Let's Take a Peek

[Tachyon 0]

“Let's Take a Peek”

Cdr. Scott Coleridge

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All the lines of code were starting to look the same. It was not physical exhaustion that he was feeling. He had not even been on duty that long. Neither tea nor coffee helped with the fatigue. Scott's body was alert, but his mind was suddenly light-years away, rifling through old memories in a desperate attempt to escape the present circumstances. Only several blinks and a vigorous headshake managed to bring it back to Aegis—and even then, it threatened to slip loose if Scott did not keep a stern watch over it. He was distracted, too prone to distraction, today, of all days.

 

It did not help that he had essentially rewritten the Breen device's programming from scratch. This was probably not the most elegant solution and certainly not the fastest, but it was the one that had the best chance of working. Even that chance, Scott knew, was not as high as he wanted it to be. A small but vocal part of him wondered what would happen if the probe, once launched, positioned, and activated, just sat there.

 

Thanks to their somewhat unorthodox tests of the device itself and recordings of Ocis' . . . testimony . . . Scott believed he knew how to replicate its effects. Or so the computers told him. He was still fuzzy on exactly what those effects were, whether they were a form of submergence in a deep layer of subspace, a clumsy attempt at phase-cloaking, an over-complicated wormhole generator, or some type of temporal enclosure. That was one reason he was excited to see what the probe, and the station's new sensors, could tell them about their recent discovery.

 

Whatever the truth behind the phenomenon, the real news was the presence of the Breen. With security a high priority, Scott had dutifully hardcoded a failsafe into the probes he had modified: without a regular signal from Aegis, the power capacitor to the probe's thrusters would melt-down, triggering a thermal overload. If the Breen could somehow retrieve the probe, it would be a heap of uninformative slag (albeit Starfleet-issue slag). Of course, if for some reason transmission from the probe's destination worked only one-way, and they could receive data from the probe but not send anything back . . . well then, it would be a short mission.

 

Thanks to the sensor upgrades Duroz had overseen, any mission, however, short, was bound to give them some answers. It would also raise more questions. Scott had his own, personal interests in this mission, because this was the cutting edge of the type of engineering that had seduced him back in his Academy days. As he had hung upside down over those probes, tweaking their comm relays to handle increases in Dirac-delta density deformations, it brought back memories of long nights in sparsely-populated lecture halls listening to a wizened Bolian drone on about the practical applications of topological invariants to subspace field theory. The mathematics had often been beyond Scott's comprehension; the physics, while interesting, was not always testable. But in the end, what had always intrigued him were the startling results: in Scott's universe, the speed of light is like the rule of law, and relativity makes sure no one can cheat the game. Gain access to subspace, however, and suddenly all the rules no longer apply, and all that math he had tried to forget after the final exam becomes essential. Scott, as an engineer, was standing on the shoulders of giants—Einstein, Penrose, Hawking, Cochrane, Manheim—and building the tools humans used not just to travel the cosmos but actually affect it on a grand scale. It was weird and wonderful and humbling all at the same time.

 

And now the Breen were doing something else weird, and Scott wanted in. He didn't particularly care why they were doing it or what threat, if any, they posed to the station. That was someone else's job. He wanted to know—needed to know—the what and the how of it.

 

The probes and the sensor upgrades would allow Aegis to get its feet wet without taking another blind leap into the pool. Send the probe a few hundred AU from the station, park it out of the way of anything in particular, and activate the subroutines Scott had just finished programming. Assuming he hadn't made a mistake, the probe should disappear from regular sensors even as it continued to transmit telemetry. That telemetry would then be used to train the new sensors aboard Aegis to be able to scan whatever layers of subspace the Breen were using to hide (if, indeed, that was what they were doing). Without the telemetry, they could scan subspace layers all they like, but they would not be able to tell the difference between a submerged Breen vessel and a burst vacuole: there was just no baseline against which the computer could interpret the data. That would hopefully change soon.

 

Until that happened, however, Scott had one more important thing to do. He pushed back from the console, stretched for a moment, and then stood up. He had been in engineering for hours, had spent several of those hours programming or running diagnostics on the new sensors. His body was willing, but his mind was weak. A short break, perhaps some physical exertion at the gym or on the holodeck, and he would be able to focus again. He hoped. Because if the Breen came knocking and he couldn't concentrate—well, all the fancy knowledge of subspace engineering would not matter so much. Despite his utter nonchalance over the Breen's intentions, Scott had to admit to a little curiosity over why they had disappeared—and why they were now, if not back, at least so much more in evidence.