Painting the Phasers Blue
Posted on Mon Mar 16th, 2015 @ 1:41pm by Commander Angelica Fairchild & Petty Officer 2nd Class Amelia Takethen
Mission:
Temporal Kickback
Location: Tactical Sub-Systems Control, Deck 17, Stardrive section
Timeline: Following the staff meeting
Angelica stared at the panel in front of her, trying to make sense of it. She'd thought she knew the phaser systems inside out and backward, but now her brain couldn't make heads or tails out of the information. Feeling like her head was about to explode from frustration, she took a deep breath and turned to ask Amelia a question... only to realize that Amelia wasn't there. Oh, right. I meant to call her... Angelica shook her head, not sure why she was so forgetful tonight when she normally had her head on pretty straight... though she had a feeling it had something to do with so many consecutive days with not enough sleep. Sighing, she tapped her communicator. =/\="Fairchild to Takethen. Please meet me in tactical sub-systems control immediately."=/\=
=/\="On my way,"=/\= Amelia replied right away. Thankfully she had been pulling a night shift when all this happened and other than the shaking of the ship, she really had no idea what was going on. she just knew she had 14 replicators in unused quarters she had to do maintenance on during this shift. Packing up her tool kit, she scribbled a few notes on her PaDD and headed out, arriving at the control room a few minutes later.
Walking into the control room, Amelia set her tool kit on a counter and stood respectfully near Angel, awaiting orders. "What can I help you with, Commander?"
"We need to make our orange 24th century phasers look like blue 23rd century phasers with the appropriate energy output readings and realistic damage for this time period." Even to Angelica's very sleepy brain, that sounded like such nonsense. It was so absurd that if she wasn't so damned exhausted, she might have laughed at it. "To make a very long story short, we got thrown back in time and we're about to be part of a rather important historic battle, and we can't risk changing the timeline."
Amelia was a bit stunned, not sure if what Angel was saying was a prank or if she was serious. Angel had a reputation though, and Amelia decided she feared that reputation more than the possibility of this being a prank. Either way, she was asking for the impossible. Thinking it over a moment, Amelia stepped over to a console and pulled up the specs of a ship of this era - a double hulled cruiser of some sort. "Other than it being impossible without a complete refit of the phaser arrays... The power levels, yes that's easy. Weapons signatures haven't changed much in the past hundred years either. That's easy. But blue?"
Then a thought struck her. "We can only rotate the spectral frequency a little... but if we route the energy feeds through holoprojectors..." Pulling up the ship's internal holo systems, Amelia checked through the possibility of doing the reroutes needed. "I think we could get the upper saucer banks partially blue with the residual energy bleedover at the very least. Other than that, we'd have to manually retune every third emitter coil and recouple the EPS feeds to a rougher stream."
Angelica blinked at Amelia's answer; even if she'd been fully awake a lot of that would not have made sense. "Um... if you say so?" Honestly, she had absolutely no idea what the hell Amelia had said. So much for knowing the system inside and out! "But yes. Blue. Has to be blue... Telvan said so."
Amelia snapped her fingers, thinking of an even easier option. "We could also invert the primary ship wide holomatrix. I assume that's how we wouldn't look out of place in such a setting. But then we wouldn't be able to disguise the ship and our weapons at the same time..." Thinking on it a little longer, a sudden thought occurred to her. "Triolic waves!"
Turning back to Angel, Amelia had an excited smile on her face. We could use the main deflector to charge the outer hull with triolic waves. Then rotate the beams to the IR spectrum. When we fire, they'll look perfectly blue from the residual triolic wave particles riding on them!"
"Huh... yeah... that would work... wait." There was something about triolic waves that Angelica tried very hard to remember, something important. After a long while it slowly dawned on her. "No... no... not good. The... floating phase things." Oh yeah that was technical, but she couldn't remember what they were called. "The ones that... they suck energy out of your brain..."
"Do you mean the Denobulans or Devidians or something? As long as there's no temporal energies in the area, we should be fine." Amelia replied with, totally oblivious to how tired Angel was at the time. She expected the security grunts to be clueless when it came to engineering things and their chief being clueless as well wasn't too far fetched to her. Besides, drawing attention to it might attract Angel's wrath and Amelia didn't want that.
"Devidians, yes! Triolic radiation attracts them." Angelica paused, considering the rest of what Amelia had said. "Are you sure? Absolutely sure?"
"I am. We had a few days on them in history class and I did a little research on their technology, as it were. As long as we don't go putting things out of phase or have any stray temporal anomalies in the area, they'll have no way to get here. Besides, the hull is shielded from it so unless it gets inside, there's no way then can visit us." Amelia explained somewhat cheerily.
"Okay. Okay, that's fine then... so... uh... how do we do that?" Totally oblivious to the fact that Amelia had already explained how to produce the triolic waves, Angelica leaned against the edge of a console as she waited for the answer.
Punching up a quick simulation on the main monitor, Amelia obliged anyway. "With a slight reconfiguration, we can charge the outer hull like this... Then with the phasers at the IR solar penetration mode in wide angle, when we fire, they'll be blue like this. Make sense, Commander?"
"Uh..." It should make sense. Angelica knew it should make sense. "Not really, no. But I trust you. I mean... this is your, uh, ballpark."
Now Amelia was worried. Her explanation and cartoon graphics should have made sense to the most dense of the security grunts but Angel wasn't getting it? That was worth risking incurring her wrath... "Are you ok, Commander?" she asked softly. "You've been a lot more out of it than your reputation would suggest..."
"That depends on your definition of 'okay'," Angelica muttered under her breath, not sure she should unload any frustration or fatigued ranting on Amelia. Part of her wanted to be angry with the question, but mostly she wanted to sleep. "I'm tired," she said after a long moment of consideration, hoping that was answer enough.
An officer admitting they were tired? Now Amelia really was worried. "Should I get you some coffee? Or some other sort of stimulant? Or just go to bed? I'm pretty sure I can handle this myself if you need me to."
Angelica shook her head. "Can't go to bed. Too much to do... combat simulations after this..." As she talked, she blinked a few more times than might be entirely normal, but at least her words were making sense again.
"Yes Ma'am," Amelia replied, turning back to the consoles and programming up a combat simulation against a Klingon D-7, normally no match for a Nebula class but with the modifications, it was a relatively even looking fight as far as weapons were concerned.
Angelica watched the simulation for a few moments, looking for any flaws in the proposed disguise. She didn't see any, but she didn't really trust her eyes either. She was exhausted enough to admit to an enlisted member of the crew that she was tired, and she knew how bad a sign that was. Still, she turned to a console to check the simulation up close. As she studied it, her eyes slowly started to drift closed and before she quite knew what had happened, the impact of her elbow against the solid surface of the console jolted her awake again.
Startled, Amelia looked at Angel in a bit of shock. Tired was a vast understatement. "Ma'am... Are you ok?" she asked somewhat timidly. She didn't want to tell an officer what to do, let alone a member of the senior staff... Other than Ven, that is... But it was painfully clear to her just how 'tired' Angel was and she was tempted to insist she go to bed.
Oh, that was embarrassing. Angelica felt a bit of color gracing her cheeks as she pushed herself back up to a proper standing position. She hadn't fallen asleep on a console since the academy, and never when she was standing up. "Okay. Maybe 'tired' is an understatement. But we have less than six hours to get this ship combat ready, and as chief of security I can't be sleeping while everyone else is working on that."
Amelia shook her head. "The ship is already combat ready. We just need to disguise her, right? That's plenty of time and technically, we can be done with the preparations in less than an hour. Then we just charge the hull just before combat and we're good. As an engineering stooge, I can't in good conscience stand here and watch you pass out from exhaustion. You might hurt yourself when you hit the console and blood is a pain to get out of the panels."
"Uh huh... I see how it is... concerned about the equipment but not me." Even tired as she was, Angelica had to grin at that. Engineering types could be so funny about the ship's safety. And she did have to admit that Amelia had a point, even if it was phrased about the console and not her head. "Technically I just have to make the phasers blue and match the power outputs. Have we done both of those? I can't remember."
"Technically no," Amelia said, punching some more data into the systems. "We just have a plan and putting it into effect will be easy. I'll program in the necessary adjustments to everything and send an instructional briefing to the bridge consoles. If you want to sit down and supervise with your eyes closed, I'll let you know when I'm done."
"Okay, that sounds fair." Angelica had a mild suspicion that Amelia might not actually wake her up, but she wasn't in any shape to argue. So she found a chair at an unoccupied console and - after checking to be sure said console was powered off - crossed her arms on it and rested her head on them. At least it was safer than falling asleep standing up.
Indeed, Amelia didn't have any plans of waking her. She just stood there, punching in the data and reprogramming the needed systems and writing up instructions on a side terminal. Half an hour later, she was finished. Saving the configurations, she fired the messages off to the main bridge terminals, as well as Angel's office terminal and started turning the consoles back off.
Now for what to do with Angel... With her strength she could easily carry her to her room but that was at least a dozen decks away. She didn't want to explain what had happened to anyone. Shrugging, she carefully picked Angel up, cradling her in her arms. "Computer, please initiate a site to site transfer to Commander Fairchild's quarters. Access authorization Drydock sigma thirty three alpha."
In a moment, they had disappeared in the transporter shimmer, leaving the room empty.
"The time is 0600 hours."
Angelica tugged the blanket up over her head as the lights slowly came on and the computer's monotone wake-up announcement repeated a second time. Five more minutes couldn't hurt...
No sooner had she thought it, she snapped awake and sat up, looking around to see where she was as the blanket slipped free from her shoulder. Home? But... that didn't make sense! She'd been in the tactical control area! Very slowly, Angelica swung her legs off the couch and stood up, trying to sort out what had happened. They'd been working, she'd nearly cracked her head on a console... and Amelia had let her fall asleep on a console while the plan was implemented. And then, clearly, gotten her home. Somehow.
Angelica didn't know whether to be annoyed or grateful. Finally, she decided she couldn't be angry about someone insisting she sleep when she so clearly needed it, and - with an amused smile - went to take a quick shower before reporting back in for duty.
