Taskmaster

Posted on Thu Mar 28th, 2024 @ 10:14am by Captain Shran dh'Klar & Lieutenant Imik S'Niohun & Lieutenant Inara Senn & Lieutenant LeFaye Antoinette

Mission: Man & Machine
Location: USS Washington

The Washington had moved into a lower orbit of the planet, and continued to scan as best they could. The Delta shift officers were feeling the crunch of being observed by the captain, something that didn't happen often. Deanna had been in command at the time when they located this planet, and most of the junior officers would have preferred Deanna being the overseer at this point.

LeFaye arrived and immediately activated the Engineering station at the rear of the bridge. Once done she approached the captain, "Engineering ready sir. How can I be of assistance?"

"I have some work for you and Inara to do. But I'll wait for her arrival" Shran replied.

Inara walked in with a cup of coffee and a biscotti. She sipped it and sat down. Placing a PADD in front of her for notes. She always did that to make sure she didn't forget anything, and to make notes. Not that her memory was incompetent, far from it. She just wanted to make sure if anything important was said, the PADD's dictation program would catch it. Inara did have her quirks, her isolated demeanor, and her strengths.

The Ojnas Officer entered and looked around at the busy Federation crew, she approached the captain and spoke quietly. "Is there some reason I may be of assistance Captain? For I see many people doing many things, can one more make a difference?"

"We have an away team heading down to this planet. I'd like my senior officers at stations where practical, just in case we get a surprise" Shran replied. "Keep a close eye on the shuttle once it leaves. Don't want our XO and the others to feel like we aren't keeping a close eye on them."

Shran looked over at Inara and LeFaye who were looking thick as thieves at the engineering and science stations. "As for you two, I have a couple jobs I need the two of you to do. First, I'd like you to see if you can do something to allow us more clarity with the sensors. This radiation is so high, especially the gamma radiation, we can't get clear readings. I don't want to have to bring the ship into the atmosphere just to scan it. Which brings me into a secondary matter, the transporters. I want to be able to transport the away team should the necessity arise." He then looked directly at Inara, "Lastly, a task I think designed directly for you. I am assuming the away team is going to find something worth studying down there. I want to be able to have away teams be on the surface for more than an hour without need of significant medical care. That means getting rid of this radiation without causing damage to the planet, especially the surface. I know Admiral Janeway had to clean up a planet once under similar circumstances while in the Delta Quadrant. I'd like for you to see if we might do the same here."

Listening to the Captain, Imik stood and thought about how she could help. Neither Security or Tactical really had much to do while the away team was on its way or when it was planet side. She moved to her duty station and ran some scans, the results weren't helpful and so she ran another scan and began to think of some way to remove the radiation. "Captain, does the Federation have or use atmospheric scrubbers?"

"Oh so someone decided to push the big red button huh?" Inara noted with her usual snark. "Well the problem for sensor is the same as the problem of not immediately dying a very painful death." She let that point sink in to everyone in attendance. "There will be large amounts of gamma wave radiation which plays havok with the subspace and other kinds of wavelengths. Simply, we need to get rid of the source of the radiation. Now a nuclear war has a nasty problem of putting the following isotopes into the atmosphere; cesium-137, strontium-90, and iodine-131, the iodine is the important part here, you see the thyroid of most humans can't discern between normal iodine and irradiated iodine. But I have an idea. Remove the radiation, you get your sensors back, and no one has to know how it feels to die from emphysema. I have some other ideas how to do it, but I have to bounce them off engineering. I will not speculate on a solution before I've had the ability to figure out the best course of action here. But if you want my advice, or opinion, this is what happens when hotheads screw up life for the rest of us. Maybe after seeing this place, you'll be grateful Earth only had a limited nuclear exchange. Limited being the operative word, and I've fought in the Dominion War as well. I don't like to talk about it." Inara had a way with her opinions.

Shran listened to Imik and the Inara. He noted that Inara was going off on a rant, a short tangent that didn't take into account who she was speaking with to a certain degree. She was a brilliant scientist just as Deanna had said, but she had a human tendency to run off at the mouth. "Saw all the death I could ever wish for in the war as well lieutenant" Shran replied. "I'm not human, so I can't say that what happened Earth was limited or not, though as I recall from my Earth history class back at the Academy, Earth had two World Wars in which nuclear weapons were used to various extents, the second time this happened nearly destroyed Earth. The Vulcans did far worse on their world. Thankfully, my people, despite our more aggressive nature, were never so foolhardy as to deploy such weapons against one another." He looked at Imik, "We have used atmospheric scrubbers, but never for the sake of radiation." He looked to Inara, "Would it be possible to do what she is suggesting?"

"We need a much larger Atmosphere Scrubber, a device that is capable of discriminating elements on even the atomic level. Something that will draw the elements I mentioned out of the atmosphere, and leave the elemental nitrogen and oxygen that a M-Class planet possesses." Inara pulled her stylus out of her PADD and pointed out the observation lounge windows towards the Bussard Ramscoops outside the viewport. "There's your larger atmosphere scrubbers. They're designed to draw in elemental hydrogen, to be converted into deuterium, and anti-hydrogen, for our ship's warp core. With minimal modifications, they can draw the radioactive isotopes out of a planets atmosphere, including the Aresols. But we'll need power to do this. Quite a bit of it." Inara mentioned. "And of course we will need somewhere to store or vent tons of irradiated nuclear fallout, maybe a gas giant or a star. A place to dispose of it."

"I suppose it is lucky that this planet has a J-class gas giant as a neighbor then" Shran said with a smile. "How much power will you need to make this idea work?"

"Then we will have to address the other half of fixing this planet." Inara noted. "When the planet warms, high pressure systems will develop, this will cause mass melting of the ice shelfs created by the nuclear winter. We may have large black storm clouds full of what is known as 'Black Rain.' We will have to decontaminate those as well. As for the rest, I do not know. Terraforning is such a fickle type of science. So unpredictable, it might as well be an art."

"Sounds like you have some work to do. Get on it. I do want sensors and transporters as soon as possible" Shran replied.

"I can handle that captain" LeFaye answered. "Lieutenant Senn can work on the atmospheric radiation problem. The sensors and transporters are reasonably easy for my team."

"Very good. Let's get things done. I'll expect updates on the hour" Shran replied.