[snip]

“A sci-guy was all excited. Passed him in the corridor. Sayers. You know him? Little guy, real excitable. Said he was using macro-b’s on the planet looking out the window from his cabin and then it cleared up suddenly. Like mist burning off a lake he said.”

El looked at the thing. Unmanned. Not from here. She suddenly had a bad feeling. “Okay, here’s a what if. These Serpents are foiled by the Greyhound, one of our ships from out of our near future that somehow got back into the past. Our boys set up this kind of defense where ships can’t go faster than light but these Serpents send this thing .. big engines, unmanned, able to travel for a long time in that soup at high impulse to the planet to wait for the field to dissipate then it wakes up and sends out the signal that it’s all clear.” El knew there were holes in that as she could not jive that with the sudden appearance of the planet and field but neither could she quite put all the temporal pieces together yet.

The others turned toward her. “Sheesh, El, you really know how to cheer a girl up,” said Rosa from her station.

El, Eng

El heard a notification bleep off the panel and her eyes flickered to it, as did the others. Damien, the one seated there, reported, “They polarized the hull. Power stable. Focusing sensors on that thing.” His fingers moved to magnify the ship in his small viewer. Galen whistled a tune quietly between his teeth which sounded louder in the quiet area broken only by the thrumming of the engines and machinery. El chewed a nail, then looked at it, remembering what the doctor had suggested, then went back to it.

“Is there a way of getting a quick sensor sweep out on a 360? See if there’s any other surprises around us?” She wondered about Elm and if she could see it out there and if she knew what it might be from her lore.

“Will try, El,” he said, working the controls.

El turned to Galen. “Galen, run to the galley and look for a girl there, a native of the world. Her name is Elm. There might be another person there. A soldier from the world. I don’t know his name. Take a pair of macros along with you. Ask them if they might recognize that thing. The soldier is yum.. is just out of sickbay. Elm is shy so don’t go in with guns blazing but if this is part of the tech that fought the Greyhound, we need to know sooner than later.”

“Right, El,” Galen said, moving to a locker and rummaging about for the binoculars.

“Call if you find out something,” El called out as Galen closed the locker and headed out.

“Cinderelli, Cinderelli, all the day it’s Cinderelli,” Galen said between whistles as he exited Engineering.

El, Eng

Scans on a 360 degree view within the short range limits of the Bonaventure came up negative off hand for anything else unusual.

GM CockRoach

“Nothing on the scan of space, El,” Dorian said. “Computer is still analyzing the lights to see whether it is a kind of computer language or mathematical mode of communication or their way of saying ‘hey’”.

El nodded and patted his shoulder with the hand she wasn’t using to chew the nail. Something was going to go down. She felt it. It happened in every romance story she had ever read and this felt the same. It was the middle of the night, no early morning hours now. Gamma shift was still fresh here. She glanced about at them. El was the odd one out that way. Between adrenaline and youth she was holding her own but boy she could use a strong coffee. She should get Galen to bring her one when he gets to the galley.

“Okay,” El said to Dorian. “Keep at that language algorithm. It can’t be just flashing like that for the fun of it. And filter that screen down before that flashing gives us all a headache.”

• El, Eng

A beep came back from the computer showing it had done what it could to try to process the light patterns. It revealed it was some kind of likely mathematical formula. Bringing it up El would find it interesting to say the least, it had some comparisons to usual known theories of various FTL forms of travel. Warp travel for example carried a pretty common line of math no matter who used it in some form or another. But the formula was also different, it would remind her of when she had been planetside not so long ago. Part of the formula matched many of the programming patterns the humanoid aliens used for their computer processing systems. What this likely meant was that the Greyhound Saviors/Survivors had probably scavenged Serpent hardware and backwards engineered it for use by the locals in various forms. But seeing how it matched up in other uses her mind would swirl with more ideas.

The first was that indeed the light pattern was some kind of signal, given the power output with each burst it was fair to say it was a long range communicator to where/when though was anyone’s guess. Also what it meant was equally a mystery and probably would always be so.

The second though was that the formula somehow dealt with FTL travel, indeed into the realm of subspace which worked in concert with warp travel to move ships and other things known to her. So with the first idea in mind she could further theorize that this long range communication was tunneling into subspace to go even further then normal so this meant whoever would receive it probably was not going to be getting it anytime soon nor show up anytime soon.

The third and probably most important though, was with this formula she could in theory create a counter formula pattern to cause interference or outright blocking of any further transmission to whoever was going to get this, the power to use it would have to come from their own warp reactor of course, and the ‘lighting’ would have to come from the ship’s nacelles, coupled with a carefully timed raising/lowering/fluctuating pattern of the ship’s warp bubble. In essence it would be like trying to run the ship at warp while staying still, starting and stopping it over and over. It would be risky of course, no one to her knowledge had ever attempted something like this, it was like over revving a conventional car motor in neutral to the red line to make the most noise and hoping you did not blow up the engine.

Of course if she or those on the ship did do this there was no telling how or what this might do to the massive diamond structure over the planet, at the least it would simply block the signal it was preparing to transmit, at worse it could in theory cause it to explode with unknown results to them or the planet below.

Finally there was one longer term idea gemerinating in the back of her mind, if this formula could be used as a means for making computers run at incredible states of processing on such simple hardware, not to mention produce such imaginational levels of power output, and use for FTL means of travel. It occurred to her that with further research who knows what limits it could produce for Earth’s Starfleet!

OOC: Aka this fourth idea is more so a hook for you to run with if you want or not in a side sim in the future for better or worse. Also as a hook for my own future plans on a main sim idea!

GM CockRoach