Commander Jo Marshall - Resistance is Replicatable (Part I)
Jo Marshall
((Engineering Annex, Gibaria Outpost))
Jo approached the canister in the room, for the first time since they'd entered the annex. Crouching down to bring herself level with the canister wall and the coiled vine inside it, settled against the base like it was resting, reminded her of Rubin when she curled up on the foot of their bed in a furry puddle. Though she wasn't convinced the vine actually did anything as ordinary as rest. And Rubin, to her knowledge, had never strangled anyone. Yet.
Marshall: Whatever's through that gate, part of it is already in here with us. It's surviving in this environment. If we can work out how, that tells us something about what we're designing for. Carefully, and without opening the canister. The last thing we need is a spate of Purple Hearts for black vine strangulation. ::Her blonde eyebrow crooked to their scientist.:: What do you reckon, Fenn?
Fenn joined Jo at the canister and studied the vine closely.
Fenn: I could tell you a lot more with a DNA sample and a week in a lab but the question that’s bothering me right now is whether this thing is simply adapted to surviving the “radiation” or whether it feeds on it like a type of radiotrophic fungi?
zh’Tisav: Or both?
Fenn: Well, considering this place is infested with it and biological species generally flourish where a food source is abundant, I suspect the latter. If that’s true, then maybe one of these projects was attempting to try and convert it into some sort of biological shielding to absorb the radiation.
zh’Tisav: That makes me wonder, if the radiation is food, could there be a substance that’s a poison?
Kovar: That is certainly a logical hypothesis worth considering.
Jo nodded, not taking her eyes off the vine, which she was becoming increasingly convinced was not taking its eyes off her, despite having no discernible eyes. It definitely was worth considering, and a question they wouldn't get a chance to ponder if the gate collapsed suddenly. Her thoughts went to the other teams attempting to rescue the outpost scientists, and get through the medical questions as well, and she felt the particular weight of command settle across her shoulders, which it did regularly and had never once asked for permission.
zh’Tisav: It looks like they were doing something with portable subspace fields. It looks like they put a lot of time into it already, could be useful.
Vylaa moved away from the pallet and paused nearby a shelving unit littered with partial prototypes and stacks of PADDs that would've made V'Lar go crosseyed. Jo watched as their Andorian engineer picked up a subspace coil, likely from a shuttlecraft, and carried it over to the central workbench.
Fenn: Sub-space...
The one-word from Maezel sounded as if the scientist had lost herself in a thought momentarily, and Jo was keen to leave her with it, lest anything useful come tumbling out. Interrupting a scientist mid-thought was akin to unplugging an isolinear chip in backup. You got fragments. Corrupted data. Occasionally a very offended scientist. Their Vulcan engineer spoke next, reporting on his findings.
Kovar: Here we are. One of the adjoining storage bays contains a probe that was used in dimensional tests 42 and 67. I will see what relevant information I can glean from these entries.
Marshall: Good find, Kovar. The onboard gel packs might have some recent memory stored with telemetry data.
She didn't air the thought that she hoped it wasn't as fragmented as Jo believed it might be, considering where it had been and what it had been pulled out from. Meanwhile, Vylaa considered the subspace coil once more, this time aloud.
zh’Tisav: It’ll take a bit to get it working, but it might be worthwhile to see what it does to ::she pointed her left antenna at the vine,:: those things.
The Bolian rushed over to the workbench, coming to a stop across from Vylaa and staring at her in a way that instantly put the Andorian on alert, her antennae flicking back momentarily.
Their Bolian scientist made a break for the workbench then, as if the idea she'd curled herself around her spine and forced her into motion. She skidded to a halt opposite Vylaa, her words tumbling out in rapid succession.
Fenn: Ok working theory – let's assume I’m right and that organism is radiotrophic and uses this strange sort of radiation as a food source. An equivalent organism in this dimension would use melanin to capture ionising radiation in the environment for use in radiosynthesis. The melanin in those equivalent organisms has a sub-space signature, a frequency, that exists in the lower bands. If that device ::gesturing to the subspace coil:: is meant to be used as part of a tool that emits a sub-space resonance field on the exact frequency of the melanin, or whatever the organism uses, then it could stop it from feeding on the radiation altogether.
Kovar: Your enthusiasm is noted. A more concise summary would be perhaps ::he paused slightly:: more efficient.
Kovar's response seemed to temper their rapid idea generator of a Bolian, who spoke slower.
Fenn: Sorry. What it means is that if I’m right that coil could be part of a device that repels it or kills it which I think an away team might find extremely useful.
zh’Tisav: I know what it means...
Jo folded her arms over her chest and leaned her hip against the workbench. She'd understood most of the rapid-fire theory, and the half she'd caught had contained the words kills it, which were doing a lot of heavy lifting for the rest. She thought about what it would take to build an interdimensional gate, and what kind of equipment the engineers would've needed for that.
Marshall: Important question. Can we build one?
Fenn: While you try and fix the coil Lieutenant I’m going to have a look at some of these PADDs. Maybe they reference some test they did with this coil.
Kovar: It appears that the probes were constructed with heavy metals similar to the ones the Lieutenant found, especially tungsten. It seems that gamma radiation was of particular concern to the researchers here.
zh’Tisav: Well, of course. They’re some of the best natural radiation shields.
Marshall: What are we thinking for the crew going through? We can't exactly bolt hull plating to everyone. Command tends to frown on that.
Fenn: Response
Kovar: Obviously these materials work well for the purposes of machinery, but not for Starfleet personnel who require mobility. To protect our away team, it would be logical to adopt a similar protective principle. Radiation resistant polyethylene and polymer composites layered between fabric material could be a solution that is sufficiently lightweight while not sacrificing radiation resistance.
zh’Tisav: Consider powdering the metals and mixing them into a polymer. They could coat anything in that form.
Expressions being what expressions were, Jo's did the thing it did when she revised her opinion of a situation upward against her better judgment. Tungsten was a starting point, not a victory lap, but there was something to be said about leaning toward the older end of their technological spectrum.
Marshall: That's not bad. Which means we need a replicator.
Fenn: Response
Kovar: Now, the question is whether we have any functioning replicators here that could produce sufficient protective equipment.
zh’Tisav: Behind the shelves in the northwest corner. It’s a Class 4 industrial model, so it’ll handle most small to medium components. Whether it works or not is up to you.
Jo looked at Vylaa for just a moment. Not long, or loud, but something that landed between a great many words available to them and had made a considered, professional decision not to use any of them. Even in Andorian. Her engineer had handed a significant problem to a colleague like dropping an egg over a cliff. Instead, she filed the thought away somewhere load-bearing for later and started moving toward the northwest corner, navigating the archipelago of discarded equipment.
Marshall: Fenn, keep going through those PADDs. Anything referencing field tests on that coil, I want it flagged. Kovar. ::She tilted her head toward the northwest corner.:: With me.
Kovar / Fenn: Response
TBC
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