The Transmission (Part 1 of 2)

Posted on 20 Aug 2016 @ 3:19am by Rear Admiral Lirha Saalm & Commander Luke Wyatt & Lieutenant Min Zhao & Lieutenant Benice Gyce Ph.D. & Lieutenant JG Natalya Kirilova & Lieutenant JG Noah Khoroushi & Ensign Miraj Derani & Ensign Mimi & Lieutenant Commander Ryan Alexander & Crewman Apprentice Sigrid Thelin

1,542 words; about a 8 minute read

Mission: Episode 12 - Recluse
Location: USS Galileo, Sector 014 - Deck 1, Bridge
Timeline: MD 01 - 1105 hrs

[ON]

For anyone aboard Galileo, the perception of time while at warp was all relative; the tiny Nova-class had been chugging towards her destination at mediocre speed for over a week, but the reality of their intergalactic travels was much different. Holding steady at warp 5.1, the starship was screaming through the cosmos and completely insulated in her warp bubble from the time-space curvature while traveling at an exponential speed of light. A speed that, according to the ancient Earth physicist Albert Einstein, was not theoretically possible.

The joys of space travel were far removed from Lirha's thoughts at the moment. She'd been born and raised aboard her family's trade vessel from a very young age and had grown up accustomed to such long voyages. She could never truly appreciate the technology that the Federation and other warp-capable civilizations now took for granted, because she had never known anything different during her life. Perhaps it was fitting, then, that she had spent most of her Alpha shift duties indulging herself on several salads and appetizers in her ready room instead of watching the stars streak across the windows.

She was mid-bite into a delicious bowl of steamed gagh when the intercom sounded.

Min had been sitting at her console, reminded why Ops bridge duty could be so tedious, and distracted (well, not distracted but her attention was partly averted) by the content of a small screen on her display. Her attention was brought back to her console by a small chirp of one of the readouts. A faint subspace signal of unknown origin had triggers the comms into an alert mode.

=/\=Admiral. Something you may want to come have a look at. We have an odd subspace transmission we're detecting.=/\=

The Orion looked down at the large wiggling worms in her steaming bowl. They were slowly being cooked and were at their prime juiciness, and hopefully she would be able to return to them soon. She wiped her hands and chin with her napkin before standing to briefly stretch and leave her office.

The soft swish of the room's doors signaled Lirha's arrival back on to the bridge. She took a brief glance around the command center to take note of the personnel present before walking towards her command chair. Her eyes flicked towards her chief of operation who had summoned her. "What do you have, lieutenant?"

Standing at his station Luke watched as Lirha entered the bridge with a careful eye. He himself had been monitoring the situation and unlike most was piecing together a bit of everything to not only formulate his own ideas about the possible signal but also tactical awareness and probabilities of the Galileo and the surrounding space. There was no lying that his new job found him most days twiddling his thumbs and watching the ship go on without him, but as each day passed Luke started to get the grasp with this new role. Just like normal, Luke had been pretty bored until his panel lit up with a flurry of information which poured onto his screen even now. Turning to the direction Lirha had asked her question, he too waited for the responses.

Between the time she'd made the report and Lirha asked her what it was, Min had pushed the signal through several filters in an attempt to clean up the signal. "Trying to clean it up but it looks like a distress call of some kind. Heavily distorted, low subspace band. It's Federation but I can't make out who and where it's coming from."

"Probably have to do this manually," Noah muttered, biting down the urge to tap his foot in irritation as the computer went through yet another sequence of attempting to decipher the message. Finally, he pulled up a new program and began breaking the recording down into sub-segments and working it bit by bit. "It's audio only - no visual, which is a relief. It's a pain just sorting what we have already." The process was slow, but began showing some progress; Noah fed through each segment as it became more or less comprehensible.

Ryan cracked one of his thumbs as he furiously typed out commands onto his console. He was trying to triangulate where the distress call was coming from. He was using directional bearings from half a dozen installations, one being a satellite in nearby Celes system. He was having trouble with distance, the algorithm he was using to calculate the time lag between each receiving system wasn't giving him a position that made sense. He had the direction, but the distance wasn't coming out quite right. He rubbed his temples for a moment, running through the various reasons for the error. "I got it. " He said loudly to himself, and he typed in a few commands and making a few generalizations and assumptions. "Sir, the distress call is coming from the Paulsen Nebula. I have the general bearing which should be on your and helm's screen. However, I am having trouble getting an exact fix, there is some strange inference that I can't account for at this time. " Ryan said trying to be as short and to the point as possible.

While Ryan worked on tracking down the location of the signal Mimi worked with Min and Noah on deciphering the signal. Communication wasn't her best field although her sensitive hearing did help pick up things everyone else couldn't. "Hhmmm." She cocked her head to the side slightly. "I think I have several parts of the message, on audio."

Right on cue from Ops, the limited contents of the transmission began to play on audio throughout the entire bridge. "........ Th.....is.....ecluse..... any.....nea....arship.............. requir...assis.......primary.........offline..........life support fail........pl.... help......"

The message was littered with unintelligible static and Lirha struggled to make out the content of the transmission. She glanced over to both Wyatt and Warraquim before craning her head back towards the Operations alcove. "Can you clear up that transmission?"

Though the question was directed at Operations, Sigrid had a list of instruments and data collection experiments that constantly ran in the back ground for various purposes to the Science department.

"I think I can help, hun." She said as her painted nails flew across her console to deactivate a few things Science had running. She positioned the receiver in a better direction and looked to Ops to see if that boosted the incoming signal any better.

The message began to replay, this time much more clearly. "This is.... Recluse to any nearb....arship, we....require assistance, our warp cor.....and all primary sys....are offline. ....We need...elp, life support and all syst.....are failing..... please help......."

The transmission cut out before recycling itself on an automatic loop and replaying.

Ryan rubbed his chin as he brought up past scans of the Paulson Nebula. He spent a few moments going over the make up of the Nebula. "Hmm. " He said to himself, he added in the primary chemical make up, taking into account the primary materials that would create inference. He knew that if this was an ECM of sorts the radiation equations he was adding to his distance algorithms wouldn't work. He waited for it to process.

"Sirs, I have a more precise location. I was able to clear up the interference on the initial scans." He said as he sent the updated packet's to there console's.

Luke scanned over the data quickly. "She's way out in the nebula, and well of course. By the looks of her path the Recluse is on a lateral spin moving deeper into the nebula," Luke advised. "It's a freighter ship so if it's carrying something hazardous one strike from the nebula's storms could be catastrophic, worst case scenario of course."

Miraj looked at the data coming through. Salvaging ships like this had been the family business. But flying into a nebula was not something to do lightly. "I can fly in. But we might need to rely on visuals rather than sensors, which would mean having lots of people spotting."

Smiling at Miraj, "Good idea ensign." Looking over his data he sighed. "I don't know whether we should be taking the Galileo in, even if we were to get close enough we wouldn't be able to use transporters, the spin the ship is doing we wouldn't be able to stay within range at a glide let alone match course and trajectory. I'd suggest a runabout if any rescue mission is going to happen, admiral? Commander?" He finished.

To Be Continued...

[OFF]

--

RADM Lirha Saalm
Commanding Officer
USS Galileo

Ensign Miraj Derani
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant Luke Wyatt
Chief Strategic Operations Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Natalya Kirilova
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Noah Khoroushi
Assistant Chief Operations Officer
USS Galileo

Ensign Ryan Alexander
Operations
USS Galileo

Ensign Mimi
Operations
USS Galileo

Cmdr Allyndra illm Warraquim
Chief Medical/Second Officer
USS Galileo

Lt. JG Braxton MacKenzie
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo

Lieutenant JG Benice Gyce
Chief of Security
USS Galileo

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