It was July 19, everyone had settled into a comfortable routine when something occurred to disrupt it.
Ensign Misaki was down in the main mess hall on deck 42. The room was large and toward the center of the ship. The rear of the compartment was dominated by the serving windows. There were a number of people in the lines waiting to get one of the meals of the day. The room was filled with long anchored tables with benches. The tables were a utilitarian design with a faux wood finish. While they looked like wood they were actually a titanium alloy. Misaki didn’t normally come to the Main mess hall, but she had business with one of the engineers there. She had found him at one of the tables on the starboard side.
“There you are, you were supposed to fix my shower yesterday afternoon”
“Sorry, sorry, but you aren’t the only one with shower problems.”
“You were supposed to fix them yesterday, so why aren't they fixed?”
“I haven’t figured out where the problem is yet, but I found the cause. Some idiot flushed a large object down the pipes and it's backed the entire system up. It's just a matter of finding and removing it. We’ll have them fixed by tomorrow I promise,” replied the junior engineer. The problem with the showers on the deck as they were flooding, due to an inability to drain.
Before Misaki could reply the ship was shaken by a sudden jolt. She rushed out of the mess hall and headed to the bridge. When she got there she discovered that the jolt was the ship dropping out of warp.
Kaori was in the armory practicing her shot. She was currently using the LP-1230, a standard-issue particle pistol with two settings. She was on the range facing armed drones in a simulated battle. The drones were armed solely with a stun beam whose characteristics were similar to the LP-1230’s beam setting but with a variable shot speed and yield. This was to enable different difficulty settings, she had the drones set to the highest difficulty level. Which meant the drones stun cannon, had the same yield and shot speed as her own pistol. She dodged a beam by ducking into cover just before it fired and then returned fire with a burst from setting two. The drone registered the hits and shut down. She was just about to shoot a second drone when the ship suddenly shook. Thinking the ship was under fire she quickly ended the scenario and rushed to the bridge only to discover it was the ship dropping out of warp unexpectedly.
Eri was down in the port side fighter bay. She had finally found the time to take a look at the new X-1204 fighter. She found the fighter to be quite sleek and wondered what it would be like to fly one. The fighter had a long triangular main body. The fighter was highly aerodynamic with swept-back wings. The wings were tipped with a thick plate. Mounted against the plate on the top and bottom of the wing was the ship's particle cannons. In addition to the four light cannons, she had 4 missile launchers mounted on the underside of her wings with an embedded loader allowing her to reload each launcher once before she ran out of missiles.
Mounted under the cockpit were two micro torpedo launchers designed for rapid-fire and to use the micro variant of the Mark V Fusion torpedo. She approached the ship and entered the cockpit and was studying the controls when the ship shook suddenly. She quickly vaulted out of the fighter and headed to the bridge, as soon as she got there she noticed the stars weren’t streaking by as quickly. She quickly discovered the cause of the jolt was an emergency shutdown of the warp engines and with the Inertial Dampeners at minimal power, the crew was given a jolt from the sudden disappearance of the pressure wave the engines create.
Sanchez was eating her lunch in the officer's mess hall and enjoying a nice conversation with her former captain Mary Williams. The officer’s mess was located on deck 5, it was smaller than the other mess halls on the ship, which each deck, containing crew quarters, having its own mess hall. The port side of the compartment had a counter linked to the local galley, where officers ordered their food. The room was filled with anchored tables and chairs on concealed tracks. The tables were topped with actual wood and the chairs lightly padded and colored to match.
“What I don’t understand is why everyone else chose that machine. He isn’t even human anymore,” muttered Williams
“I don’t understand either, I thought loyalty to one's captain was important, but they chose to support his rise to captaincy instead,” replied Sanchez.
“Ah, I’m not all that worried. One day he will make a mistake and then we can put someone proper in charge” replied Williams.
It was at that moment that the ship suddenly shook. Williams’s drink suddenly spilled all over her and Sanchez’s plate slid toward and dumped its contents in her lap with some of it going down her shirt. The two cursed and then rushed to their quarters to change. Neither bothering to clean up their lunch or check to see what was happening.
Megumi was in the lounge with Captain Countryman. The two were playing a space combat strategy game. The game was created to emulate the combat of the current era and the previous wars depending on the player's initial settings. Megumi was currently losing. The two were also having a chat about ship operations.
“... seems to be working but the civilians keep complaining about the limits.”
“Well, the factory project is nearly finished. The initial tests seem promising by next week the civilians will have something to do and less reason to complain about the rationing.”
“That’s good to know,” replied Countryman as he moved his fleet to take Megumi’s last base.
“Unfortunately, it won’t do anything about the complaints coming into engineering, between kids sabotaging the plumbing with their toys and people trying to burn down the ship, we have our hands full,” replied Megumi while she desperately tried to protect her base.
“I only received a single report of someone setting fire to the ship, do you mean another one occurred?”, replied Countryman as he took Megumi’s base ending the game. Then the ship shook and the stars streaking by the forward viewport slowed down. The two rushed to a comm panel and contacted the bridge.
“Report,” said Countryman as soon as the second shift ops officer picked up.
“Engineering just initiated an emergency shutdown of all warp engines, sir,” replied the ops officer on the comm.
“What happened with the engines?” asked Countryman.
“I don’t know something about a coolant failure,” replied the officer.
“Have the other ships dropped out?” asked Countryman.
“Yes, sir, they are 400,000 Km ahead of us,” replied the shift officer.
“Inquire if they experienced engine trouble, and if they did have them send the data to warp engineering,” ordered Countryman.
“Aye sir” replied the officer
Then Countryman and Richards rushed to Warp Engineering. Warp Engineering was located on J deck. The chamber was dominated by two massive dual-core antimatter reactors that served as the ship's primary power source. The room was filled with equipment and drive components for the warp engines. Along with banks of monitors for monitoring and operating the warp engines.
“What happened with the engines?” inquired Countryman as soon as he entered the room.
“The main port engine stopped transferring energy correctly so we switched to the backup engine, but it started to overheat which caused the spatial field generators to lose cohesion forcing the system to shut down,” replied the on-duty officer
“Let’s see the engine monitoring data,” asked Richards
Moments later the data on the engines was brought up both Countryman and Megumi looked at the data. It took Countryman a few moments to diagnose that the main engine didn’t suffer a power transfer failure, but suffered an energy drain.
“This is no power transfer failure, but a power loss in the primary spatial field generator,” remarked Countryman
“The engine monitors are dotted with red lights, whatever happened seems to have damaged half the components of the main engine and it looks like it damaged the coolant system,” commented Megumi
“Let’s take a direct look at the engines, they should cool enough for an inspection in two hours.”
“I agree,” replied Megumi
Two hours later Countryman and Megumi found themselves entering the port nacelle. They passed the forward particle sub-engine pair and then headed aft down the catwalk towards the warp engines which were toward the center of the nacelle. As they approached the main engine in section 55 the damage to the surrounding area was immediately apparent.
“Well looks like we found the cause of both problems,” said Countryman.
Megumi moved to the damaged engine and looked inside before replying, “Looks like one of the plasma conduits ruptured and the warp plasma escaped and burned a hole through multiple components and damaged the coolant system, it will take a couple days to fix.”
Looking at the conduit Countryman said, “While we're at it we should beef the conduit up and run an investigation on why it failed.”
“Agreed,” replied Megumi.
It took two days to fix the conduit and modify it and its twin to prevent a repeat of a failure of this type. By the time the engines were fixed the other ships had returned to their original relative positions. As the engines were powering up, Megumi finally asked a question that had been bugging her for a while.
“Are you my father?” asked Megumi.
“I wouldn’t know, but your mother seemed to think so,” replied Countryman.
“Can we find out?” asked Megumi.
“Yes, my nanites can run the test without bugging the medical staff,” replied Countryman.
They ran the test two hours later, but kept the results to themselves. After running the test they got a call about the factory project. Both then headed down to deck 193 and entered a room that had previously been an incomplete shipboard factory. The room had been filled with boxes full of industrial equipment and half-built machines. The room was now filled with industrial equipment capable of breaking down salvaged scrap or processing ore and turning it into anything the ship may need, for now, they were planning on melting down and compressing the scrap that was filling some of the cargo bays into space-efficient cubes. The workers in the room gave them a demonstration of the newly operational factories. The factories were functioning as intended and were online ahead of schedule. A total of eight such factories were on decks 193 and 194 all of which were now operational and ready for business.
“Finally I don’t have to worry about running out of spare parts, for a while longer now.”
“We still need to figure out a way to get new materials other than salvaging destroyed ships, if this turns into an extended search,” replied Countryman.
“True but if we could figure out a method of orbital mining could solve the problem, asteroid mining could work as well. Unfortunately, we didn’t find any asteroid mining equipment in a working condition back at mining sector 23. but with these shipboard factories we can make some,” replied Megumi
“Unfortunately stowage may present a problem, but we can solve that problem later, for now, we need to break down and compress all the scrap metal taking up space in our cargo bays, get as many people as you can on it,” ordered Countryman pleased that the factories were ready ahead of schedule.
“Aye sir” replied Megumi
As Countryman was heading up to the upper decks he was intercepted by Everson, one of the commanders for the ship's marine complement.
“How can I help you?” asked Countryman.
“My men are bored, I was hoping you could approve converting one of the practice ranges down here into a recreational facility to help improve morale,” asked Everson
“A reasonable request, I will allow it just don’t take too much time from the engineering staff,” replied Countryman.
“Wasn’t planning on it, Some of my men are field engineers and the labor shouldn’t require any significant changes to the ship so I thought my men can do the work”
“Well before they start to have them draw the plans up and present them to engineering for approval,” ordered Countryman.
“Aye, sir,” acknowledged Everson.
After that Countryman headed up to the bridge, the rest of the day proved uneventful. Two days later they found some debris, which led them to drop out of warp to investigate. The debris turned out to be an old auxiliary power module, some engine parts and parts of a ship’s outer hull from Earth. The ship it belonged to had been forced to eject the module because it was leaking radiation. It took a couple of hours but they were able to salvage the module. Analysis of the debris indicated an accident aboard ship had damaged the module and caused a hull breach which had scattered the debris across a few hundred thousand kilometers. They would have missed the field entirely if it wasn’t for the unusual spike in radiation leading the on-duty science officer to scan the area. A long-range scan failed to locate the ship the debris originally belonged to.
After resuming their course engineering spent a few days carefully disassembling and storing the parts of the power module as it was a good source of spare parts, but there was no point in repairing the module since the Enterprise had no fission power plants. As they were working on the module they got the proposed rec room plans and approved them. The Rec room took several days to build.
The debris, however, proved to be a hot topic. Over the next few days, most of the ship’s occupants were discussing the debris found and theories about what happened to the ship it had belonged to abounded everywhere. Some more elaborate and ridiculous than the next. Of course like any rumor these rumors, dispersed when something more interesting happened. In this case, the more interesting thing was when a young couple was caught going at it in one of the science labs. The lab was set up for weapons research, mostly for particle cannons. Not being the wisest place for intercourse, it wasn’t long before the whole ship was talking about it.
Countryman was walking down the corridor and passed a couple of crewmen talking about the latest rumor on his way to one of the sub rooms for main engineering. Megumi apparently had something she wanted to show him. It was something about the month’s engine efficiency chart, but she want to show him in private first before it was released to the council. He made one last turn before coming to a door and then he keyed the access panel before entering the room. The room was filled with monitors for one of the five main engines, and had several lockers full of tools on one wall. Megumi was sitting in front of one of the monitors when he came in.
“Ah, captain I thought you would like to see, the data. We haven’t had an opportunity to see how warp fields and our pulse wave engines interact long term before so come take a look at this,” said Megumi. Countryman approached an looked at the charts the data was intriguing. Megumi than began to explain the readings and shift between a few charts.
“As you can see here, engine efficiency is ten percent above our predictions. We are actually using less energy at warp than our previous predictions indicated. Which means we can actually cut our power output a little more than we thought,” said Megumi.
“Now that does sound interesting, any idea why?” asked Countryman. Megumi smiled and looked up.
“I spent last analyzing the data, most of it is still in my quarters. It seems our warp field is affecting our pulse wave engines, reducing the energy needed to produce thrust,” replied Megumi.
“That sounds interesting, think the effect can be replicated on sublight?” asked Countryman hoping for more efficient engines. Which would be quite helpful.
“Yes, I have some of the details worked out in my quarters. It may take a while to work out the rest though. Want to come see?” asked Misaki. Countryman said “ sure,” and followed her out the room and to her quarters. Which triggered an interesting rumor that was talked about for the next several weeks.
Later that week, a young woman from the Hydroponics department came to Countryman’s office with a proposal. She was cute, and like every member in the department, her uniform was covered with stains.
“Sir, I was wonder if we could use the gene bank we recovered to clone some livestock. A lot of the civilians have been complaining about a lack of meat,”
“Unfortunately as much as I want to say yes we can’t. As things stand we just can’t afford to maintain a livestock population and even if we could we have nowhere to put it. We just don’t have the space. We will just have to make do with fish and vegetables for now. I do have plans being made for a dedicated agricultural ship. That way we can have livestock, if ever get the materials needed to build said ship,” replied Countryman. The girl said she understood with some clear disappointment, before quietly leaving the office. The rest of the trip to Alpha Centauri was fairly uneventful.
