Did We Count Correctly?

Posted on Mon May 5th, 2025 @ 7:27pm by Commander Amaya Lance & Lieutenant Alexis Ryan

Mission: Pandora's Box
Location: USS Edison & USS Athena
Timeline: MD-06
1723 words - 3.4 OF Standard Post Measure

Standing adjacent to Commander Tahn, Amaya frowned over the latest updates. She was overdue to provide the Commodore with a subjective view on what they had found from the debris so far, yet the information she had been provided was incomplete and scattered. There were data sets missing from what was expected.

Hence the call to Athena's Science Officer.

"Lieutenant Ryan? Lt. Kozlov has sent me through the list of reports from the last two away teams but we're missing several. At least one from Athena and one from the Spruance team," she explained, trying not to implicate anything about her own Science Officer and the likelihood that Kozlov's competitive nature had to be highlighted somewhere. "When can I expect to hear from your people?"

Normally, the distance of subspace allowed ample scope for Ryan to remain visibly composed. As the screen activated to reveal the Science Chief's features, that seemed less of the case currently. Her expression set as a deep frown, Alex was distracted by the console in front of her for a moment before she forced herself to look up and address the question.

"As soon as I do, Commander." The tiny bleed of familiarity in the exchange permitted the edge of Ryan's tone to convey the concern behind her response. "We've been experiencing communication interruption and delays, which is not to be unexpected. Even with the relays in place, this is not an environment conducive to outside interaction." Continuing to type, Alex glanced up again and made direct eye contact. "Note the timing on the reports we do have; they only just transmitted but they were sent almost an hour ago."

Amaya noted the look and glanced at Tahn briefly. "Isn't Lt Kozlov supposed to be joining us?" she asked quietly, before turning back to Ryan. "We should perform a logistics and personnel check; with those raiders still potentially in the area we can't be too careful."

"We're in the process of trying to figure out why several of the internal relays have stopped transmitting."

It was Ryan's turn to look off screen, at which point she stretched out of view for a moment and righted herself in possession of a freshly-delivered PADD. The rapid darting of her eyes permitted the Lieutenant a moment to quickly scan the contents, at which point her frown deepened.

"Or if they've actually stopped... Let me send this to you." As she set up the transfer, Alexis continued, "Our last attempt to reboot spat back a whole lot of garbled static, but there's an irregularity we didn't pick up last try."

Amaya frowned again. "Yes. That can't be right..." she murmured, almost mirroring Alexis' action as she reached for another PADD of her own. "Commodore Kane forwarded some notes from Starfleet before we were ordered out here. Something to do with...graviton traces. Curious." She flicked through the random and poorly-catalogued notes, mentally cursing the non-scientific mind at Starfleet Intelligence for their data accuracy and reporting. "Supposedly the Planet Killer was giving off very high graviton traces before it crashed. That could be what we're seeing here. Does your data corroborate that?"

"I'd need the original data for comparison," Ryan pointed out, coming as close as she was typically likely to get at sounding overtly frustrated at being left out of the loop. "But there's something going on inside this static."

She paused, reaching for a transmitter and apply pressure with a single finger as she inserted it into an ear in an effort to improve clarity. This time, as the tangle of overlapping frequencies scrolled down the data-link, Ryan's eyes flitted about in concentration. "There." The stream froze as the Lieutenant hit pause. A partial rewind to scroll back and forth over the offending jumble highlighted a slight variance, though Alex was more interested in what she could hear given the visual mess. "You hear that?"

"I do. But I don't know what it is," Amaya responded, her curious scientist side quickly taking over. Her fingers danced over the panel in front of her. "What is that? I've not seen anything like this before. Try overlaying the data from Starfleet Intelligence, perhaps that will help isolate...oh I see. The neutronium is absorbing most of it but if you account for the echo it sounds like..." Her fingers finally stopped moving across the controls, freezing as though caught. "Is that screaming?"

"It could be."

The possibility was bleak enough to encourage hesitation. An unbidden recollection brought with it a familiar sensation of dread, cast all the way back to the midst of her isolation whilst her father was off fighting. The partially-blind Vulcan who had found himself an unintentional mentor to a young, inquiring mind had spent hours sifting through garbled communication, and though Alexis understood now that he'd always known she was there, at the time she had fancied herself quite the covert investigator. Eventually, the lessons became more direct, though she never had Soran's ear for picking up patterns in the chaos.

"Leave it with me, I'll see if I can't tidy it up."

---

Half an hour was longer than Alex had wanted to spend, the sense of urgency had upped its game now that they were running on a suspicion of more than just ineffectual communication relays. The transmission was partially corrupt, distorted by interference that was no more cooperative in being efficiently identified as the voices tangled beneath it. They were voices, at least, she was sure of it. Many overlapping layers, as if multiple conversations had been compressed together so tightly, it was nearly impossible to pull them apart. In the end, she'd focused on the one section she and Lance had already isolated. As the Captain's face reappeared on the screen, Alex was well-aware her expression did most of the heavy lifting in delivering her verdict.

"I think we need to call our people back. And if we can't raise them, Captain, we may need to go get them."

Reaching forward, she shared the reworked segment with Lance. Grim-faced, Ryan waited as the faint fragments filtered through the static.

"...report back when there is more information." That was Kozlov.

"Heavy stun, we want to question...of them.." Ryan's eyebrows raised as she watched Lance frown. "I've listened a dozen times, that's our Security Chief, who is currently recuperating in Sickbay. I checked," Alex added.

"...over here...Lieutenant...increase in...sporadic..." This was a voice Ryan didn't recognise.

"...to Zade, we've...proceeding to..." Another unfamiliar voice.

"...to Athena, medical emergency, beam...sickbay."

"I did a quick check, that matches Malone's request for extraction. Yesterday," Alex added, hitting pause. "Some of this appears to be internal communication, the relays were designed to keep teams connected to each other as much as to the rest of the fleet, but this arrived as one transmission," Ryan glanced at the clock, "40 minutes ago. Sequence-wise, this seems all over the place."

"We're receiving these all at once? But out-of-sequence?" Amaya frowned, trying to piece the puzzle together in her head.

"There's one last thing I was able to make out." The Lieutenant frowned as she continued the playback, still trying to chase down the source of an intuitive need to pull back. A malfunctioning communication system was already a diagnosable issue, the presence of unpurged clutter wasn't necessarily unheard of, but they had triple checked the network's ability to compensate for individual relay failure. Hell, she'd pushed the envelope in insisting they deploy enough to still be effective at 60% functionality.

"Movement to the right...one day...Trigger active!"

The warbled emergence of panic over the distortion of screaming they'd heard earlier sat Ryan up further in her chair.

"I'd have to seek clarification given the quality of the transmission but every identification scan I've run tells me that's Ensign Rimal."

Alexis drew in a deep breath and exhaled slowly.

"Except Iska is dead."

Amaya's nose wrinkled as her brain worked the problem. Ignoring any commentary from the man standing beside her, she poured over the reports, the communication logs, and the input from the sensors. "Gravitons..." she finally murmured. The communication line was still open. "Lieutenant, cross-overlay current graviton emissions from the moon's surface." A short pause. "If I'm right, that wreckage might actually be a minefield."

There was no comfort to having her concerns shared. Application of logic made it at least possible that this was just a case of communication feedback, a fault in the system that was resorting to the random attachment of prior transmissions to current efforts. Lack of reliability was almost a given, they'd known that going into this, but something beyond the handful of other explanations that turned this into a simple corruption of data had caused Alex to hesitate. Lance's suspicions added the final justification and, with dawning clarity, Ryan pulled up the requested data and, without realising it, held her breath as the merge finished processing.

She exhaled, very slowly.

"That...is a problem."

"And not one that seems to be going away," Amaya agreed breathlessly, keying-in all number of alerts and warnings to the other squadron Captains. A few seconds later, the screen displayed a holographic rendering of the elongated wreckage sprawled across the surface. "The more we start to peel away the neutronium, the more those gravitons are slipping out like bubbles. Given the levels I'm seeing, those 'bubbles' are likely to completely destabilize the space around them."

"And if someone were to be hit by one of those 'bubbles'?" Tahn inquired.

"They'd likely be ripped apart at the quantum level. Scattered over a few dozen fragments of time and space," Amaya replied. "Hence: Problem." She looked over at Ryan on the nearby viewer. "We need to recall everyone we have down there, right now."

"Which may be easier said than done with a communication system that refuses to cooperate."

The statement hung in the air a moment as Ryan's gaze held Lance's. The Science Chief drew in a breath and then slowly exhaled.

"I'll report to the Commodore." Tension clenched her jaw. "With comms. down and all this interference internally, there won't be a viable transporter lock." Already halfway out of her chair, Ryan added, "We'll have to extract the hard way."