[Conference Room]
T'Ra nodded to each officer in turn as they entered the room, allowing them a brief moment to settle themselves before they began. She noted a number of different glances that were exchanged, giving the room a charged atmosphere. Despite the lack of dialogue, the tension was clear, though the way it manifested in terms of body language differed from person to person, and no doubt having the admiral aboard intensified the effect. But she doubted this applied to the chief science officer, who always seemed to be ill at ease.
Once the last few stragglers wandered in T'Ra hit a few keys, bringing up what little info they had onto the screen. "We just received a distress call of unknown origin," she began. "But enough has been deciphered to make it clear that this is not some sort of prank or random transmission. Whoever sent it is in dire need. We need to find a way to track the transmission back to its source as well as ascertain any other information that might help us prepare." Once she finished, T'Ra put the transmission on, accompanied by the blurry images. Hopefully someone would make more of it than her.
SCIENCE LAB TWOInzjana was working on the design for her baby, the USS Event Horizon 2, as well as watching the proceedings of the conference on another monitor directly above the one that was currently displaying the highly detailed schematics of the second Event Horizon for the HIVE.
The first Event Horizon was of course destroyed a few years ago, during a mission she was on when first joining the Shadow Fleet division of Starfleet Command. It had been captured by a group of Romulans and was about to open a gateway away from the planet they were orbiting at the time.
Inzjana new very well how they must have got their hands on it because the Event Horizon, hence its name it's name used a Romulan style Quantum Singularity Core which even the Star Empire new very well they were not using to its full potential. That's where the Event Horizon came in, it was using the micro black hole reactor for what it really was capable of doing in the form of wormhole induction propulsion.
Nicknamed the Gravity Drive for obvious reasons, or more accurately, the aforementioned ‘Wormhole Induction Propulsion' used the intense gravity field present in the Quantum Singularity to FOLD the space-time continuum rather than just warping it, the resulting effect generated a wormhole. As the resulting graviton flux was tuned 180 degrees out of phase, the tunnel (gateway) remained stable for the Event Horizon to pass through. The only set back is that it required ten minutes, each jump, to open a gateway to the intended destination regardless of the distance. But at speeds of a light-year per second, instead of the 2.75 light-years per day of the fastest Warp Drive, the benefits outweighed to drawbacks.
Which is why the USS Event Horizon-A was commissioned by the Starfleet New Technologies division, an arm of Section 31 based on the planet Reach in the Epsilon Eridani System.
Inzjana new she had so many projects on the go but she didn't let it interfere with her normal duties and actually found thinking of new sciences and technologies therapeutic and a form of meditation in itself, and with the polywater event and to kill her Romulan aunt who murdered the president of the United Federation of Planets, she could use the distraction, either that, or a long stay at a Federation respite of Risa, none of the latter two options were actually appealing so she settled on her projects.
Inzjana still awoke out of her two hour sleep with night sweats, no mean feat as Vulcans don't have sweat glands, but although a metaphor, she appreciated the analogy.
Word filtered down to Inzjana that the Romulans had been able to steal the first Event Horizon, not due to any design error, but due to the helm officer forgetting to input a single digit and as the universe seemed to delight in doing, the Event Horizon had reached safe distance from the core worlds of the Epsilon Eridani system and activated its Gravity Drive, literally opening a gateway to the system the band of Romulan outlaws were using as their current base of operations.
It was then that Inzjana had finished the final touches on the second containment chamber holding the Gravity Drive core and finishing up her walk down memory lane that Captain Jones had played the message that they had apparently received. "Fascinating," Inzjana stated, raising her left eyebrow, more for the fact Lieutenant Johan Spielenberg, had failed to relay that bit of important information to the lab, than her obsessive interest in puzzle in all their forms.
Every single Vulcan in existence would if they had all rocked up to a psychiatrist in Earth's twentieth and twenty first centuries would have all been diagnosed with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and some form of autism. For when you thought about it, Vulcans actually possessed all of those qualities en mass.
Downloading the message to another station in the currently empty science lab, Inzjana watched the message in its entirety, her Vulcan mind studying every nuance of the audio visual file with the focus and tenacity of a predator stalking its pray, or more accurately like someone with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and some form of autism.
As the message ended Inzjana pondered it for a nanosecond and turned her attentions not on the content but the electromagnetic frequencies the message was constructed with.
"Computer, display the waveform of the message and overlay the frequency modulation and amplitude and play the message again," Inzjana asked, an idea of what the problem could be.
The computer verbally acknowledged her request with her usual reply of "acknowledged" and did as Inzjana requested.
Studying the amplitude modulation and structure of the waveform, Inzjana realized that her ‘idea' was actually right, something that knowing Vulcans should have come to know surprise to one, but surprised her none the same.
Her thought was that the message was in the form of a LASER based communication, an old concept that is used by pre-warp civilizations instead of the more conventional radio of that level of technological advancement.
Now that she had that worked out it was only a matter of triangulating to vector of the LASER beams origin, which could be from any distance, as light did not lose cohesion in space, apart from bending slightly due to the microlensing effect of gravity wells of planets and stars etc.
Inzjana sent that tidbit of information to the Chief Science Officer's PADD before moving on to the origin of the message and cleaning up to fragmented audio and visual aspects of the message.
CONFERENCE ROOM[Posting as (NPC) Chief Science Officer - Lieutenant Johan Spielenberg]
Johan heard his PADD ping not long after they had just finished playing the transmission and were currently discussing the event. Making sure no one had heard his PADD he took it off its current resting place on the table next to his half finished second cup of coffee he didn't actually remember getting let alone drinking and opened the link. "Damn! It's from that robot' he thought to himself, physically rolling his eyes and then trying to hide his growing anger. 'That meddlesome Elf just can't keep her pointed ears out of other peoples business', he thought, considering on putting a reprimand in her next evaluation for spying and then thought better of it because it was actual procedure to include the lab in any situation that required investigation.
He forcefully calmed himself down, at least outwardly and decided to take another path, knowing full well that the ‘robot' probably wouldn't know what he was about to, something that he had done a few times before, take credit for the other officers under his command's credit for their findings.
"Captain" he piped up when there was a lull in the conversation, "I have determined that the transmission was done using a LASER, a rather primitive form of communications if you ask me."
Sitting back, a lot more pleased with himself than even he expected and waited for the accolades he just knew was coming his way, or so his ego kept telling him anyway.
