The Last S.O.S.

Posted on Thu Mar 29th, 2012 @ 12:58pm by Lieutenant Cedric Shepherd & Captain Elsie Halliwell & Lieutenant Commander Dylan Blake

1,193 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: Fishing
Location: Out in the Taylforth system
Timeline: 2 hours after Going Down

"This is Baden-Powell" Lieutenant Blake's voice sounded through the comm. "Requiring assistance to locate wayward signal. Possible buoy, very weak signal. Burton and Speke please respond."

Aboard the Burton, Lieutenant LaFontaine glanced to Mailloux, who was keying up the sensors even as he spoke. "Burton here. We're starting scans now."

"Here we go..." Adalyn said quietly, glad to have something to do. She had been happy enough to stay in orbit and not head underwater with the Ranger. It wasn't that she was scared of being underwater, she'd been talked into diving once or twice, but it wasn't her favourite place to be. But logic puzzles, novels and intermittent sensor checks got pretty boring after a bit.

"So what do you think?" She turned to LaFontaine, "some old communications satellite? Maybe some kind of entertainment satellite that fell out of orbit?"

"Fell out of orbit away from the planet?" asked LaFontaine. "How would that happen?"

"Good point." Adalyn responded. "So, it can't be a satellite." She tried to think of what else it might be.

LaFontaine spoke into the silence, "could it be something actually launched away from the planet?" He paused and then continued, "a ship, maybe?"

Adalyn considered that. "Could be, but the signal's pretty weak for a ship. And why would they launch something when they couldn't rescue their space station crew?"

LaFontaine nodded. "Good point as well."

"Well, whatever it is we've only been able to find it now," Blake's voice sounded over the comm link. "I want to learn more; it could hold some clues to what happened to the planet or maybe something key about the Romulans."

"This is the Speke," Ensign Rajeev called. "We have the signal on our scans as well."

"Excellent," Blake chorused. "Feed me your data I'll triangulate the source."

Winters sat there in her bucket seat in front of Blake on the Baden-Powell, the telemetry from the other shuttles now feeding into her console. The information was patchy at best, and to Winters, it didn't really seem to make much sense. "It's still a little weak to follow," she stated, her eyes darting from one data packet to the next. "Any tricks up your sleeve?" she jested.

"We'll see," Blake replied working behind, also viewing the data being forwarded from the supporting shuttles. "I might have a hibernating rabbit up there somewhere..." He paused to work feverishly upon the console before returning the data to Winters. "Follow that trajectory."

Ella studied the course quickly, turned to face the controls and fed the information into the helm. Relaying the same details to the mini-fleet, she received confirmation almost instantly of their compliance. "The shuttles are in tow," she said, nodding to Blake as she locked eyes with him.

The Baden-Powell pushed off into the void at one quarter impulse as the Burton and Speke fanned out behind her. "This is Winters," she called out across subspace. "I'm temporarily linking up our scans with yours to ascertain a more accurate reading for the helm. Although the signal is weak, by collating our scans, we should, at least, be able to find out roughly where this beacon is emanating from. Can either of you see anything clearer on sensors?"

It didn't feel like an hour. It felt like an eternity. The Burton and Speke eventually shifted wide out from Baden-Powell's course to better triangulate the signal's position. And through space they traveled, three small power signatures chasing something even smaller. At last, the range closed tight, and with the trio of little ships almost on top of the signal it was time to act.

The search had been painstakingly slow, but finally, finally they had tracked the mysterious signal. "Bring us to quarter impulse," Blake directed to Winters as he squinted at the object before them. "How fast is that travelling?"

Winters had aligned the Baden-Powell up to push forward to the beacon under almost inertia alone. She looked up from the helm's display and readjusted her bearings. "According to our own speed, this piece of junk is only travelling about twenty kps." She switched over for a look at the Ops scans and confirmed her own suspicions. "Nuclear," she said to herself. "With a propulsion system that rudimentary, this thing would struggle to pull out of any gravitational pull from the surrounding planets. We're lucky this hasn't been downed already."

"Move us closer," Blake continued glancing up from the statistics Winters had read from. "With a system this basic it's amazing this thing is still operating let alone flying."

Winters answered by silently raising one eyebrow as her concentration now solely leant itself to piloting. She moved the shuttle closer to the object and pushed up near to it. "Matching course and speed," she replied, almost automatically as the shuttle now dropped to just inertia. "Wow, this is small."

Aboard the Burton, LaFontaine let out am amused grunt. "There's something you don't see every day."

Adalyn shook her head in agreement. "I think it's some kind of probe. But what could it have been sent out for? And when was it sent out?" The possibilities were limitless.

"That's what I want to find out," Lieutenant Blake answered. "Winters, could we arrest its momentum with a tractor beam do you think?"

Back on the Baden-Powell Ella's blonde locks whipped out from her ponytail as she threw her gaze down to the readings and nodded. "It's power signal is low enough not to pose any risk of destruction should we lock on with a beam. I'll try to lower the force of what we encase it with, but no promises, Lieutenant. It looks like a delicate piece of machinery and jostling it around with a highly focused beam could knock its power out. But we won't know until we try."

"Sir," Ensign Fisk spoke up from her console. "The issue here is the structural integrity of the... probe... thing." she shrugged at the word and carried on. "It's structure is scanning as pretty fragile, and even though 20 kps is slow for space, it's still pretty fast for a man-made object. Bringing it to a stop all at once could destroy it. Maybe we can do this incrementally?"

Ella shot a look to Blake and nodded, indicating her agreement.

Slowly, over the span of 15 minutes and 30,000 km, the probe was eased to a stop.

Adalyn looked at the probe and saw their next problem. Despite the fact that the probe was small, tiny even, there was no way they were going to be able to fit it into any of the shuttles. It was too big for that.

A thought occurred to her.

"Sir, I think the only way to get any information off that thing is to run a physical relay line to it. I can do that. I can go out there and get it connected, shouldn't even take me that long!"

"Okay," came Blake's response. "Do it."

 

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