Chapter 14 - Season 3, Episode 14, Mutually Assured pt 3
Featuring ...
Lieutenant Commander Carl Hedley Executive Officer
Lieutenant Elli-Navine Chief Engineer
Lieutenant Alexander Artopolis Chief Medical Officer
Lieutenant Johnny 5 Chief Tactical Officer
Lieutenant JG Geoffrey Danielson Chief Flight Control Officer
Elli’s recovered from space flu, so it’s time to investigate! Pretty extensive base at the bottom of the tower, operating in low power mode at the moment, with occasional spikes. Seems to be pretty securely locked down, but that’s what we have nerds for.
Door opens, it’s all dark inside, as you’d expect from a powered down base. The Borg is not particularly stealthy, so hopefully there aren’t any security measures in place. Seems unlikely, but oh well, it’s happened now.
Elli gets into the computers easily enough, and finds out there’s an automatic logging system. No worries, just boot it up in maintenance mode. Gives her access to diagnostics and the computer core, she finds out there’s this whole networked system going around the planet, it’s very fancy. They’ve got quantum computers that don’t need to be supercooled, which is obviously pretty handy. Plus they upgraded that jump drive so it doesn’t care about having suns nearby.
Time for ransacking! Warp drive, computer tech, and culinary data. Tasty, tasty data. After successfully plundering, Elli finds out that their whole system is in the slow process of collapsing. Looks like part of the failure means the report of the failure hasn’t been properly flagged, and since it would be sort of creepy to just fix their problems for them, Elli just sets a timer to add the flag tomorrow so they can fix things themselves.
Despite arguing against even coming down, Geoff decides to go off exploring and heads deeper into the facility. Surprise surprise, they tracked us arriving and sent an arrival log throughout the system, so Elli has to make a virus to go and alter them to make us look like natives. Naturally, it’s easy enough for her to do. Leaves a couple of traces, but it’s easy enough to just make those look like glitches caused by the impending failure. Job’s a good’un.
More exploration, there’s a garden, lovely little fishie pond, statue of a native wearing a uniform. Carl translates the plaque, which says it’s the guy who’s responsible for the whole system crashing! Because he’s the one who designed it.
Curiosity satisfied, it’s time to head back to the ship. Selfies happen, then beaming. Hang around on the bridge for a little bit, then their jamming starts working again, so it seems like they fixed the problem. Hurrah!
Then some Engineer Admiral calls and says he wants to talk to us for some reason. Potentially risky, but it’s not like we can pretend we’re not home. Convincingly, at least.
Surprisingly, he’s pretty complimentary. Seems like he actually likes us, mostly because of the goodies we’ve been sending back to him. He seems to think we’ve got a technological edge over the big bad at the moment, so we’re going back to get a fancy new refit, then off to join a fleet to beat them up. Sounds like fun! Especially since we’re going to get some fancy new toys to play with.