Soured Milk (Time Zone 1)

Posted on 11 Aug 2018 @ 10:08pm by Story Teller
Edited on on 11 Aug 2018 @ 10:09pm

361 words; about a 2 minute read

Mission: Fractured
Location: Main Engineering
Timeline: TZ1 || 1015 hours

Lieutenant Kemm was not pleased at all.

Sensors hadn’t just confirmed to the Kelpian that the Chief Engineer, Lieutenant Hawthorn, was missing, but so were the vast majority of the engineering staff. All in all, this incident had only left him with twelve engineers. The Operations staff wasn’t faring much better, having fourteen persons on board. Science and medical had the largest detachments, but they weren’t technicians. The theta radiation that was now seeping into the ship would kill them within days if they could not restore the shields and find the crew.

Efforts to restore the shields and the warp drive so far had failed. And the more they tried, the more it seemed that the antimatter would not just cooperate.

And the Kelpian may had just figured out why. The computer, however sluggish it had worked, had just restored what it could of the logs prior to the start of the incident. The evening before, the Black Hawk had entered this nebula as a means to stay obscured from prying eyes. The cost included severe degradation of the external sensors, but at least they could see a couple kilometers in either direction, but not nearly soon enough to make a course correction.

There was no time to see the quantum filaments that had struck the Black Hawk. The first destabilized what parts of the shield grid that were able to operate in this spatial area. The second disrupted the impulse engines. Although the ship had crawled to a halt after that, three other filaments passed through the hull, each one brushing through the antimatter. It was at that point that the power failed, and the logs ended.

For the now acting Chief Engineer, he now possessed knowledge of what happened. But, how to fix it escaped him. Tricorders now confirmed that the quantum signature of the antimatter was in flux, preventing its use. Ejecting it could not be a possibility. Without antimatter, there’d be no way to escape, much less get things moving again.

And, with so much of the crew missing, abandoning ship wouldn’t do much good either. This was a conundrum indeed.

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