FSE

Furry search engine

formerly SoFurry search engine

~ Colonel Pier sat silently for a moment of thought, staring down into her coffee. She let out a sigh, and the ferret looked back up again at Chief Master Sergeant Cressig. The badger was still in only his boxer shorts, the meeting had just kind of appeared on her calendar, and it seemed like there were even more patches of scorched fur than when he first entered. Her entire office was beginning to smell strongly of burnt fur, electrlytic gel, and panicked badger. Colonel Pier knew the Chief well enough to know that whatever matters were at hand were not frivolous, despite his unprofessional presentation.

~ "You requested a meeting?", the ferret offered, holding out her hand as if to accept an explanation.

~ Deep breath, and Chief Cressig seemed to borrow a bit of the room's air for what he as about to say. "A hacker, or hackers, have completely subverted our ship nodeworking protocols and have been taking manual control over ship systems without our knowledge. This has been confirmed aboard every ship in the fleet."

~ Colonel Pier stared in a bit of disbelief. "But.. shouldn't our adaptive measures have normalized the systems after several minutes at most?" She wasn't an expert, but she was familiar with the basics of electronic warfare. Cressig nodded slowly. "That's why I've got everyone tearing all of your ships apart, top to bottom. The hacker must be actively connected to keep dodging the measures, and we need to find that hacker." The Chief's breathing remained somewhat strained, as if he were taxing his own self control. There was something more.

~ "And what has this hacker been doing with our ships? We're not on course of a sun, or anything?", the Admiral prompted.

~ The Chief shook his head slowly. "I had crews taking manual readings off of everything, since the the computers aren't telling us anything. From what we can muster, the fold couplings are at about seventy percent power; we've slowed down. And the inertial dampening coils are in the deployed posture."

~ The Colonel looked dumbfounded and puzzled. The Chief continued his explanation without prompting. "We've been dragging anchor, and I think the hacker means to overheat the coils until they start to fail. If the hacker shuts them off it'll drop us out of FTL; that's a hardware interlock. Burning them up until they're sputtering won't do that." The Chief took a moment to breath. Huff. "In about three hours the inertial shearing from being at FTL is going to start turning us all into chunky salsa."

~ Colonel Pier leaned back into her seat, the fundamentals of FTL drives working their way through her thoughts, "...and if we SCRAM our way out of FTL, the hardware interlocks will make the dampeners spike and with them in the deployed posture...", she made a rather depressing hand gesture, "...chunky salsa."

~ The Chief finally took the invitation to sit in the offered chair in front of her desk and dropped his face into his hands. It was as though none of it had been quite true, as if it were all one complicated exercise or thought experiment until he had reported it to a superior officer. He breathed heavily into his fingers, mildly scorched and reeking of coolant foam.

~ The Admiral silently re-examined the rising steam from her coffee.

~ The badger cried.