JP by Elli and Quinn (PC from Obsidian Command by Paul)
Obsidian Command
During the break in TBR#008
1344 words

Lance had forgotten exactly how much time he had spent in the Auxiliary Shuttle Bay – now a makeshift workshop for the Quinn-Navine Drive Project. He’d shorthanded it to the QND already, having quickly moved on from just thinking about the project to actually making it happen. Indeed, it had now occupied a lot of his downtime when off-shift. He had even adjusted some of his working pattern to minimize the time it took to finish working and arrive back here. Some might have said he was obsessing, but that was only those who didn’t know him; who hadn’t seen his work on the Quantum Slipstream project.

This, he had decided already, would be the most significant advancement in Starfleet FTL technology in decades. Bigger than the Vesta programme. The second Phoenix. Maybe. If he could obtain the resources and personnel he needed. Maybe Captain De Havilland would let him requisition a few minds along the way.

The Calliope was still in pieces. A lot of the outer hull and indeed much of the inner systems had been stripped by this point. He hadn’t gotten around to replacing everything. As was typical with the way his mind worked, as he was finished making one change, a new one came to his mind and he had yet another ‘eureka’ moment. When they flowed, he simply couldn’t stop himself from scribbling them down and exploring the possibilities of it. One thing led to the next thing, and he had half a shuttlecraft laid out across the bay floor, possibly untouched for days.

It remained, he mused, an odd reflection of his mental view of the real Calliope. Stripped of what once made her working and operational. Scattered, in need of detailed repairs and a lot of effort to mend. Eventually she might fly again. It just needed time and dedication. And here he was, sitting on the deck and silently waiting for someone else to do it for him.

He didn’t notice the other set of eyes watching him at first. The movement startled him, before he sharply relaxed as he recalled having actually sent an invite. Had that been today? Or days ago? He honestly didn’t remember. Scrambling to his feet, he motioned to the young Grazerite.

“Lieutenant! What do you think? I appreciate it’s definitely a work in-progress, but this…” he waved at the scattered pieces of shuttle, “This is where it begins. This is history being forged!”

Her ear flicked.

At his expansive gesture over the humble scene, the Grazerite appeared dumbfounded, glancing back and forth between the disassembled parts and the organized chaos surrounding the skeleton of what looked to be a gutted Arrow class runabout that had seen much better days. Lt. Elli-Navine refocused back on the genius she admired, unsure if she’d miscalculated about him somehow and he might really be quite mad. She found she once again had no words, but this time for a completely different reason.

As she worked through her confusion, Elli found a place to set down the gear she had brought. She looked at the old paneling and dismantled hardware neatly bundled and piled up for removal, before she finally broke the awkward silence with a baldly disconcerted tone of voice. “Why are you using a scrap heap, Commander?”

“Scrap heap?” he was momentarily confused. “Ah! No, I can see that to the untrained eye that might be the case. No – this is our proving grounds. The test bed for our new Quantum Drive. That’s why I called you here: those calculations you provided were invaluable in starting the journey, but there’s a long way to go yet. Considering you were available, I thought I should involve you in the process.”

“Oh, for sure, yeah.” Elli nodded along. “It’s wonderful, I mean, going right into a build. I mean, it’s a bit of skipping ahead in the usual process. A lot of people would just run computer simulations and never touch a prototype for years. I can’t work like that myself. A tandem approach is great! I just mean, you know, you’re big medicine around here, Sir. Don’t you think you can get a new runabout for the project? One with a few less miles on her?”

“Hmm?” he glanced at the half-disassembled runabout. “Nonsense. The problem with newer craft is they have all the little unknown bugs and kinks – an older ship that has seen more service usually has a clearer picture of any issues it might have.” He dismissed the thought quickly, ushering her to take a look at some of the design schematics he had been working on. “Here. Computer simulations can only tell so much with the unknown variables we’re dealing with. That was part of the problem with the Vesta Project; lots of theory, not enough practical. That’s why they had all the problems with her test flight, if you ask me.”

Elli looked thoughtful and a bit of a twinkle grew in her own eye as she watched Lance page through the schematics. “I suppose you’re right. I mean, that’s part of what I love most about the Potemkin. Tested and true. Quirky? Sure. But I know all her quirks.”

“Indeed,” Lance agreed. He’d heard many tales of fleet engineers behaving this way; treating their engines anthropomorphically.

Elli reached out and paged through some of the schematics of the runabout. “Cal-ee-OH-pay.” She took a stab at the pronunciation on the drawing key.

“Calliope,” he corrected, rather sternly. He caught himself before he snapped, but only just.

“Oh, sorry.” Her ears drooped, sensing his disdain, but being at a loss for how she’d messed up, entirely. He took pronunciation very seriously, it seemed. “Calliope.” Elli repeated it a few more times. Earthers had weird spelling that broke it’s own rules all of the time. So many cultures in one globe. “Well, I mean, this is good for another reason too.” Elli tried to recover brightly, “With her all stripped down, that means you can design structural integrity specifically for the rescaling factor. That was one of the biggest hazards of the flight. I mean, you know,” Elli laughed nervously, “Apart from not accounting for time, and getting shunted a million ways from a million Sundays!”

“Yes, I read the mission report. Rescaling is indeed part of the problem; but only part. Power may well be the other concern.”

“Power?” Elli tried not to take offense this time. Power happened to be something she excelled at generating, supplying, redirecting, cycling, distributing, conserving, transmitting, dissipating and far more. She’d personally seen to the power adjustments made for the testing projects. “What’s concerning about the power?”

“With a warp field there are clear limitations and it is scalable. With this quantum drive, much more directed and variable consumption is the true problem. Otherwise you end up with broken nacelle pylons,” he remarked meaningfully.

Elli frowned. It hurt a little that he was that right. Variable consumption did change the power application. The structure of an Excelsior and it’s power distribution to the warp bubble compressed into the SIF geometry of the nacelles differently on their pylon structures than on the skates of the runabout. Elli felt like she was about to be taken back to academy but choked down her pride. Quinn was an expert. There were times when her field work informed needed spur of the moment problem solving where exacting theory might be a drawback, but when it came to designing a new mode of travel from the ground up— She had to be honest with herself. She needed to set aside her pride in her own work and learn how to stand at the drawing board.

She said nothing else, simply took the drawings and plopped down on a crate, rubbing her bottom lip back and forth thoughtfully with her thumb as she studied Lance’s preliminary plans.

Nothing else seeming to require his illumination for the moment, Lance took the Grazerite’s silence as an opportunity to return to refurbishing the runabout.