You wake up in the morning...

[KejalBuris]

You wake up in the morning, your paint's peeling, your curtains are gone, and the water is boiling. Which problem do you deal with first?
None of them! The building's on fire!

In Pegasus Fleet, this mission would only work on the USS Dauntless, the USS Zeus, and perhaps the USS Amsterdam. It is a story of incompatibility, and a reminder that some born heroes shouldn’t try to be too much more than they were meant to.

Obviously, there are firmware updates to every Starfleet vessel on a regular basis. For instance, every time a ship is refitted, every time a new ship is launched, every ship in the fleet must be updated with the vessel’s unique prefix code and command roster. There’s only one problem, every piece of info has to be stored in the ship’s core. And it has to be able to be downloaded over subspace.

There’s only one problem – it can be intercepted. There are many rogue space-probes, and all it takes is one. When it injected packets into the stream, they were somewhat inconsistent with what was expected – but only the enhanced speed and processing power of the bioneural gelpacks would have identified it. Old-fashioned ODN networks are fast, but they have no processing power unto themselves. Unfortunately, they also have the tendency to cause nodal overheats, which is exactly what happens. A “virus” overtakes the ship, causing cascading failures.

Only a skilled computer specialist will be able to identify the problems onboard the ship. Otherwise, it will soon be able to render the ship hopelessly dead in the water.

Let’s imagine this as a train, using the ODN network as a railroad. The first “stop” is not, as one would expect, the computer core. Rather, it is the main deflector, which thanks to its huge number of failsafes is somewhat protected – however, the five-degree misalignment and subsequent inaccuracy is enough to cause a ship at warp to lose its Cochrane field, pulling it very roughly from subspace into real space; with enough of a jolt that we come to our next unfortunate stop.

Sickbay. Always a hub of activity on the ship, the number of life-forms that Sickbay keeps on record is astounding. When those records become scrambled, doctors find themselves diagnosing a Human with a head cold with a case of Andorian Distemper – which only affects Andorian camels, by the by. They are forced to use old-fashioned, manual diagnoses that would make Dr. McCoy proud. Unfortunately, for all of the diseases and afflictions that affect a 24th Century crew, this is simply not permissable.

In the Science labs, the experiment stations go awry – especially when the Earth Venus Fly Trap is crossbred with a particularly vicious variety of Vulcan carnivorous plant from the Forge – it will need to be subdued before it learns to scream “FEED ME!” at the poor Science team. Between that and a Tribble being set free, the Lab will soon be up to its eyeballs in unpleasant life.

Moving onwards, we find ourselves at Tactical. Thankfully, the failsafes do work as intended – a little too well. No phaser will be able to be retrieved or fired onboard without a manual override, or until the errors have been cleared.

The Holodecks are also rendered either much more interesting, or completely unusable. The safety lockouts disappear and reappear without warning; sometimes even protecting the holographic characters from simulated harm. The characters and settings also seem random – ask for Dixon Hill, you might find Captain Proton rubbing shoulders with Nicky the Nose, and Dix being begged to help by Maid Marion.

And of course, just for fun and games, other internal systems are malfunctioning. Gravity, for one, is going nuts – sometimes from three times Earth’s to an absolute zero-g; perhaps within the same hour. It leads to quite a few crew having sour stomachs. And the fire-controls are going off, locking officers in high-level forcefields and behind bulkheads (and some have had to be rushed to Sickbay for oxygen deprivation – though the Sickbay computer reads them as suffering from Graves’ Disease),

The probe is actually one of the few remnants of the Earth/Romulan War, blasted by plasma all those years ago and overloaded. It now transmits data in all directions at subspace radio speeds, transmitting all the data it ever received – unfortunately, the format is all wrong, and thanks to the loss of its check circuits, the data is now being sent out in such a way as to be both unreadable and harmful to Starfleet vessels.

To solve the problem, the crew will have to band together against the ship itself – their one hope to survive in the harsh cold of space. Computer specialists will have to locate the problem, and then a more intrepid Engineering crew will have to crawl through Jeffries’ tubes, cutting off the ODN network in front of the errors, essentially cutting off the rest of the ship from the impaired areas.

If they can manage to close off the probe’s transmission centers, the thing will turn out to be of Romulan make, a possible victim of friendly fire – since it is a beacon containing the last, tearful logs of the Romulan ship Imperial Rage, confirmed lost at the battle of Charon in a blast of its own energies in a suicide attack against the USS Daedalus, the first Starship. Turns out the probe was better at destruction three centuries later than its launching ship. If returned home, Romulan affairs will skyrocket; the current Praetor is the descendent of that ship’s Centurion.