No-Entry

[Tachyon 0]

“No-Entry”

March 26, 2156

Lieutenant Dave Grey

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Dave was so tired that the bright lights from his console had all smushed together in a fluorescent haze that dazzled the eyes and fried the brain. He could really use some sleep, but he was reluctant to give up now, when he was so close to an idea, a solution of some kind.

 

He had been poring over the research that Lieutenant Xiang had come up with, along with his own thoughts on the aliens and the sensor data that they had. If Challenger was going to combat whatever designs these aliens had on the ship, they needed a defence. And it was up to Dave Grey and the science department to come up with one in time.

 

Grey was actually enjoying this conundrum. While he found the aliens' apparently lack of regard for the conventional laws of physics to be vexing, to say the least, he at least relished the use of his abilities to solve this particular problem. After all, it was a physics problem. No one was asking him to classify animals or shut down a massive alien weapon. He finally felt . . . useful. The stakes were a bit less too; this time they weren't dealing with a particle that could destroy subspace or anything crazy like that.

 

In the back of Grey's very cluttered mind, sandwiched somewhere between his sensory apparatuses and the little tingling thing that tells people when they are running very, very late, an idea started to form. It took root near the tingling thing and spread outward slowly but steadily through the rest of Grey's brain, taking the opportunity to rearrange some of the more disorganised bits before drawing attention to itself in the form of the proverbial light bulb over Dave's head.

 

Subspace seemed to be the answer. Used for faster-than-light communications and faster-than-light travel—basically faster-than-light everything, Grey supposed—subspace might hold the key to stopping these aliens from showing up without an invitation. If he could find a way to generate a subspace field around the ship, one just strong enough to block these aliens, then perhaps the ship would be safe.

 

It would be very, very difficult, of course. To generate such a field would require—well, it would require a field generator, and Challenger had no such generator. In fact, Grey was pretty sure that such a piece of technology was beyond Starfleet's capabilities thus far. They would need alien technology then . . .

 

Luckily, Challenger had alien technology aboard . . . alien technology that happened to generate subspace fields anyway.