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Main Sim: Engine Room

Posted May 29, 2019, 10:42 p.m. by Lieutenant Gage Whitney (CE) (Andrew Robinson)

Posted by Commander Stovik (XO) in Main Sim: Engine Room

Posted by Gamemaster Newtons Law (GM) in Main Sim: Engine Room

Posted by Commander Stovik (XO) in Main Sim: Engine Room
Posted by… suppressed (13) by the Post Ghost! 👻
The warp core humming, Whitney sat transfixed by the displays in front of him, ignoring the neverending buzz of activity around him. He’d deliberately set the Chief Engineers station out on the deck, rather than in its own contained office. It had never made sense to him to have any department head buried away in a corner when they needed to be able to see the department they supervised.

He’d actually spent relatively little time sitting at the Chiefs station. Most of his work was so transient during construction that he’d spent four or five minutes hovering over a terminal before moving onto the next project. He found he rather enjoyed sitting on the small stool bolted to the walkway. The cold grey-silver mass of the warp core lay before him, with walkways and crawlspaces fitted around it, giving the duty shift the appearance of a hive of ants crawling over and beneath it. In line with his goal of establishing a baseline for the next refit of the Kurtzman Class, he was running level four diagnostics; just in-depth enough to give him detailed information, but not intensive enough to require that systems be shut down. He highly doubted the Captain would appreciate him taking primary systems out of the loop during a mission, particularly one involving potential hostile contact.

He was currently viewing simultaneous records pulled directly from the sensor arrays and comparing them against bridge entries to confirm that there was no degradation in the circuit pathways between the two systems that could cause issues. As with the majority of systems on the bridge, everything ran through Engineering at some point. On the other three screens at his station, he was also running scans of the communications, tactical and environmental systems. He had the rest of the shift focusing on the warp core, nacelles, EPS grid and dilythium reaction systems, but none of them had his experience with broader systems and so he’d taken that role on himself.

He was interrupted as Crewman Stanton tapped him on the shoulder before handing over the cup of mango juice he’d asked for fifteen minutes ago. He opened his mouth to good-naturedly berate the man, before his head was snapped back to his screen by a discrepancy.. Then another.. Then another.. He tapped a key to pause the readout and backed it up, muttering under his breath before he isolated the internal communications array and ran another, more focused scan. He waved Stanton off, his eyes flicking back and forth between the communications data and the incoming sensor diagnostics. He scratched his face, his eyebrows narrowing in confusion. He tapped the comm panel in front of him =^= Engineering to Captain Taggart, could you and Commander Stovik drop by if you have a moment? =^=

Whitney (CE)

Chris nodded to Stovik. [O] On our way chief. [O]

Captain Chris Taggart CO

Stovik followed Taggart out into the Engineering bay. This was a place he always felt an interesting feeling when he entered. It was unusual and he didn’t feel it anywhere else on the ship. Perhaps it was due to the thrumming and throbbing of the engines, or the focused concentration of the engineers. Or perhaps a psychic energy…he pondered to himself as he and Taggart approached Whitney.

He stopped behind Taggart and stood quietly with his hands behind his back. Another interesting facet, becoming an XO again, he seemed to have no trouble slipping back into the quiet, supportive role.

Commander Stovik

Chris walked up to the Chief. “You got something Chief?”

Captain Chris Taggart CO

As the two officers arrived, he leaned up from his chair, glancing up, down, and around to ensure no one was within earshot. He motioned them as close as he felt comfortable, before speaking just barely low enough to be heard “I’ve been running diagnostics since I arrive aboard to give me a full picture of how the Chernov has held up since she left port. I ran level four diagnostics on the comm systems to make sure there was no degradation, signal lag or issues with the main subspace transceiver array” he paused to point at the fourth monitor in his panel, several sections highlighted “I ran across the normal traffic patterns. A little signal lag and some bandwidth scatter from a couple of EPS conduits that have a shielding issue on deck 3. When I focused on deck three and the surrounding areas, I spotted this” He tapped his finger on the screen and the readout blew up with a series of comm panel activation queries “This is the comm box in your quarters and your ready room, Captain… Unless you’ve been hosting virtual conferences, your box has been active repeatedly in the last few days, for 20, 30, 60 minutes at a time… I think someone has been eavesdropping on you… Someone aboard this ship.”

Whitney (CE)

Chris looked shocked. “Well I just became Captain so they must have done it when Stovik was captain. Couldn’t be the Admiral because they arrived after. I say we keep it on and not let anyone know that we are on to them. Set up a trap. I’ll say something like I need a covert spot to talk and meet them in a barely used conference room or storage area. Once I and some random officer talk about secret Romulan stuff that I make up and leave you can monitor who goes in to plant a recording device. “

Chris thought for a minute then continued. “But it might be just as Kane has suggested and the person the Romulans took was an actual spy for them. They can be anywhere with their cloaked ship still listening. We’ll still proceed with the made up plan just in case. ” Chris clasped his hand on the the CE’s shoulder and smiled. “Great work Chief. “

Captain Chris Taggart CO

He had to admit, he didn’t really know who this Kane fellow was, but that brief train of thought was abruptly ended with confusion “What person what Romulans took?..”

Whitney (CE)

“The Romulans beamed off a science officer from the bridge.”Stovik murmured as his brows lowered as he went over in his mind everything Whitney had just told them. “Chief, does it appear that the signal from the Captain’s quarters and office was only transmitted within the ship and not without? Can you pin down where exactly it was be routed too?”

Commander Stovik

He half turned to Stovik, shock momentarily crossing his brow. He dearly wished internal sensors could be calibrated to detect unauthorized transports and weapons discharge, but continuous active scan routines used far more active memory than they could squeeze into even the newest duotronic cores without negatively affecting the performance of primary systems. His voice remained quiet, but took on an edge of irritation, bleeding through from his frustration with computer limitations “I’m running targeted diagnostics to try and track down the originating point of those transmissions, but the system doesn’t record origination, just activity. If someone was directly monitoring the comm circuitry with a custom device outside the network, I’m not confident we can trace the point unless or until it’s active. If this was a Romulan agent aboard the ship, and not just a random kidnapping, it’s likely the damage has already been done. If that’s the case, then I’m damn glad the Vulcans haven’t given us the specs for their archive yet.”

Whitney (CE)

“Dang it! Thanks Chief. Maybe we can use this to our advantage. Start making decisions in the office and other places where this signal is at and then hand the person a note or something that tells them what to actually do. Keep them off our tail for a moment and might keep them from attacking if they think they can get secret information. “

He turned to a nearby security officer. “I need you to go to the bridge and hand the Admiral this note. Then give it to Lt Kane and Commander Grey. You got it?”

Chris pulled out his little pocket notepad. It was old school but still effective.

The note reads:
Admiral.
Go get the Vulcans out of their room and go to a turbo lift and tell them not to talk about anything mission related to themselves or you while you or them are in your quarters, the bridge, conference room 1, the captain’s ready room or the War room. We believe there are listening devices on the ship.

Commander Grey and Lt Kane:
Set a new course to the East side of Old Vulcan in secret. Then Grey I want you to tell Kane out loud that we are going to the South end because that’s where we believe the allspark thing is at.

Captain Chris Taggart

Chris tore off the sheet and handed it to the officer. “Go now!”

Captain Chris Taggart CO

“I’m not intelligence guy, Captain - this cloak and dagger stuff is well above my paygrade – but we don’t even know who we can trust right now… For all we know, one or more of the Vulcans could be a Romulan spy. I can track this thing down when it’s active, but if i’ve gotta crawl through half a mile of ductwork and jeffries tubes for this, it’s gonna be a slow one. We need to set a specific and deliberate trap. If you’re sure about some security folks, you can have them on standby. If I tap directly into the comm line in the EPS junction that runs behind your ready room and you make it known you’re meeting the Vulcans there, I can be ready to pick up any active comm signals and trace the signal pathway back to its origin, even if it isn’t a networked device. With a low enough power unit, anyone using the device would read it as signal bleed from the EPS relays and shouldn’t be alerted until it’s too late.”

Whitney (CE)

“Sweet! We’ll do that. Let me know when you’re ready and I’ll have the meeting. And Chief. Don’t give me this crap about not knowing cloak and dagger stuff since you suggested putting listening devices in the tubes against the High Vulcan Command. ” He smiled and slapped the man on the shoulder. “You’re a natural!” He laughed then turned to Stovik.

He let out a little cough with a sideways glance to Stovik at the reminder of his thought to bug the Vulcans. He was beginning to think that maybe he’d spent a little too much time as a kid reading detective stories; he was beginning to sound like one of those cliched noir private investigators. He turned his attention back to Taggart “I can be ready as soon as you want to give the word. I’ve got some low energy diagnostic gear in my quarters we use at UP to verify circuit integrity. All I need is that and a tricorder. Other than that, it’s just a matter of how long it takes me to get into the junction behind your Ready Room”

“Commander I need to speak with you when we are done here privately please. ” He had a look a seriousness in his raptor gaze.

Captain Chris Taggart CO

Whitney (CE)

“I am your disposal, Captain.” Stovik said evenly from where he had stood to the side, still with his hands held behind his back in a relaxed pose.

Commander Stovik

At this moment the readout’s began to fill the screen from the sensor logs, the logs showed that the sensor’s had been modified on the bridge con terminal to mask the echo in the sensor’s. A closer look at the logs showed that “shadow” had been in and out for a period of 14 hours. Further checks of the sensor’s showed that Ensign Jackson had been at all the terminal’s that had been tampered with.

The sensor logs when unlocked also showed that a low frequency transmission had occurred approximately 20 seconds prior to the Romulan’s beaming Ensign Jackson out. There also appeared to have been an upload of a audio file just prior to the beam out to the computer, it did not appear to have any malicious software in it.

GM

His eyes snapped over to the console he’d had running diagnostics on the far left monitor. His eyes furrowed more deeply by the second as he read. He scrolled the readings back and ran back over them again, more slowly. He growled softly “What the buggery?!” before spinning in his stool to face the other two

Catching the scrolling text out of the corner of his eye Stovik asked,”What do you have, Chief?”

Commander Stovik

There was a sense of near outrage in his voice as he relayed the results “Your Ensign Jackson has been tampering with sensor logs. He’s intercepted the data as it reaches bridge terminals and adjusted the readings. Look here…” he tapped the monitor in several spots “…this is a reading from the spectral array, energy scatter that would otherwise probably be read by the system as background noise or natural phenomena, but it drops in and out of range and is far too regular. That’s an artificially generated signal. Based on what I know of Klingon devices we’ve seen and the Suliban specs I studied in school, I’d say that your Romulan interloper has a breach in his dampening field that’s letting a low level read break through the cloak.” He entered several commands to compare the imprint the shadow made to the brief contract the sensors had with the Romulan vessel “I’ll run an analysis and get you a firmer answer, but I can almost guarantee you we’ve just found a way to at least get some early warning on that Romulan. This though…” here he tapped the screen at several more points “…is less than good news. Low emissions communication coming from a bridge terminal right before Jackson was beamed away. I’m no security type, but I’d say that puts the nail in his coffin as a spy.” He tried to access the audio record, provided it hadn’t been deleted

Whitney (CE)


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