((USS Culver City, Captain’s Ready Room))

Newly-promoted Lieutenant Commander Varyn K’lev sat behind his desk in his ready room, reading the latest reports on the situation at hand.  It wasn’t pretty: the Tholians were making good headway blunting the Sheliac attack in the Rhontaka system.  In fact, they were faring better than they should have been, given the circumstances; Starfleet Intelligence couldn’t explain how, though.  K’lev sighed, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes.  At least this mess hasn’t spilled across the border… yet, he thought.

He stood, crossing to the small replicator in the room and ordering a raktajino with a shot of espresso.  Returning to the chair, K’lev leaned back, putting his feet up on the desk in front of it and sipping idly from his drink as he kept reading.  He only got about halfway through his coffee, though, before an idea started to form in his mind.  He sat up, putting his drink down and tapping his combadge.  “K’lev to Lotharys, Bong, and Pelix.  Would you join me in my Ready room?  No emergency; had a thought, and I wondered if I could get your thoughts on it.”

“Sure thing, Varyn!”  Lotharys replied.  “I’ll be right up.”  Her reply was followed by a quick “On my way” from the Tellarite chief engineer. The door chimed and Bong walked in.

“Good timing sir, was just passing by to chat with Petty Officer Todd” The old chief said.

A few minutes later, the door swished open as the two new lieutenants entered, then closed again behind them.  “What’s up?” Lotharys asked as she and Pelix crossed to the desk and sat down casually in chairs opposite their captain. Bong had found himself a seat on the couch in the living area.

K’lev shared the display from his desktop to a wall monitor; it showed some of the recent scientific and tactical data on the Rhontaka system and known Tholian movements, along with what looked like a quick draft plan for a device of some sort.  The Orion stood, walking around to look at the wall display and inviting his XO and chief engineer to join him.  “Been looking at the latest reports, and I had a thought come to me.  Something in the system’s giving the Tholians an edge, but we don’t know what.  My guess is a secret weapons factory, but it could also be some sort of other facility too, possibly a research base of some sort.  What I’m not sure about is how to tell; the Tholians’ll definitely see it if we fly any deeper in, and I’m not sure that we could maintain control over a probe if we launched one in, but we could try a lower-tech solution like somehow magnetically attaching a small probe to a Tholian ship?  If we can figure out how to get one across the border and attached without being caught, and how to communicate with it too.”

Lotharys and Pelix joined him to consider the display, standing to the left and right of their captain respectively.  Lotharys in particular stood close to K’lev, her hand brushing his for a moment.  “Hmmm….” she mused, looking over the sensor data on the nebula and the draft.  “The gravimetric distortions from Rhontaka II make it pretty well impossible to track the probe once we send it in, and it wouldn’t be able to do hardly any scanning…”

K’lev nodded, looking between them.  “I know cameras won’t give us more than an idea of visually what’s in there, but maybe that could be enough?  Perhaps the ‘probe’” he put the word in quotation marks with his fingers “just needs to be cameras, a transmitter, and a mag-clamp, with a small computer to keep the transmitter pointed at us and a channel open?”

“The cameras wouldn’t be able to see very far, and I’d imagine the feed would be fuzzy, and there’d be blind spots depending on where it attached…” Lotharys trailed off for a moment.  “It’d be very limited, but it could work, if we could find a way to track the ship, too…”

“Bingo.  But not in a good way.  That fuzziness and limited data transmission capabilities of a probe that small would make the idea almost pointless,” Bong grumbled from the couch, as he absently went through the next days duty roster on his own personal PADD while the ‘kids’ chatted

“What if we added a gyrocompass and signal booster to the probe?  It could let us know when the carrier ship changed course and by how much; we’d know the Tholian ship’s base course and any course changes, which means – if we can get into the inner reaches without getting caught – we could then fly that course and see what they’ve got going on in there,” K’lev finished.  “Think it’s worth the try?”  He seemed excited at the prospect of the idea, but at the same time genuinely interested in his friend’s opinion.

Lotharys thought a moment longer, then nodded with a smile.  “I think so!”

K’lev’s eyes now turned to Pelix.  “What d’you think, Pelix?”

The Tellarite had been listening quietly to that point, considering the data; one could easily see the metaphorical wheels turning in his mind as he considered the idea.  “It’s not completely insane, I’ll give you that,” he said with his usual gruffness.  “But it could work.  I’d have to check with Tiza, but we should have everything we’d need.  Just know I’m not going to carry it there.”

K’lev chuckled.  “Well, I figure we could launch it like any other probe; the Tholians might expect a probe coming from our side so we can see what’s going on, and may even leave it be.  That, or ask Salvation if they could help us deploy it; she’s smaller than us, and maybe a hair faster, so she could possibly zip in and out.  I’d use a cloaked shuttle, but something tells me a few treaties might object to us even trying to build a cloaking device, to say nothing of using it.”

“You still haven’t fixed the resolution issue on the camera yet.  Blurry pictures of Tholian ships don’t help, we got those already.” Bong said again without taking his view off his own PADD where he was now reviewing the grainy sensor data they had received from the Salvation after her initial patrol that spotted the Tholian fleet.

“What about an auto-focusing lens mounted on the front of the camera, we can turn the thing into a telemetry guided telescope.” Lotharys tossed out.

“Teamwork.  I like it!  Thanks, Chief,” K’lev said.

“Cheers sirs, and ma’am, wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t at least try to earn my next vacation.” Bong popped his PADD down on his lap and finally looked over to the group of eager young officers with a smile.

That sent a chuckle around the room, then K’lev turned to Pelix.  “Can you spare a team to try and build this, if we have – or can fabricate – the necessary components?” he asked.

Pelix nodded.  “Yeah.  Got some more hands down there now – thanks for that, by the way – so I can spare a team.”

“Great!  Please get started on construction as soon as you can.  And see if there’s a way to make sure that those distortions don’t impact the feed to the ship, too; be a shame to go through all of the difficulty of building and deploying this probe, only for it to get no usable imagery or data.”  K’lev then turned to Lotharys.  “We also probably don’t want the Tholians to know about this, so please work with Chief Bong to set up an encrypted comms channel for the probe to use. And send our plans to the rest of the flotilla.”

The two officers both nodded.  “All right, then, sounds like we’ve got ourselves a plan; let’s see if it works!”  With that, the impromptu meeting was at an end, and Lotharys and Pelix both left the ready room. 

Bong lagged behind a bit as Lotharys and Pelix left.

“Here’s a freebie… we should launch the probe over near the border where the asteroid belt intersects the border itself, sir.” He showed K’lev a PADD that noted several errant signals that could signify Tholian ships creeping up to the border using the asteroids as cover.

“Toss out our magnetic telescope transceiver, and hopefully one of them snags it and takes if for a ride back to its home?” K’lev asked, quickly catching on to what the Chief was hitting at.

“Great idea sir. Congrats on the promotion too, Commander .” Bong smiled, nodded, and departed.