Oops!

Posted on Tue Dec 12th, 2023 @ 9:27pm by Cadet Junior Grade Maxwell Hofmann & Lieutenant Commander Darrod Hanous

0 words; about a 1 minute read

Mission: Mission 5: The Price of Paradise
Location: Deck 19, Main Deflector Control
Timeline: M5 MD02 (2268.07.25) 2200

Darrod had to admit, he was tired. After the combat they'd been in, and the awful situation they'd been through, he was leading a third damage control team in addition to the ones run by Page and Ezazzan, and leaving Solwick to run the Engine Room while Lemare and her team handled the Bridge. His trust in the team had served him well - Engineering on the Midway was running better than it ever had before.

His team had been running around the entire ship, doing everything that the other teams couldn't, or when they were were busy. Then, about an hour before he was going to knock off, an urgent top-priority red-alert request came in from Deflector Control. Downing a mouthful of coffee, the green Engineer grabbed a tool belt and gestured toward the other two, very tired Engineers. "Guys - deflector control, top priority. Hop to, we're going." He glanced around, finding one of the men working a console. "Levins, log that, tell Page and Ezazzan to continue as normal, we're on it."

With that, the three men walked with purpose from Main Engineering down to Deflector Comms Control. Entering the small room, Darrod looked around, trying to find the problem. "Cadet, report!"

The cadet swung around in the Burke chair, a stunned look on his baby face, his brown eyes were wide, "Ah sir?" He asked and then said, "I'm not sure sir."

Darrod looked at the young Cadet with an expression that wordlessly would express his exhaustion, and pulled the PADD off his belt, showing the young man what had come into main Engineering. "If you're 'not sure', why do I have a highest-priority damage report, signed by you? That's not a 'not sure' kind of report to send. What is wrong and why does it need to be repaired immediately?"

"Lt. Vox sent me to recalibrate the main Deflector Comms system to align with the latest settings from Starfleet Engineering, but... When I keyed in the commands, the system completely shut down," the young midshipman quickly explained. His eyes were wide, staring at the intimidating Orion chief engineer. His eyes seemed to say. Please don't eat me.

Darrod looked at the young man and sighed heavily, shaking his head. The expression on his face shifted from being grim, to lightening up just enough that he was willing to give this relatively innocent cadet the benefit of the doubt. He'd made his own mistakes, and it wasn't right to carry forward the negative impact of what he'd suffered before joining the Fleet. But when he was tired like this, those bad habits came forward; and he had to consciously focus not to give in. So after a moment of silence, he nodded and took a deep breath. "Alright. We'll run some initial diagnostics, then you can walk us through exactly what you did. While we run those diagnostics, I want you to run down to the crew lounge on this deck, get three cups of coffee. Black. When you get back, we'll talk about what you did and what happened."

With the young man briefly dismissed, Dar opened the panel and all three of the engineers started scanning the terminals. It wouldn't take them much less time to get the system back online than it would for the coffee to arrive. He stepped back and gestured to the chair. "Alright, Mr. Hofmann, we've got the system mostly back to where you were before whatever went wrong. Please, show us what you did. Let's see if we can't figure this mess out. After we get through all that, let's talk about what each priority means in a damage report."

The midshipman gingerly set the coffee carrier down into one of the other consoles. He didn't understand why there weren't cup holders or something installed into these things. He pointed to the clipboard sitting on top of the panel, "Those are the instructions from Starfleet Engineering," Max commented before picking up the clipboard and handing it to the Orion Engineer. The calculations contained on the pad were complicated and were not annotated, requiring a trained engineer to translate.

Darrod took one of the cups of coffee and looked over the clipboard. To his eyes, it looked standard and simple - and should never have warranted the damage report he'd received."This is all just standard comms maintenance procedure, updating the time factor and security factors. The only hitch is the fact that it's on the deflector-transmitter, so there's some demuxing involved. Frankly, once you've been trained on it, you should have been able to do this, and then sat back for a nice quiet shift - or get bored, ask for another task, and look like a hero."

When Dar passed it to one of his crewmen, and realized that he was the only person in the small room who actually understood what he was reading, he reserved himself a quiet moment for his coffee and nodded. He picked up the pad that had the damage report on it, clearing the display and popping out the stylus.

"Okay, stick with me here, I'm only going over this once right now. We already have the data, it was sent in the standard packet. It's in a tape on the library computer, compressed. But the problem is that the comms firmware does not know that, and wouldn't begin to know how to deal with it if it did; the system's airgapped so it's harder to be overridden. So, call up the tape on the audio output side - this is executing the GET. You do the same thing if you're listening to music, or if you're doing translation. Same operation as any other, just a specific, secure, tape." He tapped a few buttons on one of the controls, showing the compressed file as it streamed into the computer's buffer. A moment later, a static tone played, then a brief blast of a horrid cacophony ranging from subsonics to supersonics, all in what appeared to be a jumble before Dar stopped it and rewound the data. "That's a representation of how the comms data actually comes in. That's the sound of compressed code which, once we acoustically couple it to the transmitter in SET mode, will do most of the update for us."

 

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