Smoke and Mirrors

Posted on Sun Sep 25th, 2022 @ 6:21pm by Lieutenant Didrea Zade & Commodore Jacob Kane & Commander N'Garzi Zora & Lieutenant Xavier Leiko

Mission: Scylla and Charybdis
Location: USS Athena, Bridge
Timeline: Before "Morte Arthur"
2106 words - 4.2 OF Standard Post Measure

Nothing was more boring to Zade than watching the same sensor sweep go on for hours. She was sat in her corner of the bridge, staring at the console as it returned the same result over and over: no match. 'No anything' was more accurate; aside from the Romulan ship lurking nearby, there wasn't really anything worth looking into within the reach of the sensors. Even the Romulan ship was proving to be uninteresting, as it gave no sign of acknowledging the Athena's presence. She had concluded by now that the Romulan ship was likely searching for the Avalon as well, but it was odd that they didn't try to scare them away. Sensors could detect activity, such as sensor sweeps and basic functionality that indicated the ship wasn't disabled, it just didn't seem to care about them.

A beep drew Zade's attention back to the portion of the console tasked with running scans. Anomalous reading? She looked closer and compared it to what would be expected if it were their missing ship. There was some variation, but it seemed like a good match. "Captain, I got a match for the Avalon," Zade reported, pinpointing the location. "Bearing 330 mark 015, fifty thousand kilometers away."

"Confirmed," Xavier said from his position at the ops console. "I'm reading exactly the same as tactical."

"Check it," Kane growled. He didn't want them to break from their pattern if that meant attracting attention.

"Lieutenant Zade, do you have visual confirmation?" Zora asked as she activated her own station to get telemetry readings directly from the sensors.

"Getting visual..." After a moment, Zade turned on the viewscreen from her console, replacing the starry view with a grey ship, the lack of auxiliary lighting suggesting it was without power. However, its name was clearly visible across the hull, the black letters contrasting just enough. "The computer confirms that all visual indicators match that of the Avalon."

Kane sat upright. Finally they were making progress; and before the Romulans too. "Alter course," he ordered the helm officer. "Do we have any readings on the Avalon's status?" he pressed.

Zade turned back to her console at the sensor data. "Shields are up, and it looks like non-essential systems and weapons are down. I'm not reading any weapons damage on the hull, though." There was a little static that showed up in the reading, and while it didn't affect the ability to interpret the data, she kept an eye on it. Usually sensor data wasn't fuzzy like this, and the computer knew how to filter out noise from background radiation and other debris in space. On the console, she told the computer to identify the source of the static.

"Make sure you're monitoring the Romulans," Kane reminded Ops. "Can we break through with communications? Attempt to raise her from here?" he asked.

"Aye Sir," Xavier replied. "No movement from the Romulan ship."

While the diagnostic ran, Zade attempted to hail the ship, then after a moment shook her head. "No response. I can keep trying to reach them."

"Do it," Zora replied.

Xavier checked the sensor readings of the Avalon and pulled a face. It seemed as though the sensors were glitching but that couldn't be right, they had just overhauled the entire system, besides they had been working perfectly up until this point. "Zade, are you picking up some kind of static?" He asked without taking his eyes off of his console.

The Trill briefly pulled her gaze from the running diagnostic to look over at ops. "Yes, I have it too, but it's not impairing sensor readout or anything. I have a diagnostic running to see what it is." Turning back to the console, she frowned at the completed diagnostic that returned nothing useful. A flicker caught Zade’s attention in the sensor readout, but the readout looked normal as she stared at it for what felt like a long time. What the hell... she thought. "Leiko, you saw that flicker, right?"

"No," Xavier said as he checked the readings again. "What flicker are you referring to?"

Zora stood out of her chair and turned to face Zade. "Lieutenants, why are we getting different sensor readings?"

"Unsure Ma'am," Xavier said honestly. "Everything checks out, reading no malfunctions...wait, the Avalon's energy signature is... off," he added, doubt creeping into his voice.

Zade frowned at Xavier's reply as she kept her eyes locked onto the console. "I'm certain the Avalon briefly disappeared from tactical sensors... We pull from the same sensor data, there's no reason for the readings to differ." She pulled Xavier's sensor readout and compared it with her own, along with their back-traces to the raw data. "Strange... I'm comparing the ops and tactical readouts, as well as the raw data, and they only match before they're sent to each station. I do see a small energy variance in the raw data that looks like it cascades down."

Kane almost glared. "Someone explain to me what that means in practice."

The flicker occurred again on the tactical readout, but not on the ops one, which further confused Zade. "That flicker just occurred again on the tactical readout, and in the raw sensor data it looks like there was a... brief surge of power?" A double beep drew Zade's attention to her readout, which was programmed to detect abrupt changes in the state of whatever the sensors were looking at. More often than not, it was used to identify if a ship's weapons were coming online. "The ship just... disappeared from the tactical readout. I recommend holding position until we resolve this." Looking up from the console, her frown deepened when she saw the ship still visible on the viewscreen. It was unsettling to see a ship but not get any tactical data from it. That immediately increased risk, past what she preferred. On her console, she drifted a hand closer to the shields button, just in case.

Zora looked at Kane and then turned to the front of the bridge. "Helm all stop! Leiko, Zade run a level one diagnostic on the tactical and ops stations, if the raw data is reading conclusive the problem must be up here."

"Yes Ma'am," Xavier said as he punched in the commands and waited for the results.

Zora turned back to Kane, "I recommend that we raise shields and go to yellow alert, something isn't right here."

Not being scientifically minded but concerned by his XO's sudden sense of alarm, he motioned sharply to Tactical. "Talk to me, Commander. Did we find the Avalon or not?"

Zade started her diagnostic when instructed and shifted her readings to the raw data so she could still watch the ship. The raw data was much harder to read compared to the tactical readout, since it included everything. There were filters in place to detect certain energy signatures that were specific to each station... could something be messing with the filters? Zade pulled up the expected signature readout for the Avalon and compared it to the raw data. She then began manually applying filters to the raw data to reduce noise.

A beep sounded from her console, and she briefly averted her gaze to read the report. "Diagnostic complete, tactical reports both stations are operating normally," Zade reported, turning back to her readouts. Her head then tilted slighy. "According to the raw sensor data, what we are reading matches the signature of the Avalon, but there's an underlying energy offset of 0.02 in the incoming data. It looks like it's distorting the tactical readout instead of being filtered out. Attempting to compensate..." In addition to trying to adjust the sensor's filters, she ran a separate scan to try and figure out just what it was and why the hell it was causing problems.

"I'm getting different readings here," Xavier said as he studied the report that was coming through on his screen. "The energy signature of the ship out there doesn't match our records. I'm reading an energy offset of at least 3.726%, however with the different sensor readings it's hard to know which one is accurate, but I don't think that's our girl."

Zade turned her head to Leiko. "I'm reading what's coming directly from the sensor array before it's sent to each station. It's obvious something's messing with our individual readouts, so I recommend you switch to the direct readout instead-" A beep spun the Trill's head back to her console in time to see what was clearly an energy surge.

The ship that obviously looked like the Avalon on the viewscreen flickered. It wasn't an individual deck or set of lighting that flickered, the whole ship seemed to flicker in and out of existence. After a couple seconds, the image of the ship completely disappeared, followed by a rather underwhelming explosion. The explosion was nowhere near the size of the ship, rather it looked like something smaller than a shuttle exploded.

Zade had opened her mouth to notify Kane and Zora that there was an unmistakeable explosion about to happen, only to stare at the viewscreen as their ship disappeared in what indeed was an explosion. She didn't need to be an empath to pick up on the disappointment that began to blanket the room. It was... a fake? Turning her attention back to the console, she saw the tactical and ops stations' readouts clear up. Her earlier scan to try and determine what the underlying signal was came back, and she let out a sigh as she read the result. "It was a hologram," she reported, disappointment evident in her voice as she broke the silence. That was embarrassing... how could two stations reading the same data be fooled by a hologram?

"What!?" Kane frowned, unhappy at the outcome. "Was that the Romulans pulling tricks on us, or are we to believe that was something else entirely?" he demanded.

"Inconclusive," Xavier replied, trying to make heads and tails of this whole situation. "The radiation is playing havoc with our sensors and to be honest, after this I'm not sure if I fully trust them."

Zora stood and joined Zade at the tactical station. "If it was the Romulans, why did the ship explode? I assume it was a decoy to keep us distracted, why show their hand so early?"

Internally, Zade winced at Kane's response, despite somewhat expecting it. She kept her eyes on the console, even when she saw Zora approach and sensed her presence behind her. "I don't think it was intentional," she said, her words holding an air of caution as she made sure to fully understand what she wanted to report first. "There was an energy surge right before the explosion that looked very different from controlled explosions. I speculate it was some pod that emitted a holographic projection when its sensors picked up something nearby. Something must have overloaded, making the pod explode."

"One of ours? Or someone else's tech?" Kane asked through gritted teeth.

"Definitely not ours," came the reply from tactical. The frown that lived on Zade’s expression for the entire ordeal now held her annoyance at the situation. She was tense and noticeably more on guard as her eyes continued to scan through the incoming data. If... whatever that was could mess with the ship's ability to filter data, perhaps it would be better to keep reading directly from the readout instead of relying on the computer. "Whatever was affecting the sensor data is gone and I'm picking up a Romulan signature in the debris field left behind by the pod."

"Leiko, launch a probe," Zora ordered as she made her way back to her seat on the bridge, "set it to maximum scan radius and manually comb through the data. Once we have the information we need, find a way to better detect these holograms so that we're not caught out again. Lieutenant Zade, work with engineering to sort out this sensor glitch. Helm continue our original course and speed, let's find the Avalon."

"Yes Ma'am," Xavier replied as he started setting up the parameters for the probe as instructed.

Zade confirmed about the same time as Xavier did, tasking her station to communicate with engineering. She also told the computer to do thorough diagnostics of the data collected from both stations during the interaction with this decoy. Hopefully, the diagnostic could shed light on the root cause so it could be avoided in the future.