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Interregnum 02-03 S2 / Re: Day 01 [ 0700 hrs] The Salvage Job
Last post by Dumedion -It was fun to cut up with a new wingman en-route; Talia quickly realized the more they talked, the more Atlas seemed like a genuine goof-ball — which turned out to be a running theme with the Wolves. For her part, she had tried to reciprocate, but as soon as her hand eased back on the throttle to drop the Valkyrie from warp, Shadow switched back to all-business-mode.
The stars settled to distant pinpricks of light as the pitch of her engines dropped to a lower octave. A visual scan of the heavens around her revealed Atlas, a ways off to port, with the convoy of shuttles between them...
…And nothing else but infinite darkness.
In the following moments, she'd already checked the Valkyrie's sensors twice, along with a mid-level navigation diagnostic — just to be sure everything jived with the original flight plan the mission team had been given from Theurgy’s astrometrics. The obvious was apparent as soon as they'd arrived: there was no sign of the Cayuga — no emergency beacon, no IFF transponder, no debris…
Nothing.
Coms chatter filled Shadow’s helm while she circled back in a wide arc around the convoy, opposite to Atlas’ relative path, to open up space while forming a defensive screen — a standard redeployment maneuver. Active proximity scans of the system yielded unremarkable returns; long range showed the same. Dark eyes, tinted almost black behind the faint blue illumination of her helm, narrowed with worry.
Are we too late?
The probes launched. Shadow tracked the dull glow of their drives as they streaked away into the darkness. While the others talked and voiced possible theories, the pilots hands and fingers played across her control panels — accessing Theurgy’s astrometrics again.
Every known stellar object with sufficient mass to affect a disabled vessel of Cayuga’s tonnage was accounted for. While the data couldn’t rule out the possibility of a rogue element, or unmapped object — a comet perhaps — Shadow couldn’t help but consider that an unlikely scenario.
She wasn’t an astrophysics expert, however; the science nerds were — but that didn’t stop her from using her basic comprehension of fundamental physics to draw her own hypothesis.
Shadow’s eyes turned to the distant blue speck of the system’s far away star. To her mind, anything left powerless and adrift in-system long enough would inexorably fall into its gravity well, without fail. She’d already turned the nose of her fighter towards it when Atlas spoke up on a direct channel.
“Four copies,” she nodded, then a typed out a few quick commands on her OPS console. “Sensor network established, links active with both pups.”
She hoped he didnt mind the use of shorthand for the probes. Shadow chewed her lip in thought for a moment, considering Atlas' question.
“Doesn’t plasma cool and disperse relatively quickly? But yeah, we might get lucky and catch a trail,” she shrugged, then paused again. “We know Romulans favor plasma-based weaponry and cloaks — which have been known to leave trace tachyon emissions and anti-protons. The Savi — based off the Hobus mission data — used graviton beams. So…maybe if we look for what hunted the whale, that will lead us to her?”
Her hand keyed in the adjustments to the ship’s sensor sweeps; even with active sensor envelopes keyed in for max resolution — that still left a literal astronomical search area to cover.
“How about a clockwise spiral pattern split between us and the pups? It’d put some distance between us and the convoy, but only a few light-minutes at most. Or we can work it by quadrants and stay close; that’ll take longer, but our sweeps would overlap tighter, giving us more accuracy.”
Again, her eyes turned to the star at the system’s core.
“Your call, Atlas.”
