Posted by Gamemaster The Wrecking Crew (GamesMaster) in Main Sim [Cargo Bay] Tin Can Technology

Posted by Lieutenant Junior Grade Teebo (Chief of Keeping The Ship Together (CE)) in Main Sim [Cargo Bay] Tin Can Technology
Teebo wiped his forearm across his forehead and sighed. While he didn’t sweat like a human, enough time among them had taught him that it was the thing to do after hard work was complete. And while the keb was far from done with their new wayward trinket, he had made enough progress that it felt like an entire day’s work done. Glancing at the chronometer, he let out a frustrated croak. Only two hours?!

The corner he’d appropriated for his disassembly process looked little different than if a Barzani garbage scow had unceremoniously disgorged its contents across the polished floor. Rusted casing plates and metal braces were strewn about in loose piles, with the exception being those few items where markings had been found. Those he had stacked neatly against the wall, pitiful of a find as they’d been. What was left of the pod was a wiring nightmare sizzling and blinking mockingly at him hanging in shambles from an interior frame. Either its passenger had been very angry at the time of his encasement and decided the internal systems existed for therapeutic destruction or he’d been hastily ensconced.

Possibly both?

Shaking his head again and hissing his frustration, Teebo gurgled thoughtfully to himself. Scooping up his tricorder, he began to scan the wreckage for any sign of danger to the ship such as radiation or pathogens. While the transporter’s scrubbers were extremely thorough—a point of pride in his maintenance schedule, to be sure—he had found some particularly dense plating surrounding the pod’s defunct transponder that concerned him. He logged any curiosities he found and uploaded them to the Constellation for the science teams, then began to hunt for whatever amounted to a computer system in the remaining scrap heap.

Teebo had a few ideas about how to track its origins if he couldn’t find what he was looking for. Metallurgic degradation, latent radiation and EM emissions, and all manner of astrochemical data would at least let them discern where it had passed recently. After that, it would be a matter of backtracking its likely course based on gravitational interactions with stellar bodies, propulsion wakes, or even bumps from a friendly comet or two. While they might not be able to follow the proverbial breadcrumbs back to its point of origin, it could get them close.

But that was for later, once the dilapidated hunk of tin can technology lay broken and defeated in a disassembled pile of damnable detritus at his feet.
—Teebo, Chief Engineer—

Doing these scans would show that this pod was old. old. OLD. And it had gone through a vast area of space. The ambient radiation off it wasn’t dangerous, but it did demonstrate that it’d been through its fair share of phenomena.

Backtracking its course would take Teebo to Earth many ages ago.

-GM

The final piece of interior plating crashed to his feet with a satisfactory screech of tortured metal, drawing the attention of a pair of ensigns degaussing the far corner with microscrubbers. He sizzled almost sadistically, narrowed his eyes at them and flicked his long black tongue in there direction before heaving the plating over his head to send it clattering into the pile of refuse near the cargo bay door. They returned fervently to work, and the keb bubbled a chuckle. As a once-ensign who spent like hours suffering a chief’s disgruntled punishment for stepping out of line, Teebo felt it only proper to pay the humility forward once and again.

“You’re a sick salamander, hoss,” Pit noted glumly from his shoulder. “Gonna take ‘em all day to finish that way.”

Teebo gurgled with a shrug, uploading his tricorder data to the Constellation’s core computer.

Pit sputtered indignantly. “Yeah, I know you weren’t the one set them to task, but did you have to tinker with the pattern regulators like that? Conjure tighter beams would have made quicker work of an already-long day!”

Again the keb shrugged, crackled a stern reply before pointing to the nearby workstation.

“Character, my polished positronic posterior. You’re just surly.” Teebo waited patiently for the AI to finish his tirade, then sauntered over to the workstation and pointed. “Fine, fine. Computer, establish a link with Astrometrics. Fancy—” Pit made a sound that could only be described as a wry snort of static. “—a computer giving a computer instructions.”

“Link established,” the computer replied placidly.

“Based on the pod’s known heading at the time of retrieval, extrapolate probable course and point-of-origin given uploaded data and recorded astrogational phenomena.”

“Working.”

A star chart of the sector melted into view on the screen, followed by a cascade of the requested data along one edge. A Starfleet insignia blossomed at the center, signifying the Constellation’s current position, before sweeping to one side. A sinuous yellow line began to move across the screen away from the Constellation, spasming this way and that as the computer adjusted for gravitational fields, rogue objects, and the like. Teebo watched as the pod’s likely path wended its way across their current sector of space, then further and further still. Blistering sun, had the blighted contraption been in space that long?! As loath as he was to admit it, Teebo held a grim respect for the pod’s builders—as crude as it had been, it had survived for decades, if not centuries, in space. Finally, the wayward trace collided with a planetary body and pulsed at him.

“Projection complete.”

Teebo blinked, then stared hard at the screen. What the computer displayed must have been a mistake. Shaking his head, he tapped in a command to attempt the simulation again. And again. Five times, he tried the simulation and each time it returned the same answer.

“Projection complete,” the computer noted, unphased by his disbelief.

Absently, Teebo tapped his comm badge, his amber eyes reviewing the data as if it would change. Pit, too, sounded befuddled, almost entranced, as he conveyed the keb’s message. =^=Lieutenant Teebo to Bridge. Captain… we’ve completed an estimate of the pod’s origins. Sir… it’s from Earth… and you’re never going to guess how old it is.=^=
—Teebo, Chief Engineer—