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» LCARS » Newspaper: The Federation Tribune » Newspaper Archives » 2006 » September & October 2006 » USS Atlantis Status Report, September 2006, by Ben Versteegt.
 | USS Atlantis Status Report, September 2006, by Ben Versteegt. |  |
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Stardates:
- 2392.07.12
- 2392.07.14
Locations of the (crew of the) USS Atlantis:
- In Deasian space, approximately 2,7 light years away from the planet Helteka in the Andari system, in the Gamma Quadrant, at a position roughly 1000 light years from the wormhole.
Summary:
- 2392.07.12
On board the L'tari 3, the Starseeker, Atlantis officer Bukov and Starseeker crewman Wup had a conversation.
- 2392.07.14:
The battle between the Atlantis and the L'tari vessels on the one side and the pirates and Freedom Fighters on the other raged on. With the Atlantis still being kept busy by a large number of Freedom Fighters, the pirates were free to ransack the convoy and try to commandeer or destroy as many L'tari ships as they could.
After the L'tari 25, the Remember Edan, had practically been disabled and had been boarded by Freedom Fighters, Jomorr on the Nilav (L'tari 39) decided to lend a hand. Having docked the Nilav with the Edan, Jomorr led a team onto the Edan to take out the pirates. On board, he ran into Lieutenant Montgomery, and they made their way towards the Bridge. However, a viewport on the Bridge was in danger of breaking, which would result in the exposure of the entire first deck of the Edan to the vacuum of space.
Fortunately, emergency bulkheads had prevented this from happening, and the crew was safe. But only for the moment... The Freedom Fighters had taken over the engine room of the Edan. They destroyed the coolant systems and reactivated the warp core. This would result in an overload and eventually a warp core breach. The Edan would be completely destroyed, and so would the Nilav, if it remained docked to the Edan. The Freedom Fighters reasoned that if they couldn't take control of the ship, no one would -- they desperately didn't want the ship to reach Helteka.
While Jomorr and a team of Deasians headed to the engine room to see what they could do about the impending warp core overload, the rest of the Edan's crew was evacuated to the Nilav. The two Freedom Fighters that wanted to prevent this by shooting down everyone who tried to leave the Edan, were quickly incapacitated.
With 45 seconds left to go, Jomorr ordered the Nilav to undock, leaving him and his team stranded on the Edan. After he was forced to shoot down the Freedom Fighters, he managed to deactivate the warp core just in time. The overload was averted.
On board the L'tari 23, the T'Rinna, another countdown started. The pirate ship which had docked to the T'Rinna's third cargo bay was venting radiation. That did not only mean that the crew would have to receive inoculations when this wall over, but it also posed a different risk entirely: the cargo the T'Rinna was carrying was a substance called quaratum, which becomes dangerously unstable and explodes at a radiation level of 350 rads.
While Lieutenant Rofellian and most of the Deasian crew were left behind to keep the pirates at bay (even though the pirates had greater numbers), Commander Velden, Ensign Andrusia and a Deasian crewmember called Wana rushed to the emergency control room to disconnect the entire cargo bay three module from the T'Rinna. It involved switching gears, turning wheels and pulling levers, but they eventually succeeded -- again, just in time. The entire cargo bay three module, together with the pirate ship, exploded not much later, only scratching the T'Rinna instead of destroying the ship.
On board the Jatmey, Kadar's ship, the Doctor pondered the decisions she had made during recent events. The attempted mutiny by Doctor Zeiss and the commandeering of her ship by pirates were hard to forget. On top of that, she and her crew were far from certain that they were going to survive the next few minutes...
The Atlantis, meanwhile, was facing problems of her own. After having scared away the pirate ships, the Freedom Fighters seemed no match for the mighty Atlantis... But what their ships lacked in strength, their Captains made up for in determination. Captain Waar, the Freedom Fighter captain of the 'Valour', set a collision course with the Atlantis. Intending to ram the Federation starship, she believed that would take out the Atlantis and enable the rest of the Freedom Fighters to go after the convoy.
She hadn't taken into account the Atlantis' tractor beam, however. The beam kept the Valour at bay, but Waar was pushing her ship's engines to their limits, putting quite a strain on the tractor beam emitters. What was more, Waar activated some sort of auto-destruct sequence on her ship. The anti-matter explosion would damage the Atlantis severely enough on its own, but the Valour also had shipments of tricobalt in its cargo bays. The resulting explosion would be enormous... and it might very well take out the Atlantis.
With only two minutes to go, Captain Torn ordered the Atlantis to push the Valour into the minefield, away from the L'tari convoy. Slowly but surely, the Valour and the Atlantis entered the minefield, their movement hampered by the overloading engines of the Valour, which was trying to push them back. When the Valour's impulse engines finally shut down, the Atlantis was able to push the ship further into the nebula, even within range of the installation which generated the subspace distortion field...
But by that time, there were only seconds left. The Valour's anti-matter containment field failed (as planned by Waar), and the ship exploded, igniting the tricobalt and lighting the area in a fiery burst of bright, destructive flames...
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