Posted by Commodore Drudoc Andone (Commanding Officer) in Main Sim: Preparing the Probes ( Tag Ensign Kaden Buchanan)
[snip]

As the minutes ticked by the recon probe soon arrived on station. Its first passive ping of scans picked up the cometary debris that the Volgograd had been earlier near. The Volgograd’s hull, now it seems torn into three parts, was picked up to be passively drifting about 200km to port from the probe. No signs on passive scans showed power, or life on ruined Moscow class Surveyor ship. It was simply a dead trio of hulks in space. The age of the hull though seemed strange, it was as if stellar matter had been impacting the unprotected hull ripped up hull for hundreds if not thousands of years!

Further on passive scans within the J17 system showed an interesting find, on passive scans the system seemed much as they had been showing before both on scans and otherwise. It showed on scans an inhabited system with now 9 low warp capable ships with another 20 in system patrol crafts and mining stations and such. But visually the system looked ancient, like it was some long gone grave yard of destruction the tubular remains of the ships were slightly more advanced then the ones on scans maybe another 100 years in advance/development. But now they were torn apart as if by a great force from the outside had tossed them about like a toy with great hands in anger. The planets equally all showed like some massive hand of a God had chewed through them, the gas planets were likely tiny pin pricks of dust and the double solar bodies on either side of the system were the only semi-sense of normalcy both spinning lazily about on their orbits as if nothing had ever happened.

The only other readings being picked up were the distant radio and subspace radio ancient traffic in the region, echoing like some kind of pulse or the like. Then just as all this got recorded and sent back to the Ark Angel, the signal of the probe showed it seemed to be shaking and being tossed about like a chew toy, the last split second image they had coming in with heavy blur was what seemed like some kind of sharp object/creature. Then everything went dark and the signal ended.

Meanwhile the stellar collection probe was still on its way to the nebula.

GM CockRoach

“Tu es sérieux?” said Johnathan as he viewed the data streaming in. “What did we just see? Is this data even, correct? I mean come on it’s like we are viewing things through some type of weird time speeding lenses.” He was truly perplexed at the data, then an idea hit him “We need to scan that damn comet, like now. Also, I think we need to advise the Commodore to go all stop until we get a better grip on the situation.” He said to Lieutenant Hobbes.

-Ensign Johnathan Baptiste, medical

Kaden looked up for a second and looked at Baptist with a strange face. He attempted to ask a question related to what was said by the Ensign, “What in the world did you just say, Baptist? It sounds like French but I am not a French speaker. That was a very odd extremely quick splash of data. Do we have anything else recorded by the computer other than what little was provided before the probe exploded?” Kaden was in awe with the extreme change in data and how quickly the probe had been destroyed. He was hoping the data from the comet would be coming soon. Kaden believed there might be something in the comet causing all of this. Kaden then asked the computer, “Computer, do we have any additional data other than what was seen by our eyes before the probe disintegrated?” He waited on the computer to respond.

Ensign Buchana Engineering Officer

Johnathan turned a little red and looked at Ensign Buchana, “Sorry, closest translation would be ‘are you serious’, the data stream caught me off guard and sometimes I revert to French. My parents insist we speak only French in the house when we are together, something about keeping French Canadian culture preserved.” Johnathan returned to the data and played it back as slow as he could; there was no doubt in his mind that the probe had entered a temporal rift. “Ensign Kaden, I am not an expert on Temporal Mechanics but I would but a years’ worth of Romulan Ale that our probe entered a temporal rift. What do you think?”

-Ensign Johnathan Baptiste, medical

Katie frowned. Temporal anomalies were unusual and her training covered little besides the theoretical possibility of such things. Ultimately a science issue rather than an engineering one. “Play what data we received from the probe. Slowly. See what we can determine about the stresses the probe experienced.”

“Whatever it was has completely voided our previous intel of the area…” Gavin said as he approached the pair. “Sending anyone into the vicinity of the planet would be a suicide mission at this point.” LtJG Stacey added, turning his attention to Buchanan.

“Exec sent me down here to see how feasible it would be to take the mobile emitter specs from Voyager’s doc, and apply it to one of our EMHs,” Dr. Stacey inquired. He was no Engineer, and beyond general maintenance of the medical equipment he used, Gavin would have little to no knowledge on how to create such a device. “Besides creating the emitter, we do need to worry about the degradation of the hologram too.”

Stacey Medical

“Sure. We can do that. As I recall Voyager’s EMH drew its power and programming from the ship itself. That wouldn’t be a problem as long as the EMH remains on the ship,” Katie said. “To go off ship would require a portable power supply and enough of a computer to maintain its programming. Piece of cake.”

Katie turned her attention to Dr. Stacey and tilted her head.

“Why? Is the XO planning on sending an EMH into… whatever this is?”

LtJg Katherine (Katie) Hobbes - Chief Engineer

Gavin nodded in reply. “It’s one of our last options since sending a probe doesn’t give us accurate enough data.” The CMO stated. Dr. Stacey remembered reading that when Voyager was merely a few minutes late from beaming up their EMH from a similar mission, years had gone by for their doctor. Not only would they need a power supply for the EMH, but they’d also need one to last several decades at least.

“Do you think this could work?” Gavin asked the pair.

Stacey CMO

Ensign Baptiste was playing the feedback one frame at a time trying to decipher what he was looking at, when suddenly he came upon couple of frames. “What the hell is that?” he inquired, trying to make sense of the heavy blur that seemed like some kind of sharp object or creature, just before the signal went dark and stopped transmitting. “Does anyone have an idea of what this is?” as he brought up the last ten individual images in the frame. “I swear it appears like some lifeform.”

-Ensign Johnathan Baptiste, Medical

OOC: Ok i’m back everyone from my LOA. Seems we lost a bit of very important detail in my earlier post about the probe. In addition to the obvious time dilation oddities, everyone mostly seems to have missed that the Volgograd was literally RIPPED APART by SOMETHING in addition to it being thousands of years old. PLUS inside the system of J17 the ships present there also were RIPPED APART BY SOMETHING and were only a few decades older then the early three warp ships picked up by the Volgograd! Again these ripped up hulks were showing having been out there in J17 for almost the same amount of time as the Volgograd. Another VERY important and missed detail is that the planets are now all lifeless hulks, including the Class M world, no atmosphere, no life no vegetation nothing, utterly stripped of anything of use or organic etc. As if something swooped down and stripped it all away. Finally the last VERY important thing to note is the last image the probe sent was SOMETHING HUGE literally enveloping and EATING the probe with what might be sharp teeth! Since everyone has already moved on with this missing detail its fine, don’t worry about retconning or changing your replies so far. I’ll run with it for now and use Drudoc to steer us back on track!

As the data played back again for Baptiste he was indeed able to see how the system was like a lifeless dead zone. All atmospheres and anything remotely life like was stripped from all the planets in an organic sense. There was also indeed a blurred frame or three from the probe before it lost contact showing something sharp claw or tooth like destroying the probe. At a rough guess it was something quite bigger then the probe itself. But not much data remained to show anything more then the image, no data on life or make up was present.

Kaden thought for himself, There has to be some outside force causing this issue. There is no way this is naturally made. There had to be some outside life form or something causing this to occur with the amount of damage being caused. It might be worth noting the system as a danger area and to stay away. Kaden then asked the computer, “Is there anything from the data which is not being picked up by sight? Is there any underlying data to explain what might be occurring or what is causing this to occur?” He then waited for a response from the computer. He was hoping there was something else present not being seen causing the problem.

If they were to make a mobile emitter for a hologram, they would have to keep in mind that Voyager’s EMH’s emitter was from the future in the 29th century. Due to the Temporal Prime Directive no efforts to fully study and analyze much less reverse engineer the technology to current standards was allowed in most circles so making one the size of Voyager’s EMH just was not happening. They could though jury rig a device of their own for the EMH. It would be a bit bulky and such but it could work. In this case they would need a portable generator rigged up to a backpack frame, with a computer co-processing unit say from one of their shuttles rigged into the backpack frame with an emitter then fashioned to this as well to project and EMH. It would be bulky and unwieldy for an organic person to carry but for the EMH while looking out of place and probably a burden it could be done. However, without knowing exactly how this temporal echo/anomaly worked, it was impossible to say how it would effect the EMH or the rigged up hardware. Not to mention if there was ‘something’ near the J17 system able to rip apart whole starships and devore organic atmospheres and life on planets and such how or where would they beam such an EMH down too and what did they hop to gain? Perhaps having someone work on rigging such a device ‘just in case’ would be ok but they should probably focus their energies on getting more information on what to do further.

OOC: Aka think of that ‘mobile emitter backpack’ you see in that Voyager episode that is a holo-novel the EMH wrote to symbolize how it chains him down etc

As this was all taken in they could feel the Ark Angel slowly drop from warp and come to a fully stop. If anyone checked their navigational location they would see the bridge had ordered a full stop from warp holding position from J17 by over 3 hours away by warp. Meaning they were well over several light years from J17 still.

OOC: This is a ton of data to process for this post.

Ensign Buchanan
Engineering Officer