Listening Post 81 - Ultima Black VIc
As you investigate the device, it becomes clear that this was a jury-rigged attempt at a bomb. You think the primary warhead is probably a stripped out nuclear torpedo warhead which has had its detonator connected to a primitive computer system to handle the countdown and possibly countermeasures. It reminds you of old ships you've found, relics lost centuries ago from the very early days of FTL travel in the Hegemony. Maybe even older, in a lot of ways, these look like devices you've seen in naval and technology museums.
First you quickly strip a couple of shielding wraps off your Veritech datapad and and splice the optical fiber feeds into what looks like the detonator's jury-rigged timer and quickly set up a repeating pulse into the system, disrupting it's timing through brute force and smart routing, probing for weaknesses. Quickly, you start to see the benefit: The computer system is crashing and rebooting, trying to maintain it's own countdown, but the timer seems to be slowing. Fault tolerance being abused in full here, not that any primitive computer could have been designed to handle this kind of noise. You've given yourself some more time.
Inside your helmet, you're sweating, the climate systems whirring as they accommodate your rising temperature and pump in colder recycled air to keep you closer to comfortable as you take your metatool to the bundle of cables and wires. You trace out a dozen cables, then two and three dozen. It's a rat's nest, clearly cobbled together at the last minute. A component bomb-maker would have set up trip-wires, something cut that would instantly cause the detonator to go off.
However, they had limitations. You were fairly certain that they were using a stripped military nuclear torpedo and it's own detonator. A detonator based on a proximity fuze system. Opening the access panel by burning out the screws and lifting the plate away, you find the mechanism inside the detonator. Multi-mode sensor that would have been set in the housing the torpedo, set to calculate distance to the target and then send a bi-phase electrical signal to the atomic core and set off the weapon. That's the weak point, if the sensors are no longer connected to the detonator, it cannot receive a detonate signal. Tense minutes pass as you carefully sever each sensor processor upstream of the bi-phase conduit.
By the time you finish triple checking, certain that you've disarmed the bomb, you're sitting on the deck in a cold sweat, just now realizing that you're receiving comms from Valdar and the rest of the squadron.