Captain Pharris awoke with a start. A buzzer was sounding insistantly in his ear. The ECM officer was on the comlink with something that required the captain's immidiate attention. Pharris rolled out of his bunk, and in ten minutes he was on the bridge.
The ECM chief had piles of printouts on large rolls of paper piled all over his station. He had a map of the sytem out, and was displaying recorded radar logs on the displays.
"Three hours ago, these special forces bases launched sixty ships each. They cloaked and spread out. Luckily I was watching the sensors when they went under, and got a sample of the cloaking frequencies" he pulled up a line on the screen representing EMF activity within a certain frequency
"When they were close together, I managed to get a nice listen to their cloaking signature. They are all useing a relatively new model emmitter, which is pretty good at masking it's emissions well below the normal noise level. I lost most of the ships, but every so often I keep on catching little bits and pieces of the signature all over the system. I didn't want to wake you, but I wanted to show y- Hold on..." The ECM chief grabbed the earpiece on his headset and looked at the cascade displays. His face lit up. He froze the cascade, pulling the frozen image onto a second monitor. He started to playback the recording he had just captured.
"Got another one! Here, check it out!"
He plugged another set of headphones in and handed them to the Captain. He listened intently, but he heard nothing but the background noise.
"I don't hear anything"
"what? here, lemme tune it a bit more" He adjusted several levels on the translation and played it back again
"Listen for it... right.... Now! there, hear it?"
The Captain strained to listen, but still could only hear the noise
"you must be deaf, Skip, here let me show you" He singled out three cascade lines, and foucused on five seconds of the recording. He extended the cascade display for the five seconds across the screen, enlarging it greatly, and excentuating the fluxuations in what looked like ordinary background noise.
"There, see it now?"
The Captain was getting frustrated
"No, it just looks like noise!"
"C'mon! look at it! look hard! There, see the pattern?" The ECM chief was running his finger across the cascade displays, gesturing wildly.
"I don't see ****! It looks like noise!"
The ECM chief groaned in frustration, took his grease pencil and started scribbling a wavy line across the screen. When he finished, he turned towards the captain "There! now do you see it?"
Captain Pharris stared hard, matching the pencil line with the fuzzy Frequency line. Then, just for a moment, he saw it. The pattern was there. it was incredibly faint, even with the ECM officer's scrawled guide, he could just make out the peaks over the noise. "wow... How the hell did you find that in all this mess? I can barely see it with your guideline!"
"Well, first of all, I'm the best, second, we've got top notch equipment, and third of all, I got lucky. I managed to get a solid listen to the signature when I saw the fleet cloak, then I went back and cut the recording down and started listening to each frequency individually, trying to find where the pattern was. The trouble is, the cloaking devices have randomisers. They jump frequency to keep from being tracked, but they can't change the EMF signature of their cloaking device very easily, each cloak field generator core gives off a unique pattern. The only way to change it is if you dissassemble the cloaking device and mess with the core itself. Luckily for us, these guys seem to be useing military spec parts, so the ships all sound about the same, but if I spent a couple of hours cleaning these records up, I could probably tell each of the ships apart, but there's really no need to do that."
"Could they track us the same way you're doing?"
"Yeah, I guess so, but they never got a really solid feel for our cloak signature. The only time you can really see it clearly is just as the ship is cloaking or decloaking, and we had those jamming pods going full blast when we went under. Those jamming pods make the mess we're hiding in now look crystal clear. Without a clear picture of our cloaking device's EMF signature, they could be less than ten kliks out before they would notice us. I can see them from much farther away, though it's been pretty sporadic, as you can see."
He pointed to the map that was spread out over the console. The second ECM officer was marking down another few marks on the map. He drew their location, then added a time and a tracking number.
"Basically, we have to do this all by ear. The computer's pretty good, but this sort of thing is almost more of my gut feeling than any sort of algorithm I could write for the computer. It's not something any old ECM guy can do, you gotta have a real solid grip on your equipment, and you gotta have the ears for it. Most people couldn't see the pattern I just showed you if you gave em a million years, Hell, Most computers wouldn't have picked that one out. Basically, right now all we have Ensign Malloy here listening to the live feeds and recording the time and locations of anything he hears. The trouble is, we can usually only get a solid glimpse of them during gaps or irregularities in the background noise, otherwise they're doing a good job of staying in levels of high interference. Maloy and I have been switching off for the last five hours. Malloy's got good ears, better than any of the others in ECM, but he still can't catch everything, I have to run back through the tapes again to make sure they're clean. Then I'm gonna bring the next watch up a bit early and see how they do at picking out patterns. They've been listenining to this pattern in their walkmen since I first got it, and most of them should have it down pretty solid by now, we just gotta see who's got the ears to catch a Sal cloaking device."
The ECM officer smiled. He looked incredably tired.
"You make sure to get some sleep when the watch comes up, You can't hear **** if you're passed out on the console"
The ECM chief chuckled "All right sir, if you insist... oh yeah, you probably want to check out that map, It's got a listing of all the contacts and the last solid reading we had on their position."
The ECM Officer slumped down in his chair and started to play back the latest tapes. He watched the cascades slowly go across the screen, his skilled eyes watching for patterns so subtle even the best ECM computers would have trouble seeing.
Captain Pharris looked at the map. There were points and circles. The points represented the actual contact, and the circle represented the distance the target could have moved since it was last acquired. There were a few large, heavily escorted science vessels cruising around the system, but they were obviously a decoy, or a secondary effort at best. The cloaked Special ops ships were undoubtably the most dangerous. While it was possible to occasionally get a glimpse of them, sustaining any sort of tracking on them was quite difficult. They were searching out all the EMF hot zones in the system, the asteroid belts, the Inner Smog clouds, the rings and most worrisome, many were already patrolling around the star. They hadn't made any abvious moves indicating that they had spotted him, but he didn't expect them to do anything arouse suspiscion. He didn't know whether to try to risk bugging out now, or to sit tight and wait. If the Sals kept up like this, they would eventually find him out of dumb luck. If he tried to sneak out, he would first have to run past the science vessels patrolling the open space of the system, and eventually he would have to get through the static sensor perimeter, which had been difficult to run when the Sals had their guard down, now the slightest hint of his ship would bring the entire Sal defence armada down upon him.
Captain Pharris got on the turbolift and went to engineering to check on the Chief's progress with the cloaking device.
He walked into engineering, and saw half the Engineering team wearing protective clothing, working on the Cloaking device in the "hot" side of the Engineering bay. Sparks were flying, and the power conduits were glowing white. The Chief engineer finished a spot weld he was working on, and walked out of the Shop through the double doors. Now on the safe side of the glass, he pulled off his mask, and watched his team at work. His face was red, and his hair was soaked with sweat.
"This is absolutely crazy. We're fixing the damn thing while it's still running. it's insane. At least I left all my diagnostic leads inside it when I put the thing back together. I still don't totally understand the thing. When I went with XO to buy the thing, it looked pretty normal, just sort of beat up, once I got it on board and opened the sucker up, I realised how ****ed up the thing was. It wasn't even finished yet! I had to build half of the relay switches from scratch, not to mention that generator core. I'd never seen anything like it, It was amazing, the only problem was it couldn't stand the sustained duration we needed, so I had to open the core up and rebuild it. It worked, but we still need to do more work on it, and just about the only thing we can't mess with while it's running is the core itself. I think I could give you an extra week, if we shut the thing down for about six hours of work. The only problem is that there's no safe place to hide for that long, so I think we have about six more days out of it before the core will just stop functioning. Then we'll need to overhaul. We're in deep ****."
"Tell me about it. Worst thing is, ECM is all over the place, The Sals sent some of their best hunters after us, and in this mess, ECM can hardly see them, let alone track them, so we can't really get a good idea of what we're dealing with. ECM thinks that they don't have a good record of the cloaking device's EMF signature, and that they won't be able to see us without running into us first, which is good, but If they have our sig, we're ****ed, but really, we're ****ed either way, there are enough of them that we can't stay hidden for long."
"We're between a rock and a hard place, Skip."
"I'll find us a way out, I'll think of something..."
I'd better...
------------------
