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Kari
| | Posted on Sunday, May 11, 2003 - 05:32 pm: | |
The shuttle Diana hung in the minimal gravity at the center axis of Xanadu, a few hundred meters outside Coronado's main shuttle bay. Inside, Kariasa Ma'Aru stood near the rear of the craft, watching as the Intel Comm Chief directed his six crewmen during the final stages of the shuttle's minor conversion.
After learning from Command Farley that it would take nearly a week before ship's power was restored to the Command Information Center she'd decided that temporary arraignments needed to be made to oversee fleet operations. If nothing else, it would give her something to work on that wasn't related to the physics of the fourth chamber.
Farley's original idea called for two craft positioned end-to-end, using holoprojectors to simulate the functions of the CIC. While ingenious, Kari soon discovered that the plan was simply not practical. She'd had a hard enough time procuring the one shuttle that she imaged obtaining the two necessary specters for the holo-plan would be nearly impossible. Personal also posed a problem; everyone who was qualified to work out the details of holo-matrix linking between the two craft was busy repairing Coro herself, and she couldn't rightly ask them to work on another side project.
Eventually, she decided just to make some minor modifications to the interior of an available shuttle. The members of the intel staff had enough experience to perform the reprogramming and basic construction needed, and the conversion efforts only took a few hours to finish.
As the final display panel was closed, hiding the mess of optical cabling inside, Kari looked around the congested area. The front section of the shuttle was cosmetically untouched, with only the programming and wiring of the consoles modified to more readily suite the communications functions of the staff. All the shuttle's functions (including helm, engineering, and sensors) which had once been spread across panels throughout the cockpit were now located in a small area in the front right corner.
The aft section contained the most obvious changes. Makeshift terminals were installed in the cargo and seating areas near the door, providing room for three additional technicians. A small work table was set up against the door, currently containing a mess of PADDs, cabling, and miscellaneous engineering tools. Most interestingly, the lavatory in the rear of the shuttle had been completely stripped, replaced by a very good recreation of a holotank. When Kari was first shown the tank in operation she was told that the holo-projectors themselves had been salvaged from ship's stores, though she wouldn't consider asking where the base and control mechanisms had come from. Someone also had the good sense to place a bucket and a roll of paper in the corner.
When the systems were brought online Kari took a seat in front of one of the rear terminals. After a moments delay her personalized CIC layout appeared on the screen and she smiled approvingly at the team. "Before any kind of sensitive data is transmitted I want a full, dual confirmation accuracy check with Reorsa, and you will wait for the subspace confirmation before assuming the ansible is secure. Then, continue the duplex medium transmissions with accuracy assurance until otherwise ordered."
The Comm Chief's confident smile faded to simple indifference, responding "Aye, Ma'am." He turned and set his team to the task.
A small file of trivial content would be stringently encoded before being transmitted via ansible and subspace to the Ministry of Defense on Reorsa. Once there, the file would be decoded and altered in a very specific fashion before being re-encoded in another manner and sent back through the ansible. The altered file would then be encoded in a third manner and sent across subspace. Once the two versions of the same file arrived back at their temporary headquarters they would be compared and the system certified secure if they were found to match. All sensitive transmissions would continue to be encoded and sent by both subspace and ansible; if the two versions were ever found to differ then all ansible transmission would cease.
She'd been concerned with the communication staff's near complete acceptance of ansible as a secure method of communication, despite having no clear indication as to how it works. Now was a perfect time to institute more strict guidelines towards its use.
While that process was initiated, Kari scrolled through various pieces of non-secure data, reading recent headlines from all the major Reorsan news sources. Immigrants continued coming into the galaxy at a steady steam from the Milky Way and a small seismic event had killed a few commissioned Starfleet scientists, otherwise there was nothing of interest.
A few members of the Tactical Analysis team beamed over and, after exchanging a bit of small-talk, made their way back towards the holotank. Kari watched as they unloaded an array of cryptic-looking microcalibration tools and set to work finely tuning the projectors. By the time they'd finished the subspace confirmation had made its relatively short trip back to the shuttle and the entire system was ready for use. |
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