80618.1930
Concurrent with First Strike
-= Main Engineering; USS Serendipity =-
Rada wasn’t sure what was happening to the Serendipity at the moment. All he could figure out was that he had barely sat down in the Chief Engineer’s chair and already the ship was falling apart as a result. Every department in the ship was experiencing malfunctions and from the increased tension levels he had observed he could only guess that people were quickly running out of patience for him to fix it. His Engineers, a phrase he was still far from used to using, were doing everything they could think of to locate the underlying cause of all of these malfunctions but with their man power stretched so tightly with repairing the damage already done they’d barely had a chance to look.
He had even had Kellyn helping them out with the repairs until he finally had to insist she left to avoid starvation. He didn’t feel too bad taking her away from her usual research duties to help him as he was certain that the study of whatever he’d done to take the Serendipity from perfect working order to its current state in a matter of days was certain to fit someone’s definition of dangerous weapons research. Perhaps a device for utilisation of the Rada Dengar method would eventually replace the Phaser Bank as standard on every Federation Starship.
Then again, Starfleet does pride itself on being an exploratory agency and may therefore opt not to use such dangerous technology, they would still have records of it though and as soon as a leaked file finds its way to the Romulans and they begin utilising the technology the Federation would be forced to do so to after deciding that they couldn’t risk the existence of some kind of ‘Dengar gap’. Eventually every Starship would have to have this technology installed as standard in order to compete, of course the Ferengi and the Cardassians wouldn’t want to fall behind and would end up developing their own systems. Best case scenario this would lead to some kind of cold war and a few sweet years there would be peace.
Eventually however Rada didn’t doubt that the peace would be broken by some crazy maniac who valued victory more than life itself, probably a Klingon. All out war using this method would follow as retaliation ensued, it wouldn’t be restricted to just Starships and eventually some mad man would develop a variety capable of travelling through subspace, it would spread from Starships to Starbases to planets, leading to the collapse and eventual self-destruction of any technology which happened to exist upon them, effectively wiping out all intelligent life in the quadrant, then of course it would find its was from wormhole to wormhole wiping out all life pretty much everywhere.
Then in several billion years time the microscopic life forms which survived the Dengar plague will have evolved into intelligent beings, they will develop an interest in archaeology and begin researching what happened to the life that existed years before. Rada’s name would come up and through years of myth and legend he would become recognised as some form of ancient demon who was angered by the people of this time. This would obviously lead to an assortment of these being worshiping Rada and eventually developing time travel technology and coming back to visit their god when he took physical form. They would naturally be very disappointed when they got here.
Rada knew he couldn’t let this happen. He knew that their best hope was to find some kind of fatal flaw in the Dengar method and exploit it to repair the Serendipity so that it is decided that research into how the method can be used as a weapon is not worth it. Hopefully they be able to stop the evil thing here and now before it begins and Rada won’t have to ruin the faith of hyper-evolved amoeba when they travelled back to meet him yesterday.
After an hour’s work Rada was finally satisfied that he had repaired this particular junction and stood up to stretch his back. However no sooner had he turned around than he was intersected by Halliday, PADD in hand with another long list of problems.
“Just give me the short version,” said Rada.
Halliday rubbed his eyes until they would focus enough to read.
“Stellar Cartography is complaining that the lateral sensor array is out of alignment and that it’s losing efficiency,” Halliday announced.
“We can’t spare anyone,” replied Rada “I worked with Samson back on the Independence . I know he has the expertise for this, tell him he’ll have to perform the realignment himself.”
“I already tried that,” replied Halliday “He can’t do it himself because the associated interlocks have stopped responding.”
“Alright,” sighed Rada “I’ll take over the repairs of the Weapons Systems and you see if you work with Samson to get them unlocked.”
“I can’t,” replied Halliday “the computer keeps misdirecting my requests.”
“Alright,” replied Rada a bit more frustrated now “I’ll work on the Security Systems and the computer while you try to repair them manually, it should only take twice as long.”
“I can’t, the affected area is sealed off by life-support failure,” replied Halliday, not trying to be difficult.
Rada swore internally and then asked knowing he probably wouldn’t care for the answer “Can we get life-support back on in that area?”
“Not until we’ve fixed the computer,” replied Halliday.
Rada glanced down at the PADD “According to these estimates we’ll lose the array entirely if we don’t start work within the hour. With both of us working on it how long do you expect it to take to repair the computer?”
“With a lot of luck I’d say six hours” admitted Halliday.
“Can we spare anyone else to work on it?” asked Rada.
“With everyone in the department we might be able to reduce that time to two hours,” replied Halliday.
“Then I’ll need you to get me an EV suit and I’ll do it myself, you stay here and work on…”
It was at this point that Halliday cut him off. “I can’t, the power units in the EV suits have stopped holding a charge,”
Rada felt like his sanity was hanging by a thread and Halliday was swinging an axe.
*This is ridiculous,* he thought. He knew this wasn’t Halliday’s fault but that didn’t stop him feeling like throttling the man right now.
He took a long deep breath, forced the most relaxed smile he could onto his face and turned to Halliday.
“Then tell Stellar Cartography that they’ll just have to use the other arrays, contact Security and tell them there’ll be a delay on the repairs to the internal sensors, this whole thing will be a lot simpler if we get the computer working properly first so we’ll make that our priority. Our second priority is to keep the Replicators working.”
*Perhaps if she still can still get a cup of coffee, the Captain won’t notice that I’m letting her ship go to pieces,* he thought. Halliday daren’t say that the Replicators had stopped working an hour ago.
“Now that that’s sorted, you’ll need to keep an eye on things for me here. We can’t keep playing catch-up so I’m going have to start an investigation into the underlying cause of these malfunctions, any problems here you let me… you deal with them the best you can,” replied Rada.
Halliday nodded in agreement and set off to do it, he didn’t have the heart to tell Rada that he’d only just informed him of one of the dozen problems he had originally intended to brief him on.
Rada knew that he’d need help with this investigation and his entire department was already otherwise engaged and so with all due concern for his sanity he ordered “Computer, Locate Dabin Reece.”
^Dabin Reece is on the Main Bridge, ^ replied the computer as Rada made his way to the Turbolift.
Chief Engineer
USS Serendipity NCC-2012