Not Quite Done Yet

[Annabelle O'Halloran 0]

After the meeting in the Observation Lounge, Anna made her way down to Deck 6 and Science Lab 2, still feeling shell-shocked. Debbie’s casualty report and Aaron’s breakdown of the damage painted a picture much worse than she’d suspected. It hadn’t been easy to sit through and she’d been left with a feeling of helplessness. Fatalities were high and the number of injured was vast. It might have been quicker if the Engineering report had simply listed what was still working. Actually, it sounded like Reaent was currently beyond their ability to repair her. Captain Michaels said they were headed to the planet Ha'Vorante-home of the Vorta. Genetically engineered by the Founders, they were truly alien. She looked forward to seeing their home and hoped an opportunity to meet the people themselves would present itself.

 

But, before they could do a Vorta meet and greet, she had her own job to do. She loaded the gravimetric mine specs from the padd handed out at the meeting and looked thoughtfully at the screen. Captain Corizon’s generosity was going to be very helpful. The explosive yield of these mines was much greater than the tiny self-replicating mines used at DS9. Captain Michaels wanted her to design a grid based on DS9’s use of the self-replicating mines but these mines wouldn’t self-replicate and...they wouldn’t need to.

 

She pulled up the wormhole scans, and once again noted the magneton surge that occurred right before it opened and Reaent was swallowed. They’d picked up the dead probe on their scans and had been able to retrieve it later, once on the other side of the terminus, in the Gamma Quadrant. The Bajoran wormhole always evidenced its opening with an elevated neutrino level. Not this one. It showed magnetons... Frowning, Anna rechecked the data forwarded to her by Jon. He’d confirmed the Romulans had modified the drone and that the remote control device was still intact. He also indicated that the power source could be recharged. She tapped him a response and asked if he thought it possible that the drone might be used to direct a magneton beam as a trigger and with reverse engineering would they be able to modify it themselves? Engineering had so much on their plate right now, and Aaron also had to come up with a way to launch the mines, but this drone had something to do with the wormhole operation and they needed to know what it did and how it did it. They needed to be able to open it at will.

 

But for now...mine grid. The nice thing about the Romulan ships is that they weren’t powered by a matter/anti-matter reaction. No, they used a quantum singularity—a mini black hole. The wormhole was stable but it had formed because of instability in sub-space. A very small tear or perhaps nothing so much as a thinning of the sub-space fabric. A very convenient anomaly if you happened upon it and had a device that could take advantage of it. And also a very unstable anomaly if a quantum singularity were to be exploded in its midst. Something like that could rip apart the Chaltok system and beyond. It could also seal the wormhole for good—much more efficiently than an expelled warp core would. The Romulans would have to think twice before risking the destruction of their own area of space.

 

Anna tapped the screen and requested the computer design several mine grids based on all available information. While it worked she brought up the scans of the Proxima captured right before Reaent had taken that thirty second ride to the Gamma Quadrant. She felt strangely haunted by this ship. There were many stories of lost crews and ships in Academy History lessons and the truth was that she’d probably dozed through quite a few of them. But Proxima was different. She’d heard and tracked the transponder signal through subspace. She’d made the mistake of looking through the crew files. Missing ten years. The Romulans had either found that asteroid on the other side and scanned it and towed it through, or they’d somehow activated that wormhole and it had come tumbling through to them. Either way...they couldn’t keep her.

 

The scans showed a few things; no warp core and no life pods. Her theory that the weakening in the wormhole area of subspace was caused by isolytic weapons fire could be born out by the absence of the warp core. An isolytic weapon created a tear in subspace that homed in on a ship’s warp core. If such a weapon had attacked Proxima, it was possible that Proxima had ejected the core hoping the resulting explosion would seal the tear. It didn’t always work. The missing life pods? The crew forced to abandon ship? Reaent had almost been forced to do the same thing in the same area of space and only the Excalibur’s miraculously timely arrival had prevented it. The nearest planet that offered the remotest chance of survival was an L class planet 8.24 light years away. Not really a chance at all...

 

The computer’s cheerful chirp announced that there were mine grids to examine the pros and cons of and she thought that one of the models had real merit. She sent the grid model that seemed to offer the greatest level of deterrent to the command staff. She didn’t know how long it would take the Federation to send a taskforce to do the job of destabilizing and sealing. They had a finite amount of mines and a very small amount of time to drop those mines and get away. She also didn’t know what the Captain had in mind for the Proxima and how much time it would take to destroy her. She was hoping there might be enough time to retrieve the ship’s logs-they had her command codes. Maybe the final chapter for Proxima didn’t have to be her destruction. Her crew deserved to have their story known. They already knew it didn’t end well, but their families should have the truth. Proxima might still be able to tell that truth.

Edited January 15, 2009 by Annabelle O'Halloran