Finding the Trail

Posted on Fri Jun 10th, 2016 @ 4:04am by Lieutenant Commander Jean Reynard & Lieutenant Ryan North
Edited on on Fri Jun 10th, 2016 @ 4:05am

Episode: Lost Property
Location: Astrometrics
Timeline: MD03, Afternoon

Say what you would about the limited space aboard an Intrepid-class starship compared to large explorers, the astrometrics lab was impressive. Admittedly, Jean wasn't entirely sure why you needed a screen that size given the level of detail a conventional viewscreen could manage, but it looked great. The processing power backing it all wasn't anything to sneeze at either.

Ryan turned the operations station as soon as the doors to astrometrics opened. He gave Jean a quick smile as he entered.

"Ah, excellent, you're here," Jean said. "We have a mystery on our hands. The captain wants to know how the DeSalle got from the Sirius system all the way out here. I've loaded up every log or recording from their computers into the astrometrics system, along with all the results from our own sensor scans."

Ryan arched an eyebrow. "He does realize there are probably at least one hundred different phenomenon that could have done that, right?"

"I think he's vaguely aware, yes, but here we are," Jean said. "Come on, man, think of the challenge. Think of the journal articles."

"Challenge yes," Ryan answered. "Journal articles no. Really, though our data set is lacking to say the least. The list of anomalies is both long and robust and without proper data its going to be like finding a needles in a haystack."

"I've got data. Detailed information from all of the ship's external sensors and warp engines from the time of the incident, our own scans of the local area, metallurgical analysis of their hull - the works," Jean said. "I've even managed to discard a number of possibilities because they would have destroyed an unshielded ship outright or left other obvious signs. I know it wasn't a natural subspace soliton, for example, because that would have left spark scars on their warp coils and main antenna."

Ryan could only nod in agreement. "There are still dozens of other possibilities," Ryan continued, tapping away at his station. "Wormholes, subspace field displacements... maybe even some sort of unexplained engine failure, although given the limited capacity of the engines I would say that's an unlikely. We should upload the data and get started."

"I'm way ahead of you," Jean said. He started up a simulation he'd prepared of the DeSalle's last moments. "Here's the ship in the Sirius system, heading outbound and about to enter warp. As they engage, a gravitic mine detonates two to three hundred meters off to the side. According to historical data, that model could generate a pseudo-gravity field of about thirty thousand cochranes for ten milliseconds. Then, according to the external sensors, it started to pick up what has to be the nebula around two to three seconds later, although there seems to be some relativistic time distortion going on because not all the ship's clocks agree."

Ryan tapped in a few commands. "That could have generated a temporal field... maybe even some sort of wormhole effect."

Jean snapped his fingers. "That gives me an idea. There was a ship that had a near miss with black hole at high warp once, one of the Enterprises I think." He started entering lookup queries into the database. "They got displaced dozens of light-years. A gravitic bomb's much smaller but it was also closer to the engines as they activated. Let me download their sensor records and see if we can plug that into the simulation."

Ryan waited for a few moments until the new data had been uploaded and assimilated into the simulation. Ryan tapped a few more keys and waited for the computer to finish computing the reaction. When the screen shifted again and new data started scrolling by the slowly rotating image of the NX class startship.

"Looks like the computer models so that it would have displaced the ship five to ten light years, although the incident caused massive damage to the ships interior bulkheads, damage that we didn't find."

"Okay, so that's not quite what we're looking for," Jean said. "On the other hand, it sent the ship in the right direction, just not far enough and a little too violently. Maybe... maybe the displacement didn't take place entirely through conventional 3-dimensional space? You'd get less shear stresses and possibly more real distance."

Ryan tapped his fingers against the outer casing of his station a few times. "I read a paper about a year ago about an emerging phenomenon known as a Quantum Wave String, in theory the string exits naturally, usually around the area of a collapsing star or other dense stellar body. Maybe the ship was passing through such a string when the tried to go to warp?"

"Right, the new type of quantum filament," Jean said, vaguely recalling hearing about the subject. "Normally it's too deep in subspace and wouldn't interact with a ship, but if the interaction between the warp field and the artificial gravity well opened subspace rift, the ship might be pulled out of its natural dimension, pass along the filament to its natural end, and then emerge. The question is how to prove it - this far from a stellar mass, the string would be incredibly deep in subspace, if it's even still here. Can you think of any way to pick it up?"

"That large of an event would have vibrated the whole filament or at least in theory it would."

"And not just where the bomb went off, but at this end of the filament as well. It might still be giving off low-frequency gravity waves."

Ryan nodded and tapped a few keys. "Maybe like a sensor echo? A subspace echo that looked like normal background noise."

"Exactly. If you can come up with a program to pick those echoes out of the noise, I can rig up some probes with gravity wave detectors pretty quickly. If we spread them out enough, so that we get more than just the ship's single viewpoint, we may be able to pick them up."

"Assuming the ship emerged from the temporal string within a few light years of here, I should be able to use the ships lateral array tied into the deflector to send out a subspace pulse," Ryan said, rapidly tapping away at his station. "Sort of like old fashioned sonar, we can configure the probes that are further out in the system to help detect and triangulate anything that pulse interacts with."

"Sounds like we have a plan, then," Jean said. "I'll ready the probes while you set up the deflector and the filter program. If we're lucky, we'll pick up something useful. If not, well, the null hypothesis is still data, right?"

"Some how I don't think the captain will share that statement," Ryan replied, entering data into the ships computer. "But, I suppose we can always come back to the drawing board."

"Science is all about getting bad results and trying again. He'll understand." Jean grinned. "I'll come back when my parts done. Catch you in a bit."

OFF:

Lt. Jean Reynard
Chief Operations Officer

Lt jg Ryan North
Chief Science Officer