On the Shuttle

Posted on 13 Feb 2018 @ 4:53pm by
Edited on 23 Feb 2018 @ 9:05pm

411 words; about a 2 minute read

"Personal Log, Lt Nicci Taggert recording," she said as she walked back from the cockpit, having launched from the Tomcat successfully. "Stardate...doesn't really matter in this alternate universe. There's probably no Federation Galactic Timekeeping Service here anymore. The computer can synch up the time for me."

She walked over to her workmanship and knelt down. She was not in a standard Starfleet uniform, per captain's orders; she had tight black pants, calf-high boots, and a long-sleeve tight black shirt on; all low-visibility gear that followed her form well.

"We're on the way to a freighter, trying to find out what its situation is. I feel...uneasy," she said. "It feels like something, or someone is on that freighter that's somehow connected to me. I can't explain it. It's probably nothing. But rule 39...'There is no such thing as coincidence'."

"Anyway, our stealth plating is working within normal parameters, at least, the parameters we've designed them to have," she said. "Our subspace sensor profile was minimized to be the equivalent of a micrometeoroid and the regular sensor profile to the same. Our impulse exhaust is being masked, absorbed, and dispersed in such a way as to come across as nothing more than interstellar gas and dust from a comet. It takes additional energy but our plating masks any additional heat signatures, and even our own so that thermal imaging won't give away the people in the shuttle."

She checked the box and the gear, the plasma transfer conduits were working; power flow set correctly. The processor was normal, and the isolinear chips were all fine.

"The comm system is working as we modified it," she continued. "We're modulating using the ancient MPEG layer three codecs, which practically no one three centuries later would even know about, and even fewer in an alternate reality. Couple that with the encoding all audio into Gothic, remodulation to match the background radio frequency of the universe, and the use of a Playfair cypher in the Gothic language that I never wrote down or spoke, and I highly doubt anyone will be able to intercept and decode our transmissions."

"Looks like we're still good," she said, getting up from the shuttle floor and closing the plating on the altered components. She checked her slimline pocket, and she still had her safety knife. "Rule 9. Never go anywhere without a knife."

"We'll see what happens. You never know in a weird, tripped-out alternate reality," she said. "End log."

 

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