Idle Hands
Posted on Mon Oct 27th, 2025 @ 7:22pm by Commander Rhupert Tyree
925 words; about a 5 minute read
Mission:
On the Trail
Location: SS. Adelaide on Quatral Prime/Avan's Colony.
Timeline: After Lions, Tigers, and Cardassians. Oh my!!
Rhu puttered and found himself pacing. He didn’t like having his crew out, likely in harms way on an away mission while he cooled his heels aboard the Adelaide. In retrospect, it was foolish to be here alone and he was kinda getting that.
On the other hand, it was on the edge of what a tramp freighter captain would likely do, if they just didn’t report the signal onward and go about their business. Every hour. Every hour would cost a ship like this profit, though Rhu could reasonably argue the point that his passengers had talked him into it.
So there was that.
Lounging on the bridges command chair, Rhu was being the lazy captain with one leg hooked up on the chair’s arm and his back wedged into the opposite corner, he had the viewer set to show the landing grid, primary building and the ship’s sensors had the colony’s shield represented. They didn’t add atmosphere below the shield of course, but it did keep the planets gasses from pooling and causing mayhem.
Since the crew had entered the colony, Rhu had set up one console to keep track of the mission, with indicators and recorders running, though the interference was making it mostly garbage. He hoped that if any of the Valiants (including him) ran into trouble, they could at least get some sort of response going.
He spent half an hour getting the log up to date, then went back to sorting through the colonies faulty mayday signal. Something there was bothering him and he really wished he’d joined the away team. He knew Kat and Amy would likely tear the colonies communication system down to see if they had a rat or something else in there, so he had to satisfy himself with analyzing the signal itself.
The other communications with the colony could be used to help with that and he threw in the warning from Gil Divinis into the mix as he let the computer analyze things. When the initial findings were spit out, he wasn’t surprised that the colony was running on old systems and the Gil had a fairly new set.
After a couple more hours, Rhu felt vindicating in thinking that the Gil had been lying. The mayday signal itself seemed crafted to be picked up by other Cardassian systems, although they were using an obscure, old channel. The computer walked him through sifting through the bandwidths and he found that the colony’s signal, even though it should have been broadcast in the clear, was actually set to those same obscure, old frequencies.
Straightening slightly to ease his aching back, Rhu stood and went for a caff refill and snack from the galley. Adelaide had an enhanced Fed Intelligence com shack. State of the art and buried deep into the freighter’s systems with masking equipment and a hardwired destruct device to make sure no one who wasn’t authorized could monkey with it.
The one on the Valiant was only marginally better, but Rhu was pretty sure that’s the only reason they’d picked up the Colonies mayday signal. And even then, the signal had been enhanced to make them think it HAD been broadcast in the clear.
Otherwise they’d likely have thought it was a trap. Old equipment shouldn’t be able to spoof Adelaide’s suite like that. That in turn meant it had been enhanced by someone and Rhu doubted it had been the colonists themselves. For all appearances, they appeared genuine. Though now he knew he had to dig deeper, but there was only so much he could do.
Pacing his bridge, he pulled up the holographic display and built a visual representation of the colonies communications. There was the main system in the colony structure. They had a laser array to push the signal through the planets atmosphere, to an orbiting satellite, which then would bounce the signals around.
Hacking into the communications satellite wasn’t a huge challenge. Rhu had some tricks he’d picked up working with Betezoid Intelligence. He had a program kit that let him install a backdoor into the colonies comms and remote sensor array, such as it was. Cycling through he frowned at what he saw. The satellite was new, which made sense. The Cardassians had built the original. The Maquis had hacked into it and made it their own. The Dominion had come in and wiped out the Maquis and anything they’d touched or inhabited.
The colony had survived because it was unmanned at the time was Rhu’s best guess. So the Satellite was new, but it had front loaded old communications and sensor gear so that the colony could use the infrastructure that was in place.
What didn’t make sense, and what Rhu nearly walked into was a fairly modern snooper program that just about caught him poking around. If it wasn’t for the Betezoid stealth gear he was using, he would have been noticed and tripped….something.
Rhu pulled back his programs and thought. He doubted he had the skills to do a full on remote hack. He’d need Amy to crack something like this. What he COULD tell was there were back loaded programs operating that were literal decades beyond what the colony could use without updating the whole smash.
END
A solo post by
Commander Rhupert Tyree
Master and Commander
USS Valiant, aboard the SS. Adelaide.
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