Getting The Message Out

Posted on Thu Sep 10th, 2020 @ 9:26pm by Lieutenant Bianca Lee

Mission: Into The Delta Triangle
Location: Kessik IV: In the mines

Bianca set the PADD up so as to let the integral camera catch as much of the mine behind her and the bustle of activity as she could. As she looked into it, she got a look at her face, dirty though it was, and made a quick swipe across it with her sleeve, merely smearing it. She huffed with disgust and put some bit of a smile on her face.

"This message is being transmitted to all Federation personnel in the hopes someone gets it. It's a one-way message, as the industrial replicator Ah'm sending it from has no ability to receive a reply." She sighed, "This is Lieutenant Lee of the USS Astraea, there has been an explosion and cave-in here in the trilithium mines. There are approximately fifty survivors trapped here, a handful pretty serious. Lieutenant Hernandez is tending to them and we have made contact with a foreman named Bullgruff who wants to pass on the message to 'Hurry the hell up.'"

She took a deep breath, "Ah'm going to try to restore the replicator to full proper functionality so that we can keep supplied with food and water and try to work our way out in conjunction with the rest of the mining crew. However, Bullgruff is under the belief that it's safer for a passage to be made by the outside toward the inwards to prevent another cave-in. Ah'll also try to restore some semblance of contact with the outside that isn't through the power cable of a replicator. Kinda cool, huh?"

She glanced back, "Wish Ah was an engineer now, might make more of a difference. We'll stay strong. Lee out." She tapped the button on the PADD to stop the recording and rocked back on her haunches, picking it up and tapping several buttons to encode it into the smallest packet she could. She hooked the PADD up to the replicator and brought up the transmission program that was really just a bastardization of the comm protocols to use the outbound regulation signal to piggyback off of.

She set it to autotransmit before gently handling the best of the chips she had reprogrammed and uploaded the same comm protocols to. All she needed was about a tenth of a second of transmission, as she'd kept the message short. She stayed as far away as she could and slid the chip in. It all happened in the matter of a second and a half: The telltale whine of the console powering up, one beep from the PADD saying that the message was sent, then the back of the replicator exploded again, sparks flying and the replicator went back offline.

Bianca clutched her left hand, now sporting some burns, to her chest as she used her right hand to grab the PADD and let out the held breath as she noted it had been sent and there were three notices of receipt of transmission before it had been cut off abruptly. "Right. Now, time to get this thing back up and going. She gingerly pulled the now toasted chip out from it's slot and inspected the console again, another sigh of relief when she saw the chip had taken the damage with the power buffers doing their job. Thirty minutes? "Yeah, thirty minutes, maybe an hour and I've got this." She said, flexing her left hand fingers as she got to work on fulfilling her promise to Bull.