DISCLAIMER: Enterprise, Star Trek and all related characters are the property of Paramount Pictures, Inc. No copyright infringement is intended. This story is for entertainment purposes only and no money has changed hands. The original characters and events are the sole property of the author and may not be used without permission.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: Is it just me, or do Starfleet ships tend to get their butts kicked with alarming regularity?
"REALITY CHECK", by DARRIN A. COLBOURNE
"Countermeasures"
"So let's run through everything." Captain Archer said.
The senior officers of the ENTERPRISE were gathered in the Tactical Command Center. Various images of the ship were projected on the four screens, including a detailed 3-D rendering and several cutaway schematics. Vital information was displayed in text alongside the images. Each officer would work the controls to alter the images as he or she spoke.
Lieutenant Reed started off. "You call for a 'Tactical Alert.' Hull is polarized, phase cannons are deployed, torpedo tubes are loaded and ready, Security teams deploy to secure vital areas of the ship."
Commander T'Pol spoke next. "Main Sensors are switched from wide field scan to narrow field targeting. Scanning duration is limited to three seconds, long enough to scan at full power, record the resultant data and use the targeting computers to project target track, yet too short to be effectively jammed by the attacker."
Then Ensign Sato. "All off-board transmissions cease. Contact with Away Teams, Shuttlepods and Subspace Relays is broken off. Further transmissions are limited to coded messages sent in one-way bursts."
Ensign Mayweather. "We immediately go to Evasive Maneuvers, making sure the ship's smallest target profile is pointed toward the attacker. If we're in orbit, we head directly for the Night Side of the planet and try to keep the battle in the Cone of Darkness."
Dr. Phlox. "Sick Bay is prepared to receive multiple serious casualties. Emergency Medical Teams are put on standby assignment and made ready to deploy throughout the ship."
Major Hayes. "MACO teams deploy to the Shuttlepod Bay and the Transporter Room fully armed and ready to disembark in case ground operations are necessary. The remainder are put on alert and made ready to assist in securing the ship."
Commander Tucker finished off. "Lighting is cut off in every cabin aboard with a view to space. Running lights are shut down. Power to the nacelles is cut off, but can be re-established if we need to go to Warp quickly. The Bussard Collectors are turned off. That darkens most of the ship. The Main Deflector is switched from constant wide-field deflection to pulsed, narrow-field deflection."
Archer took a good look at the displays once everyone was done. The 3-D image made it look like the ship was dead in space. With power cut to the Warp nacelles and Bussard Collectors the familiar red and blue glows characteristic of the ship's propulsion system ceased. The little dots of Black he could see were startling. It had been years since he'd seen darkness through every window in his line of sight. Even the large running light behind the Main Deflector was off. That made the usually barely-visible dish almost completely invisible. It was just about perfect.
There was just one flaw, but it was big. "I don't suppose there's anything we can do about the Impulse Engines?" Archer said, studying the light blue glow from the impulse exhaust.
"Not without turning them off completely," Tucker said, "which would wreck our maneuverability. To get the effect you want without sacrificing performance they'd have to be completely redesigned and rebuilt. Maybe I can play with the specific impulse frequency so that the ambient light effect isn't so strong, but no promises."
Archer nodded as he turned his attention to the display that showed Reed and Hayes's deployment plans. With this pattern there'd be no more Search and Destroy missions in the corridors. Squads of armed crew members would be standing by in all the spaces boarders were most likely to head to: The Bridge, Engineering, the Transporter Room, the Shuttlepod Bay and the Tactical Command Center they were in right now. Anyone attempting to take the ship would simply run into a wall of suppressive fire.
Next he examined the display that showed the ship's various emissions. With the sensors and deflector modified and comms shut down, ENTERPRISE didn't radiate anywhere near as much electromagnetic energy as usual.
"Any other suggestions, comments?" Archer said.
"We'll have to modify the weapons, of course." Reed said. "They're all programmed to receive constant targeting cues from the sensors."
"Fixing that won't be mechanically difficult," Tucker said, "but it will be time-consuming, and eat up a lot of spare components. We need to give the phase cannons and photonic torpedoes the ability to remember and optically track a target."
"Do it." Archer said. "Anyone else?"
"I don't suppose we could repaint the hull?" Hayes said to no one in particular.
"Not the whole hull." Tucker said. "Not enough paint."
"We don't need to do the whole hull." Hayes said. He then worked the screen controls to zoom in on the 3-D image to show surface detail. "See? These patterns were added to the paint scheme to break the ship up visually, right?"
Everyone looked at the screen. At this magnification the shaded areas of the hull were clearly defined. "Right." Archer said. "What are you thinking?"
"Let's break it up further. We make as much of the dark areas as we can darker with the paint we have left."
"So we'd end up with some sort of camouflage pattern?" Reed said.
"Exactly that. With everything else we're doing to decrease the ship's visual profile that can only help."
Archer thought about it for a moment, then smiled. "Not bad. T'Pol, aren't we near a small Star System?"
"Approximately one day away at Warp Three." T'Pol said.
"Then we'll head there, find a nice moon to hide behind and make the necessary modifications. I want to begin drills as soon as possible afterwards to get the crew familiar with these new procedures and work out the bugs. Anything else?"
No one else had anything to say.
"Okay, let's get to work."
The senior officers filed out of the Command Center and went to take care of their respective tasks. Before he left, Archer took one last look at the tactical plans they had worked out. He would have preferred something more...magical, like a device that would just turn the whole ship invisible, like those Romulans they'd encountered had, but ENTERPRISE hadn't been built with such a device, so he had to make do with what he had.
He just hoped these measures would make future attacks less exciting for his crew and much less profitable for the enemy.
With that thought he left for the Bridge.
FINAL AUTHOR'S NOTE: There are LOTS of things that are flawed about Star Trek's design philosophy, too many to address in chapters as short as I intend to make these, but I can tell you that many of them are rooted in the designers' almost pathological need to turn every ship into a flying Christmas Tree. Each successive Starship class seems to possess a number of inherently stealthy characteristics (CONSTITUTION's broken-up structure, GALAXY's curvature, SOVEREIGN's backsweep, NX-01's small profile), but these are usually totally negated by the high-beam anti-collision beacons, cosmically-powered scanners, high-energy deflectors, subspace transponders, bright white and light blue paint jobs and a million and one useless windows! The Federation may never have a cloaking device of its own, but if it's not going to have better weapons or a more aggressive combat policy then it should at least work harder on avoiding hostile contacts, and its ships might be better able to do that if they turned off all the freaking lights and painted them a dark color once in a while.
