A Core Problem

Posted on Sat Oct 8th, 2016 @ 6:16pm by

594 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: Episode 93 - Warrior VS Warrior
Location: Engineering Section
Timeline: MD2 1150

ON:

There were usually good news and bad news day. This one was no exception so far.
The good news had been the Romulan ships not needing any dilithium supplies in their repairs. Even in an age of re-crystallisation, one still needed an originally mined one; there was no replication, much like latinum. Luckily, their ships had no need of having them replaced should it be lost.
Unfortunately the bad news is what passed for their matter/antimatter intermix chamber couldn't be replaced at all. And it was leaking.

Quantum fractures to be exact. Nothing dangerous in the short term. In fact, it would be a good standard Earth year before it started to go critical, more fights not withstanding.
Damned if he'd have caught it had he not remembered what emissions they were using, and hadn't read it as more background radiation. Heck he had to run the scan five times with the ships engineers to make sure it wasn't a fluke.

Normally he'd just ask the ships Chief Engineer to take the ship offline and replicate a new containment device. But again, you couldn't just turn off a quantum singularity device. They were known to keep running even on wrecks of Warbirds, albeit with deadly results for anyone around it. The price of power, one might say.
The thing to do was obviously eject their core in as empty a part of space as possible. But with no singularity cores on hand to replace, it wasn't going to help them get moving.

All he could really do, and not jeopardise anyones safety was to report the problem and let the Romulans handle it when they were safely back near their own repair yards. Assuming they did. Who knew what safety standards they had. But that didn't mean he couldn't at least attempt a 'patch' of sorts.

400's own engineers were rather good at their jobs. Came with working on such a huge station and multiple ships at once. A nightmare admittedly, but as varied as one could get. Isen assigned a small team to the situation. As much as some might be into micro-management, that was never his style. Even engineers needed to go outside the by-the-numbers approach. How else were new discoveries in technology made?
Lieutenant Heron had the most experience with both containment fields and structural bracings, so Isen put him charge of it.

Of course he had to get permission for the Romulan ship to get out of the station to get some distance. Just in case.
But, Isen was getting ahead of himself. First Heron was going to run simulations once he came up with ideas. And that could take a while as it was.

Rubbing his face, Isen went into Solomon's office. He didn't dare go to sit at his desk, instead taking a seat across from it, like he had yesterday.
All of that had just been one item on a list longer than the starbase was tall. And it was barely midday, on the stations chrono.

He called up to ops and reported in his plan, so they could be made aware of it.
At that point he was notified that the Yorktown was returning and with it commander Solomon.

Smiling a tad he got up and vacated the office, still not content to be in someone else's role. It would be good to have the person he was supposed to be working for back in the 'hot seat', as it were. Not that there was much sitting to do most of the time.

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