80219.15
After Stepping Up
--=Engineering USS Alchemy=--
Breaux had assigned the majority of the Alchemy’s Engineering crew to work on repairing the Communications array whilst he and Rada had been working on recovering the transwarp drive. With the current state or their weapons, their shields and their conventional warp drive they would be incapable of defending against floating debris let alone any kind of attack. That was of course assuming that they even realised they were under attack with the current state of their sensors. On the bright side there was some lighting failure and so some of the damage at least wasn’t visible.
Avery and Rada both agreed that their best hope was to be able to reopen communications with the Sera and to be able to get the hell out of there if anything should happen.
Rada had been concentrating on what was left of the warp coil he had realigned, certain that he had made a mistake.
*Where is it?* He demanded from himself, it was one thing to know you were responsible for something going horribly wrong but somehow so much worse to not even know why. To know you’d made a mistake and to not even know how was to constantly fear that you’d repeat yourself all over again. If he couldn’t find out what he’d done wrong then he knew he would have to resign at the end of the mission, he could never let this happen again.
Avery Breaux had in his typical fashion had been aggressively dissecting what remained of the drive.
“This is impossible,” Avery commented with a little frustration. “Such a massive overload in a system as high energy as the transwarp drive would have required almost ever ounce of energy that the Alchemy possessed but…”
“It couldn’t have” Rada finished Breaux’s thought for him “Every spare watt was being fed into the conventional warp engines and thrusters when this happened. The power just wasn’t there.”
“It must have come from somewhere,” commented Breaux, “and until we find out where we can’t risk using the drive again. I’ve disconnected what remains of the drive from any power source. I need you to check every millimetre of this ship for anywhere the power could have come from, whilst I keep working on the drive itself.”
Rada didn’t want to leave the warp coil analysis but reluctantly agreed.
“Yes, Sir…” he said and a look from Avery reminded him of how Sir was not the Lieutenants preferred title whilst working in Engineering.
“…tainly. Yes, certainly” Rada corrected himself leading to a nod of acknowledgement and a slight smile from Breaux.
Rada started his search at the burnt out surge protector, it appeared as though the power supply had somehow jumped it in order to cause the overload. Rada swore to himself that he would dedicate every second of his time to finding a more effective method of surge protection once this mission was done.
*This should be impossible* he told himself *The EPS conduits are designed to make this type of thing impossible. The creation of external conduit circuitry must by definition require casing failure but the internal redirection theory makes that impossible. The power should have failed before the jump could take place. It should take years of pressure to cause the internal misalignment necessary for that to happen and this conduit was just replaced.*
Rada was furious with himself and realised that he could not let anger cloud his judgment. He had to think like a Vulcan, not that much of a stretch considering he had spent years hiding his emotions from everyone else, how difficult could it be to hide them from one more person?
He forced his posture completely upright and clasped his hands behind his back in a typical Vulcan pose.
He began to speak to think to himself in an emotionless voice *The first rule of logic is that we must discount the impossible but in this case that would mean discounting the truth but the truth must be allowed and therefore must be possible. So we must assume that a newly replaced conduit could fail. Since we know from empirical and theoretical evidence that such failure cannot occur under ordinary circumstances we must assume that these are not ordinary circumstances and must examine how. The gravimetric interference could have had an impact or misalignment but such information is of negligible use to us in locating the problem since these circumstances have been present ship wide.
It therefore must remain that the problem is somehow related to the conduit being new. Since all conduits must be new at some point we can be confident that this alone is not a problem but that the problem is instead related to a series of contributing factors unique to this particular conduit. We need not necessarily understand these factors but rather to identify them. Since this particular conduit must come from a particular batch and been installed at a particular time we must…* Rada stopped himself immediately.
It had just hit him, the Alchemy had recently had several conduits replaced from a particular batch and most of them were in the one area. He ran to the other side of the room and practically ripped a cover off of the wall. His eyes flew open as he saw a glowing energy network had been created between three nearby redundant conduits.
They were ‘sharing’ energy; one conduit for the warp drive, one for the transwarp drive and one to the bridge. If the wrong system was activated or deactivated at this time then almost all of the ship’s power could be directed towards the one location.
They could blow out life support, the warp engines could be hit or the torpedoes could even detonate whilst still inside the Alchemy. The ship could be gone in an instant. Even the activation of a combadge could set it off.
“ Eureka !” Declared Crewman Jack Halliday triumphantly as the communications array began to start up.
“No!” Rada shouted in a panic. “Everyone out now!”
The Engineers looked at each other but knew well enough from their training that when an Engineer told you that that you got out of there. Everyone moved briskly towards the door, that is everyone except Rada Dengar and Avery Breaux. The network was suddenly thickening. The energy was growing more intense.
Breaux ran straight over to a console and started rapidly inputting commands.
“I can’t stop it. We’ll have to break the circuit,” Breaux quickly explained.
“With what?!” Rada demanded “Sever the network downstream or up and you just speed up the overload in the remaining circuitry paths!”
A loud vibrating hum began all around them.
“Then we’ll have to redirect the power. Any ideas?” Breaux responded desperately.
The hum got louder.
“Just one,” answered Rada and then demanded Breaux to “Get down!”
He bolted towards the nearest antigrav cart, grabbed hold of the top and sent it flying towards the wall. He and Breaux dived out of the way as the three conduits each finding a new circuit being created sent all of the power pulsing through them straight into the cart.
The power was too much for the cart which was suddenly in flames. Even as the cart exploded Breaux hit keys on the console that was protecting him, taking advantage of the split second of down time to sever all three systems. Wreckage from the cart dropped down and covered the room. Everything suddenly fell deadly silent.
The silence stood for an eternal moment and then both Avery and Rada looked at each other. Smiles slowly crept onto their faces and they suddenly both burst into laughter. They had done it.
Engineering Officer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012
USS Alchemy NX-53099