U.S.S. Merrimac [engineering]

[tomcat]

Ramos was called over to the main engineering work console, although it was already his destination. He had heard Downer's call over the ship's intercom regarding the crash of the Aladdin. He walked up to the multiple screen console and looked at the data feed that was being transmitted from the shuttle back to her mother ship.

Ramos sighed, "Well they have a lot of work to do over there. Let's see what we can do to help."

That said, he and his team began to pour over the data to see if there was any effective way to send help to the landing party.

[sdrotar]

Ramos assigned a team to investigate how to best repair the Aladdin, while he called up the plans for the Merrimac, hoping that he could find a way that the boarding party could get the ship's hangar bay doors open - and keep them that way.

[tomcat]

Ramos looked at the schematics of the Constitution's secondary hull with the shuttle bay prominently centered in his screen. It took the engineer all of two minutes to find the answer to the situation. Every starship had emergency evacuation systems which included small charges that allowed airlocks or viewports to be blown out. The same was true of the large hangar doors. Even if the power was cut, the charges could be activated and would literally blow the doors off their tracks and out into space. It would be a permanent way for them to open the hangar and keep it that way. Of course, if environment were restored on the crippled ship, there would be no way to make the hangar habitable again.

[sdrotar]

"Ramos to bridge." After receiving his reply, he relayed his explanation to the captain. "Those doors should come off easily enough, sir - the explosive charges are self-contained and don't require ship's power. Plus, they're refined enough that they shouldn't pose much of a risk to personnel centered in the hangar bay."

They were for emergency evacuation, after all, and it was assumed that many of the ship's personnel would be in the hangar bay, so blowing them up along with the doors would defeat the purpose.

"But of course, if we do that, the bay will be in hard vacuum; we'll need EVA suits to get any personnel from the hangar's airlock to the shuttle's... assuming that the hangar's airlock is still functional, of course."

[tomcat]

Ramos heard Downer's voice come back to him through the speaker, "Thank you Mr. Ramos. I will inform the captain of the option. Stand by."

[tomcat]

Ramos had been aware of the power surge and his staff had been running diagnostics over the last fifteen minutes. Their requests and computer responses were displayed on the bridge at Mr. Downer's station, as he ran his own level 4 diagnostic.

"Environmental Engineering to Engineering. Mr. Ramos... can you dispatch a team down here? We are having some irregular malfunctions with our doors... thanks."

Juan did not hear the comm, his mind in multiple places at once, but one of his engineers had, and called him over. Ramos looked up from the PADD and towards the junior crewman who spoke, "Sir, it seems Life support is having some doors go hinky."

The Chief Engineer scowled at the word 'hinky'... he would have to advise his staff that slang words did not help in solving problems.

[sdrotar]

"The doors..." Ramos pondered what could be going wrong there. The function of the ship's doors was so low-level, it was rarely even considered. Motion-sensing doors had been around for hundreds of years, and they were now essentially foolproof.

The fact that the doors weren't working properly, but everything was, seemed odd. Odd enough for him to investigate what else might be linked to the door subroutines. This problem was annoying, to be sure - he wanted to make sure that it didn't turn into anything else.

He sat down at his computer and began to call up schematics.

[donimator]

Message from Downer {bridge} -
"Chief Ramos, I think the Enviro controls have been infiltrated through a data link with the Merrimac. I'm going to initiate a primary system lockdown. Please have your crew monitor secondary systems for anomalies."

[sdrotar]

"Agreed, Mr. Downer," Ramos replied. That made as much sense as anything. The doors were essentially foolproof.
He notified his personnel of the situation and started searching the systems, hoping to find when any breach may have occurred.

[tomcat]

Ramos began to run through the sub-routines of many of the systems, as Downer had done not ten minutes prior. The Engineer watched for signs of irregular fluctuations in processes within the primary and redundant programs. He concentrated his efforts on all systems linked to the environmental department and the simple functions of door operations.

He typed in a standard command operation for the Columbia's computer to purge all prior cached data and to reset itself, when suddenly his screen went bright. The monitor began to fill with long strings of programming, writing over other system code and deleting it from the operations. It was essentially a computerized version of static that would soon fill up the entire program and make it nothing but noise to the primary core - no longer understood and thus completely inoperable!

If it spread to other ship systems, they could be in real danger!

[sdrotar]

Without waiting for orders, Ramos immediately sequestered that system on the software level and called out to the nearest engineer... what was her name...

"Williamson! We have a computer core breach and it's spreading quickly. Right now, it's in the door subsystems. I want you to manually disengage that portion of the computer processing door from the rest of our mainframe immediately. We'll use the manual door override in the meantime. Notify me when that's complete - I'll be on the bridge."