Peace lay around all seven decks of the Starship Enterprise. The Armoury was almost completely empty, no one was in the mess hall, a couple of crewmen were up on the bridge, but most people were down in engineering. Most of the crew was down on Earth, for shore leave, visiting friends and family and so only the skeleton crew remained… Commander Charles Trip Tucker being one of them…. He had had a thought about how to increase the warp engines to make it go faster than warp 5… he was hoping to make it reach warp 6.
Once again Trip was going to mess around with the warp engine… for about the 7th time since their encounter with the Xindi. When would he learn to leave it to the experts and let them make the upgrades? But alas… Trip was far too proud of the object he cared most about on the ship, and if there was going to be any one who could make an earth ship go faster than warp 5… Trip wanted to be the one to do it and have is name down in the history books… however his name was already in the history books, only for a reason he'd rather not be remembered by… the first human male to ever become pregnant.
Captain Jonathan Archer had also stayed to make sure nothing happened to his ship while Trip was messing around with one of the most delicate parts. Even though Trip had assured Archer that nothing could possibly go wrong with his little upgrades, Archer still wanted to stay.
Having received a message from Trip saying he was ready, Archer made his way down to Engineering. it was a slightly eerie feeling with the fact that he didn't pass anyone as he made his way to his destination. But soon he arrived and opened the hatch that led into engineering.
"Everything ready?" Archer asked as he moved over to Trip. The chief engineer was looking at a data PADD he had just been handed by Crewman Rostov.
"Of course. Otherwise I wouldn't have asked you down here to witness it working." Replied a cheery Commander Tucker. As always he was optimistic.
"And you're sure nothing will go wrong?" Archer was sceptical, from his experience he knew nothing ever worked the first time you try.
"All my simulations have come up with the same result..." Trip paused for a second as he check a couple of things on the reactor's main control panels."Smooth running warp 6."
Archer looked at warp core with an uneasy look.
Trip had messed around with the engines a couple of times before, once landing himself in a coma for 10 days…Archer wasn't so sure that it was such a good idea to continue with this test. However if anything did go wrong, not that many people would be killed in the process.
"All right. Begin the test." Archer said. The engineering team, comprising of Trip, Rostov, Kelly, a couple of other random crewmen, took their positions.
"Ok. Increase power to the antimatter injectors." Trip said as he began monitoring the power output from the engines. Rostov was standing by one of the screens alongside the warp core.
"Systems aren't responding." Reported Rostov as suddenly his screen went offline. Trip looked round the corner at the crewman. He watched as the other screens went offline and went dark. Suddenly the whole of engineering was thrown into darkness.
As they looked around the darkness they all noticed a small light ontop of the reactor started to glow, and increase in size. a light that shouldn't really be there. It was bright white and a spherical shape.
"Everyone out!" Trip called as everyone made a dash for the door, not really wanting to find out what was going on. Trip and John were the last to leave.
"And you were saying nothing would go wrong?" Archer teased as Trip closed the hatch. He just looked at his captain with one of his 'sorry' looks, slightly shrugging his shoulders in the process.
They all stood and waited… waited for something to happen. After 10 minutes of standing along the corridor Trip decided to go back into engineering.
He carefully opened the hatch and moved in. Archer and the other engineers stayed outside. After a few seconds, Trip's voice called out.
"Captain!" Trip's voice sounded like that more of concern than in a way to say that everything was all right and it was safe for them to return into engineering. But they did anyway.
As Archer stepped through the hatch what he laid eyes on only confused him. It was something that he had not expected, and definitely after all the strange things that had happened on the ship… this was probably the weirdest of them all.