It's Getting Worse
Posted on Wed Aug 31st, 2022 @ 7:51am by Rear Admiral Yoshi Minawara & Captain Ewan Darrow & Commander Jonathan Mantell & Lieutenant Commander Nolan Marc & Lieutenant Commander Asahi Kita & Lieutenant Njalia Sayffier & Lieutenant M'rrina & Lieutenant Rufus Marocain
Mission:
Between Realities
Location: Bridge
3942 words - 7.9 OF Standard Post Measure
"Computer, boost dampening field strength by sixteen percent." The few officers gathered on the bridge exchanged concerned glances with one another as the ships' computer dutifully chirped back. The ship, as if defiant, issues a slight groan from some overworked piece of frame support from running the Quantum Slipstream Drive at a standstill.
"Warning: Doing so will exceed maximum recommended safety recommendations by thirty-eight percent."
It was the ship's computer's job to call this out. Safety parameters were there for a reason, after all. They kept systems from overheating and blowing out, and kept from damaging other systems as they blew out. Yoshi and every engineer to ever pass through the academy knew this. It was impossible to forget. But every engineer also knew that those safety margins had safety margins of their own, limits that were well known to be safe to really push a system to. The Vesta's warp engines, for example, could be pushed to one hundred a fifty percent of their operating safety measure (at least temporarily) before they actually started to be at risk of damage. He could tell you every single bit of this ship's actual safety spec if asked.
The field emitters started to show serious issues at twenty-five.
"Acknowledged, disregard safety limits," the Commodore said as he pushed himself from the engineering console he's been standing at, and back towards the rear holotable to look at the gathered officers. Amelia had arrived a moment ago, wearing Lieutenant Commander Marc as though he were a backpack. This had caused him to pause, but no more than he'd come to expect from the Miran members of his crew. "That will hold for the next while," he commented to the group, looking around. "Best I can tell, whatever the Tholians were doing aboard that ship alters reality and we are making it worse. The roving areas of displaced time and space seem to be getting more frequent and abundant. We need a better solution. Ideas?"
Rolling his chair from the Science II console over to the primary science station, the tow-headed boy in blue chimed, "We've got tachyons and metreons interacting, which shouldn't happen -- or, we've never seen them interact before -- but, like, that's what's causing the temporal distortions," Nolan supplied, making a few adjustments before he pushed off and rolled the chair back over to the secondary science terminal on the wall. "Tachyons can be synthesized, but metreons are naturally occurring. Best guess is the Tholians were experimenting with some sort of phased temporal drive that used a... a, like, tachyon pulse to trigger a cascading metreon particle flow..."
He trailed off there. How that would work, what it would interact with, or the underlying mechanics of that kind of reaction were all unknown variables. The hypothesis was decades ahead of current temporal mechanics, let alone theoretical particle physics. "...Basically, think quantum slipstream drive, but for time instead of distance," Nolan supplied, summing up his best guess as he swung back over to the main console and looked at the Commodore as he added, "But when I say guess, I mean that even that hypothesis flies in the face of everything we thought we knew about temporal mechanics for the last several decades."
Asahi sat off to the side, arms folded against his chest and silent. He adjusted his stuffy uniform; the material was not as breathable as he was used to in the past few months. Luckily, he had managed to ask the crewman who he ran into what was going on as well as managed to cobble together some minor access to notes that detailed what was really going on. Tholians. It was always something weird with Tholians.
Unfortunately, Asahi was only really an expert at getting himself into trouble throughout time and space instead of out of it. "I'll have to run a couple of background searches to figure out what they had gotten themselves into that allowed them to fiddle with time and space to begin with, but in my experience, usually it's a 'replicate the situation' deal. We don't have any of the tech they had, which... kinda makes it moot, but if I go back and figure out how they were utilizing the tech..." his thought trailed off into a series of mutterings and calculations, before he waved himself off. "Not exactly helpful, but it's usually not a good idea for time and space tech to mesh with Tholian tech. Too much temperature regulation needs to be done for it to work."
"Comforting that it sounds like even the Tholians had no damn idea what they were doing..." Ewan said as he set his tea mug down on the pool table in the middle of the bridge. "Structural integrity is starting to suffer from whatever this thing is as well, the different times and realities meshing with our own is causing random sections of the hull and superstructure to age randomly. As they get more abundant the effects are becoming more so as well. If we start getting longer and longer cross-overs its definitely going to be a problem."
"The impression I have is that the zone of instability is physically located, can we move beyond it?" asked Njalia. "And if the Tholian pursue, they would hit the same problems as we are currently experiencing." She called up what limited sensor data that had, though the gaps were obvious.
"Unlikely, you have to consider something that we have that the Tholians don't Lieutenant," Ewan said as he tapped on the table and pulled up a model of the Vesta, "The Quantum Slipstream drive and currently the quantum bubble that we're using to hide from the Tholians. We still don't know a lot about some of the effects of the interactions of the Quantum field with other levels of space and subspace. Now mix that in with... whatever the hell it is the Tholians are doing who knows what could be happening."
Njalia nods and leans back, Then she pauses. "Do we have the . . . temporal/dimension echoes that have happened cataloged? And the frequency of the quantum bubble? Perhaps there is a way to predict the shifts and where or when they are opening to."
"At the moment we can barely say where we are in space," Rufus replied with a frustrated puff. "What the Captain said about the effects on structural integrity also applies to navigation - every time one of these 'events' hits, helm readouts go fuzzy as my fur in a field of static. At this point I'm holding position mostly by dead reckoning from features in the nebula. When those stabilize. Things out there have shifted a few times. Or I have."
While the others had been talking the Marine look around at the group of Starfleet Officers, feeling in that moment outclassed and out of place. That was, until she stared down at the tricorder unit, and without waiting for any input slotted the device's connection into the pool table unit. There was a moment when the ship thought about it, and the table's holographic display flickered to life with all the data. "This is what we got from my Marines transition, and then from the Commodore's whiskey glass. Just now the Commander and I ran into a series of almost comical back and forth displays. Well until the borg," she muttered, but carried on. "But our suits keep a full record, not to mention if we're actively recording and looking for something Spooks like data after all. Does this help Lieutenant?" she asked looked to the Operations Chief.
Njalia sent a request to her Ice Maiden QAI while she set an indexing routine to work on the data. "It is my thought that at least some of these . . . Tholian-Quantum echoes must be links to future possibilities, yes? We just need to find, or create one, to a future where we escaped and get their solution to this situation and use it ourselves."
"Mm," With the specs for the QSD sitting upon his PaDD, Asahi gave the diagram a confused look. "I'll throw in what we've got in Intel too," he stated in a deadpan. "But if the pressure from the explosion of the ship started some unforeseen reaction, it's not outside of the realm of logic to think when we skedaddled out of here, we likely carried it with us." His mind raced; this all seemed like some odd deja vu to the Intel Chief. "So it's less likely that we're looking at pinpointing a location and probably looking at whatever anomaly decided to hitch a ride with us." He paused, eyes narrowing. "Gonna get that dumb question out of the way, but no one decided to bring aboard a hitch-hiking piece of tech, did they?"
"You were there Lieutenant," Amelia replied, confusion colouring her tone. "Unless Commander Mantell decided to bring something back I couldn't imagine any of us could have smuggled anything back with us." She looked like she was going to say more before she was cut off by the Commodore stepping forward and adding to the display. The table, showing the Vesta added a thin yellow line around the edges of the ship, and then a bubble around us.
"This represents the field from the Quantum Slipstream Drive as it is right now. If we assume, for now, that it is the cause of the transitions, then we can probably control them. The field attenuation unit is used to basically adjust the field in Quantum transit. Voyager's was far more manual than ours, but ours is based on theirs. We should be able to basically focus in on a point we are looking for, and try and connect with it. Problem is that running those kind of manual calculations is going to have to have us cycle through frequencies by hand. If we aren't careful, we could pull ourselves into a reality where we are all Qoird." Keying a few commands in he started a series of equations. "That said, we could probably only move a small section, likely the space right next to the deflector dish. Would give us far more room for error."
M'rrina, perhaps impolitely but by reflex, licked her lips at the mention of the Qoird. Caitains did not hunt sentient species; but there was no denying that they did look, well, distressingly delicious, had they not been so. "The deflector dish, sir?" Her ears flicked slightly. "Have to be careful not to crossover with that then, though; especially given the weird reports we'd been getting concerning the hull aging stress in spots."
"Yeah." Rufus' nose twitched, then wrinkled briefly. "Careful about how we nudge things. I keep getting a whiff of something like lizard, so we might already be near some weird crossover."
Ice Maiden's icon popped up on Njalia's datapad. {Main computer patched up, except for strange overwrites, trying to isolate to minimize interference.} she posted. [Thank you. New task.] replied Njalia. She outlined the hunt for patterns among the Tholian-Quantum echoes. {That seems like much more fun. On it.} The Ice Maiden icon derezzed. "Hunting for patterns now. Though the data is spotty, at least we can rule some thing out, which is a start," reported Njalia.
"Structural integrity issues were the reason I was down near the deflector dish when I injured my shoulder, to begin with," Ewan said as he subconsciously rotated his arm a bit to make sure it still had its full range of motion, "I'd be hesitant to stress the area too much more then it already is because of the micro-fissures on the exterior hull plating. If we started doing it on the interior as well and somehow blew out the plates.... yeah that would be bad."
"We can probably stabilize that issue," Yoshi said, forcing the overlay to blow out into an exploded view of the systems around the deflector itself. "We use the Chroniton regulator to lock the frame in sync with our timeline, and create a small pocket of altered reality here," he pointed to a general service room not far from the deflector. "This room has a computer console used for referencing sensor data and probe control. Not the best system, but it should be able to connect to the solution we've likely created and allow us to port it back. It'll mean creating basically the exact opposite of the dampening field that-" he looked up at the ceiling as if the room was going to make another noise. When it didn't he continued "-we are using here on the Bridge. We could probably use transport enhancers to amplify the field, but our ability to control that point would be limited, maybe two minutes? Unless Commander Marc can buy us more time, or a miracle happens and Jack suddenly walks through that door. Failing that, we make it quick and easy. Download the data, get out."
"Chroniton pulse," Nolan echoed, falling silent again. The boy's eyes seemed to dart back and forth as he worked out whatever theory he had in his head, before the boy began to plug an equation into the console. "The metreon particles are coalescing into our temporal plane momentarily through the formation of mesons. The mesons only exist for fractions of a second, but its how we're able to detect the particle interactions at all," Nolan remarked, thinking aloud as he continued to work. "Thus far, we haven't been able to identify the antiquark component of the mesons, presumably because that aspect of the meson exists in some other moment in time -- or some other reality."
Glancing back up at the Commodore, the boy said, "But a chroniton pulse might be able to extend the duration of the mesons long enough for us to be able to get an identification on the precise particle structures, which could then give us the information we need to stabilize them -- creating a sustainable bubble."
Njalia flicked her initial pattern analysis of the Tholian_Quantum echoes to Yoshi's datapad. "As I suggested it, I feel that I should be the person who takes on this task, sir," she said, although her mind was awash with all the terrible things that could happen, she pushed them aside, this is what a good officer does, she told herself. Her tight grip on her datapad might have give away some of her feelings about the situation however.
The Commodore looked over at the calculations. It would work in theory, which was better than anything else they had at the moment. Especially as everything going on was a matter of discarding known theory and working on an entirely different establishment of reality as a whole. "Like old time sonar," he muttered to himself. It was a massive over simplification of the issue, but it make sense. They'd basically be able to, very temporarily, map the entirety of the intersecting points of space-time around the Vesta and choose one at will. "How long would-" but he was cut off.
"Why not just build a pocket universe in fluidic space?" A crackling voice interrupted the proceedings, a mix of familiar highs with a lower timbre interjecting as much as the voice itself. The brown-haired teenager hadn't been present for the start of the meeting, or noticed much by the participants yet. He only stepped closer the moment that the Captain —who seemed to be a Commodore here— mentioned his name. He brushed back the long bangs hanging down below his eyebrows, his hands making familiar movements as he spoke. "Just set it to vibrate at the harmonic resonance of the Jeska Current to avoid observational drift, and bam! Your ship is slip!"
A new challenger appeared. "A who-what-where?" Nolan chirped, even as he tried to wrap his brain around the suggestion that had just been put forward. Then gave a shake of his head as even his imagination didn't stretch that far.
"To start, interstellar particle interactions inside fluidic space is a total unknown," Nolan blurted out. "It's an organic medium we haven't even begun to study with any reliable data." Nolan's own theory of how the Tholian ship operated was already stretching the boundaries of scientific hypothesis and science fiction. Whatever this new suggestion was smacked entirely of Saturday morning holo-cartoon.
"Second, who are you again?" Nolan uttered, blinking as he sized up the teenager. He looked familiar, but Nolan couldn't place on proverbial finger on how he knew the gangly, brown-haired teen.
Yoshi's eyes turned to the person interrupting them, and at the same time the Marine near the door shifted. The computer had allowed whoever this was onto the bridge, which meant that they had officer level clearance at the moment, and yet, neither of the pair knew who this was. "Plus the Quantum Slipstream Drive can't operate in fluidic space, we've long since run the numbers based on Voyager's data," he said, his tone halfway between annoyed and concerned. "I second the Lieutenant Commander, who are you and how'd you get on the bridge?"
"Jack?" The teenage boy tipped his chin up, turning unscrupulous blue eyes to meet the face of this Commodore. They shifted until he found the man standing behind his customary mug of tea, turning to the familiar face for support. "Ewan will know, I work here. Or your 'me' does, but close enough right?" The teenage version of Jack scanned a nearby chronometer, as if that would help fix him in the right era, glancing back to the dozen or so eyes on him. "Well, whatever, physics usually stays the same. Blondie can tell you that much, even if he's still so twenty-fifth century."
Seeing that wasn't about to fix the question of identity, the teenage version of their Chief Engineer went on. "You do have a Jack here, you just said so. Don't give me that whole 'who are you' routine, I barely look that different! Anyway, I got here about the same way your Jack found me, with a souped-up spactial trajector, just took a few days for me to get the equipment together. You won't believe what it takes to get reliable antineutrinos these days."
Blondie? Nolan just blinked. "Wait, wait, wait," the boy uttered, waving his hands in the air as he spoke. Rising up so that he was standing on his knees in the chair, the boy leaned across the science console as he called bullshit. "Jack's an Only. For him -- you, whoever -- to be a teenager would require..."
He paused as he ran the math in his head. "...at least a thousand years," Nolan supplied, glaring over at this Fake-Jack.
Rufus ears had lifted at the new person arriving on the bridge and he'd stared, head swiveling back and forth between him and Nolan and the Commodore as they all threw around advanced physics like cooks debating the best spices for a stew, but his nose had also been working. Whoever this was only vaguely resembled his Jack, but his scent... that was unmistakable. "It is Jack, or a Jack," he said and tapped his nose. "This one's hit puberty, but otherwise his scent is the same."
"Hey, I resent that remark!" The teenage version of Jack whipped his head to the Kainan pilot, his eyes cross at the insult. "I haven't lost to puberty yet, don't condemn me." Puberty was a dirty word among the Onlies, ingrained in him even centuries later. Or longer, as the Blond Science Kid had pointed out. "At least that long, anyway. Give or take a millennia. In any case, I can see I'm in ancient times, you don't even know much about fluidic space and you're still experimenting with slipstream stuff."
Njalia looks at Jack. "Your solution, while theoretically fascinating, is useless as we can barely keep the ship together among the increasing dimensional and temporal splintering, if you can contribute to solving that do so, otherwise, please step aside." She returns to running her analytics.
"Whoa, ice cold!" The teenage Jack held up his hands in surrender, taking a step back from the pool table. He glanced around at the crop of mostly-unfamiliar faces, the barest hint of recollection nudging him for one or two more. What it must be like for them to see someone so similar to their own Jack, and yet so...old. "Yeah, doubt you could pull it off anyway." There was the easy smile, the cocky tone in the lower-pitched voice, something still unchanged for all the millennia. "You'd need a superluminary computer system, and a couple cog-ments to maintain the gravitational constant of that universe. Otherwise you'd turn fluidic space into a giant pinball machine..."
This Jack folded his arms, leaning back on his heels to stare pointedly at the Andorian. "Actually, that could be kinda fun, but you don't look like the type to have fun."
Nolan's head came up, looking toward Jack but clearly wrapped up in his own head. "Gravimetric..." the boy uttered, holding up one hand. A finger weaved in the air. A close observation would have revealed that the boy was working out a series of equations in mid-air, rapidly working through a series of quick calculations and permutations as he started to mull over a new idea. Then, looking over at the Andorian, the boy repeated back what she'd said just a moment before. "Dimensional splintering..."
What did that have to do with the price of kool-aid in Okinawa? The boy's mouth fell open, a hand starting to raise as he seemed to have an idea formulate on the tip of his tongue, but then walked it back in his mind. Finally, the boy looked up at Commodore Minawara and said, "If we could generate a gravimetric pulse, the distortion might actually work to stop the dimensional shift -- not stabilize it, but at least lock us in phase while we figure a more..."
The boy's hand waved in the air as Nolan tried to come up with the right word. "...a more better solution," the Only offered finally.
It was quick, running the math in his head as Yoshi thought over the various isues and how there could be problems with the various subsystems that made up the Vesta's overall design and function. When he couldn't come up with a better solution than Of course this is a bad idea, but what other. ideas are there? Slowly at first he nodded, then looked to his Chief Scientist and head of Ops and nodded more confidently. "Do it. Commander Marc, you'll support however you can. Lieutenant Sayffier, I would like you to take control of making sure the operation run smoothly. With our Chief Engineer," his eyes darted to the teenaged Jack, "out of Commission, we will need to be light on our feet and quick of wit. Ewan, support the Engineering team however you can, and Lieutenant Kita, I will have you support him in that as well. Your background in Engineering outweighs your intelligence duties for the time being." Looking around at his crew, he cupped his chin with his left hand, and took a shiort breath. "Get to it, you're dismissed."
