Shifting Sands

[Sorehl 0]

As the grains shifted in the Vulcan sandscape behind him, Sorehl continued reading the report from Joy Five. As expected, the android had done a thorough job of exploring the ramifications of intelligence gleaned from the Shallia. Tactical and propulsion technologies which exploited an expanded continuum concept would explain much about Scorpiad effectiveness against them. Understanding this paradigm would be key to developing functional countermeasures.

 

Sorehl remembered the frentic pace at Utopia Planitia, in those months after first contact with the Borg, trying to anticipate and defend against a potential offensive. After decades in astronautics, it had been the impedus for actually becoming a member of Starfleet himself – his background and existing degrees offering him an immediate chance to be useful. In the end, they’d still been caught unprepared.

 

He did not desire a repeat of that experience.

 

He returned to his reading.

 

“... the Federation was once well on the way to developing the Scorpiad ability to phase ships into adjacent realities. The project was abandoned to honor treaty requirements, but if we have any documentation, engineers or scientists associated with Pegasus, they would be most useful in understanding Zie's data and working the shield tuning project.”

 

Sorehl glanced out the viewport, setting the PADD on his desk. With the relocation of the station, the upper decks no longer offered a vantage of the bluish-grey mists of Avalon. The Command Center of Camelot Station pointed away from the planet to allow better transporter contact, shield coverage, and energy transfer between the Engineering Ring and the colony below. Instead, the more distant, light brown disc of its trojan partner Tintagel was visible from his office windows.

 

The Vulcan mused, but not serenely, on reference to the Pegasus project. In 2355, after failing to secure a subspace research position with the Galaxy-class Theoretical Propulsion Group, he had opted to leave Shuvinaljis Warp Technologies for Wilson Energies, where he began supporting the test of tactical prototypes on the Oberth-class USS Pegasus and USS Perseus. In addition to his work on phaser collimation and tri-cobalt warheads, he’d been a subsystem consultant on what became the interphase cloaking device.

 

Though he shared no complicity, he was not eager to disclose his personal involvement in this research.

 

Essentially a molecular phaser inverter coupled with rudimentary cloaking capability, the project encountered huge challenges - chronition particle flooding, phase instabilities, adverse subspace field interactions, and continuous run time issues. It also had the dubious distinct of being, under most interpretations, a forbidden area of research. Starfleet Intelligence had covertly urged phase cloak development by insisting that the restrictions of the 2311 Treaty of Algeron applied only to fielded, operational units – not theoretical development. In any case, the loss of the starship Pegasus during a field test in 2358 seemed to signal the end of such efforts. Indeed, after similar accidents, the Klingons abandoned their own research the following decade. The Romulans, undeterred by treaty, conducted an unsuccessful test as late as 2368.

 

With many terms of the 2311 Treaty, including the Neutral Zone itself, abrogated by the Dominion War, none of the Allied powers had yet openly revisited the development and use of phase cloak technology. Unlike the multi-lateral agreement banning subspace weapons, expressly forbidden by the Second Khitomer Accords, there was precedent for suspending clauses of the Treaty of Algeron by mutual agreement between the Romulan and Federation governments. In fact, it was logical to assume the Romulans held the most recent experimentation data. In all liklihood, they should be approached about the option.

 

He wondered, were they about to engage in another shift in Alpha Quadrant politics?