Touring the Facilities

Posted on Tue Mar 22, 2022 @ 4:07am by Lieutenant Commander Elli-Navine & Commander Carl Hedley

Mission: S2 M1 Stellarcide
Location: Obsidian Command, Main Engineering

"Welcome to Engineering!" Elli-Navine practically sprang around the center planning table as she met the first officer at the door. "Sorry. I'm excited. We don't get a lot of visitors in the Engine Room. Usually all the guests and big wigs head straight for the bridge, or the conference rooms, or the lounge."

With a warm smile on his face at the exuberant welcome, Carl stepped in and offered a hand. "No, no need to apologise. It's encouraging to see you so excited about showing off your ship, and I'm grateful for the warm welcome! I've always thought it was important to get to know your ship. Sure, the bridge is important, but without Engineering there wouldn't be a ship at all. As for conference rooms and lounges... Once you've seen one, you've seen them all, and I saw quite enough of them working with diplomats that they've lost a lot of their charm."

She shook his hand and waved away his last statement. "Oh well, you bring all the charm back when you enter anyway. Er..." she paused, thinking for a moment that it might have sounded a little over the top.

No stranger to avoiding awkwardness, Carl took the comment in stride and, without missing a beat, replied, "Oh, I don't know. I always find they're missing a certain liveliness which Engineering seems to have in spades."

Elli opted for moving on before the awkward completely set in. "Let's see the warp core!" It was huge, and right there thrumming away in their ears. Still holding the hand she'd been shaking, she basically just wheeled herself and Carl around on their heels, turning in the longer, less convenient direction before practically spinning completely back where they had begun. "Ah, there she is!" Elli motioned with one open hand and happy-sighed like the proud mama she was. "She's been refit more than a coupla times. But!" Elli slapped the side of a display. "She's a classic. Goin' on eighty, the old girl. These Excelsiors are fleet work horses, and gorgeous to boot."

Quite happy to be wheeled around, and not at all opposed to taking the scenic route, his eyes followed her gaze with expressive interest. "She certainly is a fine piece of reactor. I've heard good things about Excelsiors, and so far she hasn't disappointed. She's certainly pretty spry for her age, and there's something to be said for the classics. You get a lovely air of gravitas that newer ships just can't match."

Elli pulled up the operating monitor on the reactor and sighed as the flow rates and output measures ticked along. "She's got a good good heart."

Despite his very cursory knowledge of engineering, it was clear even to Carl that the reactor was in excellent shape, and he nodded. "She does. But I can't help but feel that after all the scrapes she's been through, that's at least as much due to the surgeon taking care of her as it is to her."

Elli blushed with pride before remembering herself. "You know we picked up an engine upgrade to the Nacelles from the Protectorate. They're kinda these big teardrop shaped focusers." She tapped the display and it zoomed over the plasma conduits until arriving at the port nacelle and illustrating the current status of the engine skate. The long warp repulsor now had a feature unit that was indeed tear shaped. "last time we were in port, Obsidian Command took measurements and sent them back to the Fleetyards for reverse engineering design. I hope they come back with a report soon, in case one gets damaged beyond repair. Not sure how to replace them and the nacelles are always just dangling out there in a firefight, being weak points, structurally speaking."

"Really?" He asked, eyeing the components in question. "Well, all I can say is good luck to them. I can't say I'm much of a physicist, but it looked to me like they were about as far ahead of us as we are ahead of your average gnat, technologically speaking. Is there even a possibility they can understand how those things work without a few more decades or centuries of technological advancement?"

"I... doubt the Protectorate would give us terribly more than we can manage, or anything that would be too dangerous an advancement. I think it's kind of like when we come across early warp civilizations and manage technology exposure. As advanced as they are, the Protectorate actually sprang out of the ideals of the Federation. Their civilization began as an offshoot of our own, just lost a couple of hundred thousand years in the past. It's a bit of a mindbender, really."

After a brief pause spent contemplating the sombre thought, he chuckled and added, "I can take a hint, anyway... I'll try and make sure the next people who try and blow us up don't aim at the engines. I'm sure I can get them to shoot something less important. After all, we've got so many phaser banks, we can afford to lose a couple."

"Thanks. I'm sure Scott will appreciate that," she teased.

"I'm sure he will, but I'm the XO! It's practically my job to make sure the senior officers get a good challenge every now and then. You're all just so incessantly competent that I'm having to think about extreme measures to even make you blink," He replied, mischievously.

"Oh!" She hopped up sharply as if something bit her.

Carl jumped ever so slightly in surprise. "What is it?" He asked, scanning the place for the source of Elli's apparent discomfort.

"Nothing, I just remembered!" She started walking around the other side of the room, expecting Carl would catch up as she eagerly climbed a set of access stairs into a cat walk access behind and beyond the reactor. "The Protectorate. They also gifted us a Quantum Entanglement Communicator." She motioned for him to hurry along, as if she were a kid showing off a treehouse in the woods, and then came to a stop in front of a complicated array of transparently encased circuitry. "One end is here—" she punched a coded series of release keys and several of the components first withdrew, then shuffled and exchanged with an interior unit that slid out with a hiss of decompression, revealing a tray that housed an elegantly curved capsule with a hermetically sealed liquid "seed" slightly off center within. "It's linked with our communications array, and the other half is with them, in the Great Attractor. It works instantaneously and is completely untraceable, which is really important because we have to keep their location, and ours, a secret from their enemies, the Tenzim, at all times," she said kind with great intensity.

Carl did indeed catch up, though he was certainly slightly bemused by the Engineer's sudden and mysterious revelation. Still, he clambered up behind her, examining the unusual device with clear interest. "Fascinating. I'm no expert, but I was under the impression that quantum entanglement wasn't any use for communication. Something about... Information not being able to go faster than the speed of light? If it works it works, though, and I can see how untraceable communication would be good for them, I think. I'm still a little unclear on that whole situation... I should probably have a bit of a peruse of the logs and get my head around it, really."

"That's the beauty of it! The message doesn't have to travel. It's like a couple of tin cans without the string, and they still share the same state. I did manage to reverse engineer the quantum entanglement communication device and I prototyped an additional one of our own that links us to Obsidian Command's array. It's completely lossless and not reliant on subspace."

"You did? Impressive work. Not that I expect any less of you by now, of course, but even so... Well, maybe there is hope for the rest of their technology, then. I suppose we'll just have to wait and see.

"Do you want to see the computer core?"

"I want to see everything."

"Really?" Elli started thinking about everything she was dying to share.

A brief pause, then, correcting himself with a slight cock of his head to one side, "Within reason. I don't want to make you crawl about in tubes for hours to show me some obscure system, but you know what I mean."

Her eyes got big "If you did want to crawl through some Jeffries Tubes, there's a weird spot on deck eleven, where a shunt from one of the refits left a big gap in an old plasma compression chamber, and we found all this old houseware and a bedroll and stuff... we think there was once a vagabond stowaway aboard! like twenty or thirty years ago."

"Now I think I do want to do a bit of crawling around. I love a mystery, and you've got me curious. Have you ever tried to find out who they were or what happened to them?"

"We have a few theories that have become a kind of lore. But we don't know for certain."

"Hmm... You know, I bet there's archived security footage somewhere... If not on the Potemkin, then in some Starfleet computer. It might be fun to try and find it, do a bit of sleuthing back in time. What do you think?"

"I think that sounds like fun." Elli agreed. "Ooh! Wanna know a secret?" Elli grabbed Carl by both hands and looked like she could barely contain herself.

He couldn't help but start back a little when presented with such boundless energy, but gathered himself quickly and grinned. "Well, now I know there is a secret, how could I possibly say no?"

She was practically bouncing. "There's a spot where the gravity plates cancel each other out and if you jump at just the right moment in turbo lift five, you float!"

"There is, is there?" The XO replied, a glint in his eye. "I probably ought to be telling you to fix that, but that would probably ruin the laid-back, fun-loving XO reputation I've done so well establishing. I'll just make sure the officer part of my brain forgets all about it

"Come on, I'll show you!" Elli yoinked Carl by the hand.

"Oh, absolutely! I think we've covered all of the things here I really wanted to see, so lead the way!"