far better than being slammed into the console or worse to the deck.

The Systems Status Board was a mass of flicking status indicators, with the predominant colors being yellow and red. A number of the external turrets were offline, most likely blasted to non-function in the last volley.

"Losing antimatter containment on the starboard containment chamber's field..." from Yaichiro's report from Engineering caught Sune's attention, but there was nothing he could do about that, the Engineer and his people were far more qualified to address that.

Hanako's micro-fold bought them some time, but the Eucharis was not going to out run any serious pursuit. Sune's fingers flew across the console as he sent multiple queries and worked to find solutions. A check of the cargo hold inventory showed that the fighter Hanako had previously was not present. But there were several Spanner Drones. Sune sent a command for them to deploy.

There were several formidable if not incongruous items on the inventory. A Tasha and a Troll, both formidable in their own right but not of much use against starships.

He listened to Hanako's suggestion for Ramiro to use the EWS to create an illusion of the 1XF arriving. That might buy them a little time, but it would not take long for the NMX to realize that it was another illusion, provided they did not decide to blast the Eucharis just out of spite and then try to run.

"Aye Taisa, I'll do my best." Ramiro started plugging in commands for the 1XF into the Electronic Warfare Suite. This one was a little easier than the other commands he had done earlier since most of that data was already on file. Once it was compiled he started the command cycle and watched as the fake fleet started folding in around the Eucharis. Meanwhile, warning tabs started opening on his console. "Alright Taisa, it's done, but the Warfare Suite won't hold out much longer. We've been working that thing at full capacity for several minutes and the cooling systems simply can't keep up with the heat output."

CFS Systems

Takeyu visibly bite his lower lip, he had finished up with the portside CFS and was crawling through the maintenance conduits to the starboard side when he saw an engineering report about the anti-matter containment field. Son of a...

He hurried to the starboard CFS system and threw him into the room and looked around, his quick eyes spotted plenty of stuff he could fix but his concern was the containment field.

Moving over to the system, he knelt down beside the main four panels and took them off. Electrical damage inside of the system is what greeted him, not all surprising considering what he had seen on the portside.

What also caught his eye was the backup systems for the containment field, under more circomstances if the primary containment field was losing strength the backups systems would come online - in this case the backup system itself was offline due in part to the electrical damage and also a damaged regulator. When he removed it, he noticed that he could get it working again, but it would require some jury-rigging.

"Takeyu to Engineering, backup containment system is offline I am performing repairs on it now. Primary system is online, but it's suffered quite a bit of damage from these attacks, I am repairing it as much as I can." Takeyu sent and wiped his face plate while he worked on fixing the system, removing dead and destroyed circuits and replacing them with fresh ones while also finding a way to fix the system when he actually lacked some of the components to do so. "Jury-rigging, I love it," a broad grin fell onto his face as he glanced up at the bulkhead.

As the First Expeditionary Fleet began to gather up behind the Mishhuvurthyar forces, this time they we able to detect that Eucharis was in fact using volumetrics so they ignored the new ships and continued to try to corral and capture the Eucharis, seeking it out with graviton beams.

Suddenly, an immense wall of aether and anti-matter beams showered the distracted NMX fleet. The actual First Expeditionary Fleet and First Fleet had arrived! Positioned to give their largest broadsides or along centerline cannons, Taisho Yui's fleet was "crossing the T" of the NMX forces and flanking the NMX ships from behind their engines. As the NMX ships began to scatter and better reposition themselves, Eucharis found herself free again. Better yet, the Star Army was turning the tide of the battle with its surprise attack and a 5 to 3 ship ratio.

Bridge

Hanako called down to main engineering. "See if you can get the main cannon back online after the anti-matter is ejected from the starboard side. We can still fight."

She turned to Sune after hanging up. "If not, we can always join the battle on the surface."

Deck 3 Corridor

Reika rushed down one of the ships corridors ahead of the damage control group consisting of Armundo, Cherry and herself, all of whom were attempting to locate ascertain and isolate the most critically damaged that were disrupting the systems of the Eucharis.

Unfortunately, Reika's skills were rather limited in regards to ship maintenance and repair, so she could provide little technical assistance on her own. As she moved along, she used a canister of fire suppression foam on an exposed conduit that had blown due to a power overload caused by battle damage. The conduit kept sparkling and releasing small arcs of electrical energy to areas in close proximity.

The damage sensors in this section must be off-line or malfunctioning if this conduit is still receiving power, Reika thought to herself. She tried moving in closer to assess the damage and considered how she would proceed.

The operative then glanced at the serial number printed beside a conduit, and chose to send a verbal message across the engineering communication channels as well as to the rest of the damage control team located nearby.

"Engineering team-- this is Tachihara-Hei on damage control. The primary power conduit in Deck 3, Section 13-A has ruptured due to what appears to be an overload. Whilst damaged, the conduit is still active and it seems like it is hemorrhaging a significant amount of energy into the surrounding deck -- I'm guessing that the conduit's damage sensors and remote control mechanisms are also malfunctioning due to proximity when it ruptured. The exposed conduit is likely inhibiting the functions of key local systems like the CFS, so I'm going to try and perform a manual shutdown -- I would suggest being careful when trying to re-route power through the adjacent secondary conduits, I doubt they can take much strain if they are overtaxed right now."

Reika -- using a tool from her portable repair kit -- pried open the fried power junction control mechanism near to the exposed conduit and after a few moments she believed she had located the circuit breaker switch.

"Okay Engineering... I'm flipping the circuit breaker now -- you're going to have to redistribute the power from your end." She flipped the switch, and the flickering illumination panels winked out and the nearby electrical discharges abruptly ceased whilst Reika was left weightless in the powered down section until the engineering team redistributed the electrical energy. With precise movements, Reika pulled herself along the corridor wall by the rungs in an attempt to rejoin the rest of her damage control team.

EDIT: Didn't notice Takeda had been recalled to technician duty -- removed references to her.

Bridge

Sune let out a brief sigh, "That was definitely cutting it close. My compliments to the Taisho on her excellent timing." he said to no one in particular.

He looked at the status indicators there was no real change for the better. "Well, the Eucharis took a beating, but we live to fight another day. Before the NMX decided to just kill us I was about to suggest that if Engineering is unable to stop the containment failure for the anti-matter. We could take the Tasha out on the hull and cut it out from the outside and toss it."

He picked up the Handset, "All hands secure from Condition 1 and go to Condition 2. Damage Control efforts by all available hands should continue."

He checked his suit meter and seeing that for once the bridge was still sound, cracked the seal on his helmet and removed it.

"Taisa, I would like to recommend Kage-Chusa for a commendation. Even though he was brought aboard in an advisory role, he has repeatedly served with distinction in our conflicts taking charge of Engineering and coordinating the crew there." He said facing Hanako.

Takeyu mentally cursed himself while he was repairing the primary containment, a lesson that all techs were taught, yet in his haste he had nearly made a mistake so critical it could've costed his life. He was replacing boards in the primary containment system 'while' the system was online, he had only four boards to go before he realized his potentially fatal mistake and backed away from the system to check himself over.

"Stupid..." he said with a shake of his head and switched back to working on the offline backup systems. "I'll get this fixed 'then' I'll work on the primary," he muttered before he heard a gentle hum of electrical energy somewhere in the area.

He glanced over his shoulder and could see some of the power coupling to the various systems comign to life. He tapped a few keyes on his ICP, seeing several of the nearby systems coming online with gentle running noises. With a faint smile, he grabbed the power regulator he had just fixed up, jury-rigged for the most part and carefully slid it into place.

His expression was a mixture of annoyance and anger, he didn't like how there was no warning of power being restored to an area of the ship while a tech was repairing a critical system, but he let that slide considering he made a potentially fatal mistake himself. Though he still planned on talking to whomever it was that did that, provided he ever found out.

After letting the diagnostic run its course, getting an ok from his ICP, he sent a message to Charisma to bring the backup systems online - and hoped that his work would pay off. He picked up his kit and crouched down near the hatch leading back into the maintenance conduit, and just waited to see whether the system held or would suddenly sputter and fail.

After being around as a sort of useless appendage to the bridge crew, Helen removed the helmet of her AMES suit and let out a sigh. It was one astounding bout of pointlessness. Why did they find themselves tossed into the middle of an alien species' downright stupid display of bravado? What was next, was the crew expected to wipe their noses too? It left Helen feeling quite bitter at the fact that she could have ended up losing a very valuable body for the purposes of appeasing inter-species relations. Even worse, it seemed that the NMX were quite intent on getting their hands on the ship... more likely than anything though, they wanted to get their hands on the crew, and it left Helen to wonder just how her future prospects were lined up if the Eucharis would not get to port any time soon.