Second Officer's Log

[Cmdr JFarrington 0]

Second Officer's Log, Stardate 500502.20

Cmdr Jami Farrington, MD

USS Manticore, NCC 5852

Wolf 359

 

"One Ping"

 

One ping. The prearranged signal for covert away team beam-out from an operation. The term was a hold-over from the days of sonar when submarines used one ping, supposedly to verify distance to target, but actually used to send messages from one ship to another during covert operations. Hundreds of years later, in Black Ops jargon using the "one ping signal" meant sending a signal lasting bare nanoseconds and masked as subspace noise. Only minutes ago Commander Jami Farrington had used one ping to beam from a cloaked Romulan ship back to Manticore. They were engaged in yet another covert assignment, and, as was true with most of their assignments, this one seemed to engender more questions than answers.

 

Over the past few weeks Starfleet's finest ships of the line had assembled at Wolf 359 to dedicate a memorial commemorating the lives lost twenty years ago when Starfleet intercepted and attacked the Borg in a vain attempt to halt their progress towards Sector 1, Earth, and the seat of Federation government. That day, 39 ships and a total of 11,000 lives were destroyed by one Borg ship.

 

A few days ago, Manticore cruised casually through the fleet in her space-tug cover guise. They had come upon the USS Hawk, a Federation ship using a surreptitious tractor beam to tow a cloaked object. It warrented further investigation specifically because the use of cloaking devices by Federation ships was expressly forbidden by treaty. Knowing of no other way to investigate covertly, an away team was sent and found themselves aboard a cloaked Romulan ship, its Romulan crew in stasis, and a time-bomb powerful enough to take out the entire assembled fleet and then some. Twenty years before it had been one Borg ship. Now would it be one Federation ship?

 

According to Engineering Chief Lt Cdr Garnoopy, The bomb appeared to be connected to the antimatter injection systems. Once it exploded, all ships within 20,000 km would be destroyed and anything within 1,000,000 km would be damaged. Projected casualties: several thousand. It was one of the most deadly things he had ever found.

 

The initial 55 minutes to disarm quickly dwindled to 15 after a small slip accelerated the timer. Fifteen minutes still left enough time to evacuate in Jami's estimation, but it was cutting it close, and Jami had another goal to accomplish before it was too late.

 

Something Lt Cdr Precip had said sent a chill down her spine. "I feel we best deploy a homing device on this floating bomb. For all we know the ceremony may not be its final destination." If not the ceremony, then where? Speculation at this point was not an option, only the transfer of vital information, data Jami had gathered and stored on her tricorder during her inspection of the ship.

 

So she left the away team on the Romulan ship. It was a definite breach of protocol, but several considerations had led her to make that decision. First, if the bomb exploded it wouldn't matter if she were with her team or aboard Manticore. They would all die. Second, her presence on the Romulan ship was not needed for the progress of the operation. She trusted her away team implicitly. Then, in her second breach of protocol, Jami left Lt Cmdr Precip in charge. She wanted to be sure the senior officer, Col. Eason, was free from the added pressure of command so she could continue her work deciphering the data she was gathering from the operations console. Finally, there was the matter of the information Jami had loaded into her tricorder, sensitive information that may lead to the origins of the Romulan ship and the perpetrator of the situation at hand. It was imperative that she deliver it personally and upload it to Black Ops' secure safe haven well away from the projected radius of destruction.

 

After a gut-wrenching few minutes on the bridge of the Manticore and with only 42 seconds to spare, Chief Garnoopy, assisted by Lt Matt McFly, had worked a miracle and disarmed the bomb, saving not only the lives of the away team and the Manticore, but the lives of half of Starfleet deployed personnel.

 

But the situation itself had yet to be disarmed, and too many questions remained unanswered. Why had the USS Hawk continued on as though nothing had happened when their bomb had failed to detonate? Was Lt Cdr Precip correct in believing that the ceremony may not be the bomb's ultimate destination? And what had led him to that speculation? If not the ceremony, where was the USS Hawk bound? Why tow a Romulan ship? Why a Romulan crew in stasis? Question after question continued to emerge in the aftermath.

 

For the present, however, Jami Farrington was content to rest in the knowledge that in this one incident they had succeeded. Now, if she could only succeed in getting the color to come back into her face.