Forwarded by the ASC-VSO Posted: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 07:38:26 -0800 In: alt.startrek.creative From: "Jay P Hailey" Title: Star Trek: Outwardly Mobile Author: Jay P Hailey (JayPHailey@hotmail.com) Series: MISC - TNG OCs Codes: None Part: 40/342(?) Rating:[PG] Archive: Fine with me, just tell me where. Disclaimer: Paramount owns all things Star Trek. I claim Original Characters and Situations for me. Webpage HTTP://jayphailey.8m.com The Harmon: Episode 40 by Jay P. Hailey And Dennnis Washburn "Captain's Log, Stardate 48234.5" "The Harrier has been lost in space for four hundred and forty-four days. We are still under way for the area named in Murachi legends as the location of the Harmon. We have made seven long range sensor contacts with Kliges'chee starships. The Harrier's condition is good, and the crews morale is good, considering the circumstances. Our main problem at this point-" "Captain." Spaat reported urgently. "Deflectors have just snapped on." "Log off." I said. "Tillean, scan please." Tillean turned on her scanners and directed them at the target. She gasped and put it on the screen. I turned to see the largest subspace shock wave that I had ever encountered bearing down on us. "Red Alert!" I yelled. "Shields to full power! Sound collision alert!" The wave loomed on the screen. The Harrier's alarms whooped and screamed. A moment later the wave struck us. The Harrier lurched. It felt as though the ship leaned way over to the port side. I could see Ensign Zuma flung across the bridge by the impact. I looked at the Engineering station. The readouts showed the main power taxed to its limit by the shields. The internal force fields that held the Harrier together hit the red line. I knew that if they failed the Harrier would fall apart like a house of cards. The inertial dampeners caught up to the forces and the Harrier seemed to lurch all the way over in the other direction. I could feel the deck shuddering. Other alarms started going off and I heard the computer talking. I couldn't make out exactly what it was saying, but the engineering station showed hull damage. "Turn her into the wave!" I screamed, hoping that Spaat could somehow hear. The Harrier had been launched with oversized navigational deflectors. This was considered necessary for the original mission that I had commanded. When the experimental "Holly-Hop Drive" failed, the Harrier's navigational deflectors were left alone. The decision was made to leave them when it was discovered that replacing them with weaker ones would cost more money. I was thankful for that piece of bureaucratic inertia now. The over sized navigational deflectors might be able to blunt most of the shock waves' impact. I could see Spaat clinging resolutely to his station with one hand while entered the commands with the other. His Vulcan hearing enabled him to hear my shout. The Harrier turned slowly and uncertainly to bring her nose into the wave. The floor swayed drunkenly. I could see the power readouts. The main reactor was dangerously overloaded. It was heating up rapidly. As the Harrier swung around and fed power into the navigational deflectors the ride seemed to smooth out. I could hear people yelling and the alarms whooping. "Computer! Alarms off!" I shouted. A certain amount of the caterwauling quit. "Tillean!" The Science Officer had both hands free. I could see her legs curled around the underside of her chair. She was holding herself in her chair with her calves. She was scanning. She looked back at me and screamed something. "What?" "It's a supernova!" I cringed. There was now way to tell how long the buffeting and pounding would go on. I clung to my seat while the Harrier seemed to be thrown up and down by the shock wave. The incredible turbulence seemed to go on forever. I watched as the temperature of the Harrier's warp core climbed steadily higher. Eventually the shock wave passed us. As soon as the deck regained stability, the main power cut out. -*- "The phase inducers have failed." Ruezre' was telling us. The briefing room had a palpable sense of stress. The Harrier had been without main power for most of the day. Without main power, the Harrier was unable to get to warp speed. We were stuck and helpless. "Without those components, the warp core is crippled." "Can you reroute power?" Li'ira asked. "Yes, but it's a purely temporary solution. It won't hold forever." "How about the rest of the damage?" I asked. "The structural integrity field generators were badly overloaded. I can get them back up to sixty-five percent, right now. With a little work I may be able to get eighty or eighty-five percent hull integrity back. But that will be all." She continued "There was some hull buckling along sections twenty to twenty-five and sections forty to forty-five. This can be repaired fairly easily. However, the support systems in that section were impacted. The shields over that area will be weak until we can rebuild the plasma conduits there." "Okay, thank you." I dismissed her. She left the briefing to get back to work. "Tillean, what do you have for us?" "The shock wave came from a supernova about three hundred light years away at heading 343 mark 355, relative to the Harrier." She said. Tillean was subdued by the bad news for the Harrier, but her enthusiasm for the stellar event was catchy. "It was the closest that any Federation starship has ever been to a supernova. We got excellent readings." Tillean grinned. "Our readings, if properly analyzed could reveal much about the inner workings of a supernova, especially in the area of subspace. The subspace function of the insides of stars is not well understood." "Great." Stephanie Anderson growled. She was not impressed by the science potential of the kicking around that we had just received. "Dr. Flynn, your report?" "We had twenty-one injuries, but there is nothing that we can't deal with. Everyone should be back on duty within the week." "Thank you." I said "Stephanie how is our tactical stance?" Stephanie, the Chief of Security shook her head ruefully. "Pretty crappy, to be blunt. Our shields are weak and we're stuck at fifty percent of main power. I don't think that we could fight off one of the Kliges'chee Type-A scouts without suffering heavy damage ourselves." "Anyone else?" "I just hope that Harmon space is pretty close, Captain." Li'ira said. "Amen." It was all that I could say. -*- It was another month before we realized what we were heading for. The large blue star that the Murachi said was the gateway to Harmon space was a blue super-giant. It was big enough so that if you put Earth's sun at the center, then Pluto's orbit would still be inside the blue super-giant. The Earth orbited its sun at a distance of roughly ninety-three million miles. If the Harrier got that close to the blue super-giant star then we would be baked instantly by the extreme heat and radiation pouring out of the star. Our shields would not hold for even a whole second. A blue super-giant pays for its strength. They only last a few million years before exploding into a supernova, and splattering themselves all over the sector. While we watched the giant burn, I had a chill. I realized that every atom in my body had been cooked by a giant star before it had come to be me. Hydrogen was the most common element in the universe. The giant stars transmuted hydrogen into heavier elements, and then spit the heavy elements out in the supernova explosion. I was watching the civilizations and people of a billion years from now, cooking in a giant star. There were a pair of even stranger objects in orbit around the blue super-giant. They were a pair of black dwarf stars. Tillean thought that this was very important and significant. She explained it to us. A star the size of Earth's sun is too small to have a supernova explosion. When the lifetime of Sol is done, the spent fuel will simply compact down into a ball of extremely dense material. The act of compacting will heat up the spent stellar fuel and material. The little compacted ball will glow like a small star of its own. This will be called a white dwarf. In time a white dwarf will radiate away all of its heat and cool off, becoming a black dwarf. The estimated time for this to happen is something like thirty-five or thirty-six billion years. The universe was simply too young to have black dwarfs in it yet. Moreover, there they were, in orbit around the blue super-giant. The blue super-giant was destined to explode in another six or eight million years. It never had time to capture these exotic objects nor would it be around long enough to enjoy them, on a cosmic scale. As we closed in to a safe distance to take readings, our sensors read gravitic anomalies all over the area of these three objects. That settled me. If creatures could build an energy bubble one hundred light years across, then perhaps they could build this strange collection as a sign post. We moved on. It was almost an anticlimax, when we lost the warp core again. Ruzere was able to get it back, but our speed was severely reduced. -*- We crawled along for another twenty-five days. We were now nearing the halfway point of the year 2370. We had been lost near the end of 2367. The Harrier was showing the results of two and a half years of cruising with no spare parts. On the bridge, everything was clean and shipshape, but the master environmental systems monitor was dark. It had been stripped of processors to replace the ones in Tillean's science station. The Harrier was crawling along at warp four. At this rate we were making one light year every two and a half days. We weren't going to make it very far at this rate, while the Harrier's critical systems were aging to death around us. Other systems weren't doing very badly at all. The main computers and the impulse power systems were still nearly at factory specs. The life support system was robust, and threatened to keep us breathing for another century, at least. --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.634 / Virus Database: 406 - Release Date: 3/18/2004 -- Stephen Ratliff ASC Awards Tech Support http://www.trekiverse.us/ASCAwards/commenting/ No Tribbles were harmed in the running of these Awards ASCL is a stories-only list, no discussion. Comments and feedback should be directed to alt.startrek .creative or directly to the author. Yahoo! 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