No Rest for the Weary

[Salir Julio 0]

The Agincourt cleared the outer rims of the Rigel system at impulse before jumping to warp towards Vulcan, her precious cargo safely secured below decks. For his part, Salir Julio sat happily on the bridge of said starship considering that maybe teal wasn't so bad a uniform color after all and trying his damnedest not to think about the moulder heap of ruin that was Earth.

 

Sadly, that was easier said than done -- especially every time he looked at the data on his console and it referenced sensors logs from the Earth attack. Like just about every other scientist in the quadrant who had any ties to Starfleet, he was working on developing an early warning system to prevent, or at least minimize the damage of another attack, should the Soltans decided to pop in from Perseus Arm again for a bite of lunch, and ruined planet.

 

It was proving problematic. Tay and Shadow had been working from the same data set he had been, and they had some promising ideas, but like everyone else working on the project, there always seemed to be something causing the whole idea to go 'poof.' Every time they thought they found where the ball of string was knotted, five more problems would crop up tangling the mess even worse.

 

Odile had been helpful, though Salir thought she needed sleep. And a massage. And some pampering. Good luck convincing her of that, though. He felt sorry for his department head, she had a lot on her plate right now, well everyone did really.

 

The humans on the ship were the ones he felt the most sorry for though. They'd not even had time to grieve before being whisked away on another mission, and yes, it wasn't exactly as if they were in the line of fire, but there hadn't been any downtime on the ship since, gods, since before they'd been thrown into the middle of this whole thing. Keeping diplomats happy wasn't exactly stressful, but being a moving target sure as hell wasn't a cakewalk on the psyche.

 

A beep disseminated from the console and he turned his attention to it once more. The communications network was finally starting to recover from the effects of losing the major hubs on Earth, and he'd finally been able to start getting data uploads from sensor networks across the grid, including some long range data from the Bedivere array that linked the Gamma and Alpha Quadrant bases.

 

Sullenly, he brought up the information and looked over it again. Just as he'd expected, nothing of note. Five hours of wasted time, wonderful.

 

As a scientist and warp field theorist, he had to admit the Soltan technology was breathtakingly exciting. In theory, it worked on similar principals to Borg Transwarp Conduits and Scorpiad Point-to-Point Fold-space Drives. However, in application it functioned very differently.

 

One of the biggest problems at least he kept running into was that they were still wrapping their brains around how exactly the drives worked and what sort of things to look for in detecting the opening of a subspace tear early enough to provide any useful warning.

 

Closing his eyes and running his fingers through his hair, he took a deep breath. His shift was nearly over, but he was well into transferring the data set onto a PADD to work on this evening in the mess hall. No rest for the weary he supposed.

 

Opening his eyes again he glanced at the time display on the console. With a few easy keystrokes he brought up a second dialog window and pressed another series of codes and hit enter, filing his duty report for his shift.

 

Standing, he logged out and took the PADD laying next to him and headed for the lounge and at least a carafe of strong, black coffee.