When the blast of war blows in our ears - Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood

[Atragon9 0]

::A9 was just going over the details one last time, at his desk in his Ready Room. They had passed Altorus and were just reaching what he had started to call "Point A." It is where the Coxeter was going to start their drive tests. The sector between Altorus and Rehmanii was the test area, with "Point B" being closer to the Crimson Nebula. It is an area that gets very infrequent visits from Federation ships and no ship was anywhere near the area now. Pulling up the summary briefing he had pulled together for the department heads, he listened to it one more time, to refresh his memory::

 

"The Coxeter was towed here by a cargo vessel and then set adrift and alone. The test parameters did not allow for any other vessel to be in the area while the drive is in use. The engineers were still not sure of the range of the effect of firing up the Hexaco drive and generating a field big enough to move an entire ship. So, Captain Weyl ordered their tow ship back to Deep Space 4. His log on that stated that they would be out of any possible harm's way, back there. Besides, he wrote, the Coxeter would either be flying all over known space and not in the drop zone, or they would need to spend time troubleshooting any drive malfunction, or they would disappear and take some of the known universe with them."

 

"Speaking of Captain Weyl, he was not only the Captain of the Coxeter, he was the chief architect of the Tesseract project. Hermann Weyl has devoted his entire adult life to the idea of a four dimensional "propulsion" system. After earning doctorates in Quantum Engineering, Theoretical Cosmology and Fine Arts, he realized that Starfleet had both the resources and security framework he needed to design, build and maintain his dream. He petitioned the Federation Council and the Starfleet Corps of Engineers and was accepted into the Academy and the Corps, where he completed his design specs and his Academy degree in just over two years."

 

"His designs were ambitious, but not beyond current engineering science, so the Corps and the Council provided him with his own lab, team of engineers and a robust budget. Looking over the reports from the monitoring teams, Weyl had a way to get his team members as excited about his goal as he was. They completed their lab tests almost eight months ahead of their own schedule, since his team worked extremely long hours and took no leave, at their own requests. When they moved on to the plans for the field test, there was a lottery for who would be on the crew of the actual test ship, as they would be automating much of ship operations, to minimize the need for a full crew. As dangerous as this test was to be, people were bargaining with each other to be on the ship when it fired up the Hexaco engine."

 

"As for the Coxeter design itself, they needed to use an Olympic class ship because the components of the drive were enormous and needed special considerations. They gutted the entire spherical section of the Olympic and suspended the drive in the middle of that sphere for better field harmonics. {For some weird reason, this reminded A9 of an old joke where someone had asked the settlers of the Western portion of the United States why they always reacted the same way when threatened by the indigenous population at the time. "Why do you always pull your wagons into a circle?" "We get better reception that way"} The Hexaco team removed the warp nacelles from the Coxeter for practical reasons. The presence of anti-matter, warp coils or warp plasma was quite dangerous to the functioning of the drive - and survival of the ship. The depleted and scrubbed nacelles would have just been dead weight, so they were removed for the test. In fact, some of Weyl's team had already submitted designs for a fleet of Tesseract ships, generally spherical with small impulse engine "growths" protruding from the main hull and a trailing pylon of living/working quarters. This should make it easier for the Manticore to find them, if their drive is failing, as they can't have gone too far from this area of space"

 

"The Coxeter had been sending regular subspace reports to the Council and the Corps right up to the first firing of the Hexaco. After that test, they had only sent one message back to Federation HQ. It was actually received 5 minutes before their last pre-test transmission and it was Captain Weyl with one word, "Success." The engineers monitoring the transmissions were very confused that they received "Success" before they received "We will begin the first test in 3 minutes." It wasn't cleared up until the Tesseract team, that was not on the ship, were consulted. They were able to point to a special carrier frequency that had been imbedded into all Coxeter messages that shows the Coxeter's own time stamp. This is how they found out that the "Success" message was actually sent After the engine test, from the ship's perspective."

 

"Other reports verify that the Hexaco drive does not leave any warp signature or ion trail, so we will have to find some other way to trace the ship's whereabouts once we arrive - unless we find it waiting for us."

 

::A9 steeples his fingers in front of him as the recording and its accompanying documentation screens fade at the summary's end. He knows that Chief Faldek and Captain Sovak each have the full sets of reports for further analysis, but this more than gives himself and the other department chiefs food for thought. He wonders what we will find when we arrive at Point A, but is glad that the wait will soon be over::