round 9 The Westons - Alt F4

[~Mo~]

((Intelligence Office, Deck 5, USS Drake))

:: Oliver flomped into his chair and twirled around once before cracking his knuckles and calling up the three blue screens at his desk. They each came on with a quiet chime and after a moment to get a fresh mug of tea, Oliver started calling up different data feeds to monitor while he tried tapping into their doppelgangers communications network. The first screen monitored their Drakes subspace communications and the range and impact of their active sensor sweeps. The second watched the same outputs from the Alternate Drake, and the third screen was set to run simulations before Oliver actually put any methods into play. ::

WESTON: Here we go.

:: The Primary Drake wasn't communicating with anyone for the moment, and on the Captains orders it was essentially running silent, but she was currently actively scanning the Ishkarian Sensor Beacons, the Alternate Drake and the Ishkarian homeworld. And while those scans were passive and generally hard to detect unless you knew to look for them, they were still a liability. So Oliver started to work masking them. ::

:: The work was quick and easy as there was nothing to countermand and their was no great rush, but the prospect of next breaking into the Alternate Drakes communications network was altogether different. He'd have to first find a way to listen in without their Operations Officers realising that their was a security breach or hearing an subspace echo and, as Pandora suggested, he'd have to compete with himself nearly every step of the way. The thought of which was as unsettling as it was hard to grasp. Finally finished with making their passive scans nearly untraceable by Federation standards, an alert caused him to nearly jump out of his seat. ::

((Alt Intelligence Office, Alt Deck 5, Alt USS Drake))

:: Something wasn't adding up. Other than the pounding headache he had had since their time displacement, the Comms and Operations Officers had reported a few phantom signatures that they couldn't quite place and Oliver was tasked with figuring it out. Starting in their communications network and rolling back through past sensor sweeps and their burst scans of the Ishkarian beacons Oliver started to notice the phantom signatures for himself. It was a tricky business but he managed to discover that they had even been passively scanned at least once in the last few hours, and the beacons weren't responsible.

:: Digging deeper he started actively monitoring their communications network. ::

((Intelligence Office, Deck 5, USS Drake))

WESTON: Not good.

:: Speaking to no one in particular, as the room was empty he quickly input a subroutine that made his infiltration look like software malfunction. A simple burst of static on the Alternate Drakes communication net that would hopefully throw off his pursuer. ::

((Alt Intelligence Office, Alt Deck 5, Alt USS Drake))

:: Oliver scrunched his brow at the data read. What a moment ago looked like a piggybacking communication was now just a line of static and distortion. On a different screen he checked the status of the comms array and if any of the extensive damage to the roll bar and sensor pod would have caused the static. The data came back negative. Something was going on. ::

:: Quickly he reinitialised his earlier scan and started shutting down the Drakes communications one by one as it scanned. Internal shut down first, killing all comm traffic within the ship for a few seconds. There was no breach there yet. Emergency/Priority went next, but it was seldom used and Oliver found nothing there. Subspace came up negative, but the final passive data communication with the beacons lit up like a firecracker. ::

ALT WESTON: Gotcha!

((Intelligence Office, Deck 5, USS Drake))

:: Oliver’s eyes went wide and he made a noise somewhere between a gasp and a bark. He'd been pinged bang on after being chased through four different communication channels. Each one had been silenced as he retreated his scan and eventually he had nowhere to run. From their Internal network he picked up nothing but inane chatter, which was no use to anyone from an Intelligence standpoint, but now that he'd been caught he was on the backfoot. Now his only priority was making the Primary Drakes location and existence impossible to discover. ::

:: Working quickly he collapsed the piggybacked comm signal he'd been using and played his first card. A red herring in the form of a real space comms burst from his ship to theirs. It would be nearly untraceable and because it wasn't sent via subspace it would muck up their external comms long enough for him to cover his tracks while they attempted to dig it out. The burst went off without a hitch and he severed the connection with a sigh of relief. The relief was short lived as a scan warning lit up all three monitors and Oliver blanched. ::

:: His quarry had either not fallen for his ruse or simply ignored it and now the Primary Drake was faced with an active scan from multiple vectors. ::

((Alt Intelligence Office, Alt Deck 5, Alt USS Drake))

:: The fact that someone was not only following them but also surreptitiously scanning them and attempting to monitor their internal communications made him angry. Doggedly he continued following the digital breadcrumbs left behind and stopped only momentarily as they received a real space communication packet. He ignored it completely, giving not a frell, and instead requisitioned Ops to actively scan the space around them. And to make matters more frustrating for their pursuers he doubled and then tripled the scan output by tapping into the two nearby Ishkarian beacons. The scans all came back with a bevy of data and Oliver filtered it through his station first. They were being pursued along the ion trail they'd left while on their way to the dark side of a nearby planetary body. ::

:: The data came back and slowly Oliver’s jaw started to drop. It was a Federation signature. More data spooled in; ship size and displacement, class, configuration, registry number...::

ALT WESTON: Oh...

((Intelligence Office, Deck 5, USS Drake))

WESTON: ...frak.

LtCmdr Oliver Weston
Intelligence Officer
USS Drake