Standing afar off
Posted on Sun Sep 5, 2021 @ 7:40pm by Commander Cullen Walker & Lieutenant Penelope Naroot & Lieutenant Arashi Tanaka Mr. & Lieutenant JG Aergad Halvor & Lieutenant JG Ardal King & Lieutenant JG Sydney Friedman Jr & Senior Chief Petty Officer Samantha Summers
1,192 words; about a 6 minute read
Mission:
Archangel
Location: USS Victory
Timeline: 0630 Hours (Concurrent with Captain/Doctor's away mission)
Penny was playing with the viewscreen. Her chin was resting in her hand and she was scanning around them, reorienting their map, toying with various scans and trying to understand how four warp trails stopped.
"Okay, so, we've established they aren't cloaked, there aren't any nebulae around....isn't much of anything around. We know their warp trails stopped. Not dissipated, just stopped, and no ion trail of an impulse engine. So how did they get away if they weren't using their engines?" she was speaking half to herself, but then turned and looked at the others on the bridge.
"Well if they had abandoned their ship and had a getaway ship prepared they could have made it look like that. I doubt that though because there still would be a trail leading to where the ship was abandoned."
"Exactly what I was thinking," Penny said, shaking her head.
"So," Arashi continued, "either they blew up their ship with a self destruct or they were able to mask their ion trail somehow. I think they were able to mask their signature somehow, if they are who I think they are. I can't confirm or deny anything but I have my suspicions. "
"Blowing up would leave debris I could scan," Penny said, shaking her head. "Even if it was atomized, we'd see a difference in the particle density."
Walker was thinking, then he mumbled, "You must understand that there is more than one path to the top of the mountain." It was a quote from a Japanese Samurai. He stood up, "Naroot, check out system. When I was in the field and we had to go after a bad guy, we had a guy who could hack anything. We would hide within a stones throw. Then run a scan for shield vibration frequencies that could distort our sensors." Despite his size, he was so lightfooted that Vulcans on the ship weren't aware.
"Scanning," Penny said. "I've done a few diagnostics already. I'm not holding out much hope that we're broken," she said. "Diagnostic will take a couple minutes."
"You know," Sydney said, getting up from her station towards the rear and coming forward. "It's always possible they really just up and vanished, isn't it? They could have found a new way to cloak, or to borrow from Lieutenant Tanaka's idea, they got picked up by a ship that cloaked but hasn't moved, or they found another way to move. If normal solutions aren't working, what are the abnormal ones? What's in this area of space that's...well, empty?"
"It's not empty," Penny said. "We're here. But what came before us?"
Walker went through the list, "Temporal shields. Inversion cloaking. Is it possible someone made it work?" He started laughing. "qasta HvIS DIS 'arqon chenmoHlaHbe' vay'." His dialect wasn't the common one. He said in Klingon, The humans used to use magic mushrooms to fly. He had tried to ask at the Academy, he got told the old Klingon must have been talking about drugs.
From inside her cell in the Brig, Summers walked back and forth, somewhat fuming. "What is going on here, I know I can be of service here, why won't they let me out? " She turned to the closest guard. "Guard, I need to get back onto the Bridge - can you contact 'someone-anyone' to help me get back up there?"
"I'll see what I can do but we need to have the captain's orders to do anything." The guard said and sighed. "I am not sure that there can be anything done when the captain gives her orders.
Summers nodded in agreement. " I understand where you are coming from," She replied. " But I feel a bit helpless in here, and I know I can be of help on the Bridge, even with an guard attached. All I am asking is that you at least *try.* "
"We're assuming they're hiding," Sydney said. "Is it possible they're actually gone? What if it's as simple as another ship picked them up? Or they have some other kind of propulsion, that doesn't leave an ion trail?"
Penny shook her head. "If it were another ship, we'd read their wake. We'd see displaced gasses and space dust even if it wasn't an impulse drive." She got quiet, trying to think of other possibilities. She felt distracted, worried. In fact, she was about to catalog approximately seventeen different emotional statuses when her panel beeped. She hit it and a familiar voice filled the bridge.
“Kennit to Victory," the Captain's voice suddenly said over the comm system. "Lt. Naroot: I need for you to devise a way to detect access points into the Vaadwaur Underspace, and additionally a means of identifying and tracking recent starship transits through the access point.”
Penny immediately spun around and faced her board. "I should have thought of that," she scolded herself, quietly. "Aye, Captain. Working on it now."
She brought up the records from the USS Voyager and tried scanning the area. There was an anomalous reading approximately six-hundred meters away on the starboard side. She wasn't sure if that was their goal, but it was close enough to explain the ion wake's disappearance in this general area. She steered them towards it and scanned again. "In the original mission reports," she said, "the Voyager was pulled into one because its warp field acted as a magnet, pulling it through a breach. It was kicked out of the corridor with a resonance pulse. So it may not be a matter of looking for an aperture, but rather learning how to make the wall permeable..."
She hit the comm panel on her board. "Bridge to Engineering."
"Engineering, Lieutenant Aster here," came the reply.
"We need to increase the warp field radius," Penny said. "We need to see if we can snag an Underspace corridor. I think if we pulse the field, we can get a ping as to where the corridor goes and find a weak point to slip inside."
"Give us....ten minutes, we'll have something for you. Engineering out."
Four minutes later, Penny's board lit up. The engines were powering up and she immediately began scanning as the warp field began to interact with the space around them. She revved the engine core and expanded the field, sending out a flood of warp particles. Like leaves on a stream, they all began to flow. She sent out another wave and watched them gather. She began refining the scans and brought them alongside what she was sure was one of the subspace corridors. Now all they needed was an opening.
She quickly opened a channel to the Castel. "Naroot to Kennit. We've found a corridor. Attempting to locate a place to penetrate the barrier."
“Excellent work Lieutenant. I knew we could count on you. Keep me informed of your progress. Kennit out.”
Penny watched as the Castel and the now caught-up Saint George came up beside them and transmitted the warp field modifications. Between the three of them, they would hopefully find a way in three times as fast.
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