Ensign Talon Morda: Taking us one step closer to laser swords
Eston Melton
((OOC: Tried to pull Connor’s sim with a Connor/Morda sidebar with Korras’s more recent one. Apologies if there are bumps.))
((Bridge, Deck One, USS Khitomer))
Morda: Commander -- that thick one has some awfully thinner cousins that’ll slice right through the atomic bonds of your person. I advice caution the closer you are to that thing.
C. Dewitt: You heard the man, no more touching.
Korras: We also do not know if touching it would have any effects on the parts of the ship it is connected to.
C. Dewitt: Can you detect those thinner filaments? Any way to make them visible?
A loose neuron was rattling around in Morda’s brain, the shadow of idea backlit by … something.
Morda: I’m…formulating the beginning of an idea, sir. I’m on it.
C. Dewitt: If you have any ideas for a local or ship-wide solution, please start working on it.
Morda: Aye, sir.
He took a deep breath, hoping not to inhale flesh-eviscerating filaments, and took a handful of steps to the Security console on the starboard bulkhead. Surely the incredibly powerful internal sensors on the bridge would be able to pick up the loose filaments -- right? Or at least extrapolate some kind of data about their location like he’d done with the borrowed tricorder in the Jefferies tube. But their infinitesimally negligible physical presence made them feel incredibly slippery. He remembered, for a moment, trying to grab onto a laser beam at a hazy amphitheater show.
oO Oh. Ah! Oo
Morda: Commander, I have a notion for at least a half-measure.
C. Dewitt: I’ll assist you shortly! ::pause:: These thicker strands… Are they structural or functional? ::stepping a little closer:: Data conduits? Antennae? Some kind of interface?
Morda puttered at the console. He didn’t know yet how to detect the filaments’ presence in the bridge atmosphere, but once they figured that out, he had an idea of how to make them plainly visible to the naked eye. Almost. Meanwhile, Valeris, Korras, and Dewitt puzzled through the rest of the mysterious device.
Valeris: I’m reading energy transfer through the filaments. ::Beat:: There appears to be several avenues of travel through each strand. Power coming out of the central structure and possibly data flowing in.
Korras: It is definitely data. It is structured in such a way that would indicate a compression format being used by it.
C. Dewitt: We need to understand their purpose. And we need to know how we can remove them. Or will beaming them out make it worse? ::looking to Vealeris:: When you secured our systems, start working on that, Commander. Lieutenant Korras will assist. Maybe earlier scans from the Lattice Alliance ship can help. They might have suffered from the end stadium of what we are looking at.
Valeris: You got it, boss. ::Turning to Korras:: Can you get me the scans from the Lattice vessel? I want to do some direct comparisons.
Korras: That is possible. I am routing them to your screen, both the current sensor data, and what we recorded previously.
Valeris: The hull breaches on the Lattice ship roughly match the breach that this ball of yarn left when it entered the ship.
Korras: I doubt they would knowingly do that to themselves.
Morda caught nary a ward of the exchange. His half-measure visibility idea seemed viable, so he’d shifted to trying to detect the kriffing things. Sure enough, the bridge internal sensors picked up the same trace interactions of nanofilaments slicing through deck duranium and consol materials, but he couldn’t get them to resolve any interactions in the atmosphere. He puckered his face into a scowl as Commander Dewitt -- rather bravely, given the circumstances -- approached the back of the security console chair.
C. Dewitt: We need a way to see those thinner filaments without relying on tricorders. If they’re cutting through matter, they’re interacting with it, right? That interaction leaves a trace…
Morda: Yes, sir. The bridge sensors can pick up the atomic reaction cutting through the bulkheads and consoles. But I can’t get them to resolve any atmospheric interaction. They might be moving too slow to cause a discernibly energetic reaction.
Dewitt reached past him, pulling up a sensor report and environmental scan.
C. Dewitt: What if we force a reaction? An infrasonic harmonic, low frequency. If those filaments are under tension, we might be able to excite them just enough to reveal distortions. ::gesturing toward the air around the projected model in front of them:: We would not see the filament, but we’d be seeing what it does to the spac earound it.
Morda: It wouldn’t help if we have any of those free-floating ones we also encountered in the Jefferies tube. But for the ones taut on both ends, yes, I could see how making them more energetic would make them more detectable.
The XO nodded: they seemed to have the same thought.
C. Dewitt: … and it might even make the more active… probably more deadly.
Dewitt sighed, and the image of a lengthy but invisible violin string snapping and taking off everyone’s head flashed through Morda’s head.
C. Dewitt: I’m open to suggestions.
Morda nearly shrugged.
Morda: It’s a risk, but I can’t think of anything better right now. We need to know where it is and isn’t safe to move on the bridge. And that’s just it: you’ve figured a way to possibly make the filaments visible to sensors, but we need to make them visible without having our eyes adhered to a console. So I suggest once we excite them with the subharmonic, we create the galaxy’s lamest laser light show to make them on the bridge itself.
C. Dewitt: Response
Morda: ::Pointing to the convex apparatus hanging at the center of the bridge dome:: That housing, and other fixtures around the bridge, contain various internal sensors. They include low-power lasers using in a non-visual wavelength that test for atmospheric quality, act as rangefinders for visual recording files, etc. I suggest we shift their diodes to emit in visible light, tie them to the sensors, and use those lasers to draw a “do not cross this line” pattern on the deck, say a half-meter to either side of any nanofilmanets we detect.
C. Dewitt: Response
Morda: Aye, sir: I’ll get working on it. If it works, I’d think this one-two punch should work in many but not all crew spaces elsewhere on the ship.
Morda sensed Dewitt shift his attention to the other bridge officers, returning the security officer to his work.
Valeris: I’ve locked down propulsion and life support. Fairly easily too. Whatever this thing is doing, it doesn’t seem that interested in primary systems. I am reading some comm interference coming from the center of the bridge. Maybe jamming? Electromagnetic feedback?
Korras: Scanning.. Give me a moment, please.
C. Dewitt: Response
Valeris: It also appears to be curious about what ingredients are in a Talaxian Souffle. Something is accessing the replicator repository.
That item perked Morda out of his computer reverie.
Morda: There’s more in the replicator databanks than just food: patterns for equipment, weapons, biochemical agents. Any signs it’s probing anything hazardous?
Valeris: Response
Korras: Got it. I have the frequency on which it is broadcasting, which is also causing interference on the comms. The bad news, I can not find where they are broadcasting to.
C. Dewitt/Valeris: Response
Korras: The good news, it might be possible to counteract. It is broadcasting by vibrating the crystals, like the commander did earlier, but on a far more precise scale. Like sound, it might be cancelled out by broadcasting on a mirrored frequency.
C. Dewitt/Valeris: Response
Korras: It might anger the entity, and we have no way of knowing if it will retaliate if we do so.
Morda looked over his shoulder from the security console.
Morda: Commander? The computer came up with a range of harmonics it can create that might energize those filaments, and the adjustments to the atmospheric sensor diodes to paint boundary lines is ready to go. Shall we proceed?
C. Dewitt/Valeris: Response