A real mission
Posted on 26 Nov 2023 @ 11:29am by Ensign Kat Walker
1,841 words; about a 9 minute read
Mission:
Miranda
Location: The great void of space
This was it. A real mission. Not that doing a sensor run over an alien moonbase wasn't a real mission, but that seemed like a warm-up compared to finding a trader that had several days head start on them. At least Kat knew that she was considerably faster than the trader's craft at max warp. And she'd have to travel at max warp for as much as possible to have a chance to catch up to the civilian ship - somewhere in between a large shuttle and a small runabout in size.
The Odin in her rear sensor arc, she lined up with the navigation data she'd been given, to try and find an intersect course where she could pick up the craft's decaying warp signature. Hopefully it wasn't too decayed and there was still enough for her to pick up. Maneuvering on thrusters and then impulse to clear Odin's airspace (technically space-space, but biologicals tended to think that sounded incredibly silly, she mused) before she jumped to warp.
And now, she had nothing but time on her hands, as she streaked through space, sensors out. It would take hours upon hours - the better part of a day - to catch up to where the trader's shuttlecraft, a Kheldorian 'Luxus Traveler' model named 'Artigo', would have passed. Where she could, with some luck, catch its warp signature. Fortunately the Kheldorian brand shuttle would have left behind a very distinct trail to follow, owing to its aging Magnadrive make warp engine's unique signature. At least, so old sensor logs and some extranet research were telling her. Also fortunately the Luxus Traveler was a fairly common type of civilian warp ship, popular with civilian traders for a competitive blend of space, capacity, comfort and cost, and information was plenty.
During the journey she reviewed logs, files given to her by Petty Officer Omani, sensor logs from Odin herself and the USS Montana as well, compiling as complete a picture as she could from those files. A significant portion of her available parallel computational threads dedicated to this task. Compiling, analyzing, refining, re-analyzing, comparing, interpreting. It seemed this particular Luxus Traveler model of civilian warp ship's Magnadrive warp engine was slightly out of tune, running a bit rich, giving Kat a very singularly recognizable warp trail to try and pick up. She sped along at warp 7.6, her maximum sustained warp factor, her beefed up cooling system running overtime to keep her reactor and warp engines at nominal temperature.
Even at those speeds, it took a number of hours to pick up the warp signature. And at those speeds, her sensors only bleeped for a fraction of a second - but that was enough for the AI to get a bearing. She instantly dropped out of warp and wheeled about, long range sensors picking the trail up again when she doubled back on herself. Setting a new course for navigation and re-entering warp she now had a trail to follow, like a bloodhound. And follow it she did, checking her sensors one hundred and twenty eight times a second, to ensure she wouldn't lose track of the signal. She spared some more of her threads to calculate where her new course would take her, then when her calculations told her she would end up flying straight into a distant star, she re-calculated. Was this a mistake? No. The trader's warp signature would lead her straight into a star. A bright giant, in this case - with a Yerkes special luminosity class rating of 2.
This caused her some concern. If the trader's warp ship trail led her straight into a star, then the chances of finding the ship intact decreased dramatically. As did the chances of finding out more information about where the strange, manufactured disease had come from. She calculated various possibilities and filtered and ordered them according to likelihood. The two most prominent ones were that the trader had delivered the engineered disease to the fleet on purpose and flew his shuttle into a star to erase the evidence, or that someone had used the trader to deliver the disease without his knowledge and had steered the shuttle into a star to erase all evidence. Neither possibility seemed conducive to figuring out where the disease had come from.
She dropped out of warp again when she suddenly lost the trail. Once again she wheeled about and doubled back on herself, flying at high impulse to give herself more time to scan surrounding space with her sensors. This might take a while, she mused, as dropping out of warp had meant she had overshot the point where she'd lost the trail by some amount. Sweeping the area at max resolution to try and pick up the trail again. After some time, a blip on her long range sensor - the much fresher signature of the slightly out of tune Magnadrive warp engines. It had passed by here not too long ago; a day or two at most. She came about to the correct heading and jumped back into warp, now closing in on her target, on her mission goal.
It didn't take long for her long range sensors to pick up another blip - a ship. Small, roughly matching the size of a Kheldorian Luxus Traveler. Slowing down but staying in warp as she approached, every passing moment her sensors picking up more detail. It matched every scan, this was the ship she was looking for. It was still intact. She dropped out of warp and approached it at impulse speeds, opening a hailing channel.
"This is Starfleet Ensign Kat Walker to civilian shuttle Artigo. Please respond."
No answer.
"Ensign Kat Walker to shuttle Artigo. Respond."
The shuttle was ever so slowly tumbling to space, seemingly adrift. Power readings were sporadic. Again, no answer.
"Shuttle Artigo, respond."
Still no answer. Nearing, Kat mirrored the Artigo's lazy arc through space, scanning every detail of the ship that she could. Minimal power readings, engines were off. No apparent damage. No life signs.
"Artigo, respond."
She activated her forward floodlights, illuminating the inside of the dark shuttle through the forward windows. There was the trader, sitting slumped in his pilot seat. Skin pale, sunken in, signs of early decay starting to appear. He was dead, and had been for a number of days.
Deadeye powered on her tractor beam to grab the shuttle - the effort straining her hull as the system fought the combined inertia of a Luxus Traveler and a Valkyrie, Kat's thrusters easing their slow tumbling movements, bringing both craft to a complete stop. She pondered for a moment what to do - though 'a moment' for her meant a second or two at most, as hundreds of threads calculated simultaneously.
She considered towing Artigo back to Odin at warp with her tractor beam. It could work, as long as the shuttle was fully inside her warp bubble. Unfortunately, said bubble was too small and the Luxus Traveler too big, to fit.
She weighed leaving a beacon behind at the now stationary derelict shuttle and reporting its position to the Captain for Odin to pick up, but decided against it. The shuttle itself was an uncharted navigational hazard and the non-negligible risk of the disease infecting the atmosphere and interior of the shuttle meant it was a potential infection risk too.
She deliberated destroying the shuttle, then and there, to ensure the safety of anyone traveling through this area and countering the infection risk. This solution returned mostly positive and within Starfleet guidelines to dealing with similar situations, though that would mean the loss of the Artigo's navigational, sensor and communication logs. Maybe there was a way to safeguard those? Bringing those logs back to Odin would be a prize, to be sure.
She considered for a few microseconds her cyberwarfare suite. Unfortunately, it was purely a defensive one, not designed for attack, not written for hacking in to other ships. But she could write a cyberwarfare suite that could do that. At least, she was fairly confident she could write one that could remotely access an aging, civilian shuttle like the Artigo, which would have considerably simpler systems and ICE to anything military. So she re-opened the files detailing the Luxus Traveler's sytems. Specifically, the ship's main computer. As expected, it was an older type, and as expected, according to extranet forum posts and manufacturer software updates, there were some minor vulnerabilities that could, possibly be exploited.
The two ships hung silently in space, unmoving, one with sporadic power, the other working overtime, AI core analyzing, interpreting the files she had on the shuttle's onboard computer system. Half an hour passed, as she worked. Coding, writing a new program, compiling, testing. Attacking possible vectors, vulnerabilities in the Artigo's onboard systems. Trying to log in remotely - no luck, the standard administrator password didn't work, so the system had to be patched beyond version update 5.66.3a. Hailing it with a backdoor access code. No luck, that vulnerability was patched out, so the system had to have update 5.78.3 installed.
She then realized something. The trader had been dead for a number of days. And the Kheldorian corp pushed out a new update, two days ago, update 6.35.2c. Chances were that Artigo didn't have that update yet, and Kat had downloaded it in her attempts to be have the most complete and detailed files on the Artigo that she could.
She spent another twelve minutes unpacking the update and analyzing it. Maybe she could write a trojan to hijack its way in on the back of the patch. It was worth a shot. Her core worked overtime, quickly writing a virus that would, with some luck, give her maintenance access to the Artigo when she pushed the patch. Recompiling it, once more opening a frequency - this time pretending to be Kheldorian corp - and - ... success. The patch went through, along with the trojan.
Now to push another signal, that of a request to open all systems for a scheduled maintenance. Success - her trojan worked. She was in. Though maintenance mode didn't quite offer her much more than various self scan and diagnostic routines. Still, these were unencrypted routines, and therefor she could read them and alter them. Some more coding, and she injected a subroutine that would allow her to reset the admin password as she ran a diagnostic. With the diagnostic started, the password reset, she sent another signal, once more asking to log in remotely. She tried the standard admin password, and this time she got in. Success, she now had access to all of the shuttle's systems.
Including navigation and engine control.
Kat had originally planned to just download the communication, sensor and navigation logs, but this - ... this was much better. And so, the two ships lazily wheeled about in complete, perfect synch with each other, and shot to warp. At the Artigo's max warp factor of 5.5, it would take over a day to get back to Odin again.