Intel decyphering

Posted on Mon Jan 4th, 2021 @ 8:32am by Ensign Will Raynada & Lieutenant Anthony Edwards Ph. D & Lieutenant Helena Wells

2,098 words; about a 10 minute read

Mission: To catch a thief
Location: Science lab 2
Timeline: 3rd April 2395 1100hrs

ON:

Pushing a grav cart down the corridor Will made his way to science lab two, Binea had told him that the Captain already assigned Lt Edwards and Hg to go through the data they had taken from the research bases sensor logs and; when he bought it to them, go through the pirate ships computer core with a fine tooth comb for anything useful, and he was to help anyway he could.

"Good morning Lieutenant, Miss Wells." He greeted the pair as he bought the cart through the labs doorway. "One captured computer core, or most of it at least."

"And what are we to do with this?" HG asked. "I do not need any quaint pieces of abstract art cluttering up the place." She added looking at the somewhat mangled piece.

"I'm afraid it wasn't my decision to take a phaser to it and cut it out but seeing as we couldn't save the whole ship we had to get something to have a look through." Will replied.

"It is okay Ensign, as you may have noticed most since you have joined us if not while you were at the Academy, many junior security officers have a belief that they need to keep their brains in their holsters beside the phaser. So you were part of the team that rescued this piece of equipment. Lets see what we can get from it cause one of us might face the sack if we get nothing. How much can you tell us about the lay out of the room, relative to the station where you found this piece of abstract art as Miss Wells called it." Anthony said with a chuckle to himself.

"Don't let Lt Barron hear you say that Sir." Will smirked slightly as he slowed the sled to a stop. "Your typical small scale computer room, one large bank, one small bank, pair of consoles."

""She has been to Commander too, we are lucky to have her. I am sure she has met quite a number of the security people that are exactly like that, though from your words I shall discuss safe removal of equipment over quick with Lieutenant Barron at some length at a time that we're not busy, as quietly as I can. I expect she will shout a lot but the fact that she was able to get it out at all and make it back to the ship with her whole team intact is so much more important so long as we can connect it we will get a lot more information out of it that if we didn't have it and it was destroyed." Anthony said with a nervous chuckle.

"Intact but bloody." Will told him. "Ensign Turell took a shot to the shoulder, she's in a pretty bad state."

"Oh Amanda that is a pity. I have seen the two of you are quite close on my infrequent trips to the chow hall. I am sorry she got hurt she is a lovely lady for an English woman." Anthony said before he continued with an explanation of that statement. "I like Ensign Turell too, she is well put together and unusually bright. As I said before many security officers come out of the Academy with their brains beside their phaser, not her, It is just the Scots and the English have a long standing rivalry which stems from the centuries of injustice forced upon the Scottish people by the English. That said let's get our art installation plugged in and see what we can find."

"It might take some time to get it up and running again but I'll get it." Will raised the grav sled till it matched the height of the table he'd parked it by. "Will you help me?"

"Oh course we will." Anthony rolled his eyes at the pun that had just come out of his mouth. "Did I really just say that?" he asked rhetorically as he got ready to help Will lift the computer core over to the lab table.

The core peice was very heavy but between them they got it to the table. "Thanks, I'll get to work on getting her running again."

HG just watched a bit until they two got the thing more or less settled. "So...." she let the word out in a long way. "Are we just gathering what we can or is there something specific? It makes the search parameters easier."

“Let’s start with generalities and work it with a finer and finer toothed combs each time we turn it over, let’s try and tie both end of this attack together and find anything we can.” Anthony said.

HG still stood back looking at the thing letting her mind range across the problem. "If I may," she said quietly for her. "What about doing a virtual mapping. We know that areas have been damaged but the circuitry that remains will retain pathways that will have been biased toward certain connections. I am thinking that we can utilize that bias to sort of reconstruct parts virtually." She shrugged.

“Good idea Miss Wells.” Anthony said before he added, “Computers are always build with failsafes, go arounds, redundancies and backdoors to everything which means we may not need to get is fixed perfectly to get the information to be recoverable.”

"Worth a try." Will said. "What was it like on the base? looks like they took a bit of a pounding.

“Nervously bumpy. We had no shields you know. Though having said that Captain Tigran moved to protect us with the Wolf’s shields. Other than that a lot of nervous engineers and operations people running around, they were United Federations people though so they were less nervous around us once they knew we had Starfleet uniforms on. Helpful even once they knew we were there to help and assist with the repairs or following up the criminal organisation that attacked them.”

Will grunted. "Sounds like you had it easy compared to us. Have you found anything useful in their sensor logs?

“Not much, that I didn’t get over on the station. We left the station knowing we had seen at least one ship of these pirates before. They were Dead Skull Privateers, we recognised their icon as that ship we saw a couple of missions ago and we got that about two minutes after your team got there.” Lieutenant Edwards said.

"Dead skull privateeers huh," Will remarked. "Nice to finally put a name to a group."

HG let the two chatter for a bit while she was working with only one ear sort of on the conversation. "Right," she said at a pause. "Think we are ready to give it a go. I analyzed the circuitry patterns and had a recreation of what might be the missing pathways based also upon Anthony's suggestion of backups. Shall we?"

“Well if you think you have a stable work around HG I guess now would be a good time to give it a shot. Let’s start with a low level power and maybe a diagnostic reading to find out if it is going to work for us.” Anthony suggested “A good diagnostic will show up any changes need to make it work with our systems at least.”

"Yes sir," HG kept it professional. "Everything looks nominal. I will keep an eye on the construct and circuitry stability while you two make the inquiries."

"So, lets see what we can find." Will plugged the computer core into the labs seperate isolated power supply and slowly it came online.

HG did exactly as she had said and kept an eye on the construct, so far so good, the matrix was holding decently enough.

"Some small glitches, but nothing we can't handle between the Science team and one of the smartest operations officer on this tub." Anthony said, he wasn't blowing shit up Wills skirt Anthony actually believed Will was actually one of the smartest officers in operations gold.

"Best you two start making inquiries, not sure how long this will all hold." HG quipped.

After about five minutes of playing with it Anthony said "Alrigthy then I guess its time to see what we can find." As he said it the files from the battered core flashed across, "Oh looky here, a restricted file. What's the bet that is important either way." he said as he started trying to open it.

"We should probably try and copy everything we can to a data core of our own while we're at it." Will remarked. "Just in case we lose it."

"Being a pirate ship I expect USS Wolff is in much better looked after so and up to date, which means that the computers would have to be much quicker that this core is used to, so saving a copy shouldn't be a problem." Anthony said tapping a few buttons on his console which started downloading the computer core to the ships core.

Will looked through some of the data as it copied, "Looks like I have some technical information here, what modifications they made to the ship, weapons inventories."

“Good, good to see, at least we’ll have information on what to defend against.” Anthony looked over and said “Yes that makes sense considering the damage to the station. I am getting the feeling this attack was pin pointed to get that prototype and that was all. It would certainly be worth a lot of credits.” Anthony’s station bleeped at him and he said out loud to himself as he started listening to a captains log. “The belt.” He turned to will and HG and asked “Is there an asteroid belt nearby?”

"Let me run things through astrometrics," HG responded and turned to tap into the astrometrics data. "Yes, there is, mark 14 about a light year and a bit away."

"I expect that will be somewhere we shall have to investigate before we go too far even if it is to rule out that location as their base." Anthony said.

"Makes sense," Will mused as he continued to look through the data. "an asteroid field is a good place for small ships to hide."

“Very. Especially if it has some big chunky ones that might have a gravity field. There are some very small objects out there that have gravity high enough to stop things like an over sized runabout like that corvette you were investigating.” Anthony said.

"Have you thought about taking a look for micro-gravitational perturbations?" HG asked. "A moving object through space-time causes small waves of gravity. I wrote a paper on how to detect cloaked ships a few years back. 'The use of micro-gravitational wave metrics to detect moving hidden objects.' Think fleet has used that now as standard and one reason they wanted to tie me to a desk."

“That might work but for it to do so they need to first be within range. As we know they weren’t before we left the Tukefra nebula I think we will need to be closer to that asteroid belt before it would actually help finding anything I couldn’t see with my own two eyes and a science sensor. Apologies HG if that sounded harsh but at the moment we’re still looking for the right farm that frost grows a crop you can make haystack out of the leftovers, before we can pick out which haystack the farmer hid the needle.” Anthony wasn’t discouraged or discouraging of HG, she was the best out of the box thinker this ship had. She could probably think of a way of making transwarp seem slow given enough time, now however was time for a meticulous concentrated study of the information they had from both the station and the data core and see if they could firstly work out where they are going and secondly if at all possible beat them there.

"Yes let me think upon that while you two dig around the 'guts' of this poor thing a bit more." HG kept a bit of an eye on things but she was thinking on something else completely at this point.

=/\= Bridge to Lt Edwards =/\=

=/\=Edwards responding!=/\= Anthony opened the comm.

=/\= Please report to the bridge, we're arriving at the Tukefra Nebula.=/\=

=/\= On my way.=/\= Anthony reacted. You two continue I have some space dust searching to do.



OFF:

Lieutenant (jg) Dr Anthony Edwards, Ph.D
Chief Science Officer

HG Wells
Civilian Scientist

Ensign Will Rayada
Operations Officer
[npc Taliserra]

 

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