Creative Computer Engineering

[WxMurray 0]

“Saf. Saf! Wake up!”

 

“Gah...what?”

 

“You were snoring.”

 

Murray glared at Dickinson and replied levelly, “I. Do. Not. Snore.”

 

Dickinson grinned. “Yes. You. Do,” she teased.

 

“No. I don’t. I didn’t hear myself snoring. So if I couldn’t hear it, it wasn’t happening. Now,” Murray continued, before Dickinson could continue on, “what have we got?”

 

Dickinson indicated the pool table console. “Nothing so far. Nothing we try is working. I’ve run through just about every decryption I can think of. Those logs don’t want to be read.”

 

“Every protocol?”

 

“I even used some Klingon, Romulan, Breen, even some Dominion protocols. Nothing.”

 

“Heh. Could be worse. They could use Pakled protocols.”

 

“They don’t. I tried.”

 

Murray looked astonished. “Wow, when you said every protocol, you meant it.”

 

“I’m not just a pretty face.”

 

Murray smiled egomaniacally. “Hey, that’s my line. So what do we do now?”

 

Dickinson sat back and sighed. “I don’t know. What we really need is to actually find the original protocols that were used to encrypt the logs in the first place and use them. But we don’t have their protocols.”

 

Murray thought for a minute. Then an idea hit him like lightning to a guy holding a metal rod in the middle of a field. “Maybe…maybe we do.”

 

Dickinson was confused. How did they have the original encryption codes? “Huh?”

 

“We have their ship. That ship has the encryption protocols. So all we have to do is hack into their ship’s computer and pull out the encryption codes.”

 

“Can we do that?”

 

“You took advanced computers courses at the Academy, right?”

 

Dickinson grimaced at the memories. “Yeah. Not the most fun course in the world.”

 

“Right. So you can get it. And Nora Brady is a computer specialist if you need any help.”

 

“That’s not quite what I meant, but I’ll see what I can do.”

 

Time passed. Brady and Dickinson hacked. Murray helped pass the time by telling various anecdotes. After almost five hours Dickinson was shouting across engineering.

 

“Saf! I think we’ve got it!”