Phaser Shenanigans

Posted on Tue Jul 11th, 2023 @ 5:56am by Lieutenant Xex Wang & Ensign Mei Ratthi & Lieutenant JG Sheldon Parsons

Mission: On the Road Again
Location: Sickbay, deck 2
Timeline: Mission Day 3 at 1107

[Sickbay, deck 2]
[MD 03, 1107hrs]

Sickbay hummed with the comforting, prosaic sound of electronics and machinery going about its usual jobs. A pair of medtechs chatted amiably in main sickbay while they deconstructed, cleaned, and reconstructed one of the inboard biobed chambers to ensure the alarm codes they kept receiving weren't due to some hardware issue. A patient talked quietly with a nurse, as part of a routine check-up. A few samples spun in the processor.

In short, it was a wholly normal, leisurely day in the Sojourner's medical corps.

Her CMO was the only exception; Xex was stood behind his desk, an enormous holo taking up the entirety of his small office displaying numerous small boxes, a trio of androgynous humanoid figures with a few of their various bodily systems highlighted labeled, and a complex network of lines that connected each box or figure to the next. The man himself was idly flipping a small sampling vial clasped in his blunt fingers, an unprepossessing dust falling through the clear vial with each flip, like sand through an hourglass.

Although he had left sickbay for a number of hours-- mostly to appease his staff-- Xex had hardly ceased working on the problem of the phaser immunity since Bridgeport had first brought it to his attention. He'd already ruled out the easy answers: a strange shared immunity between the three affected personnel who had come for treatment; sensor or scan anomalies in sickbay; malfunctioning equipment... and so on. If Bridgeport had found any other security personnel with similar experiences to himself, Dravor, and Wali-- who wasn't even security, simply in the wrong place at the wrong time-- he hadn't yet brought them to Xex's attention. Although expected, this was both intriguing and frustrating. With such a small sample size, Xex felt uncomfortable making sweeping generalizations about the strange phaser effects, and he'd been back time and again to the cross-references the computer had made, as well as the various tricorder and other data brought back from the surface. By now, he felt solid in his hypothesis that the effect was confined to the moon's surface-- further inquiries about the firefight aboard the Sojourner had only served to confirm his suspicions.

Now, however, he was stymied. Every scan comparison, every closer look at bodily systems of the affected personnel had turned up nothing unusual. The Sojo just couldn't find anything anomalous in the affected individuals, and Xex couldn't find anything-- apart from the usual alien things, like six-legged felines-- anomalous about Shaddam IVa itself.

He ran a hand through his hair, sighing out a puff of air. He wasn't prepared to give up-- not yet, at least-- but likewise, he wasn't entirely certain which line of questioning to pursue next. Perhaps something in the planetary atmosphere? “Computer--” he started, but was cut off by the chime of his commbadge.

“Ratthi to Wang.”

Xex froze mid-sentence, head cocked to the side with interest.

“Wang here.”

"Apologies if I'm interrupting, Doctor." The ensign's tone was diffident as usual, even across the comms. "But you asked me to let you know if I found anything interesting in my tricorder's scans of Shaddam IV's soil, and, well, we- I mean me and a few of the other people here in the science labs- have been looking at them, and we think we might have found something." There was a soft emphasis on the 'might' that was counterbalanced by the underlying excitement in Ratthi's voice. "Shall I bring our results up to you?"

Xex glanced upward, mouthed something inaudible to the ceiling, then said aloud, "All the stars bless you, Mei, you cannot imagine how glad I am one of us has found something." Her excitement was infectious, and Xex found himself grinning, completely ignoring the qualifying 'might' of her announcement. "If it's not too much trouble, please do-- I've got the rest of the correlated data up and we can combine our efforts."

"Of course! I'll be right there."

As the connection closed, Xex ran a hand through his hair, running his eye over the full-room holograph. He moved a few components around, rearranging them with flicks of his fingers to make it accessible to someone who wasn't inside his head. By the time the doors to his office opened, he thought the data was arranged logically enough, with some space in the display to expand on several of the data boxes that were tagged from Mei's tricorder data.

Mei bustled in and came to a stop a couple of paces from Xex, hugging her PADD to her chest. Her eyes were bright, and she seemed to be on the verge of bouncing around like a kindergartener with her energy held back only by a sense of official decorum. She looked around at the holograph, then down at the computer panel nearby. "May I?" At Xex's expansive gesture, she brought up a collection of new data that included a collection of thumbnail images of faded artwork and a chemical analysis of soil that was similar- if not identical- to Xex's own results.

"Okay. So. Now that my brain has kind of stopped short-circuiting and let me actually think about things, I was running some analyses of the scans of the artwork we found in those buildings on Shaddam. Tapestries and murals. I took a bunch of high-res scans, because anthropology. And when I remembered our little chat about the dust and soil there, it occurred to me that dust collects on everything. Including walls and tapestries." Mei gestured to bring up the images of the tapestries, selected one, and retrieved the full-resolution file. The subject matter was prosaic enough, showing a group of Kazon engaging in what looked like a dance or other communal activity. Then she zoomed in far closer to show a patch of woven fabric whose once-bright colors were dulled with age and a thick coating of dust.

Xex's eye snagged on the artwork, a perplexed look furrowing his brow, but before he could ask about it, Mei was explaining.

"Now, I'm an anthropologist, not a geologist, so I bugged some of the other people in the science labs and had them take a look," Mei continued. "They thought the dust looked a little weird, so when they did some additional chemical, metallurgical, structural, and whatever other analyses they do, they realized that this dust isn't ordinary dust. Like the dust that collects on your bookshelves is all sloughed off skin cells and fabric fuzz and whatever else is floating around in your house. But Shaddam's dust is weird." Xex's brows arched with interest as she zoomed the image in even further, right down to the dust structure itself. Instead of being an uneven layer of random-seeming particles and the bits of stuff Mei had suggested, the dust from the tapestries was organized into a latticework pattern that seemed to be forming structured layers as it collected.

Xex's eyes darted about the visual as his mind worked through the ramifications of such an unusual terrestrial property and he breathed, "Stars-- look at it!" he exclaimed unnecessarily-- she was looking at it. She had shown it to him. This seemed lost on the doctor as he continued, "It's organized. Like some sort of fabric, or coating...."

"Right? So as soon as we figured all this out, I contacted you because, you know, you asked me to. But the people in the science labs were all like, 'We can't really say how this would affect phaser fire at this stage, we'd have to run some simulations and whatnot, and maybe we should collaborate with someone in engineering'. Which- understandable. And I think that brings us up to date on what we've figured out about the dust. There are some chemical and atomic scans in there, but I don't think I personally have much to add to what's already up there." Finally finished, Mei let herself bounce on her toes a couple of times, then went still.

"Chemical and atomic..." Xex repeated in that vague way that seemed to indicate he was trying to remember something. "Chemical, atomic...." He began sorting the data again, throwing away some of the boxes he'd had up with a flick of his fingers and expanding others. "Ah!" he exclaimed, and enlarged one set of scan results that at first glance appeared to be a product of a respiratory scan-- if the lung-y shapes were any indication-- but when he tightened the parameters, a very similar lattice to the one from Mei's results appeared. He overlayed them and a bright grin split his face. "We were looking at it all wrong," he explained happily, "We were looking at the latticework as keeping things in. In this case, the ability of our alveoli to exchange oxygen-- that was part of the reason for the breathing treatment when we returned from the surface-- but it's not just that they keep things in, it's that they keep things out as well-- like the energy from a phaser. Mei," he turned to the anthropologist and exclaimed, "You are a genius!" sweeping her into an exuberant hug. Abruptly realizing he'd hugged the poor woman without so much as a by-your-leave, he immediately released her and stepped back again. Mei regained her balance and laughed, clearly unperturbed by the doctor's enthusiasm.

His own excitement was still palpable, the energy radiating from him such that he could neither stay still nor keep silent. He began to bounce on the balls of his feet in unconscious imitation of Mei's earlier energy, gesticulating with his hands as he spoke. "Now, it's just a theory, but it's certainly the only one that's made a modicum of sense. And your colleagues are correct; we will need to run some simulations. Fortunately, we have a few samples," he held up the vial in his hand, waggling it between thumb and forefingers, "to be starting with. Plus your samples as you ran away. Excellent work keeping the tricorder running, by the way." Although it could have been a throwaway compliment, Xex specifically tore his attention from the holo and met Mei's eyes, holding her gaze for a moment.

Mei blushed and shrugged, turning her gaze to the simulation, though she didn't seem to be taking it in. "I wasn't really thinking about the scans at that point. It was just that I hadn't turned anything off. A bit of good luck, I guess, since it got us the extra data. Looks like it's going to be pretty helpful."

"It is," Xex said, busily bringing up several more scans, these seemed to be full-body in nature, and there was much more detail, particularly about specific body systems, “I'm still not prepared to entirely discount a neurological component, but we absolutely need to test this barrier theory. We didn't specifically look to see who was coated,” he said, voice turning dry, “but I think we can confidently say everyone was covered in the stuff by the time we encountered any phaser energy. And the felines would of course live their lives coated in dust. I wonder how their bronchioles have adapted--” Realizing he was wandering off on a tangent, Xex visibly shook himself and waved that line of thought away.

“Let's see who's free in engineering,” he said, bringing up the engineering duty roster and running his eye over it. Pausing, he glanced aside at Mei, “You will join us for some testing, I hope? Your hard work brought us here, after all.”

"I guess?" Mei looked back at him with a puzzled look on her face. "I don't know what I'll be able to bring to the table in this, but I guess you never know. My tapestry scans seem to have helped a bunch, anyway. I suppose there could be some sort of cultural event or development that clashed with the physical nature of Shaddam's dust since the Kazon seem to have been there for a while before they abandoned it. You never know. The universe is a weird place."

This tickled a wry chuckle from Xex, who agreed, "Extremely weird. And you're definitely not giving yourself enough credit. Good luck or no, it was your tenacity that brought us here-- perhaps as you say, something else will occur to you during testing. Ah!" Apparently having found an appropriately available (or at least as close as possible) engineer, Xex grinned at Mei, still buoyed by excitement at their progress, and tapped his commbadge.

"Wang to Engineering. Might I borrow Ensign Parsons for a consultation in sickbay?"

[Main Engineering]
[Concurrent]

In the middle of re-calibrating an ODN relay, Sheldon heard the voice come over the comm, his eyes widening to the size of twin, Galaxy-class saucer sections. Wang wanted him?! For a "consultation?" The engineer's thoughts flashed back to the last time Wang had pressed him into service, having him serve as an impromptu nurse during the Waverider's crazed flight back to the Sojo a few days prior. While Wang saw to the wounds of the Kazon woman Kaldri, he'd had Sheldon fetching unfamiliar tools and operating a dermal regenerator. The whole experience had been completely out of his wheelhouse and, frankly, had left the overly-anxious engineer vowing to steer clear of Sickbay for the foreseeable future.

Yet now Wang was asking for his presence and the duty officer in charge was already pointing him out the door. It was all happening so fast and Sheldon felt like he didn't have a choice. Didn't even have a chance to have a choice. He started to stammer a protest, gesturing anxiously with his ODN recoupler, but his words died in this throat unspoken, his face flushed and hot with anxiety and embarrassment.

"Get going, Shelly Belly," the duty officer said, a mock-mocking tone infusing the words as he called Sheldon by the nickname that had begun propagating for him throughout the ship. Apparently, the engineer's ability to digest the heavy food at Debbie's had been earning him some friendly ribbing from his peers.

"Going, sir," Parsons lamented and relented, closing the panel he'd been working in and unthinkingly moving for the exit. As the doors swished open, he realized he was still holding the recoupler, however. He walked back to the master display table and placed the tool on the surface. He then exited a second time, but then realized he was still wearing protective handwear. Sheldon returned one final time, his eyes rolling as his coworkers all stared at him with barely-restrained laughter. He removed the gloves and placed them, too, on the table, before sighing and departing one final time.

[Sickbay]
[A few minutes later]

The doors to the medical ward swished open, admitting the awkward and anxious engineer. He asked after Wang and was directed into the Doctor's office, where the silver-skinned physician and the spritely science officer waited for him to arrive. "Um...h-hello," Sheldon stammered, his nerves getting the best of him. He'd been working on his confidence, which had helped a bit with his stuttering, but here and now, he was practically crawling out of his skin. "Am I, um," he gulped, "here to help with a patient? You d-don't seem short-staffed," Sheldon said, having just walked past a number of people working in the main part of Sickbay.

The pair in question were stood in front of the large holographic display projected above the CMO's desk, still fine-tuning some portions of their theory. They were moving pieces of data around, discarding some, correlating others. Their body language was excited but not hectic, by any means, their low tones enthusiastic. At Sheldon's voice, Xex half-turned, leaving Mei to enlarge some sort of matrix they were currently working on.

"Sheldon!" Xex greeted the anxious engineer warmly-- and familiarly-- as the poor ensign edged his way into the office as though about to face a pit of vipers, "Thank you for joining us so promptly. You're acquainted with Ensign Mei Ratthi, I presume?" Being overly social himself, Xex always assumed everyone knew everyone else. Mei, turning from the holo, wiggled her fingers in greeting, shooting Sheldon an encouraging smile.

Sheldon nodded overly quick, his nerves still nerving despite a familiar face. He'd not really interacted with Mei much in the last several days but he'd enjoyed drunken Truth or Dare with her around the campfire before the events of Shaddam. He tossed a very awkward wave her way before looking again to Xex, his original question about helping a patient still hanging in the air.

Xex chuckled, apparently genuinely amused by the young man's question. "Ah, no. Not directly, anyway. Unless you're keen to get back into a nurse's uniform?" He arched his brown at Sheldon but the grin splitting his face entirely undermined the teasing. "We're actually working on a problem that started physiologically, turned geological by way of anthropology and zoology, and has now become mechanical. We need to do some testing, and were hoping you'd be able to help."

In broad, layman's strokes, Xex outlined the background of the phaser immunity experienced by both their crew and the feline analogs on Shaddam IVa, skipped the boring research parts, and hit on the big discoveries made about the unusual makeup and properties of the dust.

"So you see, before we rule out any neurological issues, we would like to be sure the dust functions like we think it will in deflecting and dispersing energy-- particularly from phasers, but if we can test a broad spectrum of energy signatures, I don't see why we shouldn't. We have a few samples of the dust; do you think you can help us set up some testing parameters and then... well, shoot stuff?" Xex asked, his enthusiasm at their discoveries translating to a restlessness that had him gesticulating rapidly, his face an open book of expressive excitement.

As Wang explained the reason for Parsons' requested presence, the engineer's face gradually slackened as intense relief washed over him like a wave. This was an engineering problem -- well, sort of -- and that was something Sheldon could work with. Narrowing his eyes at the little tubes of dust samples, he stepped forward and peered at their contents. "There's not a lot of it there. Not sure if it's enough to work with, to be honest. But..." Sheldon's eyes sparkled, "I might have a solution."

Xex's eyebrows arched with interest, his expression inviting elaboration.

"The Waverider is currently covered in the stuff," the engineer said. "Cleaning it off has been low on the priority list given all the repairs we've been double-shifting to make to the Sojo. It's on my to-do list, though," Parsons noted. "Want me to collect a bunch and meet you both on the phaser range?" An offshoot of the main armory, the range would give them a safe place to discharge a phaser without accidentally damaging anything. "We could coat something in the dust and take potshots at it while we scan?" Sheldon suggested, already backing away towards the door to Wang's office as if the idea were a forgone conclusion.

"Excellent," Xex exclaimed, clapping his hands together and rubbing them in anticipation. "That will be much better than trying to synthesize our own. I shall assemble some appropriate targets. Mei," he turned to the young woman in question, "If you wouldn't mind collecting a scanner array that seems appropriate for the kind of scans we're going to need?" Although she still looked somewhat doubtful that she was the best person for this job, she nodded in acquiescence. When he looked up again, Sheldon was halfway out the door and Xex called after him, "Make sure you use breathing protection! I don't want to have to put you back in the decontam room!"


[Several hours later...]
[CMO's office, Sickbay]

“Here, eat,” Xex ordered as he joined Sheldon and Mei back in his office, sliding a tray onto the desk. It was filled with a wide variety of finger foods, as though he'd asked the replicator for every shareable food available in its catalog. Maybe he had. “Our brains will work better for it-- I really do apologize for making you miss lunch.”

The meal hadn't seemed important on the phaser range, where they had set up a wide variety of double targets, from plasteel to granite to vegetable-- even, on Sheldon's recommendation, a replicated steak. They'd then begun coating one of each of the targets with progressively heavier layers of dust, taking shots at them-- and their uncoated counterparts-- at each layer until they began to see visible effects-- or lack thereof-- of the dust's protection. The entire process moved quickly once the security crewman who'd been hoping to use the range arrived and rather than come back after they were finished, offered to help. None of the people actually running the experiment were particularly good shots and, as it turned out, one did have to hit the targets to gain any data from the exercise.

Now, having stripped out of the protective coveralls and the respirators Xex had insisted they wear while in close proximity to Shaddam IVa's dust, they could process the data they'd collected. Although visually, it'd been obvious the dust provided remarkable protection, even against high-powered phaser fire, Xex wouldn't be comfortable sharing these findings until he had some hard data to back it up. While he collected the comestibles, he'd directed the two ensigns back to his office to get the data up in a format they could make some sense of.

“Ok, so,” Xex said, as he shoved some sort of toasted bread product into his mouth and chewed, “How right was I?” He grinned around the food, scanning the holographic datasets to ascertain whether his on-the-spot hypothesis about the dust's protection seemed most noticeable at the higher range of the phaser power spectrum.

"Looks like you were pretty right," Mei said brightly once she'd finished chewing the bit of cake she'd chosen. "Especially at the higher power levels. Though even with the thicker coatings, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have wanted to be in the celery's shoes. Though maybe smaller targets or ones with more water suffer the most? Phasers have a lot of energy, even if there's some kind of shielding between it and the target, and all that energy has to go somewhere." The scans showed that the celery had been fairly well cooked at the higher power levels, but not actually burned. The larger objects showed fewer signs of overheating, presumably because they had more surface area for the phaser's heat to dissipate across.

"It's definitely an interesting property," Sheldon mused, chewing distractedly at his own snack as he reviewed the hard data they'd collected. "With enough of the stuff, we could coat the hull of the Sojo and make it incredibly resistant to energy weapons. Hell," he looked up excitedly, "the Waverider probably already has that protection. At least until it gets a bath," he smirked, eyes darting back to the data readouts.

Xex snorted, and muttered something about not informing Timmoz of his craft’s new superpower, then quieted to listen to Sheldon continue.

"Unfortunately," Sheldon surmised, his tone disappointed, "this dust is entirely a natural phenomenon native to Shaddam IVa. I don't think our replicators could reproduce this effect in a synthetic version of the dust. Meaning," the engineer explained, "if we wanted to develop some kind of dust-infused coating agent, we'd have to go back to that moon and collect as much of the stuff as we could. Guessing this Subrek fellow wouldn't be fond of a return trip to their sacred ground?"

"Definitely not. And speaking as an anthropologist," Mei said primly, "knowing now that it is a sacred space for a living, breathing people, I'd suggest that we avoid disturbing it any more than we actually have to in the future. But since we already have some dust and the scans of it, I don't see why we couldn't run simulations to see if we can find a way to use the dust's properties. It's a natural phenomenon and not specifically part of the Kazon's cultural heritage. At least, not in any way I've found. So ethically speaking, I don't think it would be an issue for us to try to synthesize the dust or develop something with its properties to boost our defenses. And even if we can't figure something out on our own, we can at least send the information back to Starfleet the next time the wormhole opens, and maybe someone back home will find some way to use it."

“Excellent thoughts all,” Xex agreed, around a mouthful of food. Swallowing so hastily it looked painful— one eye squinching partially closed and a grimace twisting his mouth— he continued, “and definitely ones that now need to be shared. So let us compile those data sets there,” he gestured, “and I’ll work on a report to the captain. That way, he can apportion our assets appropriately to continue testing and dissemination back through the worm hole.” He nodded to Sheldon, then Mei in turn. “And thank you both for your invaluable assistance. I am not exaggerating when I say I couldn’t have done it without you.”

“Now,” Xex said, flopping into a seat while the other two made neat datasets of their findings, “to put this into captain-speak…”

A joint post by:

Ensign Mei Ratthi
Anthropologist


Lieutenant Xex Wang, M.D
Chief Medical Officer


Ensign Sheldon Parsons
Engineer