Lieutenant jg. Mi'shune sh'Sonora - That's No Mine...
d.reinhart
sh’Sonora: Any landing we walk away from, amirite? ::She claps her hands together.:: We have officially landed, Sir.
Foster: Good. ::he let out a breath he didn’t realize he was holding. Despite the good performance, Wyn wasn’t used to a ship with so much extra movement while it flew.:: Alright, I’ll let the crew know we have landed. Make sure everything is secure.
sh’Sonora: Aye aye, Captain!
Ysatch: All systems look green on my end. And whatever they're doing with those power cores in the lab hasn't exploded yet.
Mi’shune powered down the warp core and cut power to the impulse engines, the freighter equivalent of a ground vehicle’s parking brake. As she powered down non-vital systems and tested environmental seals the Maximum Thrusters sent automated commands to connect to the landing pad’s umbilicals. An error message solved the latter quickly by revealing there were no hookups to external power. Mi’shune shook her head, lamenting the unpreparedness of the landing pad.
She was on the tail end of her post-flight check and filling out the civilian post-flight ‘paperwork’ on her PADD (for bureaucracy’s reach was extensive) when Foster grabbed her attention.
Foster: Alright, while our teams get out and get moving we have work to do. We need to figure out what those mines are protecting. Do we still have contact with those probes?
Ysatch: Yep! In fact they've continued to mark potential mine locations this whole time.
sh’Sonora: We have a positive connection to probe one, Sir.
Foster: Mi’sh – I’m giving you remote control capabilities on one of the probes. You should be able to pilot it like a long-distance vehicle. Tori – I’m routing the sensor data on that probe to you.
All the challenges of flying a small missile with the latency of a subspace connection and none of the tactile thrills. Probes weren’t Mi’shune’s favorite thing to fly. But when the commander asked for a porthole buffed one didn’t say they don’t do windows.
Ysatch: What are we looking for?
sh’Sonora: Whatever it is, I can have it on a standard search pattern within seconds.
Foster: There are a lot of asteroids out here, most of them are moving, and I’m not seeing any evidence of a lot of explosions. That indicates that the mines are either only attracted to certain things like… I dunno possibly warp signatures or power emissions of some sort – or they can be turned ‘on’ and ‘off’ by whoever put them there.
Ysatch: I think I see what you're getting at. We could use the probe to simulate some of these conditions in a way that looks like a natural phenomenon. Something a controlling intelligence wouldn't want to waste their ordinance on. If the mines activate, we know what sets them off. If they don't activate, we know someone's got their hand on the wheel.
sh’Sonora: Might be difficult to make our probe look like an asteroid. It’s made of sensor-absorbing composites and not rock and iron, but with a little sensor spoofing that might work.
The corner of her eye caught the flicking of the Bajoran officer’s earring.
Ysatch: So what are potential detonation conditions? Like the captain said, warp signatures and power emissions are big ones. There's also biodata -- scans for life signs. Any others?
sh’Sonora: Simple stuff, like magnetic signatures, EM frequencies, light sensing, AI photographic extrapolation with a good old fashioned camera lens. You know, the classics.
Mi’shune saw the metaphorical duotronic boards light up in Tori’s mind, and his attempts to ground and organize the ideas patiently.
Ysatch: Power emissions seem an easy one to start with. We can set the probe's core to run hot and dirty and the lieutenant can pilot it on an arc out from one of the wrecked planets that clips the edge of the danger zone.
sh'Sonora: I mean, that’s doable, but I’d still worry about looking out of place.
Foster: ?
Ysatch: It's kind of a double-reverse decoy. An automated system would flag it as a potential threat, but a good ops officer would see a radioactive meteor that's not going to hit anything and isn't worth the effort. ::looks around awkwardly:: At least that's what I'd do.
Antennae twitched and spasmed as Mi’shune rolled the idea around. She wasn’t quite thrilled, there were holes in the plan a Pakled clumpship could fly through, but lacking any better ideas… her antennae sprang up. She might not have an original idea, but supplementing someone else’s wasn’t beyond her skill.
sh'Sonora: A slight variance from its propulsion system will give us the radiation reading we need!
Foster: ?
sh’Sonora: ::Clapped her hands together.:: Alright, now we’re talking! Let’s send our ::Air quotes, with fingers and antennae.:: ‘radioactive meteor’ out for a little sleuthing.
Running the engines slightly hotter, while maintaining a speed normal for a meteor, was easy to do. It was, by a pilot or engineer’s standards, the equivalent of revving the engine while maintaining a lower gear, but the effect left a convincing radioactive trail.
It was just her and her little ‘meteor’, traveling the outskirts of a smashed planet, seeking dangerous explosive devices to tweak the noses thereof.
Weaving through the planetary detritus proved more enjoyable than she anticipated. The probe responded almost in real time, and without inertia as a distraction she could pull off some tight turns and tricky maneuvers through the asteroid field. It was like playing on an arcade holoconsole back home.
As it was no game, Mi’shune kept her government-mandated fun to a reasonable, businesslike saunter through the debris field once she found a suitable ‘ping’ to follow. And it was a big one. Right behind an asteroid the size of a skyscraper, imposing and rust colorered, indicating a high ferrous content. As it dwarfed the probe by a factor of… thousands she guessed, the rusty-toned surface filled up her forward display, forcing her veer down the asteroid’s dorsal section.
She was close. Cutting speed completely so the probe drifted, Mi’shune rounded the astroid and aimed the probe’s visual lens at the closest duranium signature.
It was a large chunk of duranium, that much was true, but it was no mine.
sh’Sonora: Holy frell… is that a… ship?!
Any: ?
TBC
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tags/tbc
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Lieutenant jg. Mi’shune sh’Sonora
Helm Officer
Starbase 118 - Ops Department
O240208MS1