Tangled
Tangled
Summary: Sen, Fenix, and Roubani join forces on the virus plaguing the Kharon and her Vipers.
Date: PHD024
Related Logs: Related Logs (Say None if there aren't any; don't leave blank)
Players:
Sen..Fenix..Roubani..

Kharon - Aerospace Fabrication

Sleep? What's that? Maybe Captain Eos got a wink or two of it, but likely it was because she facedesked on some console while trying to work with her team to quarantine the virus that's infected all of Kharon. And possibly the Moch 7's. Sen is currently walking around one of the hunks of metal they've recovered, the white stick of a lollipop jutting out of the corner of her mouth. Her blue's shirt is on, but it's completely undone, so this what must qualify as a 'break' for her.

Roubani is likewise in his blues, though the top button is open. That's all that's open though, gods forbid he show chest or wrist. A pen's slid behind one ear, partly buried in his thick hair as he has a quiet conversation with some petty officer at the hatch and is pointed Sen's way. Hands behind his back, he creeps closer to the Captain and alerts her to his presence with a soft clearing of throat. "Captain?"

Sen works the stick over to the other corner of her mouth. "That would be me." She says distracted, still looking at the piece of Raider with slightly narrowed eyes tainted with hatred. Finally she turns, and spreads a smile for the ensign. "Right, who are you then?"

Roubani's solemn eyes flicker to the Raider piece, evenly, then back to her. His shoulders straighten a little when her eyes land on him. "Ensign Nadiv Roubani. Major Vendas told me to come to you." He gives her a slightly awkward look and brings his hand out from behind his back, offering her a little baggie with a couple jolly rancher-esque candies in it, and tells her deadpan, "I was informed that interdepartmental diplomacy is essential, sir."

Sen eyes the candy, then the Ensign's face. "You and I are going to get along famously, Ensign." She accepts the candy, thrusting it into her pocket for the time being, as she's still intimately involved with her sucker. "So. Your my airwing liason? I hear your brain is ripe for the picking. Do you like math, because I hate it. Say, you don't happen to be good at computers, are you?"

Roubani withdraws his hand soon as she has the bag, fingers retreating behind his back again. He gives her a thin half-smile near the end of all that. "I adore math, sir. I'm afraid complex differential equations are a bit of a vice for me." His attention gets stuck on her mouth for a second when he hears the sucker clicking against her teeth, eyes bouncing up and down with the stick like a cat's would. "Computers aren't my specialty, but I know my way around them fairly well."

Sen mms. "Good. More points for you. Alright, so! Here's the deal…" She starts walking around the wreckage again, as if she's got some personal vendetta. "My ship is frakking up, your Moch Sevens are frakking up. Last night we /found/ something, in the mainframe of the Kharon. I don't know how it got there or how bad the damn thing is, but I've had non stop problems since…say, do you think I should page that deckie?"

Roubani's brows draw as she talks. "In the mainframe, sir?" His tone is some mix of dread and piqued excitement. His hands unfold and he starts after her, longer legs easily keeping up. "Have you run a checksum against what we found in the Vipers? May I see the code?" His brain arrives at the last part and he ohs. "Chief Fenix? Your call of course, sir. I haven't met her."

Sen starts moving towards the wireless, "That's just it, I haven't had /time/. Every blip on my monitors, I can't ignore. Multiple false alarms or not. You know how exhausting its to try and coordinate all these damage control teams chasing phantoms throughout the…sorry. I'm tired. Crabby even. Did you know that…" She stops short, canting her head to the side. "Hmm. I have no trivia about crabs. I'll have to fix that." She starts walking again. "Code! Yes. I have it. You can see it. We need to cure this damn ship before the virus eats away all our systems. I've already hard booted the Kharon. Twice. Late last night."

[Intercom] Sen says, "Petty Officer Fenix to Aero Fab. Petty Officer Fenix, please report to Aerospace Fabrication, Deck One Aft."

"Did you know that blue crabs swim using a fifth set of legs that rotate 20-40 evolutions per minute?" Roubani supplies, as he follows her. He seems eager to get a look at this mystery code. "I can only imagine, sir. Already it sounds like something we've seen; the avionics systems of the Mark VIIs have required multiple reboots in the hangar, and whatever is affecting them seems to be getting itself in deeper each time. I can likely tell you if they're the same, but then comes the hard part of course."

Sen hangs up the wireless, then pulls her sucker out of her mouth, gesturing at Roubani with it. "Say that's good. I'm stealing that." She starts pacing again, like if she stops, she may just fall over. "Right. The hard part, like how the hell do we get rid of it. I can't quarantine it. I've had people pounding keys for twelve hours now. It's…everywhere. What I'm trying to find out, is if it's possible to go back to an older version of the systems. Like is that why the sevens are being effected by not the two's?" She motions with the lollipop again, before her eyes catch it. Oh yeah, I was eating that. And back in her mouth it goes.

Roubani purses his lips, glancing at the lolli and then back at her eyes. "The closest I can figure, sir, is that it's attacking a specific cycle in the avionics software. Cyclic redundacy checks on the system show it active at different points in that cycle, which means it isn't set on a universal trigger. Something…outside the Vipers is setting it off somehow. But you're correct - the Mark IIs don't use that software package. If we can isolate the exact program that it's embedded in and shut that down, it'll be a start, but it means backtracking through the attacks." The 'but' isn't said as though that's something to hesitate over.

Sen exhales slowly, "So that's it then? We roll back the systems and …pray?" As if that revelation is heavy, she finds something convenient to sit down on, which just so happens to be a piece of the wreckage. She knocks her heel against the slab of Raider she's using as a chair. "Any of these tubs have salvageable electronic systems in it? Something we can compare our programs against?"

"Rolling back won't help, sir, unless the virus is contained first," Roubani shakes his head. "Else the damage will just repeat itself. We need to isolate it first. Track the corruption back to its first source and use a cryptographic hash function to look for the foreign block of executable code. It may mean shutting down non-essential systems for the search." He glances at the Raider and frowns. "I'm afraid I can't say just yet. I hadn't gotten that far when things were switched over."

Sen gives a tired smile, "And you're a …pilot? I thought they just liked to frak, fly, and fight." Her teeth crack down on the lollipop, causing a loud crunch as she breaks some of the candy away from the stick. "You think if I slapped you with my top electrical engineer, the pair of you could suss this out?"

Roubani turns a faint shade of red at that checklist. "Yes, sir, I'm a pilot." Chest beating upon that statement is conspicuously absent. It's almost awkward, really. He clears his throat softly and nods more firmly to the last. "Yes, I believe we can."

Sen sits up a little straighter. "Son, if I weren't married, I'd propose to you this instant." The ChEng is sitting on a hunk of Raider debris, talking to Roubani about their current problems. "We'll get with the Deck Chief, get you whatever kind of clearances you need. I don't need to tell you this is a top priority. I'll speak with your CO, but I'm going to need your focus on this until it's finished."

Roubani promptly turns a healthier shade of red at that first pronouncement. Dear oh dear. "I'll give you all I possibly can, sir," he says, scratching his upper arm through the uniform blue. Air Wing's undoubtedly got him busy with like, flying and stuff. "I recommend setting up terminals with the corruption logs, isolated from the mainframe so that we can safely go through it. In the meantime, can you tell me what effects you've been seeing around the Kharon, sir?"

That's a wonderful line to walk in on. "Don't let me interrupt the moment…" is Fenix's drawled response to the overheard 'proposal', her voice arriving a second or two before the woman herself steps through the hatch. Dark eyes flicker around the Viper birthplace — or graveyard, depending on how you look at it — before flickering toward the other two. "Captain Eos, I presume." Toward the woman, then, "Ensign Roubani."

Slips back to her feet, still crunching on a lollipop, the white stick waggling at the corner of her mouth as she chews. "The one and only." Which Sen can safetly say, giving the mass destruction of man kind. "Petty Oh." Her attention swivels back to Roubani. "Whatever you need, I'll get you." She takes a deep breath. "Alright, now that we're all breathing the same square feet of air. Let's compare notes. The anomolies in the Kharon's systems really flared up right before the Cylons showed up on Dradis. Directly before then, we suffered power outages and systems malfunctionings. I've got phantom fire alarms, CO2 scrubbers that aren't cooperating, airlocks operating of their own accord…"

Roubani clears his throat softly. "Petty Officer, how are you." The soft-spoken Ensign nods to Fenix, then Sen has his attention again full-steam. Something she says causes lines to appear in his brow. "Before they showed up? We'll need the exact timestamps on the error logs if you have them…/before/ they showed up! The trigger must be part of their FTL sequence or…goodness, I don't know, but it's brilliant!" Brilliant, of course, on the wrong side, which makes him frown again.

"Whatever's frakking up the ships, it's only taking down the newer machines," is Fenix's oh-so-articulate assessment. "The IIs are still up and running…" a pause, and then a wry correction, "Or they were, until they went out last night. We've been running trials on the VIIs since they were grounded. Reboots are a temporary fix, but that's all. The sevens computer systems interface directly with the Kharon. The twos were rolled out before that sort of thing was possible. If what you're sayin' in correct," a tip of her chin toward the Engineering officer, "Whatever's frakking up the mainframe is probably in the sevens as well. I ain't do computers… but as I see it, we need to make the sevens like the twos. Cut 'em off."

Left without candy, Sen has taken to just gnawing on the cardboard stick. "Right." Her hand lifts to her forehead, massaging away a headache that's days old. "So we need to run that checksum you were speaking of, Ensign. Blue crabs swim using a fifth set of legs that rotate twenty to forty evolutions per minute." The last bit is murmured as she starts pacing again. "Alright, I'm going to have the computers set up in here. Keep other noses out of this. How the hell did it get /in/ our systems in the first place? What else do we need?"

Roubani nods to Fenix, folding his arms over his chest as this person-to-person contact thing increases in here. To Sen he says, "A checksum algorithm on the mainframe will let us compare the corruption errors to those in the Mark VIIs, and clarify whether we're dealing with the same malicious code. A subsequent cryptopgraphic hash function…we can probably use the Masset-Demmgard build - it's better resistant to collisions in Mark VII systems…" He gently rubs his temple as he considers that for a full few seconds of silence, then goes on. "—can then determine the corruption trail." A soft exhale and he frowns. "It's /got/ to be a remote access attack. I don't know how the original code got planted but there's little way this is happening without them using a remote trigger, such as one piggybacked on their FTL signal as I mentioned." He glances at the Raider thoughtfull. "Perhaps that has an answer in its systems. It will take some digging for that part, sir."

Fenix is arching a brow at Sen's last comment. How did it get into the system? Hell if she knows. Fenix deals with the birds on her deck. The mothership? That's Sen's headache. Until, of course, the mothership starts infecting Fenix's birds. Then it's personal. And then Roubani's talking, and suddenly Fenix has no idea what's going on. The small mechanic turns an almost dubious look on the pilot — when did Jocks grow brains? — before she's snorting to herself and moving to lean against a piece of Viper shell. "I'm going to try to unhook the VIIs," she announces, seemingly to herself. "We may lose some of the fancier bells and whistles without the main interface… but at this point, I don't think anyone's going to complain."

Sen seems to nod along with what Roubani's saying, grasping the concepts he's spouting on about. "If we can figure out the digital signatures in the fixed-size bit string, maybe we can excise it from the programming and…salvage…something…" She shakes her head, pitching her lollipop stick into a refuse bin before digging out another piece of hard candy, this time one of the ones Roubani gave her. "Alright. We have a plan. Let me run it up command."

Roubani looks energised by the back and forth, giving Sen a quick nod. "Exactly, sir. Salvage…as much as we can." He rubs his fingers under his lower lip and glances at Fenix right in time to catch that dubious look, which brings a little awkwardness back to his posture. "Admittedly, I've worked more with Viper systems than mainframe systems like the Kharon's. Some of it will be a learning curve. But I'll do whatever's needed, wherever it is."

Fenix has her job, and judging by the way she simply stares at the other two — as if she were looking at some new exhibit — she's content to leave them to theirs. She'd no sooner start fiddling with their computers and code strings than she'd allow them to put their hands in one of her Vipers. And so she remains quiet, simply nodding her agreement as either makes their closing statement.

Sen clicks the candy against her teeth as she moves it around her mouth. "Hopefully, the lot of us will be able to work off each other, fill any voids when it's not someone's particular forte. We'll get this. We will. They might have captured our Queen, but we're far from being in check mate yet. The pair of you need anything else from me? Otherwise I have to go get our shopping list signed off on by the old man."

The chess metaphor makes the corner of Roubani's mouth tic. But the Ensign's retreated mostly back to shy mode, and simply shakes his head. "No, sir."

"No, sir," simply spoken by the Deck Chief. And then she goes quiet again, waiting for the inevitable dismissal.

Sen smiles congenially. "Dismissed." Besides, there's nothing any of them can do until the red tape is cleared and they have their equipment. Might as well eat or get some rack time, or go fret out of the ChEng's hair.

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