On The Clock

Posted on Fri Jun 18th, 2021 @ 3:55pm by Jeassaho Kea (*) & Chief Engineer Michael Burnstein & Jinx Jorasco & Laurier Cami & Liha t'Ehhelih

Mission: Mission 13: Stowaway
Location: Cargo Bay
Timeline: MD 08 10:00
1104 words - 2.2 OF Standard Post Measure

Jeassaho looked at the stasis unit with a frown on her face that was deep and looked like it would not be shifting any time soon. She had not spoken to her husband about it all, but she could imagine he was seething with anger at the Ferengi and Betazoid currently held up in the brig. It had always been his rule despite how much money it would make, Reuben had standards and a deep moral code that went so deep that Jeassaho was sure one day it was going to kill him.

“So, any idea where to start? I have no idea about this technology,” Jeassaho admitted, standing from her crouch among the debris and chaos that was the shuttle bay.

"If we had time I'd say take the whole thing apart and rebuild it again." Cami shrugged. She'd not really left the unit alone since they'd inadvertently opened it. "Since we can't do that, we need to make sure it doesn't blow up first. I defer to the expert on those things," she added, glancing at Burnie.

"The point here is to make it blow up," Burnie replied with a grin. "Just not until it's in their hold. We just need to get it functional enough to hold together and patch up the outside so it looks unopened. The real work is getting the read out to show it as working with an occupant in stasis."

“Hmm, yeah, that is certainly real work,” Jeassaho murmured. If they had been on a Starfleet ship it would have been a simple realignment of a probe or something, but on the civilian ship, they needed to think outside the box... a very big box. Nothing was ever normal.

“Have they seen the unit?” Jinx asked, pondering things as she went on tip toes to peer at the display screen. “Can we simply...swap out the display? It doesn’t need to be connected to any of the actual sensors in the box, does it? We simply put in our own programming to display what we want. Like when you spoof a security sensor and loop it back.”

"Sounds like the sort of thing they used to do during the Occupation," Cami nodded. "Could probably work. Odds are they won't know what they're looking at until it goes boom."

Jeassaho shrugged. She had no idea of the approach to it all at all. This was outside her field of expertise. “We could use the rest of the cargo to cover it,” she mused. “They did say they wanted all of it.”

“Good to have backup layers,” Jinx agreed. She examined the stasis unit display for what tools she would need to remove it.

“What do you think, Burnie?” Jeassaho asked, defaulting to him as her senior officer. She might not be Starfleet, but the mentality still stuck in her mind after a decade of training and ship life. It was hard to shift, no matter the freedom. Ship life was ship life no matter military or civilian.

"Swapping out the control panel display is the easiest fix," Burnie said, walking around the unit. "But we also have to shield the explosives enough that a transport weapons filter won't catch them, and engage the systems enough that a cursory scan will make it look like the center of the box is at suspension temperatures." He paused, rubbing his chin. "Actually, if we can get the cryo system running, I could rig a two part explosive that will activate when the liquid part warms enough to flow and hit the catalyst. That way it won't read as a bomb, and we just need the stasis to fail once it's beamed over."

"But if they aren't really after the girl and just the cargo in general they are not going to turn off the cryo unit," Jeassaho wondered, wishing they had more time. She worked best under pressure, but they just had so little time. She was almost warming up to the idea that her husband had muttered of Liha going over and killing them all.

"Oh, I wasn't counting on them turning it off," Burnie explained. "If they mean to deliver her to bond to someone on revival, then waiting might not blow them up. At least not in a timely manner. No, I mean to set a fail point so the stasis cuts off once it's in their hold. But you raise a good point. I'll rig a secondary trigger so that it blows if anyone tries to open it before that."

“We could fool the transporter filters into removing the catalyst block during transport,” Jinx said. “A little of the biogel from the biogel packs inserted between the chemicals and infected with a virus would cause the transporter biofilters to remove it. If we get the amount just right, and a relatively harmless virus, it wouldn’t even trigger an alert, just routine pathogen filtering.”

Burnie considered that moment. It was elegant, but required a lot more medical tech knowledge than he felt comfortable he or anyone else here had. "That's clever, but I'm not sure we have the expertise to get all of that just right. My plan just counts on setting one circuit to fail so the chemicals mix once stasis cuts. That way if they open it the normal way, it will blow too. But I'll add a trigger to the lid so that if they notice a stasis fail and try an emergency extraction, it'll ramp the heat and set off the bomb."

"Less that can go wrong for sure," Jeassaho commented, crouching again to look at the damage again. This part looked like an easy fix, at least for the casing. How it had not damaged the girl inside she would never know. “How long do we think? They gave us two days to make our choice.”

"The outer shell stuff is superficial," Cami explained. "But the power unit is fused. Probably a good job they let that poor girl out of there. We'll need to replicate the parts and replace them individually. Rebuilding a unit this old? Forty-eight hours might be pushing it."

"All we got," Jeassaho murmured, not wanting to add it was more like forty hours now, but she was not going to add more pressure to an already volatile situation.

“I’ll see what parts we have in stock for the power unit,” Jinx offered, pulling up their inventory of spare parts.

"Guess we should get started then. We're on the clock, right?" Cami said, cracking her knuckles and pulling back her sleeves.