Under Construction
Despite the inaugural resolve ceremony, many of the civilian hubs are still nowhere near internal completion and it is Mixie's task, as Chief Engineer, to make sure the civilian contractors keep to their time scales and budgets. A section of the hubs are destined to be a city within the space station, providing a home for the civilian personnel required for manning a universal space port and more importantly, a base for colonising this new, uncharted sector of the universe. Mixie checks her schedule, she has to inspect a quadrant of new metro apartments which should be finished on the StarVale hub. The contractors, Makeship Inc. is one of the largest working on Sentinel and one with the largest amount of out-sourced workers, making it fraught with agency and union pay negotiations, wildcat strikes and working practises which often fall far short of Starfleet regulations.
The inter-lift doors open and Mixie steps out into what can only be described as chaos and not the tranquil, boulevard decks featured on the hologram ads promoting StarVale home ownership across the universe. She searches for the Makeship rep who should have met her but he is nowhere to be seen and so she starts to inspect the metro apartments on her own. Soon the list of fails is longer than the passes and it is clear the building work is way below minimum safety standards. The whole section of apartments would have to ripped out and started over. As far as Mixie could tell, the place was an accident waiting to happen.
Anger and annoyance are beginning to eat in to Mixie as she climbs through each apartment. It is clear Makeship Inc. has cut corners on quality to the detriment of safety and it is the kind of work ethic Mixie, as both a Volelian and a Starfleet Officer, finds abhorrent. She is about to give it up as a bad job and simply condemn the whole section, when the apartment she is in starts to shake and the sound of grinding, stressed alloys gives way to the loud roaring of a superstructure failure. Mixie tries to run out past the collapsing bulkheads with the rest of the workers but she is not quick enough and her way is blocked by falling subsections, crossbeams and mouldings. The chain of lights illuminating the apartments flickers and dims to nothing and Mixie is left, trapped in the dark.
She reaches for her flash light and shines the beam around the cramped space she finds herself in. She carefully inspects the ceiling and checks for any signs of instability but it looks secure enough, then she shines it on the wall of rubble blocking the exit. She tries to move some but it is solidly wedged tight. Mixie is about to use her communicator to call for an emergency teleportation rescue when a sound attracts her attention. Somewhere, near the base of a pile of fallen rubble, is the sound of tapping. Mixie crouches down to get nearer the sound, there is no doubt about it, a regular rhythm, three taps, a space and then three more taps. Mixie wonders how much air is left in the small space she is in as she carefully looks for two pieces of metal to tap a reply with. She finds a thin tube for running cabling and remembering the rolled up toolkit she carries with her at all times, she finds a suitable wrench and starts to tap back a reply.
The sound echoes dully in the cramped space and Mixie cannot work out if the tapping sound she is hearing is in reply to her or not. She remembers her communicator and calls the bridge. There is no reply. She tries engineering, again no reply. It looks as though she is well and truly stuck and she checks the time. No one would expect her back from the inspection for another hour. She sighs and starts tapping on the tube again. Hoping a construction worker on the other side might hear.
Numbers stops mapping the sector he is working on and glances over at Elenah, still engrossed in her work. He quietly switches his console from a map of a far constellation to the schematics of the space station and enters in his access code. He searches for the areas still under construction, enjoying seeing the way his designs are taking shape in reality. As he scans the new hubs his attention is caught by a strange tapping noise in StarVale, and as his mind connects and explores the sub-structural systems in that area he finds something is not right at all with that part of the hub. Something is, in fact, very wrong indeed.