Space Bauble - pt 3
Posted on 13 Nov 2022 @ 5:40pm by Commander Calliope Zahn & Lieutenant Louke Haille & Chief Deputy Marshal: Ridge Steiner - FMS & Lieutenant Commander Cesar De La Fuente Ph.D. & Lieutenant JG Gabriel Lyons
Mission:
M3 - Into the Deep
Location: Aquatic Space Station (Pathfinder Away Team)
Timeline: MD08 1645HRS
2380 words - 4.8 OF Standard Post Measure
The structure seemed to Louke, as he let his gaze follow the track of his scanning, to hold a certain modular aspect. "These pieces look as if they could be adapted to numerous applications. Useful for quick design, but—" it lacked a certain stream-lined aspect. "This could either be an adapted process, or something developed for mass use."
"Yeah, I was having the same feeling," Calliope agreed." It's not as ugly as the utilitarian modular designs I'm used to seeing, but the seams are showing."
"Perhaps there are more of these structures scattered deeper in the region," Louke wondered out loud. "The station doesn't appear to require direct oversight. Likely this one had some remote function as this unit isn’t designed for supporting more than five life forms at a time. Not that there's anyone here besides ourselves." Louke double checked life sign readings again to confirm before locating a surface where he could start unpacking the water collection kit.
"Yeah. Kinda quiet." Calliope agreed, switching off her headlamp now that the station itself was glowing. "What's the tactical opinion on this place, Mr. Lyons?"
"It seems fairly innocuous," he said in response as his eyes took a practiced turn around the room in question. Everything was smooth, except where texture delineated panels and controls. "There's no weapons caches, no hidden panels, no tactical displays."
He tapped an octagonal button on the display, which was pliant under his fingers, and he chuckled when the window appeared in the wall across from him. The wall just...became transparent and offered a view into the depth of space beyond. Little glitters of copper, gold and occasional silver flickered through the transparent space, with lines of bright metallic blue at the edges of the window.
"I wonder if it hides it's actual function because I see nothing that makes me think anything. That makes me think that the functions are hidden, or that this was an area of the shell that was used for more innocent purposes... I'm inclined to think the first with no further information."
Calliope let herself drift over to the window, where she could see the Pathfinder and the Theseus hovering not so far off. "It can't be here for no reason at all..." Calliope began to do some additional scans of her own, drawing out a tricorder and using the now powered up systems to create a tracing of the small station's grid. However it was powering it self, she could at last map the charge and figure out what else it was linking with.
"On an aside, I wonder if the color changes mean something." Lyons gestured to the change in the color of the wall, at the door to the next chamber. There was another difference in shade in the chamber beyond.
"It's possible." She said thoughtfully. Lyons was likely correct. "Even if we don't know what they mean. It's possible the colors are just environmental and insignificant. But still, I mean, we use colors as signifiers all of the time."
"Fair point" said Gabe as he glanced at the subtle shifts in color, like the hue of a pearl. "I'm going to follow the blue-purple chamber designation.". He propelled himself into the so marked room, and cast his light around. There were a few tiny points of phosphorescence the glinted back at him.
Calliope peeked into the additional chamber. "Looks like a sleeping space. These are all drawers. Go ahead and sample what artifacts you can into a collection bag, Mr. Lyons. We'll see what we can glean from the personal effects." As the security officer set about opening the drawers set into the wall, she swam back to Louke. "What have we got going on with the sampling scans?"
While Science wasn’t his forte, there was a certain overlap to his Operations training; a fact for which Louke was grateful as he set up an array of tubes for water samples. "The scans indicate a rather robust microbial life in the water, judging by the markedly high salt levels. Most of what I'm seeing tends toward algae and other microscopic organisms, some bacteria as well as some zoonotic viruses"
"Are we in danger of bringing back any contaminants?" Calliope knew that the transporters usually filtered everything out. But she'd worked on a medical ship for much of her career where the protocols for handling contaminants were very strict.
"None of it appears to be a threat to the team in any way," Louke reassured her, "but it seems the microbial life is capable of breaking down and cleaning up decomposing plant and animal life. All signs of a healthy environment, but the sheer numbers are a strong indication that the water has not been filtered for about twenty years."
"Okay. Get all of the samples you can so Wagner can do the full analysis for DNA and waste traces that she wanted." Calliope directed. Meanwhile her tricorder was compiling a clearer outline of the tracing of power and she pursed her lips as she picked out a console that seemed to be a hub to the network. she gently kicked off of one wall and floated back into the main work area to have a closer look. The panel seemed to motion sense her approach and lit up in a brighter array of intricate symbols and forms.
"I think I found the main station," she said, holstering her tricorder. Calliope watched as the display in her visor tried to translate the symbols, but the Universal Translator had nothing else to go on, and so mostly came up with a bunch of distracting blanks and unhelpful suggestions. she switched off the translation overlay. Maybe someone with anthropology would have more luck tuning the UT later, using the alien computer with more context.
"I think, " Calliope said after a few minutes," The bulk of the equipment here is supporting a massive antenna system. They were trying to broadcast and receive. But I can't tell what or why. Let's just take the computer core back to the Pathfinder. I think that's going to be the most illuminating here."
"We're stealing stuff?" Steiner replied, concerned. "This station is not our property, nor are those" He gestured at the items than that been brought from what appeared to be crew quarters"
"Yeah, and we're trespassing in the first place when they didn't answer the doorbell and we let ourselves in," Calliope said with pleasant sarcasm. The Marshals tended to work a little differently, dealing with citizen matters as compared to procedures for deepspace exploring protocol concerning abandoned facilities and derelict ships. "nothing here has been powered on in a couple of decades. We're collecting for further examination. Sometimes you have to look inside the lost wallet to find the home address. Take the computer out of the housing so we can get it properly analyzed, Mr. Steiner."
"We were just visiting until we took things, now technically we're trespassing" Steiner muttered but she was right, they needed the data on the computer to proceed. "But you're the boss"
Louke glanced up as conversation trailed off. "I guess there's a reason they hire private security for archaeological digs, otherwise there'd be no reason for museums." His mouth quirked slightly in amusement.
"You'd be surprised at the black market in looted art treasures" he commented "Then the lawyers get rich trying to get things returned to their rightful owners"
Steiner swum over to the panel; it was not like anything he had seen before. Most of the controls appeared to be mechanical, probably because touch-controls would be affected by the movement of the water. He unclipped his Tricorder and the standard EVO suit toolkit from his belt. Running the tricorder over the panel brought him up a three-dimensional image of what was within it.
"Looks to be a self-contained unit" he held up the tricorder display. There was a cylinder, about the size of an eighty-gallon drum, with several connections to cables at either end. The drum itself was sealed, dry inside and filled with what the tricorder was reading as a mix of inert gases, instead of water.
Within it was a complex array of data processing chips, a spiraling helix-shape of processors arranged about a central bus. "That's interesting, the tricorder reports the chip are made of Gallium Nitride crystals, not silicon based. They are sort of grown rather than assembled"
"Likely a protective measure in light of the environment," Louke mused, making note of the process to review later.
Steiner compared the display to the panel and found there was a circular access hatch on the side, secured with fasteners. He activated his magnetic soles and got into a stable position, standing on the wall.
The fasteners were an unusual design, so he resorted to going at them with a pair of pliers. Luckily there were not tight, and he had them all undone within a few minutes. Not having a pocket to put them in he wondered how to store them, but then found they were magnetic and held themselves in place on the bulkhead.
The hatch cover slid to the side and he bent down to look inside, the drum was opaque but had a series of illuminated diodes on the outside, they gently flashed in a spiral around the drum, mimicking the processor layout inside. There were three cables connections on the top, they simply unscrewed and could be pulled out. Once he had done that, the lights went out and the panel above died. Reaching into the hole he got a grip on the drum, braced his knees and slowly pulled it out.
As soon as the drum cleared its receptacle he reached around and uncoupled the cables at the other end. Keeping a firm hold on the core until Zahn decided what to do with it.
Louke glanced over at the Commander. "Anything else we want to collect in here, Ma'am?"
"I think we've got the scans and the samples we need. Let's get the computer addressed and shipped." Calliope let herself glide back to where Steiner was working and examined the computer unit. The casing was sealed and there was no indication from the material scans that it was going to be problematic in air. She didn't see any reason it couldn't be transported so she took a signal tag from one of her utility pockets and attached it to the peek of the spiral form of it.
"Pathfinder," She said, "Prepare a sealed sample tank in the science lab with these atmospheric density measurements, then beam this computer unit into containment there, site-to-site."
The comm chirped. "Aye Commander." Mr Jop responded back from his post in the transporter room. Nothing happened right away, since he was communicating with the science lab.
Calliope pushed off with her fingers to see how Caesar was coming along. "You've been quiet Commander," she said.
"It's going to take me a little while to translate this. The UT isn't picking it up," De La Fuente cut her off. "But it's strange... the station seems to have gone dead... twenty years or more ago. But it's still receiving data. Not regularly, though. Very sporadic..." he said, more as if he were just talking out loud to himself than actually speaking to Zahn. Finally, though, he turned to look at her. "I should be able to review the signal's telemetry and ba-," he stopped suddenly, his eyes staring past Commander Zahn to the center of the water where something caught the edge of the light beams from his helmet and from Steiner's farther in the water.
Calliope was looking down at the display Caesar was referencing and missed his turn of attention. "Interesting. Neither ship was picking up a broad signal. It must be a narrow band. Meaning someone knew the trajectory of this station. Or, is guessing at probable trajectories at intervals. We can mdel the strength and signal loss to narrow down a likely point of origin on the line of trajectory—"
Cesar pushed gently around her, turning his head the way he thought he'd saw the object move past, adjusting the aperture of the lights so that it flared wide and covered more space. Almost immediately the object became visible, and in so doing made it clear that it was not an object, per se, but a figure in some kind of an EVA suit. Not one that they'd ever seen before.
"Madre de dios," Cesar breathed. He immediately turned his head the way the body had floated from, scanning with his lights and simultaneously taking out his tricorder and setting it to a wider ban scan. Now it was only finding the one figure in the water to his right. "Where the hell did it come from?" he asked desperately.
Noticing his hear rate spike on the team life signs monitor, Calliope swiveled to see what the Science officer was talking about. "Oh shhh-" She practically leaped out of her suit, startled at the appearance of an alien figure floating stiffly at the center of the command space. Her gloved hand reflexively moved towards her racing heart as she regained a grip on her reflexive reaction. "How did sensors miss...?"
The body was clearly not moving in the manner of anything living, but inanimate and carried by the flow. "It must have moved out of a hidden space or pocket the sensors were shielded from, maybe when we turned the power back on turned the filtration system restarted. Then pulled towards the gravity well." It was suddenly, uncannily, in the center of the room, after all. It took all of her own reasoning to convince herself that the body had suddenly turned up for physical reasons and not creepy supernatural ones. She could imagine Lance would have come to the same conclusion and probably would have skipped being startled by the idea of an apparition.
Calliope took another transporter tag from her pocket while breathing in a controlled fashion. "We'll have to have Doctor Wagner perform an autopsy. Mr. Jop, I have another signal for you to lock on to. Please have medical prepare a containment field in the morgue..."
