Short Notice

Posted on Sat Sep 21st, 2024 @ 7:11pm by Lieutenant (Junior Grade) Jasmine Evalli & Captain Temperance Harding & Ensign Bart Ramsey

Mission: Mission 5: Lost, Stolen, or Missing?
Location: USS Endurance | Main Engineering

ON

The double doors opened with a heavy hydraulic sound as Harding walked into the Main Engineering. Max could handle setting up a patrol pattern while their sensors gathered more data. Everything was being fed down here. Harding was pleased to see that Max was true to his word, he had indeed handed it off to a working group of engineers and scientists. Okay, it may have only been half an hour ago at most, but with Nyx missing almost eight hours total now, every minute was counting.

"Who's in charge?" The normally pleasant tone had a sharpness to it. It was no one's fault. Though she was blaming herself, and that was coming out.

A short blonde glanced up and over her shoulder and visibly swallowed. She could only be five feet tall if she were an inch and sported a brand new half pip to go along with the duller and clearly older full pip on her collar. "That would be Lieutenant Slattery, but he's with a bunch of the others in one of the conference rooms so it would be me?" Her voice squeaked a couple times, "Ensign Evalli." She gave the wrong rank out of nerves.

In any other situation, Harding would have been amused. She didn't have the energy for it now. "Look, I realise you guys have barely had the sensor readings. I'm sure the Lieutenant's conference meeting is eliminating the impossible. Short answer: what do you have?"

"That's giving him more credit..." Jasmine glanced at the floor and muttered under her breath. The truth of the matter was that the Lieutenant was a good organizer and manager, but didn't have the critical thinking ability. "Right now, we don't have much. I was reviewing all of the small craft traffic since Ny- Commander Valentine left and none of it appeared to be any more suspicious than anything else. We had to standard station-to-ship, planet-bound and even outbound traffic. Three of the outbounds were a hair off their filed courses, but all were tracked out-system at warp." She was a specialist in this area, "I heard from Aidels that the sensors were acting up and fuzzed an area of space. That's what they're going over in the conference room, but it would be better off in here."

"'Fuzzed'?" Harding repeated the word back. "Any idea what caused that?" She was trying not to jump to conclusions. Her gut was screaming the word 'cloak' at her. It was too soon to go off half-cocked. Nothing would be gained if they went warping off in the wrong direction.

"There are about fifty things that could have caused it!" Jasmine blurted out, then stopped for a moment, "Well, more like a half-dozen or ten, but it's all the same. Active sensor jamming, some sort of glitch in the sensor array tasked for the coverage of that area, a cloud of gas that was passing through, that sort of thing. We've got a detailed diagnostic running on the array, but whatever was going on wasn't there when we brought the secondary array into focus on it, so the glitch sure sounds right."

Harding looked around the team. "Hypothetical question." She hated the fact she didn't have a science or engineering background. "That so-called sensor glitch. What about a cloak? Could it have been a cloaked ship that has since left?"

"Hypothetically?" The young engineer asked rhetorically, thinking for a moment and then shrugging, "Yes, it could have been, I suppose. That would explain why we couldn't get a good read on the area initially and why it was clear after. But wouldn't that be illegal if someone were cloaked? I'm not aware of the Federation having a cloaking device aside from the Defiant, but if it were the Klingons or Romulans, wouldn't it be a treaty violation?"

"We are dealing with people who kidnapped a Starfleet officer." Harding replied coolly. "Let's assume it is a ship, for the sake of argument. If we were sat on top of that signal, could you use a high intensity scan to find some sort of ion trail?"

"After this long?" Jasmine shook her head slowly, "Any particle trail would have dissipated after an hour or two at most. That is, if you add in particle decay and if there's been any additional traffic in the area, if we were lucky enough to find the right trail, it'd be one in a thousand..." She thought for a moment, "But if you put together a map of all of the traffic in the area at the time, put together when the sensors last caught it as fuzzed, to when it was clear... There's the possibility of putting together a potential exit path for a cloaked ship. Once away from the normal station traffic? Possible."

"How long to get a heading?" Harding inquired seriously. "I don't mean to rush you, but the clock is always ticking." She wanted to remind the junior officers this wasn't just an intellectual puzzle. Add onto that, Harding had three rules she captained by: never overestimate time for a job; never be afraid to ask the Captain a stupid question; messy is sometimes better than perfection.

"I don't know..." Jasmine admitted with a shrug, "We're working with a lot of IFs." The blonde girl turned towards the console and paused for a moment before bringing up the sensor scan with the 'fuzz' on it and running the playback. "IF that's a cloaked ship and IF this was the traffic pattern at the time." She used the fast-forward until something wavered on the screen then paused it, transferring the ship location map to another screen. "To remain undetected, they would be unable to get within five hundred feet of these ships, but there's also a sensor array above and below the station to prevent cloaked ships from entering via those directions, so a polar departure is too risky."

Jasmine briefly asked herself, 'What would Nyx do?' then sighed, beginning to trace lines in amongst the ships, stopping, then tracing a new one, always looking for the path of least sensor coverage. It was several minutes of trying to solve the maze puzzle of starships and finally one came out the other end, "That's your probable exit point, and from there we've got this cone of probability for an exit vector." She draw a 3-D cone that was about a 30-degree area. "But that's the best I can do right now."

Harding pointed at the focal point of the cone. "Send those coordinates up to the helm."

tag?

Before she even got a reply, Harding tapped her commbadge. "Harding to Bridge."

"Captain, Bridge. Officer of the Watch Ensign Ramsey."

For a flicker of a few heartbeats, Harding wondered why Ramsey was the watch officer, and not Max. She dismissed the irrelevancy. "Ensign, Helm is being sent a set of coordinates in system. I went us there on full thrusters. The second we arrive, start pinging every sensor system for an ion trail that leads perpendicular to orbital traffic. Relay everything down to Engineering."

"Ye... Yes Ma'am. Helm just gave thumbs up. We're under way at full thrusters."

Harding gave Jasmine an appreciative nod. "Good work, Lieutenant. Find me that ion trail, and I might just replace that black pip for a gold one. Contact the Bridge with a heading the second you've got it. I'll let the Bridge crew know you have my authority to issue a course heading."

The very young engineer's voice squeaked and cracked again, this time with nerves at being given essentially not only the job of finding something that may or may not be there, and the job of saving her boss (who she actually liked), and the ability to change the ship's course on her own. "Ma'am, I just got this black one three days ago, I graduated the Academy three years ago, I... I'll do what I can."

Harding nodded, and headed out of Engineering, still with much to do.

"Right." Jasmine sighed, wishing her Chief were here, but then she'd not be in this situation. "No pressure."

OFF

Captain Temperance Harding
Commanding Officer

Lieutenant (jg) Jasmine Evalli
Engineer