[snip]

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!”

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

With the Warp Core Reactor possibly growing in vigor, Astrid looked to the next problems to solve. Firstly, the sonic driver was a temporary solution only. if it should fall or be knocked from its current position, then the reaction would stop again. So, something more permanent would need to be jury-rigged up. Secondly, the source of the jamming was still unknown. She could search for that using the Merrimack’s science stations, but that needed full power to be restored first.

“I think we need to leave this area now,” Astrid said. “That [NPC] engineer may have been a little over dramatic, but now that the reactor is working again, radiation levels here are going to rise very quickly up to life-threatening levels.”

After encouraging them to leave the Warp Core Reactor, Astrid walked over to an engineering console with advanced science and engine power settings. She wanted to use the console to determine the nature, and therefore possibly the source, of the jamming. However, she had stupidly forgotten that the problem it was causing was not merely the progression of matter-antimatter reactions, but that it was somehow jamming communications too. Which meant that while the console may get EPS power back once again, due to the disrupted network, it would still be unable to measure quantum state particle-wave functions or to give any readings.

She hit her right palm against her head. “Stupid, Stupid!” she said. This was going to require a re-think. And the lack of internal communications made it even more difficult, as they had no communications with the Bridge crew except by way of the Jeffries Tube that Joe and George had used.

• Astrid, Warp enthusiast

George stepped back, away from the Warp Core Reactor and was quite pleased with what they had done. “Well shoot!” George told Joe. “I darned did fire up that fancy contraption, Joe, an’ see if you can’t make me a big ol’ admiral right now! Or… at least git that moonshine a-flowin’.”

• George, Eng