[snip]

The Warp Core was definitely dark as were the consoles in the Main Engineering area.

In the absence of new orders, George followed Joe the barman down the Jefferies tube and back to Engineering. He tried to avoid Joe as he landed awkwardly himself. George was keen to find out what his colleagues in Engineering had been doing all this time and whether or not they had solved the problem.

” Ah , George my man!” Joe spoke as he clumsily handed over the engineering tricorder to George. ” Here you go Engineer George. Extra power cell and a tricorder. I think we should start at the front and work back what do you think? You know this could be some game of all of us losing our minds together. So, let’s take this beast’s temperature. Joe walked over and stood, looking down into the dark maw where the matter anti matter core should in theory be. Making a bit of noise and making at least a bit of heat.

The tricorder would turn on but unfortunately as it only scanned with signals, it would not scan. They could open things up with tools that were battery operated though and look at things.

There was an urgent and angry high-pitched animal vocalisation, and something small and dark ran across Engineering in front of them. It headed for the doors, which had stopped working, only half open, and escaped through the gap.

Joe promptly jumped into the air thinking that surely the warp core had exploded in his face. Finally, the thing decides to work as I’ve got my face in it!” He thought.

Turning he yelled as the cat was escaping out of engineering. ” You, felonious feline you! If you show your furry fuzzy carcass again and I’ll toss you into the warp core to check the warp core temperature!”

Joe scratched his head. ” Well, this makes no sense George. Taking a temp is a passive thing. The temperature should come to us. ” Well maybe something is completely stopping any air flow. Maybe we got a clog of sort George? Maybe we need to give the old girl a good cleaning what do you think? It’s a darn crazy thing when passive things can’t be measured let me tell you. So, you want to climb in there and see if we can get vaporized George? I know I have nothing better to do at the moment.”

Joe just looked at the silent George and shook his head as he wondered why him. A bartender was crawling into something which could turn him into iddy bits which would be too iddy or biddy to even be registered anywhere. He sighed then and said to himself. ” Yes, I remember. Miri. Adam should never have let that spare rib go.”

Joe gathered more tools than what he thought he would need. But you never did know. Just when you thought you might need a good slippery whosit . You wouldn’t have it. The thing would be somewhere else being used as a paperweight. Joe got to the top and tried the door to the catwalk there. He grumbled as he looked around for the interlock. As he popped it open, he asked Silent George. ” So, George you have a girlfriend or a wife or anything?” Joe then handed George the bundle of tools to carry as they started walking down the catwalk.

“Ay have ayy gerl bak home, Atlanta is huurr name,” George replied.

What George really couldn’t understand was where all the other Engineers had got to and why there was no one in Engineering. He thought his colleagues would have already begun this work, especially considering they were all going to die otherwise.

“We done had bettuurr do this here!” George replied to Joe’s earlier question. They had to fix the ship if no one else was going to, and if he never saw Atlanta again, well, ‘C’est la vie’ as they said down in New Orleans. He took the bundle of tools and carried them as he followed Joe down the catwalk towards the silent Warp Core. They should be okay, as long as it didn’t suddenly spring into life again.

There was one more bulkhead door to go before they would be in the same chamber as the matter -antimatter chamber. ” So, George.” Joe began, “everyone keeps chattering on about some sort of thing that seems to be around us in us or just creeping around us that keeps stopping things. No one knows what it is. It’s cause, its shape is it living? Can it be measured? Have you heard anything more? All I know really is that it’s a thing that turns everything off.” Joe then used the interlock on the door and as he did he said over his shoulder to George.” Let’s pull that Sonic driver out of the bag George. Hook it up to put us up a bit of a sonic field around the whole works. ” Joe looked at the uncertain hangdog look on George’s face and knew that if he were in the boy’s place he’d feel the same way. ” Bah don’t worry George, ” Joe said with a laugh. ” One day after you get your medal and your leave you can sit around the table and tell your girl Atlanta how you saved the day.”

“Some kaand ov dampening field would be my here guess?” George replied. “Maybe at thay …err nuculaar level?”

Joe considered George and smiled. ” By Golly George one day I can see it now. You a gray-haired old grandfather. Telling your family of about twenty or so of all your adventures. And them all sitting around eating up all your words that they might tell others. You know the types . Those with normal and boring fathers and grandfathers.”

Joe rubbed his forehead a bit as he considering what they were about to do. Well the sonic tool might well do the job. ” Joe said absently. But using sonic waves around that core is like getting an elephant to stand on tip toe on the head of a pin. Not that it can’t be done mind you but let’s be careful just the same. So, let’s start the waves out at the low end of the scale and bring them up slowly, okay?” Joe took a deep breath, clapped George on the shoulder and said,” Well let’s get that gadget going George and see if we can’t make you an Admiral.”

George was certainly a man of little words. Joe had that right. However, at the moment he was still flummoxed about where all the other engineers were… you know, the engineers that usually sat at that big control panel and monitored the Drive, and the senior engineers who managed them. They ought to be doing this work, rather than a multitronic communications engineer and a barman who used to work in security. And this was occupying his mind more than it should be, so he hadn’t really thought about the danger of what they were actually doing here, or of service medals, or of one day becoming an Admiral! When Joe clapped him on the shoulders, that was a bit of a wake up call to George, and brought him back to focus on the job at hand.

“Yup!” George replied, “Ay! We gotta git crackin’ wi that thay …err gadget! And fix this here Warp Cawe!”

George pulled the sonic driver out of the bag he been given to carry, and he passed it between his hands. It was a newer model that he’d used before, with a more responsive delta time and an improved ultrasonic wavefront. If there really was some kind of nuclear dampening field then this device ought to detect it, just as sure as God had made little apples. Whether it was of biological, mineral, alien or supernatural origin, well that might be less certain.

George leaned forward to the Warp Core and he passed the sonic driver over the entire unit, beginning at the top and working down. Then moving to the bottom and working upwards. It looked cold and dead, the usually bright blue light totally extinguished from it. When he reached the bulge in the centre of the machine, where the matter-antimatter chamber would be situated, and where the Dilithium crystal would regulate the energy production, he lingered a little longer. He was looking for annihilation particle pairs, and he wanted to discover if the internal energy was still equal to the sum of kinetic and potential energies, hoping to find some reason why the power was off. This was something he had only done at Starfleet Academy, and then only studied in lectures, in theory without any practical experience. George was a Multitronics and Communications engineer, not a nuclear physicist, but it had been difficult to reduce Joe’s expectations of his abilities. Any energy is released should be discoverable in the form of photons, neutrinos, and occasionally more exotic particles.

George carefully used the sonic driver to unscrew the six security bolts around the centre of the chamber until the cover became loose enough to remove. George then took a Banana out of his back pocket and very carefully placed the Banana inside the Dilithium Chamber.

Bananas emit antimatter because they contain potassium-40, which decays and releases a positron every 75 minutes. But this positron is very quickly annihilated by a passing electron. Bananas turn out to be a reasonably good source of positrons because they’re a good source of potassium. A single banana will produces about 15 positrons a second.

“The old Banana trick!” said a female voice from behind him.

George jumped in shock, then turned around and realised that it was just Astrid Murdock. Her thing was warp field dynamics!

“A simple yet very effective trick,” she said. “We used to impress all the new engineers with that, back in the day when everything was regularly jury-rigged. Did you take off the safety protocols first? Otherwise, they’ll stop the flow of reactants and the energy distribution, even if the banana does manage a slow and steady release of positrons into the chamber. Let me help you!”

Astrid opened up a side panel and flicked off the top two switches.

“Now try that,” she told George. “Sorry, no one was here. We didn’t get abducted! We were just had a departmental meeting about what we ought to do.”

So, there were some Engineers about, and they haven’t been murdered by the Monster of Ardan, thought George. He was heartened by Astrid’s words of encouragement.

He looked over to see what Joe thought, “Ken y’all see those there first Vulcan engineers, back in the 9th Century, a-doin’ this here with a banana!” George laughed.

Joe had quite frankly nearly fainted. He wiped the sweat off of his brow and answered George. ” No and I’m amazed we just did it and survived. I was always taught that you had to have the same amount of matter and antimatter. And here you can use the dilithium lattice as a waste unit? Who would have guessed right? I need a beer. If you two need some more bananas to keep things going let me know I think I have a few in the dragon for daiquiris. Joe then turned and started to head away from the warp core as fast as he could. For he was pretty sure that with all that jiggling about of the intermix ratio he would be little bits very soon and he planned on being very drunk when he became a subatomic particle.

“No, you’re absolutely correct Joe!” replied Astrid. “You must have be paying attention in lectures! The Warp Reactor as it’s commonly known, or the gravimetric field displacement manifold as we engineers call it, runs on a very precise ratio of intermixed matter and antimatter, with the Dilithium crystal converter assembly to energise the reaction. All the rest of this equipment..,” said Astrid, pointing around them at the same time, “…it’s just for magnetic containment and control engineering. This is the important bit right here, for the reaction to take place… But just think of it like a campfire if you have ever been wild camping. The banana is like the kindling that you’d use to get that first spark going in the dry paper or in your tepee of small twigs. Once it gets alight, it needs to ignite the more solid pieces of wood that you’ve added to the fire, and then you work your way up to a full blown log fire. We still need to turn up the matter and anti-matter streams yet. This may take a bit of time before we produce a pulsing plume of electro-plasma again, but hopefully this is a start [OOC: and only if the GM is in a good mood today.]”

An NC crewman joined them ‘’ Guys I have seen something similar, I’m going in the Dilithium Chamber close the glass door behind me. I shall get it to work again manually. If it does start raise the ship’s shields immediately and get out of the orbit we are in. Do not open the glass door for any reason due the high radiation’‘.

The NPC knew it would definitely kill him but he also knew that the ship did not have much time left before it burns down and take the rest of the crew with it.

“Darrn it! That there lookin’ ayy mite over the top!” George thought out aloud.

“Not to mention, totally unnecessary,” added Astrid. “And he’s not even a melodramatic Vulcan!”

“Hey You!” Astrid shouted after the NPC. “If you insist on going into the Dilithium Chamber, then put on a radiation suit first and no purple heart heroics are necessary!”

Astrid turned back to the others again to explain, “When Captain Spock gave his life on the Enterprise A, going into the Dilithium Intermix Chamber without a radiation suit, that was because the old radiation suits in use back then relied on electronics to work, and the radiation levels were too high for those old Duotronics suits to work. Since then, Starfleet set up a commission and held an inquiry, and those old radiation suits got retired and replaced by new Multitronic suits that can work at much higher levels… and anyway the problem we have isn’t with the supply of matter and anti-matter from the Intermix Chamber, the problem is with getting a reaction going at all. No reaction, and no radiation either!”

“Ayy!” George agreed, “Ever’thin’s all Multitronics in thay …err gadgets now!”

OOC: Do remember that the Merrimack is in the era of the first episodes of Star Trek,so what they did not have then we don’t have now .

OOC: Not true at all. We are TOS Movie-era Trek. Set after the Khitomer Accords, and I had this discussion with Robert Archer once, but sometime in-between construction of the ship in 2302, and the 2318 that a strict adherence to where the terms of the Merrimack Charter might place us:

( “the Merrimack will be set 293 years from today” - which depends how you read it - either actually from “today,” or from the date of the charter, forever and ever.)

That’s why I’ve been allowing a limited number of “Away Teams” and “Ship’s Counsellor” discussions as I figure that we need to transition into them at some point.

When/if I ever resign as Captain, the new Captain can do a reset (like Daniel Craig’s James Bond ) back to 2302, but until then, progress!

Also, I didn’t make that bit up about the radiation suits, it is semi-Canon as it comes from the novelisation of the Wrath of Khan (though not in the actual film itself.)

Also, the bit about Bananas releasing positrons is actually true as well!

• Dave

The NPC could not understand why they were cracking jokes at a time like this ,with such a serious matter at hand and no solution the ship was doomed .All the Captain had to do was look up and see his ship coming down in flames.
He thought it was best that he leaves, for who knows maybe something might happen to their advantage.

OOC: Okay I am not an official engineer so am a bit lost with all the tech talk there. So, for clarification…did you actually turn on the sonic driver and create a sonic field around the warp core while trying to find atoms or whatever? That was a good idea btw…if you did turn on a sonic shield I will let that work and why not let the banana spark a starting reaction in the chamber?<BG>

OOC: Yes, that’s what George did, by accident, but he did it.

IC:
The sonic field created by the sonic driver seemed to work interrupting whatever it was that messing with the warp core being able to make an antimatter reaction. The sonic driver detected matter/antimatter moving around the chamber in low amounts. It would seem to be safe to reignite the warp core if they were able to keep up a sonic shield protecting it. This would tell Astrid that it was some sort of signal that had caused the interruption in the first place.

GM Nosferatu
Your Darkest Nightmare

“Keep that sonic driver going, George,” Astrid told him. “It actually seems to be working. Whatever was interrupting the reaction seems to be being blocked by the sonic field, and that reaction is slowly starting again, ignited with those positrons from the banana. Hmmm! That means the interruption is a signal of some sort itself. And if it is a signal, then we should be able to shield other equipment from it, maybe shield the entire ship… I need to find out exactly what the signal is though. if I can do that, then maybe we will be able to work out the source, and it will be a lot easier to stop it at source than to shield every individual thing from it.”

• Astrid, Warp enthusiast

George was on cloud nine. Despite not being able to remember much from Warp Core theory lessons, he had only gone and done it, and fixed the damn thing, and at the same time, he had lived up to Joe’s high expectations of his abilities as a nuclear physicist. However, this was a good start, but it was still only the beginning of what they needed to do. He left the sonic driver switched on, but he set it down in a position so that it continued to cover the Warp Core Reactor with its sonic field. With his hands now free, he very carefully removed what was left of the soggy banana and its skin, and he slowly began to replace the manifold cover plate by tightening up the six security bolts that he had removed earlier. He still had no idea of what kind of nuclear dampening field they were dealing with here, but if it was being blocked by the sonic driver, then it wasn’t supernatural in origin, and if its presence had a good scientific explanation, then they ought to be able to discover the cause of that in time. For now, George just needed to wait while the reaction grew inside the reactor chamber, until the antimatter injector had cycled up to the desired rate, and that comforting constant blue pulse would be visible once again. George concentrated on the matter at hand, and he left all the big theoretical thinking about the origin of the jamming signal to Astrid and those with more knowledge.

• George, Eng