Fire On High (Star Trek: The Next Generation) by David Peter

Author:David, Peter [David, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Pocket Books/Star Trek
Published: 2002-08-04T04:00:00+00:00

IX

SOLETA ANDBURGOYNE STUDIED the readouts from the matter-antimatter reactor assembly as the Excalibur moved through space at warp three. "You see?" Burgoyne said, noting the energy spikes. "There it is again. Some sort of rhythmic pulse."

"And you seriously believe it could be a biologic?" Soleta asked. "That seems rather far-fetched, Chief."

"More far-fetched than a gigantic flaming bird smashing apart a planet?"

"No. I will grant you that. And the theory," she said, looking over the case history of the problem, "is that somehow it's becoming energized whenever we use the warp engines."

"That is essentially correct."

Soleta stepped away from the consoles and looked at the massive matter-antimatter reactor assembly. The M-ARA stood ten decks tall, with the matter reactant injector at the top and the antimatter reactant injector at the bottom. The core of the reactor was a series of doughnut-shaped pressure vessel toroids, surrounded by phase adjustment coils and coming together in the dilithium housing and reaction chamber in the middle. The crackling energy of ionized gas, hotter than the sun, pulsed within.

"Something existing in that?" Soleta said in wonderment. "Something feeding off it?" She weighed the situation for a moment, and then said, "Well, there is one way I can think of to test it."

"That being… ?"

"Well, when an infant is feeding at its mother's bosom, if you remove the food source, you get a reaction. The child demands to know where its food source is."

"You're not suggesting shutting down the engines cold."

"It shouldn't be necessary. We can scale the engines down and very likely generate the same reaction."

"Yessss," Burgoyne said slowly, stroking hir chin and studying the reactor core thoughtfully. "Yes, we could. And I'll have my people running scans all over the M-ARA to see if they can localize some sort of anomaly. It might very well stand out against the lessening energy and, at the very least, make its presence known. While we're at it, we can run a PPT—a pressure port test—at either end of the assembly. I'm worried that damage might have been done to the port seals during all these energy spikes. Besides, with the ports open, we'll have an easier time running scans to see what, if anything is in there, and we can only run PPTs when we're operating the engines at a fraction of normal capacity."

"Won't you have to remove the magnetic fields in order to do that?" Soleta said, sounding a bit concerned. "We could flood the entire engine room with radiation."

"No danger of that. We'll put a temporary containment patch on it. That'll be more than enough to hold everything in place. Only problem is," s/he said thoughtfully, "we won't be able to run at warp speed. Impulse will have to do."

"Do you think it wise to delay?"

Burgoyne shook hir head. "Something is going on in my engines. The sooner we know what, the better off we'll be."

"All right," Soleta said in a no-nonsense tone. "I'll get the necessary clearances from the captain. We'll be a bit late for our rendezvous with the Seidman, but that's hardly a matter of extreme concern.

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