" Trying To Look Beyond The Invisible To Seeing Something Is Not As Easy As It Sounds "
(Previous Post: " Preparing ")
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Stardate: 60298.1536
Setting: USS ANUBIS, Bridge
Captain Simmons had made it sound so easy, all that the Chief Science Officer of the USS ANUBIS had to do was to locate the cloaking field that the scientist had caught a mere glimpse of when they had first arrived in sensor range of TOLAR IV. All that the Shillian scientist had to do was to figure out what element or compounds naturally found in the ice and snow of that world were interfering with their scans, to find a way to adapt their sensors to counter this interference and scan for a ship that was hiding behind the veil of secrecy of a Romulan Cloaking Device. To make the task more challenging, as if it had not already been that, the scientist had only minutes to accomplish all of this in order to place the odds of the second wave of their assault as much in their favour as possible.
Barely managing to make sense of the colossal amount of information the Shillian had been researching and studying, the Chief Science Officer was glad that the Commanding Officer had not asked her to figure out something in the line of the Universal Gravitational Force that held the cosmos in the shape and form that it was in. All things considered, trying to figure the latter might have proven to be slightly easier when taking into account the crushing timeframe that she scientist had been given. Not only would being able to identify the exact location of the cloak ship prove to be an immeasurable advantage in the targeting of their weapons against the ship and the Jem'Hadars that called it their base of operations, but it would also go a long way to making the lives of the away team member easier. Without specific beam down coordinates, the assault team that would head for the surface of TOLAR IV would have to fight the raging storm currently covering that entire region rendering their task that much more difficult and dangerous. For the sake of each and every member of that team, the Shillian scientist had to figure out a way to pierce the natural interference generated by the snow and ice.
The odds had been that there had been some sort of malfunction in the cloaking field generator that had permitted the sensors of the USS ANUBIS to detect it the first time, as little as it was. With the cloaking device that had been figured to be of Romulan origin back to what appeared to be full operational status, the Chief Science Officer had been left with little to use to help make her job easier.
At first the Shillian had thought that melting the snow and ice would be a perfect way to remove the problem, but in doing so the Chief Science Officer had uncovered a completely different problem: that in order to accomplish this the ANUBIS would have to use a considerable amount of power that would advertise its presence and location to anyone in a two hundred light-year radius. Certain that this would never be an acceptable conclusion, the scientist never bothered presenting the idea to her Captain instead looking at another way to accomplish the desired final objective without breaking the precarious secrecy that the ship had amazingly managed to keep up until now.
So if melting the snow and ice was not to be considered as an option this left the Shillian scientist with only two viable options. The first was to find a way to circumvent the natural interference created by the element or elements present on the frozen water or to find a way to cause the Romulan cloaking device to suffer some sort of malfunction that would make it possible for the sensors of the ANUBIS to once again detect the field and the ship that hid beneath it.
The more the Chief Science Officer debated as to which of the two angles to concentrate on, the more the Shillian figured that the second held the best chances of success. Not only would it reveal the exact position of the ship to the ANUBIS and the assault team, but such a malfunction could possibly create a distraction that would further give the advantage of surprise to the Federation crew. All that the scientist had to do was to figure out a way to cause this malfunction from hundreds of kilometres away.
After several computer simulations that all failed to cause the desired malfunction in a standard Romulan cloaking device, the scientist took a moment to gather her thoughts and lifted her eyes from her station. What she observed was the rest of the senior staff members hard at work with their respective parts of the plan given by Captain Simmons. Quickly coming to realise that any sort of distraction had not been the sort of luxury that any of them could afford, the Chief Science Officer returned to her work understanding that she was but a small part of the team, a team that needed to work as one if this plan was to be successful.
While looking at the theoretical cause of the failed simulation, the Shillian woman thought about what she had just realised about her own role in this plan. There would have been no way for her to be able to accomplish this on her own, it was only through the cooperative work of the crew that the plan would have any chance of being successful, and maybe the answer to her problem laid in the same wisdom. Instead of trying to isolate the elements that were causing her so much trouble, what would happen if she used them instead?
With a new perception on the dilemma that she had been faced with, the Chief Science Officer resumed her work this time trying to use the natural properties of the snow and ice to their advantage if this was at all possible. The scans performed by the Shillian had yet to reveal the specific elements that had been at the heart of this interference but they had been enough to give the scientist a idea to start working from. Because of the unique properties of this snow and ice, any electronic signal coming in contact with it was disrupted in such a way that it was pushed a little out of phase. That information by itself was of little value since the change in phase frequency was completely random and could not be predicted, but maybe the change itself could prove to be exactly what they needed. If enough snow could be made to collide with the cloaking field, the sensors of the ANUBIS should, in theory, be able to detect an increase in the phase variance of the. The current storm was quite effective in doing this but the problem had been that because of the higher reach of the storm, detecting phase variance on the surface had been nearly impossible. What the Shillian scientist needed to do was to create similar conditions but to have them limited to being on the surface instead of thought the atmosphere.
It took only a few seconds for the Chief Science Officer to come up with the final answer as she witnessed the storm on the surface of TOLAR IV starting to clear. "Captain," the Shillian said, "I think I have a way of detecting the cloaked ship. All that we would need would be to create an avalanche that would sweep the general area where we are suspecting the ship to be in. The interaction of that much snow against the cloaking field should create a measurable phase variance that our sensors would detect. I mean should detect if my theory about the cause of the natural interference and its interaction with the energy field that is hiding the ship are both relatively accurate. According to my preliminary calculations there is a high probability that such a plan would result in the discovering of the hidden ship, the only problem is that if I made an error in my trying to understand all of this in the little time that was given, we might just be burying the ship under a few dozen meters of snow making it that much more difficult for us to locate and reach with any type of attack."
The Chief of Security grinned as he looked at the Shillian scientist. "If the ship gets buried by snow and ice, they might be forced to drop their cloaking device in order to get out. Either way it looks like we might just have been given a way to figure out where they are," Lieutenant Seth said sounding almost surprised that the answer had actually come from the overly long-winded scientist.
"Do it!" The Commanding Officer ordered, glad to see that the Shillian woman had come through as he had hoped she would.
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Jessica Solarik { maya_992003@yahoo.com }
Lieutenant Maya
Chief Science Officer
USS ANUBIS
"To see the world in a grain of sand,
and a heaven in a wild flower.
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
and eternity in an hour."
- William Blake (British, 1757-1827)
