Star Trek: Elite Force II Diaries Part Three

This is my exploration of Star Trek: Elite Force II where I will chronicle my playthrough like a text-based Let’s Play. Now let’s continue Star Trek: Elite Force II…

Lieutenant Munro’s personal log, Stardate 57038.3. Arriving at the USS Dallas (NCC-2019), I led a Hazard Team over, consisting of En.s Chell, Franklin, and Jurot. Artificial gravity was out in the cargo hold we beamed into, and upon scanning a large hole in the hull, Chell suggested that something biological ate its way inside the ship.

Our first priority was restoring gravity to make it easier to navigate the ship. After using a console and my tricorder to reroute auxiliary power, we gained access to the shuttlebay next door, though since the doors wouldn’t open I had to continue through into the next cargo hold to find a Jefferies Tube access hatch. Suddenly, something scurried away on the gantry near the ceiling, and I didn’t catch much of a glimpse of them!

After trying to see what it was, thanks to the still-low gravity, I entered the Jefferies Tube by cranking the manual door release handle. It led me into a turbolift shaft, and I spotted a tail escaping upwards before I could get too close. I jumped across the gap, entered the Tubes on the other side and made my way down to an emergency panel which controlled the gravity subsystems. After hacking it, I went back to the shaft and saw a turbolift plummet down a couple of decks suddenly. However, it had moved out of the way of a ladder, which I used to access the Tubes which I had seen the entity use.

In the cargo hold below, Chell was concerned that the deck below his feet might suddenly drop out if the creatures ate it, and Franklin was wondering if I was supposed to be wandering off on my own, as the leader and most important one. Chell basically shrugged in response. Locating a room with a functioning console, I restored partial power to the section and the doors opened.

Franklin said that we had to get to Engineering to restore more power, though he didn’t say which deck that was on. The door label said that we were on Deck 3, and most ship designs put Engineering further away from the bridge than Deck 3… As we followed a hallway, a corpse was dragged into a hole in the wall by something that sounded slimy. Speaking of, as we entered a lounge, several enemy blips appeared on the tricorder, converging on our position! But then they disappeared.

Blasting our way through a door, we reached Engineering (roughly 10 decks higher than it should have been), but the doors were locked. Franklin said that we could get to the other side if we used the Jefferies Tubes and went through an observation lounge, so off I went. I finally got a semi-decent look at one of the creatures, though it was through night vision as it ran away. They looked like little dinosaurs, with two larger rear legs and a tail.

Exiting the tubes into the lounge, I could hear the creatures clanking in the bulkheads. As I approached Engineering, I was attacked! Short lizards with scythes for arms is probably a better description for them than “dinosaurs”, or maybe a mix between the two. Weirdly, they kind of exploded several seconds after I had killed them? Nothing large enough to hurt me in any way, but definitely some kind of explosion…

Franklin told me to activate the main console while they were attacked. I had to admit that the sounds of them fighting for their lives were really distracting while I was reroruting things… Once main power had been somewhat restored, I reported our progress to Cpt. Picard who told us to proceed to the bridge. I had to nip down a Jefferies Tube to restore power to the turbolift, and then we travelled to what Franklin called “the bridge deck”, though all bridges I had ever seen had turbolifts that opened directly onto them, rather than down the hall. If we located any survivors, the first thing I wanted to do was ask them why their Excelsior was so weird.

Franklin took off down the corridor, saying that he would show us the way to the bridge. Before I could ask him why he thought that it wasn’t a straightforward route, he was grabbed by one of the creatures and pulled into the ceiling! Assuming that he was now dead, we continued on trying to get around some flaming jets of venting gas and force fields. I had to crawl through a couple of the tunnels that the creatures had created in the bulkheads and we were attacked a few times, but we reached the transporter room, clearly having taken a wrong turn somewhere.

We ignored it, because it had a green force field blocking the entryway, and worked back to locate the bridge. I had to drop down into some Jefferies Tubes to then climb up to an observation lounge, and blast a door open to finally reach the bridge. And there didn’t appear to be any doors for turbolifts, though gaining access to a second observation lounge (who designed this ship?) revealed a hovering starship model which I picked up.

Once Chell and Jurot were on the bridge, she confirmed that the captain had died from the ship losing life support — which I imagined extended to the rest of the bridge crew — before Chell brought up the captain’s log. Recorded on Stardate 56535.1, they were attending a distress call from an Attrexian space station when they had suddenly been attacked. Most of the crew had been beamed onto the station, while he and a skeleton crew took the ship away to try and salvage it. Unfortunately, we had seen the results of their daring escape. However, the log went on to explain that the Chief Engineer had been authorised to carry out an experimental procedure to keep a portion of the crew inside the transporter buffer. Given the date in the log, it had been months at this point, so if the procedure didn’t work, their patterns would have degraded entirely.

Ordering Chell to disable the green force field from the transporter room, I then took Jurot with me to rescue the crew. We came under attack as we backtracked, but got there in time before the transporters lost them, so reconstituted them on the transporter pad. As luck would have it, life support in this section appeared to be operational as the three reformed in front of us. As well as chief engineer Scott and my former teammate Murphy was a crewman who never got a chance to introduce themself. Scott explained that her great-grandfather had previously used the same transporter technique to stay alive for ~80 years, though clearly the old man was a better engineer since these three had almost died after only eight months…

Speaking of which, why had the distress call taken eight months to reach us? And what would that mean for the state of the Attraxian space station which had also been under attack?

Chell reported that he was having trouble disabling the ship shields — much like life support, I wasn’t aware that they were active. He asked me to return, and almost as soon as the request left his lips he exclaimed that the creatures were attacking! I left Jurot to tend to the three survivors and ran back to the bridge, under heavy attack the whole time. I arrived in plenty of time, and we beamed back to Enterprise. I had eliminated 120 enemies, with a 44% accuracy.

Myself, Murphy, and Scott were pulled in for a briefing with Picard and Tuvok (and curiously none of the other senior staff). Apparently, the alien creatures had impulse engines built directly into their exoskeletons which was how they had spread from the station to the Dallas. They had no other new information we hadn’t already uncovered, so Picard ordered me to prepare the Hazard Team for our arrival at the Attraxian station. We were to render aid to the remaining Dallas crew and the Attraxians themselves, and would insert via shuttlecraft to avoid Enterprise from suffering the same fate as the ship which we had just left.

So, I headed down to the shuttlebay, where Chell was finishing up preparing a shuttle for us. I passed by two crewmen who were, according to one of them, replacing some GPS conduits? Not being an engineer myself, I could only hope that they didn’t mean EPS conduits. While exploring, I had the urge to pick up a phase converter, so I did. Then, I wasn’t really paying attention and a shuttlecraft almost landed on me…

Chell reported an issue with the shuttle’s plasma exhaust, and no sooner had he finished when smoke began pouring out of the shuttle! He told me to hurry inside the shuttle and “bleed off” some plasma, which I managed and finally we could get under way…