Chapter 11: Under the Cover of Darkness

Her career was turning out to be an interesting one for sure. Within one day Lizzy had gone from Assistant Chief to Acting Chief and now back again. Something to put on her resume at least. Who knew that overseeing the re-routing of deck 6 sickbays power would cause her to miss out on so much.

In truth the re-rout hadn't been as simple as a casual inspection had implied, but that was why they had in depth diagnostics. A deeper inspection had revealed that the power had been severed in the panelling between deck 6 and 7. Panelling that could only be accessed by using the ships crawl space after shimming down to in via one of the warp overload outlets. After a quick Comm's chat with a collection of the overseeing engineering officers Lizzy and Mike had set about shimming down to the crawl space.

~oOo~

"Hey Liz, would this be a bad time to tell you I think I might be claustrophobic..." Mike trailed off with a gulp on looking at the darkened crawl space.

"Well it could be worse I suppose."

"Yeah how could this be worse?" They were hanging in the Starfleet issue harnesses both sporting rather attractive neon orange uniforms. The black lettering that indicated that they were in fact engineers and not old age prison rejects was braced against the wall opposing the dark maw of the crawl space, legs bracing them so the could rest to pull out their torches.

"I saw a film like this once..." there was a flicker inside the maw and a spark of a damaged panel, "...some ship lost in space, back from a hell dimension or something." She paused and sent Mike a cheeking grin. " Brought something back with them didn't they, anyway end result they all died."

Lizzy placed the torch in her mouth, clenching it with her teeth and pushed herself towards the crawl space climbing into it with an uncharacteristically eerie grace.

"What's your point?" Mike peered after her.

"Well you're not dead." She deadpanned.

"You know that really helped, no like really." The sarcasm wasn't lost on her and she let out a slight chuckle as Mike pulled himself into the crawl space beside her.

"You know what would really help Mike."

"No."

"If you weren't staring at my butt, I am technically your superior now. Your worse than Kirk sometimes I swear it." The attempt to give him a stern look was tempered by the back glow of her torch.

Mike scoffed and attempted to flick his hair back only for his head to bounce off one of the supporting panels. His yelp of pain was accompanied but Lizzy's giggle.

The banter continued as she shuffled their way towards the damaged panelling. That when the firs shock came. It wasn't just one panel damaged, a collection of them carried deep scaring down their length and the perpetrator was dangling from one of the steel wires. By the looks of things one of the supporting beams had broken free. That alone was stumping. Support beams were made of strong stuff, true there could have been a fault line running through the material. It happened from time to time in the manufacturing but more often than not since the new age things like this had been caught by the pre-placement analytical inspections. Even then, if they had missed in the engineers working on the building of the enterprise were top notch people in their field, she knew, she had followed the whole processes. To miss something like this, that was career damning.

"Looks like we need some..." Mikes sentence was cut off as the both launched themselves away from the plasma arch that travelled between two of the power circuits.

Lizzy fumbled with the her Comm badge as the arc bounced off the damaged panelling wires and sparked its way towards her. Mike seemed to be having similar issues and she heard his yell as he backed out of the crawl space.

Undeniably quickly she was running out of harness rope and she could almost feel the fibres of her suit giving way to the superheated bolt.

=/\= Power off to sector 34...POWER OFF NOW =/\=

She felt her voice crack as the bolt flickered to non-existence, its source of power completely dead.

All the breath escaped her lungs as her head clanged off the metal walkway.

"Liz, LIZ are you alive."

"Barely Mike, barely." She almost wanted to laugh. Her second near death experience and all in one day, one day that was quickly defining her career.

"You know it could have been worse."

"How could that have been any worse?"

"You could be dead." There was a moment of silence and then laughter echoed down the crawl space.

~oOo~

Needless to say that unexpected fireworks display had left another 6 panels damaged giving them a nice dozen to repair in the dim torchlight. Not to mention they had to re-solder the support beam that, their impromptu light show had led them to conclude, had been sliced free by the plasma arc. As such they needed a handheld generator and solder lowered to them in a sector that was completely dark.

For 40 minutes the only light had been the soldering iron and dim glow of the torches.

When they'd finally returned to the floor of deck six Lizzy had been called to engineering, something about a new Chief. Her overall were smudge and she was pretty sure that she was sporting some smouldering singes. A quick glance, and the a double take, in the reflective panelling of the turbo lift alerted her to her new make up job. She looked like a kiss reject. What a wonderful way to turn up.

As soon as she stepped through the doors of engineering she knew who she was looking at. That was Montgomery Scott, or otherwise known as the guy who killed Admiral Archers beagle. It was a hush hush secret in engineering that there had been a fail experiment that said Cadet, at the time, Scott had preformed. An experiment that would have changed space travel completely had it worked. This Montgomery Scott was so confident it would work, that allegedly, he'd tested it on Admiral Arches prized beagle. Said experiment failed to the sever anger of the poor beagles owner and that was the last she'd heard of one of the engineering departments most prised students. He'd 'disappeared' the year Lizzy had arrived so the gossip had been flowing like the proverbial river.

This was somewhat of a strange situation for Liz. Montgomery Scott, she glanced at his collar, Officer Scott was ... well a role model of hers. His ideas had sparked some of her own and she'd absorbed pretty much every paper he'd ever written. He was an inspiration and was now standing in front of her. He seemed to be apprising her and she resisted the urge to tug at the ridiculously dirty and singed overalls, or attempt to straighten her frazzled hair, or even try to clean her face. TO be honest there probably wasn't a part of her clean enough to attempt to clean her face. This was just joyful.

"Um, Sir...Acting Engineer Elizabeth Hayes reporting."

"You look like someone attacked you with a plasma torch lass." He extended a hand and Lizzy glanced at her own dirty ones shrugged and shook the mans hand. " I'm Montgomery Scott, Scotty if you would. I'm the new Chief...you were the previous assistant right?" He cocked an eyebrow at her and she answered with a nod. " Well you can keep your job then. As long as you take care of this beauty..." He laid a hand gently on the panelling of the ship, almost like a lover, "...then we should get along fine."

He spun on his heel and started to stride off. "Well come on then Elizabeth."

"Lizzy."

"What?" He paused.

"I prefer Lizzy, if you don't mind."

He turned back with a smirk. "Well come on lass, we have work to do!"

~oOo~

I didn't really know what to do with this chapter. A lot of things happened while writing it and I just sort of lost the feel of it half way through. Hopefully things will pick up again in the next one and not so much will go wrong with me so that I can actually write it. So this is a little filler for now until the next chapter and there is a high chance I'll be redoing this at some point later on. Thanks to all the follows, faves and reviews you lot are awesome!