"Sacrifice"

The crew of the Phoenix were overjoyed to celebrate the wedding of Lieutenant JG. Amy Olson and Lieutenant JG. Malcolm Parsons. It was during the afterparty that it was noticed that the ship – travelling at warp – was being tailed by another vessel. With the craft rapidly catching up the Phoenix crew attempted to hail the vessel but it was to no avail. All crew were called away from the wedding and straight to battle stations. The Phoenix dropped out of warp to force the craft to overshoot them, only to find it turning around again. It began rapidly circling the Phoenix – and when a tractor beam was used against it, it retaliated with a beam of blinding red light. Some sort of heat-ray weapon, it began to drain the shields and alter the ship’s structural integrity. When an attempt to hack the offending craft was made it only resulted in a virus being sent back to Phoenix, knocking out lights and communications. With the warp core’s integrity declining it was debated whether they should eject the core, but if they did then the faster craft would have them there like a sitting duck. It was decided that they needed to disable the engines of the other craft so they could not chase after the Phoenix if they jumped back to warp once more.

With science and operations working together to drain the shields of the craft and tactical focussing fire on the engines, it gave the helm the opportunity to plot a course into space displaying the location of allies. Fire suppressant systems eventually turned on, a sure-fire sign that the ship was becoming unstable. The modified fire-shuttle was also deployed in order to externally attempt to halt the hull’s temperature increase. With engineering working to make the core stable enough for them to perform a jump, the ship was about to execute the manoeuvre when a warning flagged up to say an engineer was still within the hub. With the casing to the warp core cracked it would have meant that the ship would never make it – and that engineer would not make it, either. Finding out that Lieutenant Parsons – newly-wedded and the engineer in the hub – had an EV suit on, he was ordered to donn it and do his best to repair the damage so they could make it out safely. The ship made it back to friendly territory but the unidentified craft began to follow; only to be halted by the now-familiar, spectral phoenix entity that seemed to arrive whenever a person died. It was as such that the announcement came through that Lieutenant Parsons had not survived due to a leak in his EV suit. With Lieutenant Olson cradling his body and the ship in silence as they mourned, something seemed to change. The phoenix entity swept around the ship’s hull, seemingly burning up – and a moment later, surrounded by stardust, Lieutenant Malcolm Parsons came back to life. The ship, aided by the USS Inglis and IKS H’thothmigh, then returned to ESD for repairs.