Late Nights

[H.G. Reed 0]

The darkened room was illuminated only by the dim light emanating from the computer terminal on the desk. H.G. blinked at the screen several times to clear her blurred vision before leaning back in her chair and rubbing her temples. She hated nights like these, prevented from sleeping by something on her mind despite her exhaustion. Resting her right elbow on the edge of the desk and her chin in her palm, she closed her eyes for a moment, sighing. There had to be a solution to this problem; she just wasn’t seeing it. Thinking over it once more, she tried looking at their predicament in a different light.

 

Lieutenant Lessard’s suggestion of tying the Challenger’s sensor array to that of the Cepheus had been a good one, but the practicalities of implementing such a plan had proved to be difficult. Working with Lieutenant Poldara, H.G. had repurposed the navigational wide-angle IR-UV gamma ray imager and the high-energy charged particle detection sensors in the arrays on the forward, upper port, and upper starboard sections of the hull, which allowed those arrays to have a direct pathway to the main computer. She had also created a sensor filter which would screen out the dilithium deposits within the Prosperity Asteroid Belt and instead detect anything else that might be hiding amongst the small asteroids and other space detritus gathered there.

 

However, that very debris was the cause of her current problem. Challenger’s main deflector dish was working overtime to keep anything from impacting with the ship. The dish radiated significant amounts of both subspace and EM radiation, which caused havoc with sensor readings. This was not usually a problem, because the long-range sensor array was located directly behind the main deflector so that the primary axes of both systems were nearly coincident. However, the tie to the Cepheus was proving to be more detrimental than beneficial to both ships. Challenger’s long range sensors were not coincident with Cepheus’ main deflector dish, and therefore they were picking up significant radiation and feedback from each other, creating unrelated noise on the sensor readings and gaps in the sensor net.

 

The problem would be solved if they turned off their deflector dishes, but without the protection provided by the deflectors, both ships would suffer from hull damage or possibly breaches. While the deflector dish was operable without the shields, the shields could not be raised without the deflector dish being operational, which wouldn’t allow them the option of merely raising the shields to safeguard the ship while they conducted the scans. There had to be some way to make this work, but right now, late into gamma shift, the only viable solution seemed to be to disengage from the Cepheus and run their scans independently from one another via search grids.

 

Exhaling in frustration, she began to tap the fingers of her left hand against the desk in a staccato pattern. The sound of her nails striking the desk reminded her of active sonar reverberations, part of the archaic sound navigation and ranging method used in underwater exploration centuries ago on earth. It suddenly occurred to H.G. as she stared at her hand that they could use a similar technique to scan the asteroid belt. Mid-infrared caused hot-body, or warm, objects to radiate strongly which is in turn absorbed by molecular vibrations, where the different atoms in a molecule vibrate around their equilibrium positions. Because the mid-infrared absorption spectrum of a compound is very specific for that compound, they could easily isolate anything in the region that was not a dilithium-rich asteroid, as the reverberation would be much different. Using the Cepheus as the “wall” by which to judge the farthest extents of the belt, they could still coordinate their search efforts. It would be easy to bypass the interference caused by the deflectors if they narrowed the scans to a small band of the electromagnetic spectrum.

 

This would also provide them with a reasonable justification for what they were doing. They could easily claim they were merely testing the viability of an alternative method of navigation in a region where the matter was all of a similar molecular makeup for calibration purposes. Calling for the lights, H.G. checked her chronometer; she needed to speak to Poldara right away.