A primed directive

Posted on Mon Sep 20th, 2021 @ 9:07pm by Lieutenant Commander William Gunnison & Lieutenant Commander Evelyn Rozia & Lieutenant Commander William Rogers

Mission: Double Bind
Location: the bridge

The captain and first officer had not long departed the bridge. On the viewscreen the moon the Astraea was using to obscure itself from the natives of Caetov L9N continued it's tidally locked rotation around it's parent.

Buck rose from the command chair and began to make his way towards the Ops station. "Commander Gunnison, Commander Rozia, a moment of your time?"

Evelyn glanced over at Will before she acceded to the request. Did he know what they were trying to do? Did he plan on stopping their potentially questionable idea? “Yes, sir, we’re trying to get some research done on the Caetovians, see if they may actually be capable of warp. It’s… A bit time sensitive?” She had to be wary, just in case.

Buck nodded. "I won't keep either of you long. I overheard your conversation earlier." At this he gestured apologetically towards his ears. "The enhanced hearing doesn't come with an off switch." He looked at the two officers, first Will, then Evelyn, and made an attempt at gauging their reaction when he asked his next question. “Have you managed to make any progress?”

“Shit.” Evelyn figured what she and Will were doing was on the edge of the Prime Directive, but they weren’t actually fiddling with things.. Yet. “Forgiveness is easier to obtain than forgiveness.” She whispered, “Will here is the one trying to gain access to their systems, I’ll evaluate what we find. Will?”

"I should be able to get into their systems without being noticed," Will said. "And just in case anyone else ever asks, we're still simply monitoring the situation, nothing more. We're just getting a better vantage point to do that by. Speaking of which, here we go. I'll pull up the current security videos first." Several different video feeds came up on the monitors. Turning to Evelyn, he asked, "Anything you can work with there?"

Evie’s eyes danced over the various displays, smiling as she saw the ship she’d theorized about in one of them. Her eyes locked on that single display for nearly thirty seconds as she searched the hull seemingly inch by inch from the non-magnified view, then she saw what she might be looking for and tapped the image between the rudimentary nacelles, which lacked traditional buzzard collectors and seemed far more contained, “Can we zoom in on this or get another view? Maybe find some footage from an archive? I’m reasonably sure that’s a hatch, and if they were significantly paranoid about an overload, they’d put whatever power source or initiator for a drive as far away from the cockpit as possible.”

"We don't know enough about their culture to make assumptions about their design philosophy." Buck reminded Evelyn as he watched over her shoulder. "We’re only going to get one shot at persuading the Captain to intervene. How far over the line are the two of you prepared to go to save these people?”

"Design philosophy is all well and good, Buck, but culture only has so much effect on functionality." Evelyn replied sharply, "For a stable warp field, there are constants that have to be maintained. Science and Engineering trump Cultural biases when it comes to this." She sighed, "But how far am I willing to go? Get me down to the planet and you'd find out. If Will can get me into their system schematics or a close enough view, I can see if they've got problems and probably solve them. All the way, Buck, all the way."

"My wife was a bit like James Kirk. She didn't quite believe that there was no such thing as a no-win scenario, but she did believe that you could still pull off a lot of things if you just knew how to look at them the 'right' way. It seems that the argument against helping these people is that if we let them know we exist right now, there's the possibility that said knowledge could be just as harmful, if not more so, to them in the end than the current conditions on the planet are - which isn't a bad argument. We really do not know anything about them, and as such don't know how they'd react to such news. So if we were to help them, we'd have to do so without revealing ourselves. But how to clean up a planet's atmosphere without doing just that?"

Will paused for a moment, then said, "I did, though, manage to get into some of their text files and read over them. They were originally planning on conducting a test warp flight with their craft several months ago, with the target trip being to a Class-L moon in orbit of one of gas giants. The only problem was that while everything else seemed to work, they could never get the ship to get to warp before it would nearly shake apart and they had to abort. One of the engineers suspected it had something to do with the ship's structure and may have been close to fixing it when the asteroid hit. I don't know if that's something we could work with."

Evelyn's eyes went back to the screen with the view of the ship again and this time looked closely at it from front to back, instead of looking for where the supposed fusion plant could be hidden, actually looked at the structure. As the view panned back towards the aft, she actually looked at the nacelles. They were on struts held away from the hull and her heart sank, "The engineer is right and I can't believe that I didn't see it beforehand... Those nacelles can't 'see' each other. Any variation in the forming of a warp field has the potential to tear a ship apart, which means that as the nacelles begin to radiate, the first point where the field joins needs to be somewhere a variation won't tear into the ship as it envelopes the vessel. In our own ships, if the computer detects any difference, it can shut down the fields before any damage is done. At least these people knew enough to not push it too far. For this ship to go to warp, they need a complete aft redesign."

"The argument that we might make things worse is a hard sell when the alternative is everyone dies." Buck scratched at his beard. Evelyn was clearly on side with helping, but to his mind Will was still on the fence and everyone that knew about his plan and wasn't on board to help might be someone who tried to stop them further down the road. "Evie. Best guess, if they had a working design how long would it take to refit the ship?"

“IF the biggest problem they have are the nacelles?” Evelyn hedged, mind leaning on Arcturus’s time in the research and development side of engineering. She ran through how they’d need to redesign the thing in front of her, need for fabrication by hand, in case they didn’t have replication capability which was doubtful, “Thirty days, forty-five on the outside. If we were the ones doing it, about a week even with needing to look at their construction process. I’d still need to look at the rest of their design to be sure that there aren’t any other more technical problems, but those can be resolved while they refit it.”

Buck gave a half hearted sigh. "We'll be lucky if there's anyone left to save with that kind of turn around."

Evelyn smiled softly at him and placed a hand on his forearm, “Thanks for reading our propaganda sheets, but despite what those say, we aren’t issued magic wands in engineering, and only the best R and D engineers are issued the limited supply of sonic screwdrivers we have.” She managed a joke about one of her favorite recreational video series, “Unfortunately these discoveries and manipulations of them take a lot of time. Earth’s Zephram Cochran’s took what? Twenty years to develop a working warp ship. If Kerai Cerreli hadn’t spent fifteen years working on it, Trill may still be waiting for a functional drive. Lorshan Gawaii of the Third House about the same for Betazoid. So many things can go wrong, but everything HAS to go right for these things to work.”

"Well," Will said with a bit of disappointment in his voice, "it was worth a shot. We'll just have to look at other options. I don't suppose that you know of anyone on board who's familiar with emergency but discreet terraforming from a distance?"

"Terraforming? No. But perhaps one of the science types knows how to disrupt the storm?" Evelyn pondered, "Or something... There has to be something we can do to help."

Buck considered this. It seemed to him to that that would also take too long. "We're not out of options yet. For now figure out how to get that ship to warp. We'll work the rest out later."