Saturday September 4th 2021
Lieutenant Commander Carl Hedley Executive Officer
Lieutenant Commander Ezekiel “Zeke” Pride Flight Controller
Lieutenant Elli-Navine Chief Engineer
Lieutenant Alexander Artopolis Chief Medical Officer
Lieutenant Scott McIntyre Chief Tactical/Security Officer
Lieutenant Reeza Ral Chief Operations Officer
Podcast: To Boldly Roll The (Mis)Adventures of the USS Potemkin
While returning from a side mission the Away team picks up a distress call. It would take them off course and they were only flying the Potemkin’s only Delta Flyer they are duty bound to investigate. They arrive at the source just a few hours later and find a massive somewhat ominous looking ship silhouetted against the iridescent and turbulent gas giant. Scans of the ship show that there are life signs, but they are unable to narrow down anything better than ‘everywhere’, large machinery and storage bins suggest that the ship is a mining vessel. There is no sign of a warp drive or indeed any other ftl drive they are familiar with.
Boarding the ship, they head for the bridge first. The ship is dark and cold, there is a presence that none of the away team can pin down. Just a sense of being watched, of uneasiness. Their arrival in the ships command centre does nothing to ease these feelings, the walls are covered in blood, far more than any one person has, closer inspection by the Doctor shows that there are eight donors to this carnage.
Doing their best to ignore the implications of so much blood they get to work restoring power to the consoles, or at least one of them so they can investigate. Elli and Ral managed to hock up a portable generator and get the command station working, Ral manages to get the last few seconds of the final captain log to play. Admit the terrible screams but a signal phrase is spoken. “Libera te tutemet ex inferis” latin, translated into “save yourself from hell”. There is silence among the away team, then their tricorders bleep, they had just detected a gravity wave, its source seems to be coming from the ships power core, or maybe the drive core. It’s unknown which
They enter into the engine room, a room filled with consoles and a large door that led to the core room. The pulses of energy that had plagued the crew were getting stronger and coming faster. They had to shut the core down before it built to an unknown reaction. As they moved to shut the core down, they find they need to pull four super conductors that allow for the core to work in the firstplace. In a flash, the three spinning rings surrounding the core align and a bright white ‘sphere’ appears, each of them suffer a night terror like vision. Basin falls to his knees as his overwhelms him.It passes, the rings start spinning again and the vision stop. They pull out the conductors, each a meter tall and half meter across. As the last of the cylinder-shaped conductors is removed the rings stopped spinning, grinding to a halt now they were no longer powered.
It is decided that they would leave at this point, too much wrong had happened upon this ship but as they head back down the connecting corridor, they notice that explosive charges that line each of the three corridors are now active. They rush back towards the front of the ship and as the Elli passes the blast doors, it closes behind her just as the explosives exploded cutting the ship in half.
They manage to return to the runabout, which was on the other half of the ship. Both halves were now rapidly descending into the upper wasps of the Gas Giants atmosphere. They managed to get away from the ship but the away team, doing one last scan before they allow the ship to fall into the crushing depths below; they find three life forms in the forward section.
Once again, with caution they board the ship, this time to find the three people. Maybe they could shed light on what happened. What they found was even more shocking than a bridge painted in blood. Three humanoids lay upon morgue like slabs, each of them had been cut open, their innards suspended above them, the worse part, they were still alive. The medical bays technology was keeping them alive. Thankfully they were not awake.
Getting to work quickly the Doctor managed to stabilise them readying them for transport back to the runabout and in turn the Potemkin.
Aftermath:
The Potemkin wasn’t equipped to deal with the level of trauma that the three survivors had suffered, they were placed in stasis until the Manticore could take them to a starbase. They would need more treatment and would most likely need to see a psychologist as well.
The Two halves of the mining ship quickly descended, the front end settled a few thousand miles below the rolling clouds and crushing atmosphere. But in a flash of blinding light, and a pulse of gravity waves the back end disappeared into the unknown!