Skin Deep

[Lisanna 0]

Away missions can be dicey... and not always just for those on the team. Transporter Chief Lisanna Stuart is often tasked with constant monitoring of the away team's signal so that, in an emergency, she can pull them back at a moment's notice. When you throw in an organic hull with unknown properties that makes getting a solid location lock iffy at best, nearly impossible at worst, it turns a shift from the usual boredom to complete stress in a heartbeat.

 

Upset that the initial transport put them somewhere completely different than where planned, though she used the scan data given to her so for that she couldn't be faulted, nevertheless she prided herself on dropping people on a dime, and while keeping the away team on her monitors she looked over the transport log to see where things went awry. Everything in the log looked status quo through the initial stages of de-materialization and buffering; even the initial stream emission was right where it was supposed to be. The moment it passed through the organic hull however the stream deflected. She couldn't find any piece of data that suggested how it was deflected, so there was no way she could anticipate how another transport would respond. She could only be thankful the bits of the away team members were only deflected and not dispersed, as she would've had a hell of a time trying to put the puzzle back together.

 

Before she could contemplate the matter further the away team's signals suddenly came into sharp focus while the Scorpiad ship lit up like the Thames on New Year's Eve. On alert, she prepared for the disembodied order to pull them out. When it became clear that it wasn't going to happen, she turned her attention on the differences in the ship before and after the sudden change.

 

"Interesting," she muttered to herself in her contemporary received pronunciation accent. Comparing the scan data of the point she used for the original transport lock as well as other points she'd scanned in detail before the change, she found that the signal returns were completely randomized in the scattering effect. The point of the randomized scattering was the exterior hull of the Scorpiad ship. Considering the level of resolution necessary to transport a being's atoms from point to another, there was a lot of data available, and only certain segments of the scan data were affected by the random scattering. Throwing out the scattered returns she began to get a reasonable picture of what the transport would have looked like without the interference. Matching the contours of that picture to that of the hull she noticed a small discrepancy, enough to give her an idea of what was going on.

 

"Hmm... that doesn't quite line up right, does it?" She measured the difference. "Not the outer layer at all." Pulling up the closest analogue she could think of, Lisanna looked at the library article on skin. "Hmm, I suppose that would be the dermis, wouldn't it? That would make sense though, yeah? You'd want the outermost layer," she looked back to the article, "the epidermis to be the primary defense. Quite thick as well. That would act as ablative armor against weapons, probably, slough off and deflect energy. Probably small particles too.

 

"Then further down you'd have," again a look to the article. "Papillary region of the dermis to connect to the outer layer, and that's where the shield generation is to keep anything else out from the more sensitive stuff below. But we're talking molecules here, and there's plenty of space around them, which is why transport works altogether, of course. So, the field generation in these shield cells in the upper dermis don't quite have enough lateral reach to overlap with the nearest neighbor molecule when they're not fully active, because most of the shield strength is focused upwards to assist the epidermis."

 

Tapping her finger against her lips, she pulled up another file and mapped out what she was seeing and considering based on the data.

 

"Yes, because the ship didn't have these shield cells fully activated, the highly focused transporter beam was still able to find the holes between them where the shield strength wasn't strong enough to fully deflect. The scattered bits of the stream were re-gathered, and because of the limitations of the available space to beam through the signal didn't end up where planned."

 

With a little fist pump to celebrate her discovery she then finished up her report and findings. While it wouldn't be an issue now with the ship's defenses lowered, she knew now how to beam through a Scorpiad hull while it's defenses were on minimal settings. She imagined when it was fully up and running it would be no more use to try than with any normal starship's shields, but it was another advantage and another discovery for the usual crew of the Excalibur. Sending the report up to Operations and flagged for Lt. K'hal, she gave herself a mental pat on the back before re-focusing all of her attention on the away team and her equipment.