4: The Big Bad
Ship's log, Stardate 56477.4, Lieutenant Commander Erik MacLeod commanding:
It's been four days since we arrived in this new universe and we're only just now planning to restart our warp core. Though Lieutenant Varik told me five days, he and his teams have managed to get the core online a day earlier, and not a moment too soon. I think everyone is fed up eating ration packs as I've had to limit replicator use to ship repairs while we've been surviving on our fission generators.
Thankfully our fighter compliment was relatively unaffected by either the battle with the Borg or our dimension-jump so we've been using them to scout out the local star systems.
It looks like we can find resources nearby, so after the warp restart, I plan to order the ship cleared, funerals held and then carry out a massive mining operation.
We have been unable to detect any subspace signals which suggests that this universe uses a different form of inter-system communication. We have seen several ships transverse to a sub-dimension in a nearby system using a giant 'jump-gate', so we suspect that this universe lacks any ftl travel except via this subspace plane.
The ships coming through this 'gate' are strange. On the one hand they obviously have ftl of a form, but in normal space, the ships we've observed are slow, ugly monstrosities. We've seen several freighters come through, almost all lacking artificial gravity and they have a large amount of armour, but it is primitive. The Vanguard's ablative armour is light-years ahead of what they have, and what we suspect the military for these people have as well.
A few hours ago a military ship came through. Again, it was big and ugly and even more inefficient with it's power than the freighter, yet the energy it could generate is sufficient to concern us that, given our current situation, a few good shots would be a problem, though given it's almost comical lack of manoeuvrability, I suspect it would take nearly ten ships like that to even concern us at present. Though if they have bigger, and better, armed ships things could be interesting.
Unfortunately, the Captain's condition hasn't improved and I now have to make a horrible choice: Allow him to slowly slip away over the next few days, or give him an injection that will allow him to be mobile again, but will mean he'll be dead inside of forty-eight hours.
I know what I would want, so I hope he agrees with my decision, and I pray one-day I come to terms with what I have to do.
Sickbay:
Willard slowly opened his eyes, blinking rapidly at the dim lights.
"Captain, welcome back." He turned to see MacLeod standing next to a junior doctor and the EMH; that was not a good sign.
"Report Commander." MacLeod handed him a PADD and gave a brief summary, slowing down his speech.
"Nearly three hundred dead, thirty more still in sickbay. We have massive structural damage resulting in the warp core being offline for the last four days. Fighter compliment is acceptable and deployed for recon and protection. Romulan survivors are integrating into the crew and helping in non-critical locations. No ships, friendly or otherwise in the local system as we're in a parallel dimension."
"Very good Coman…" Willard dropped the PADD and stared at MacLeod. "What did you say?"
"We are in a universe with a different quantum signature than our own."
"Starfleet?"
"No sign or any communication on any known subspace channel. We've detected several vessels in a nearby system though. We believe they use tachyons to communicate, but with have avoided opening communications until we feel the ship is in a state worth y of presenting itself."
"That bad?"
"Worse."
Willard sank back down onto the bed, what little energy he'd had was draining from him quickly. "Ok, I'll read through your reports then get back to you in an hour."
"Yes Sir. Also, the doctor has something that you need to hear. I'll leave now and when I return I'll accept whatever punishment you decide."
"Very well Commander, get back to the ship. Get us ready asap." Willard watched as MacLeod walked out of Sickbay before turning to the EMH. "Well doc, what's so important that it made my tactical officer run away?"
Peregrine-class fighter Jindo
NearbySystem
Ensign Mok looked down at the timer one more time. They had another three hours to patrol the system. Since the Griffon had viewed the enemy ships coming into the system via the 'jump-gate', the orders for the recon ships had changed to long-range scans.
Commander MacLeod had decided that was better to avoid the local powers until the Vanguard could regain an acceptable level of combat readiness.
"How we doing BB?"
BB, specialist Briana Blake, looked up for her scanners to answer. "Nothing of any real interest, we've got six planets, four are gas giants while the inner two are too close to the star to be suitable for any real mining for now, not that they have any real resources that we couldn't gain via a replicator."
"OK, and there's no 'jump-gate', so we can assume that the locals don't visit here often either."
No sooner had Mok stated that fact the ship's sensors detected a large vessel 'jumping' into the system.
"That'll teach me, running passive scans." He waited for a few seconds as the data was processed and displayed." Looks like some kind of large carrier vessel. There's around 10 small, one or two man shuttles which appear to function as fighters attached to various docking latches in two con-centric rotating rings. There's another rotating ring so it seems this particular craft uses the rotation to simulate gravity near Earth-norm. They look very primitive, no match for a type-nine shuttle, never-mind one of our fighters or Peregrines."
"So typical of the ships we've so far seen the locals use. They seem to be a strange mix of techs. FTL capable but sub-light, they're no better than pre-Federation, but I suspect even an NX-class would be able to handle most of their ships one-on-one."
"Maybe your…" the console bleeped again. "Hold up, something is happening. They watched as a new, massive larger ship 'shimmered' into existence. It moved towards the first ship and fired a single, continuous beam, easily slicing the carrier in half.
"Holy….." Mok looked down at the energy readings. "That thing is massive, about one kilometre long. Energy readings from the beam are similar to early twenty-third century phaser arrays. No idea if that's full power but it's massively beyond anything else we've seen."
"So guess we've just seen the biggest and baddest guys on the block."
"Hopefully, and hopefully they're friendly or we're going to have a major problem." They watched as the massive spider-like ship scanned the wreckage before tractoring in a small section then 'shifting' away.
"Ok, activate full scanners and let's see what we can learn about that weapon then we'll finish up our survey and return. Something tells me the Commander is not going to like this."