Under a Rock: Into Focus

Posted on 19 Jul 2021 @ 10:34am by Commander Calliope Zahn & Captain Corvus DeHavilland & Commander Thaddeus Zayne & Captain Lachlan Callum & Commander Bruce Kensforth
Edited on on 02 Jul 2022 @ 10:55am

Mission: M2 - Sanctuary
Location: Obsidian Command, CiC
Timeline: MD06 0700
3140 words - 6.3 OF Standard Post Measure

Aboard the Theseus, Calliope had enough of a breather on the return trip not only for cleaning up, but also for some slapdash medical help courtesy of Doctor Corduke. After a lot of head shaking and snide comments about the complexity of her treatments that Calliope couldn’t help but be darkly amused at, he finally threw aside the tricorder and reprogrammed a cortical stimulator to account for the worst of her nausea, because, he claimed, the math on the drug doses was going to call for a crack science team. It was a little bit of brute force and she was only supposed to wear it until she could lay down again and sleep off the difference, but she was ecstatic to find it worked almost instantaneously and gave her some semblance of a respectable poise back.

One of the medical personnel returned her cane from the shuttle and she was no longer ambling side to side like a drunk, but pacing herself along with Captain Callum and Commander Kensforth as they approached the Starbase command offices.

It was the first time Calliope had seen the deck completely online and she tried not to show her shock at the difference between the damaged, offline, under-construction vibe and this perfectly completed, polished, furnished and online one. It didn’t feel like the station she had been assigned to. She hadn’t been there to witness the transformation and have the satisfaction of bringing it online and she felt a fresh wave of helpless frustration over the whole matter. Absorbed in thought, she said very little along the way.

“Enough to make you rethink taking a Starbase job,” Bruce mused as they looked back at the sea of terminals in the expansive CIC deck.

Calliope bit her lip.

“Speak for yourself,” Captain Callum shook his head. He’d have been hog-tied and lobotomized before he took a job on a Starbase. If he didn’t have a ship under his feet going as he pleased, he wasn’t interested.

They found their destination in the massive holotable that dominated a section of the CIC where there were a few Officers already assembled just going about their business. Lachlan recognized the form of Captain DeHavilland, looking far more upright and mobile than the last time he’d seen her. But she hadn’t noticed them approaching. A blonde-haired man on the opposite side of the table cocked his head curiously as he looked up from his station, his eyes flicking between the three of them and then resting on Calliope where his expression turned cold and impassive.

“Captain,” he muttered, gesturing his head that way.

Corvus turned away from the incoming ship manifest and started to smile to see Captain Callum joining them in the CIC but as she saw her former First Officer, it faltered a bit. She tried to recover it as best as she could but she doubted it was missed.

“Captain,” Lachlan nodded, walking up and offering his hand. “Good to see you again.”

“And you, Captain,” she nodded, shaking his hand. She gestured back to her office, “I have a bottle of single malt on my desk for you. Don’t you dare leave without getting it.”

He grinned crookedly, “I’d never be so careless.”

“Captain. Bruce Kensforth, of the Ardeshir,” he offered, answering the obvious question in the Captain’s eyes as she looked to the rest of Callum’s company.

“Commander,” she nodded, turning the smile, albeit a whole lot more forced, on Calliope. “Good to see you up and around,” she said.

“Thank you, Captain.” Gauging Zayne and Dehavilland with cautious neutrality, Calliope switched the cane into the opposite hand and didn’t return with any smile, forced or otherwise. “It’s good to be up—” She settled her poker face in Zayne’s direction where the chill was rolling in from. The spirit of things between them was completely opposite of when she’d first met him and he’d fantasized out loud about seeing people on the promenade again. Since her fall from grace, she’d felt Zayne completely shut her out. She’d no real idea why, but he’d refused to take her analysis and recommendations seriously and set up anything actionable, which had left her looking to do her own follow up. Calliope decided then and there not to bring up Zayne’s oversight. She wasn’t there for a blame game; it wouldn’t make either one of them look better. But she knew that he knew, and that was enough. “—And it’s good to be around.”

“Well what brings you three here?” Corvus asked, glancing over at Zayne to see if he had any thoughts. He just looked impassively back. She had to admit, sometimes she preferred his simple cold calculation over Calliope’s more emotional, and friendly responses. They both had their pros and cons, but in this moment his simple silence conveyed so much. He had no idea what was going on and he was wary about it. She’d managed to work out that much in how to read her new XO.

Calliope reached across the command board and pulled up a holo menu. She found they had completed installing the privacy shield and initiated it. A holographic privacy wall formed in an oval shape around the table, muffling sound and visuals. “It’s possibly sensitive, depending on what you want to do with the knowledge, Captain.” she proceeded through some additional selections on her holographic wrist brace, which she’d largely come to use to replace cumbersome Padds and chips. When she had the miniature display loaded, she cast it to the display table. A fairly ugly pitted rock form hovered in the center.

“What am I looking at?” Corvus asked with a twinge of concern.

“This is Distant object 0994. At our current orbital positions, it’s right…” Calliope cast an additional display of the Loki system and motioned into the air to highlight the position of 0994. It lit up as if she’d touched a puddle and the highlight radiated out momentarily. Additional displays automatically ran material analysis, rotational speed, projected orbit, stardates from active scan history, and other trivia— Calliope waved that into minimized mode for the moment.

“When we first recovered the Starbase from the Void, our sensors were non-operable. To compensate, Lieutenant Commander Kimberlye from Intel frankensteined a temporary sensor net. The net greatly extended our sensor reach, but having limited resolution, created sensor shadows and feedback. Fully operational high grade sensors tune out refractory data. Refraction is like looking at a pond in the light and seeing glitters off the fine surface movements. There’s too much that blinds the sensors. So a refined image purposely removes that noise with highly tuned filtering protocols and models. Kimberlye’s kit-bash wasn’t fine tuned and included all of those signal fragments and refraction. So to differentiate noise from items of interest, we compared it with ship sensors, which only gave us narrow corridors of fine resolution and only at certain times.”

At that point, Calliope projected an additional overlay map of various ship sensor data as reported in a single particular day. The day she picked was the one just prior to the day of the attack. It basically looked like little stripes through the system, highlighting the patrols. Each ship had a finer sensor image within a travel corridor and a less refined one radiating in a larger tubular track. Long range scans covered the entire system but not to high resolution. “The morning of the attack, Lieutenant Commander Kavalar met with the USS Wasp to investigate what was deemed likely one of these refractive signals detected off Distant Object 0994. They were mid way through the investigation when the call to defend Obsidian Command arose and they elected for an emergency in system warp hop to answer that call. It’s understandable that 0994 became forgotten since then. But I’ve…” Calliope looked between DeHavilland and Zayne where they stood across from one another, eye-beaming across like they were telepath twins. The new command duo. They had so much in common, including what Calliope read as very serious skepticism. She was sure that if she hadn’t been walked in by Callum and Kensforth she’d already be out on her ass at this point in the presentation. She stretched her jaw in thought. “I’ve had a lot of time on my hands.

“So I’ve been scrounging for a lot of reading.” She continued. “When I read the reports from the Wasp crew, it was mentioned that the signal fragment seemed to form a countdown in an archaic type of Romulan numerals. A countdown that reached Zero and ceased projecting the moment the first ships decloaked around OC. This seemed a little dramatic. It was possibly put down to the heightened battle senses playing tricks on memory. I called up the logs on the Wasp and listened to it myself. It did seem a little like a countdown and vaguely sounded Romulan through the static. It was enough to make me curious. I did some further research on the history of the Loki System and Romulan interests, particularly a hundred years ago, and decided it was possible what Commander Kavalar and company had almost found was a communications array under an older cloak. Having nothing else to do but play backgammon with myself and read old Loki System archives,” Calliope motioned to Bruce. “I invited Commander Kensforth to help me finish the unresolved investigation into the object.”

Corvus turned a concerned look to Commander Kensforth as she said that, caught somewhere between hopeful that they’d found something useful or pity that Calliope had managed to drag an otherwise stellar officer into her web of madness.

“When we arrived, there was nothing very remarkable, apart from some evidence of empty volume in the rock as compared to the mineral composition and volume vs mass. Since I had an idea what I was looking for, I ran some scans for residual effects of the older cloaking technology and found what I suspected to be a power source. Pinpointing that, I was able to reveal this—” Calliope waxed her palm through the air and her composite image of the comms array came into primary focus, forcing the rock to recede into a side bar.

“An ancient comm’s array?” Corvus asked quietly, looking over to Callum with a look that clearly said ‘please tell me that’s not it’. She knew Callum had a reputation for bucking orders and for putting his nose where it didn’t belong, but from everything she’d read, he’d always been on the right side of it. Him and Kensforth being there, with their reputations preceding them, was the only reason she didn’t pull Calliope aside before she started and shut her down.

“That’s what I thought as well. No harm in getting a closer look, right?” Bruce smirked impishly. “May I?” he asked Calliope, not really waiting for the answer before he stepped up to the holo-controls and brought up another set. This time it was a holographic representation of the Seventeen just as they were approaching the rock. Inside the holo was the two of them. He hit the control and the feed began to playback the sensor logs in holographic form from the moment that Calliope announced: Voila!.

DeHavilland heaved a heavy sigh at first, not ready to have to shut down her friend again, but her face fell when Bruce cried out and juked the craft. She stepped closer to the table, one hand resting on the edge as she watched, now enraptured. Corvus glanced briefly across the table to see Thad with his arms folded, watching with that same ‘cold-as-ice’ expression he always seemed to have. Meanwhile Calliope closed her eyes to prevent repeating the motion sickness in the recording.

“Theseus answered their narrow-band distress,” Callum chimed in. “I’m sorry to report your Arrow runabout Seventeen was damaged beyond repair. Commander Aker scuttled her for parts,” he offered consolingly. “We immediately turned to investigate. But all we found was the remains of the comm’s station, some debris and one Romulan corpse floating in the void. Likely one of Kensforth’s unlucky pilot foes,” Callum explained further. “We did complete scans of the rock and several of the ones nearby, but as of yet, nothing more to report.”

“I have a good idea where else you should be looking though.” Calliope offered, switching all the way back to Kimberlye’s ‘imperfect’ images. Had they not been so flawed, all of the signals would have been lost to filtering. It had been the oversensitivity that had paid off. Calliope paged through the various recorded impressions and matched up all of the fragmented signals with similar time signatures to the countdown leading up to the attack on OC, then had the computer eliminate the noise that didn’t sync up. She’d precompiled the imagery or else it would have taken uncomfortably long to process. The work resulted in a system wide map of points on distant objects and some of the planets and planetary moons.

“My suspicion is that after the station was lost in the Void, other parties took over abandoned old Romulan comms which had been abandoned after the Loki System became a UFP protectorate and Obsidian Command was first constructed. Although not every hideaway may have a shielded comms array, some of these shielded arrays may coincide with other bases and hideouts—” Calliope stopped there somewhat abruptly, as if cutting herself off short. She had to remind herself that it wasn’t really her business to advise the command team on what to do with the information, just to share it. “During the countdown cycle, there were two hundred and thirty seven comm signals like the one that came from Object 0994. There may be others that were not active at the time. I’m working through a lot of other signal noise in the records to suss that out. Whether or not they’re currently manned as 0994 was, these are the confirmable locations so far. It’s entirely possible that some of these also act as passive listening posts, tracking movement in the system and picking up open signals.”

Bowing her shaved head and holding up one finger in momentary pause, Calliope suppressed a burp and whispered a note of “sorry” under her breath before looking again particularly to Corvus, thinking back to the moment while they had watched the coming swarm of small attack craft with binoculars. “At least we can guess how so many of them got here so fast. They were already quietly amassed in the system.”

“What is it you’re suggesting, Commander?” Corvus asked, shaking her head at the sheer volume of data in front of her.

“Scan every last object in the belt and melt to slag any comm stations still standing, just for good fecking measure,” Callum chimed in.

“It might flush the rabbits from their holes if we tasked every runabout and patrol vessel to do that,” Kensforth agreed.

“We won’t be guaranteed to find everything, but… It would shake out the rugs. Alternatively, you could take out none of them. They might not know we have any idea. Just got lucky picking out one. Tactically we might like having microphones to whisper into. We might be able to use what we know to learn more. But, “ Calliope bit her lip. “That’s not my wheelhouse.”

Corvus considered it for a long moment. She stared blankly at the holo before her, her mind a million light years away as she worked out the angles. Yes, there was something far more sinister going on here that they knew very little about but they’d also put them on the ropes and then right out of the ring. They weren’t going to bounce back very quickly, but if they allowed them this tiny, insignificant foothold, they might well rebuild into something that could actually do them harm.

She finally looked up, turning her attention to Zayne first. “Tell Kavalar his squadron was just activated. They’re to escort the Pathfinder, Yellow Jacket, Wasp and Theseus, if you’re still in the game,” she said, gesturing to Callum. “In scouring all the objects in our surrounding space. If they’re hiding, we’ll flush them out in force. If they’ve already run, we’ll leave nothing for them to run back to.”

“Theseus is with you, Captain.”

“Ardeshir is down for refit, but I’m with you as well. Tell me where I can help,” Bruce smiled, “Preferably in a fighter, if you don’t mind,” he added hopefully.

“I want you on the Pathfinder, Commander Zayne,” Corvus ordered as well.

“Aye, Captain,” he replied with a curt nod.

Calliope closed down the display, moving the secure files with her maps made from the ‘faulty’ scans to the Command files for the others to use to coordinate. A hand went to the back of her neck to touch the device there. Her work was done. And she knew she needed to lay down and turn off Corduke’s cortical stimulator before things compounded worse than they already had.

“Captain, Commander,” She addressed Covus and Thad, “I’m afraid I need to excuse myself. Thank you for entertaining my brief. Good hunting.”

Cold as ever, Thaddeus simply nodded back. Corvus understood his hesitation and she shared it for certain, but she’d also known Calliope a very long time. There was so much to unpack that it couldn't be simply expressed, so she settled for a simple statement. “Good job, Commander,” she offered to Calliope, moving straight on to the others. “Captain. A moment before you go,” she said, waving Lachlan towards her office.

“Aye,” he agreed.

“Hang back a minute, Mr. Kensforth,” Thaddeus chimed in quietly. “I’d like to coordinate our approach.”

“Sounds good,” Bruce grinned. He caught Calliope by the shoulder as she was turning to leave. “Good job,” he beamed, “Next rounds on me.”

“Thanks, Bruce,” she said, relaxing on an exhale and letting down the guard she’d worn with everyone else. If she’d had it in mind to take a look all on her own, she wasn’t sure in retrospect if she would have made it back alive. Impulsively, with his hand on her shoulder she closed for a quick hug of thankful camaraderie and clapped him on the back before she broke away. “Give Kavalar my regards and call me when you get back.”