Fighter

After a quick glance around the room, O'Conner turned to the crew. "We know what we need to do, so let's get to it."

And with that O'Conner stood up and when to Sangliar. "Yes, what of this secret fighter? You didn't break it yet did you?" He said with a smile.

Niomo nodded to the Commander, "Lieutenant Commander Niomo Lire, sir. New Technology is made to be broken. Hopefully we will be able to see how she ticks."

"Aye, Sir, if you'll follow me," Sangliar said succinctly. The Tellarite was all business and he wanted to get the information to the Engineer as quickly as possible without the usual pleasantries associated with meeting a new officer.

He led whomever would follow to the nearest turbolift and said, "Shuttle Bay 23," which sent them hurtling down ninety decks through the Starbase to the desired location. Fortunately, the turbolift's complex mapping system sent them to a horizontal tube to take them a quarter of a way around the circular base, and outward such that they would have a minimal walk across the kilometer-wide deck from their departure point.

They then entered the shuttlebay which had several engineering officers and crewmen walking back and forth between some of the older shuttles and speaking in low but intense voices and occasionally shouting out an order or recommendation. It made the whole bay hum with mixed voices like an old Earth market bazaar.

In the far corner was a compartment usually used by the base to keep illicit cargo obtained by security teams that regularly search the contents of civilian cargo ships that are using the base for their transactions. When they approached the compartment , Sangliar keyed in some commands near the door and said, "Authorization Sangliar Alpha-two-niner-Gamma" and the door slid open to reveal a sizeable room with various boxes shoved hurriedly to the side so that the fighter could be piloted in through a large opening on the other side from which they entered.

The fighter was a small craft compared to most similar vessels, even a Maquis raider. It had room for one pilot only. It was slender but longer than a Type-9 shuttle. Two men were on top with a panel open to grant access to the engine beneath and were carefully diassembling certain parts and laying them carefully on an antigrav lift beside them. A third was below, waiting for the necessity to take command of the lift in order to move the parts aside on the ground where they had them all assembled in groups based on their function. They nodded to Sangliar when they saw him, and simply went back to their work. They knew of his distaste for pleasantries and figured they would not be introduced to the other engineer standing beside him... at least not yet.

"We're carefully reverse engineering the thing," he said to Niomo, "so feel free to lend your assistance if you have the opportunity. All parts and connections are being meticulously mapped out." He gestured for Niomo's PADD and with a few swipes of his fingers he instantly brought up all the specs that the engineers had documented so far.

He handed the PADD back to Niomo. "The main problem with being inside the Anomaly is its affect on matter and antimatter. Atomic and subatomic reactions increase exponentially causing the warp core to quickly move toward a cascade failure. Impulse engines and thrusters are affected as well. Anything reacting with the environment will be affected. In fact, the only thing keeping our atoms from being torn apart instantly is the ship's shields. Therefore the only way to travel through is to brute force your way through the entry point and rely on inertia to carry you through to the other side. Slowing down, stopping, starting from a stopped state, and turning are all impossible. If your ship gets stopped for any reason, the only way known to get out is what the Artemis did: to use the tractor beam to collect a series of debris to make a wall and then fire a salvo of torpedoes into it in close enough proximity to cause the force of the explosion to propel your ship outward. That, of course, comes with its own set of problems."

"Something about this ship allows the impulse engines to function at least for a short time. We also found this graviton generator, which perhaps would allow for the ability to slingshot around asteroids, debris, and other objects within the anomaly," he added, pointing to the part. "This may be why the ship was built to be so small."

Niomo thought about what the engineer said. It was difficult to comprehend the fact that a small ship could somehow get around the anomaly without a problem, but larger ships with more sophisticated equipment were destroyed. "Does the ship have a warp core? Where is it getting it's power from? From what I briefly read during the briefing, it seems as though everything needs to be running on battery power. Maybe this grav generator is somehow making a Hampster Wheel that can recharge the batteries when they get low. Of course, the generator itself needs power, so it creates a paradox. However, using the batteries' original power as a source, it would be possible."

The Tellarite nodded. "It has a micro-warp core that has a maximum of Warp 6, but I doubt that's how they're navigating the anomaly. More than likely the key is in the impulse drive."

"Hmmm. Possible. What have your boys found so far?" Niomo asked.

"Not much, Sir, in regards to the impulse engines," Sangliar responded. "I was hoping you and the other Engineers could take a look."

"Very well." Niomo nodded. "I suggest the first thing we look into is how the engines were getting power. If we can figure out a way to supply our impulse engines with power, even for a limited time, that does not drain our reserve batteries...Well, that would be a fantastic discovery."

"Right you are, Sir," Sangliar said, handing him a hypospanner. "Let's get to work then."

The pair focused primarily on the impulse engine, examining anything that looked out of the ordinary. It was clear that the Horizon's Children had some very good designers and mechanics working on the thing. It looked as well built and designed as anything Starfleet could put together, and thinking about it, the Tellarite presumed that they probably were previous Starfleet officers.

Then, seeing something interesting, Sangliar crawled deeper behind the engine so much that his entire short frame almost disappeared within the belly of the ship. A small bioneural circuit chip was sectioned off with just a few EPS conduits running between it and the engine. It was near a separate dedicated power conversion module and he noticed a switch that had a manual override. Reaching in with his left hand, he triggered the manual override and grunted with shock as a forcefield appeared just inches from his face. Jumping back, he gathered his wits quickly from the shock and motioned to the small enclosed area. It appeared to section of the circuitry and power conversion module and actually release the couplings to the engine to section the whole thing off inside.

After recovering from the initial shock of almost having his nose surgically removed from his face, Sangliar turned to the more experience Engineer. "Sir, do you think?... it is like a floodgate," he said, trying to explain his thoughts. "Protect the power source with a forcefield just like the Artemis had to do with the Warp Core. But then once a certain amount of power has built up, release the forcefield and allow it to feed the Impulse Engines for a short burst. Perhaps that's why they need the graviton generator, to supplement their way through the asteroids and debris and allow for navigation through quick slingshot calculations when the engine is off and protected."

Niomo shook his head as he had been daydreaming over the schematics. "Sorry about that. Uh...your theory is sound, but I was under the impression that we needed to have our warp cores deactivated completely. Unless......could it be possible that that force field isn't like a standard field? What if their generator has been modified to deploy a metapahsic shield. Like a shield within a shield. It would provide a stronger resistance to the anomaly and possibly allow a warp core to remain on line, generating a small amount of power." He put a finger to his forehead. "It still doesn't make sense."

"Oh, I doubt they're using the warp core," Sangliar responded. "The interior of the Anomaly seems to be quite small in fact, so the warp core is absolutely unnecessary anyway."

O'Conner had been quietly watching the two work, he smiled to himself as it clicked in his mind. The cultists were using a very basic binary control scheme. He had read about this before on other projects, most notably the ancient V1 rocket. A binary motor only has two modes on or off, if the crews were to run the cores like this they could turn the off the cores before they started to overload, allowing the cores to generate medium amount of power... in theory.

After getting a bit lost in his own mind he finally chimed in. "True a warp field would be useless but a reinforced binary pulsing warp core would be able to maintain enough energy in the EPS grid to all the graviton generator to create a shell of gravitons."

As he contained he moved to examine the vessel's thrusters. "This should allow for normal impulse operations. With a few modifications we could do this on a larger scale though I wouldn't suggest running other systems on a pulsing warp core. I would suggest that we would run everything else on batteries, as we wouldn't have time to properly determine the maximum frequency we can safety run a core."

Niomo nodded in agreement. "Good thinking, Commander. But I don't think that is how this fighter operated. He tapped on his PADD and brought up the adjusted schematics of the ship, with the power conversion module that Sangliar found. "Look. This looks more like a fusion reactor than a warp core. Which makes sense. Instead of risking a warp core breach, they just worked around it; using something that the anomaly wouldn't affect. Additionally, because most of our ships are larger than this fighter, we probably would be able to set up larger, or multiple versions. We should easily be able to supply us with enough power to recreate this "floodgate" to give us impulse at minimum."

Niomo looked at the fighter's engines, trying to see if there was anything different about them. "That being said, I do agree that everything else should be run on batteries. Though, we'd be poor engineers if we couldn't at least present a mostly dangerous plan to run the ships off the reactors."

Looking to Sangliar he asked simply, "Besides the engery generation and gravitron generator, is there anything different about this ship than ours? Different metals? Types of energy used or outputted?"

"Not that we've found yet, Sir," Sangliar replied, in a similarly matter-of-fact manner. "I think we have come up with a best case theory. Let's run some simulations. The Starbase computer should have parameters similar to the ones recorded in the Azimuth Horizon, albeit with some manual tweaking by me, since they tend to break the known laws of physics."

Sangliar moved to a display on the side of the cargo bay which interfaced with the central computer. "Computer, begin a simulation; Environment: Azimuth Horizon Sangliar One."

He looked at Lieutenant Commander Lire and said, "Let's start off small, shall we?"

"Computer, add the USS McKenzie to the environment," Sangliar continued. "Initial velocity zero. Warp core state is off, with a level 10 forcefield erected around it."

"Now comes the fun part," he added gruffly. If a Tellarite could smile he would have at that point. The possibility of working on new engineering cases and designs was what he lived for. "Computer, how many redundant deuterium reactors does the McKenzie have?"

"The USS McKenzie has one redundant deuterium reactor," the computer said in reply.

"Add four more, take two offline, and use the other four in a repeating cycle, overlapping each cycle by twenty-five percent." It was similar to the way ancient Earth pistons operated. Each cylindar contained a piston that moved up and down, but in all vehicles, their movement was staggered. Most four-cylindar vehicles had pairs moving in tandem, but ocasionally the places where they attached to the rod would be staggered in quarters, as these reactors would be. This was especially the case on the eight-cylindar ones.

"Activity time of cycle required," the computer commanded of the Tellarite Engineer.

"Let's say five minutes," Sangliar responded. It must have been at least that long until the Artemis had realized their predicament and shut off the engines.

"Erect a forcefield around each reactor and include a physical switch for the EPS conduit such that it will retract as the forcefield is raised. Cycle the forcefields on as the reactor is turned off. Modify the deflector to create a graviton generator that will be aimed at each nearest asteroid or large debris the McKenzie encounters. Simulate the success rate of the McKenzie's escape from the Azimuth Horizon using these parameters as well as for differentials in the cycle timing and number of reactors."

Since it would take a while, before he told the computer to begin processing, he waited for any input from the others in case he had missed a detail.

As Sangliar looked at the other engineers, Niomo just nodded. "Look's good to me. We can't find out what's wrong until we break something. And that something, luckily, is a computer program; not a real ship."

O'Conner had hope that the Artemis wouldn't need any debris as he figured and anomaly in the middle of nowhere was unlikely have a lot of debris, but he trusted the telleriate and his engineering people. "Let's see it."

"Computer, process the simulation," Sangliar said, and then watched as the data was processed and a holographic projection of the USS McKenzie was seen beginning to move through and make a path around several large asteroids that had been pulled into the Anomaly. It plotted its course out and continued to use the bursts of the impulse engines and various calculations around the asteroids to slingshot its way through turns. The scenario and others were played out using the different defined parameters until Sangliar said, "Disable visual respresentation," at which point the computer was able to process each of the hundreds of iterations at full speed.

"Simulation complete," the female voice of the computer stated, and the results were displayed in front of them. With more redundant reactors or higher cycle times the damage was greater, but too few or too short of a cycle and the ship didn't receive enough power to make it through. It displayed the most ideal setup although several different combinations resulted in success.

Sangliar said finally, "Computer, run the same simulation for the other four ships and send all five results to the Captain, XO, and Chief Engineer of each."

Satisfied, he turned and motioned to the officers who had accompanied him. "I'm going to keep looking over this thing, but you might want to consider returning to your ships. I'll be sure to pass on anything else I find."

Niomo said, "Thanks for all your hard work Marksus. Let's hope nothing drastic changes in the specific simulations. Just remember that the Alsea will by flying in MAVM formation. That's 3 ships with smaller engines than 1." He thanked the other engineers before tapping his comm badge.

"Alsea, one to beam up directly to Engineering."

Niomo dematerialized and left Starbase 10.

"Let's hope this works in real life. Would hate to have to come back and haunt you." O'Conner jabbed at the Telleraite as he left the cargobay the old fashion way.