Forecasting

Posted on 23 Sep 2025 @ 12:55am by Lieutenant JG Cajag Lagnas & Lieutenant JG Dylan McConnor & Ensign Emilie D'Astous

1,209 words; about a 6 minute read

Mission: The Festival of Unity
Location: Planetary Orbit
Timeline: After Transfer Back to Cygnus

The Type Six Shuttle, banked wide away from the close orbit of the near planet. Below the last recess’s of the storm could be seen petering out. Flood damage could be seen even this far out. But they were too far out to observe any structural damage.

Caj coughed a little as he sat in the back of the shuttle craft. He cracked open his tricoder for the fourth or fifth time and then slipped it back into his uniform belt.

Caj was not the only one on the shuttle. He was accompanying two other Starfleet officers. Two strangers to him as he was the new guy after all. Out of the shuttle crafts front screen Caj could see the first of the weather satellites they were due to review.

Émilie eased the shuttle to a slow approach as they neared the first of some sixty-something satellites they had to inspect. For whatever reason, the Captain had asked them to do a visual inspection of each and every satellite, as opposed to relying on sensors and remote connections to the things. Who was she to complain?

"Coming up on our first target," she announced.

Dylan tapped the console from the starboard aft quarter. "Visual inspection looks good, the satellite seems undamaged. Ensign Cajag, how's it looking on your end?"

Cajag took a look from his own terminal, his fingers typing delicately on the LCARS touch screen display. "I concur. No damage to the array. It is powered down at the moment. We need to get closer and manually access its computer."

"Stay clear of the aft compartment," called out Dylan.

He activated a forcefield that cut them off from the shuttle's aft compartment, while Émilie maneuvered the craft into position. The rear hatch opened, and Dylan activated a tractor beam to bring the satellite aboard, lowering it gently onto the deck. He re-sealed the hatch, and lowered the forcefield.

"All yours, Cajag," he said.

Caj, thankful he would not need to be taking a zero g space walk, stood up from his seat and marched over the the part of the satellite now attached to the shuttle craft. His fingers dextrously tyyped on the small key padd. There was a click and hiss and then front panel swung open. Caj then took a an adapter wire from the engineer and attached it to the satellite then linked it to his own data padd. "right lets see what you got."

Émilie watched the Trill work his skilled fingers on the control panel for a moment before turning to McConnor. "So Dylan," she said matter-of-factly. "Word around Elysia is, you found a way through Stovek's Vulcan stoicism... How'd that happen?"

McConnor nearly choked on the sip of water he'd been taking, and quickly replaced the bottle down by his feet, wiping his chin on his sleeve.

"Excuse me?" he asked, dumbstruck.

"Well, you know... Rumors travel fast," she said, taking note of the fact that the Engineer was blushing.

"Let the rumors fly then," said Dylan. "I don't kiss and tell."

Émilie smiled. "So there was a kiss."

Dylan remained silent, intently examining his console.

"Is he a good kisser? I'm sure he would be, I mean he's analyze everything about the kiss, the right amount of pressure, angle of the head tilt..."

"I'm sure you're just dying to know," replied Dylan, not willing to entertain Émilie's gossip trail.

She chuckled and turned her eyes on Cajag. "What about you, Cajag? Is there anybody on Elysia that's getting under your skin?"

Caj smiled to himself as he worked. He flicked open another data port andf began moving isolinear chips out an into various data ports as he began to examine the data programme of the weather satellite. The LCARS display screen turned blue and programme code began to rattle down it. Caj turned his head to look at his fellow junior officers. "Guys I've only been here a few days....I dont want to get anyone in trouble."

"Who'd get in trouble?" asked Dylan.

Émilie spoke over Dylan. "Okay, you haven't been here long, still looking around. Maybe I can help? What are you in the market for?"

Dylan turned to her. "Émilie!" he called out, taken by surprise.

"What? You heard him, he just got here."

"I would get in trouble" mused Caj to himself with smile, which then turned into a bit of a frown as he reviewed the script running down the script. He lightly touched the screen to pause it and then scrolled back a bit. Caj let out a thoughtful "hmmmmmm" as he re-scrutinised the scrolling script. Had something been added to the code or had he imagined it? He shook his head slightly to himself thoughtfully. Caj returned himself to the conversation. "IO just spent the last ten plus years stuck in a lab doing classified Lab work for Research & Development in the DTI so at this point I would take anything.....but you know i have sort of met someone...i think."

"Oh, do tell!" asked Émilie, smiling devilishly.

"What is it?" asked Dylan in turn. The Engineer got up from his station and looked over Cajag's shoulder at the screen. "Code injection?"

"Yeah.....Looks like the code injection has its own chameleon sub-routine. Its literally designed to blend in with the rest of the programming code. We Wouldn't of noticed on a passive scan. It looks to of re-written key parts of the programme." Caj looked at Emillie. "CMO...Ok....Its the CMO. Well i think. I dunno, she kind of blew me off the last time we met."

Dylan touched the screen to scroll back to the new code. "It's been a long time since I coded anything, and I'm not familiar with this coding language. Any idea what it does?"

Caj shook he head gently from side to side. "We should get the operations officer to look at it. But my guess...some sort of variable, tri-level coding sync with an adaptive pattern to re-write code the make the change code to look like normal unchanged coding.....this would really mess with the planetary weather patterns."

"Can you restore the old code?" asked Émilie, returning her mind to business matters.

"I wouldn't," said Dylan. "For one, this is evidence. We can place the satellite in lock-down mode for the time being, but we need a cyber forensics analysis. Whoever did this may have left digital fingerprints. And two, whatever we do might get overridden by the other satellites. These things are supposed to keep each other in sync."

"Yep....." said Caj snapping his tricorder shut. "Looks like we need Security on scene and as soon as possible because this thing is already starting to self degrade."

Dylan held up his data PaDD and filmed the screen.

"Scroll through the code slowly," he instructed. "If this gets overwritten we'll at least have a screen capture to work with."

Once Cajag had finished, Dylan put away the PaDD. "Put it in lockdown mode. The code might be pushed from the network onto this one. If we sever the connection we might be able to preserve the evidence."

::OFF::

Lieutenant JG Dylan McConnor

Ensign Emilie D'Astous

Ensign Cajag Lagnas

 

RSS Feed