Season 1 - Episode 7: Signal Fire
May 28, 2371 (2 Months, 13 Days in the Delta Quadrant)
"I'd sit alone, and watch your light. My only friend, through teenage life. And ev'rything, I need to know, I heard it on my radio." I sang, my arms elbow deep into the replicator in my quarters.
Today I wasn't scheduled to be on duty, my weekly day off having finally rolled around after three weeks without it, putting out fires and settling Security down into their new roles, and I was trying to make the most of the free time. Whether or not I actually was, was something to be debated at a later time.
The singing was something I had picked up as a child. I'd be working on a problem, or trying to fix something that had broken, and I would put on some music and sing along to it. It focused my mind and steadied my hands, and at the same time made whatever I was doing seem like less of a chore. Although in this case, I didn't have the luxury of the song being played by the computer. Fortunately, I had a very good memory.
Is it really worth it to live in a universe where Queen never existed? I wondered, only mostly joking. I'd have to see about maybe programing their greatest hits, maybe the Live Aid concert. Recreating it from memory would be an a cast iron pain, though ultimately worth it.
Then again, if I start with Queen and it works, that will eventually lead to me recreating a hell of a lot of other artists. Maybe some kind of limited memory reading tech? When was Paris going to be falsely convicted of murder again? Well, at least it would keep me busy.
'Focus, Shepard.' I berated myself
"You gave them all, those old time stars. Through wars of worlds, invaded by Mars. You made us laugh, you made us cry, you made us feel, like we could fly." My voice rose in pitch to match what I remembered, but failed to quite reach Mr. Mercury's. Okay, it wasn't even close. Shepard apparently was a Baritone-Bass.
Right then I was trying my damnedest to not touch, brush against or otherwise interact with the damn bio-neural gel pack in my replicator. These things were amazing, if I was honest. Essentially an organic computer system, bio-neural fibers surrounded in a blue gel matrix that could store more information and operated at faster speeds than isolinear circuitry. Making billions of connections and generating an astonishingly sophisticated and responsive computer architecture.
The downside was that these stupid things couldn't be replicated. Voyager had a good deal of spare gel packs locked up in engineering, and even more had been added when Janeway had ordered as many gel packs as possible to be replaced with isolinear chips without compromising the ships systems. Unfortunately, so many of the systems had been redesigned and specially constructed with gel packs in mind that the order only got a quarter of the packs recovered. I didn't know how to make them myself, and even with my computer overrides I was sure the information wasn't anywhere in Voyager's databanks at all.
The problem I was currently dealing with was that inside each and every replicator was a gel pack. It was mostly because each replicator acted as a decentralized hub for the main computer. Not because the replicators themselves needed them, but because they were a convenient location to network the ship's computer systems together. It maximized efficiency, and made any kind of crew-side modifications much more difficult, which might've been as much a feature as it was a bug, given to what the Ensigns could get up to with enough free time.
This bit of information, however, left me doing my damndest to install a pair of devices into replicator without breathing on the damned pack. Not that I actually believed the devices to that fragile, one could probably play softball with one of the things, but there was no way I was going to risk one of these. Not when it'ld take a month or more to have a replacement grown with the two pack creators we had. Torres had already petitioned the captain to take one apart to see if she could make more, but Janeway had shot that down, stating that we needed both of them in case something happened to the other one, and it was passive scans only. The fact that they were actually shielded against those, to keep the tech in Federation hands didn't seem to matter.
"So don't become, some background noise. A backdrop for, the girls and boys. Who just don't know, and just don't care, and just complain, when you're not there." I picked up the volume as I worked, placing the small, custom built disk behind the bottommost panel and finalizing the necessary connections.
It was almost comical how all the parts of the device fit together. Most people looked at a replicator and assumed it was drawing power directly from the ship's power plant. The truth was it was a lot more complex than that. First, power from the warp core traveled through the ships EPS conduits, the main arteries of power running through the ship, enough power contained to wreck the ship and enough safeties to choke a bureaucrat. Then from there, when you make a request of the system, it would feed into a hilariously convoluted series of capacitors which stored the energy before use. At first I couldn't figure out why they did this, since it wasn't really needed and was less efficient than drawing directly from the main system, but with a little bit of thought, I realized it was because of the exploding-console syndrome.
The matter-energy convertor inside the replicator was a very twitchy system. Like, Nitroglycerin on a roller coaster twitchy. Part of the reason replicator technology wasn't shared, besides the fact it was against Federation law, was because of how easy it would be to cause a building-leveling explosion if these devices - again, located in nearly all quarters as well as the mess hall - were to be hit with a power surge. Most consoles had some kind of system in place to prevent those ruptures, even if they weren't a hundred percent effective, that allowed them to at least appear to be safe. Exploding consoles, while enough to burn or throw a man several feet away, were designed to do so in such a way as to not riddle the poor soul with lethal shrapnel. Most of the time.
However, Starfleet couldn't risk any kind of overload with a replicator, so they went overboard on the safety. When not in use, the system collected just enough power to run the computer systems. That was safe enough. Then, once a request is made to the system, tomato soup or whatever you wanted, it draws the power from the ship into several capacitors and then feeds it into the matter-energy converter. The feed stock - usually collected from the reclamation systems - is then deatomized and sequenced into whatever was requested.
Yes, you were technically eating shit. Still tasted better than the Talaxian's cooking.
Funny enough, the Academy never went into how to actually make a replicator or even how to do much more than basic servicing or repair. Replicators were barely more understood than magic, apparently, since you need to be a wizard - or at least one of the few people who are responsible for their construction - to learn more than the basics. It wasn't even until a few years into my S31 training that they covered how to turn a replicator into a miniature transporter. Or a bomb.
Now here I was, installing something that only I understood. Just barely so, anyway.
It had taken weeks to design, replicate and assemble my version of the Arc Reactor. It was, in the most basic sense, a fusion reactor. As we know, fusion involves the nuclear reaction between two lighter nuclei to form heavier nuclei. The circular part of the Reactor was the result of highly energized particles moving with a magnetic field acting upon them, and thus generating energy through their collision - like how the Large Hadron Collider worked in my old life.
Just really, really small.
The white-blue light they gave off was Cherenkov radiation, a phenomenon that results from nuclear decay. In this case, because I don't have access to starkium or a tesseract, I was working with palladium. As best I could figure out, this form of reactor was initialized through the ionization of palladium through an electric arc, while the radiation - coupled with the collisions of the particles inside the core, produced a difference in the core, and thus causing current to flow.
That being said, I still didn't fully understand how it works. I just had the blueprints in my head and enough Trek-knowledge to backfill the possible, probably 'whys and hows'. What I found more interesting was that, without Star Trek manufacturing methods that make engineering allowances of plus-or-minus point-zero to the thirtieth, Stark made the damn thing work at all. By all rights he should've blown himself up, trying it, but he'd somehow made it function on the first try. It was slightly radioactive, but as I didn't plan on putting it in me, a bit of extra shielding was no issue at all.
With Stark's tech, and this ship's manufacturing capabilities, it made it possible for my reactor, roughly the size of a god damn doughnut, to generate three thousand megawatts of power. And I had two of them now connected to my replicator and hidden away in the wall. For context, the USS George Washington, a nuclear aircraft carrier, was powered by two three hundred megawatt reactors that were each the size of a large house. Small fusion reactors, like what was carried on Voyager as an emergency power source, were the size of a king-sized bed and put out upwards of ten thousand megawatts.
Something inside me just screamed that all of this was a bad idea. I hated not knowing exactly how or why something worked. Alien space magic was never an acceptable answer, especially not when I made something that could outperform all other fusion reactors currently known in a few hours once I figured out how to machine the parts.
Closing the panel and putting everything else back to where it should be, I gave a silent prayer of thanks to Odin, Thor, and anyone else who might be listening that I had remembered to shield the damn devices before I switched them on.
I sang a little more freely, no longer having my thoughts divided between what my mouth and hands were doing. "You have the time. You have the power. You've yet to have, your finest hour. Radio."
Standing up, I took a few cautious steps back from the replicator - even while knowing full well that if anything went wrong the explosion would leave nothing of me left capable of worrying. "Computer," I called out, the system chirping its acknowledgement and ready for my pending request. "Why mess with the classics? Tea, Earl Gray, Hot."
There was another chirp of acknowledgement, the replicator platform glowed, but nothing else happened.
I frowned at the site. The system was on, it had heard my request, was lit up in anticipation, and now it was just sitting there. Like a video game that froze mid-battle.
Activating my omni-tool, I waved it over the station to see what was happening. Maybe I accidentally knocked something out of place or decoupled something that needed to say in place? Either way I needed to get a better picture of what was happening.
Just as I finished my scan, the replicator hummed quietly before a teacup and saucer appeared on the serving tray. Once it had finished, the device shut down.
I rolled my Tool over the device, first checking the replicator to see if it was going to explode any time soon, and, once seeing that everything was fine, I checked the liquid.
You needed to be very cautious with replicating food. Most would assume food stuff to be the easiest thing in the world to replicate, but it was actually one of the most complicated. You replicate steel, you end up with a shaped piece of metal composed of iron and carbon atoms in a uniform crystal structure.
Organic matter was a great deal more complex. Everything has a ratio of water, proteins, fats, amino acids and much, much more that had to be in an exact ratio. Slight adjustments in these ratios could result in your replicated beef patty burger tasting like the juicy burger you envisioned or tasteless lump of organic mush, assuming you didn't manage to poison yourself. It got even worse when you are trying to differentiate the difference between Earl Grey and English Breakfast tea. The molecular compositions between the two very small, but resulted in large differences in taste and chemical effects on the body.
"No prions, no harmful compounds, no free radicals, and perfect temperature," I muttered as I read the results, glad it hadn't superheated the drink either. "Moment of truth."
I reached out for the cup, lifted it to my mouth, and sipped. "Perfect," I breathed in relief.
There should have been no reason for me to suspect otherwise. I hadn't tampered with the computer systems, instead just disconnecting the device from the main EPS network and slipping in my power replacement, but I wasn't about to take unnecessary risks with my health.
A quick diagnostic also offered an answer as to why it had taken ten seconds for order to process. It took some time for the replicator's capacitors to store up enough power to complete the function. The output from my Arc Reactors was nowhere near the raging tide of energy running through the EPS, and as such wasn't enough to make the process immediate. That said, it was still enough to make the system work as intended, checking my Padd to see that the cost of the drink hadn't been removed from my allotment of rations, so I'd consider it a win for now. Until I built something better. anyway.
As I savored the warm beverage, I took a seat, closed my eyes, and reflected. Today was a Friday, and last Tuesday my eleventh point would have rolled over into my Inventor bank, except that my ability had a cap of ten. I'd been wondering what would happen if I tried to go over my limit, and the result was hilariously mundane. Nothing happened! I had a solid night of sleep, with no unpleasant headache waking me up at two in the morning.
It was pleasant.
But with that experiment having come to a solid conclusion, it was time to start utilizing my ability once more. With any possible health effects of not using my points addressed, I wasn't inclined to waste any more. A single charge gone to understand my power was a fair price, but only one. I'd spent the last few days wondering what to focus the next handful of points on, and it was difficult to decide.
Opening my eyes, I looked over at my desk in the corner, and smiled. To anyone else on the crew, my pair of large monitors mounted on the wall along with a keyboard resting atop the desk would be an alien sight, but to me it just felt familiar. I would admit that part of me had only done it, building a personal computer setup, to see if I could. But, now that it was there? I couldn't imagine working without it. It ran off the main computer, just like every other system on the ship, but my changes made it useful for more than just reading reports. From here I didn't need to go to the holodeck or spend hours straining my eyes on a tiny padd screen, I could do all my designing and rendering from the comfort of my quarters when not on duty. three small holoemitters, the kind I used for my Omni-Tool, even created a three dimensional modeling space, able to create theoretical gear on the fly to look it over myself.
That alone made it worth building.
Tucked away inside the computers private and heavily encrypted data storage, were many different things I wanted to work on to improve this ship and its crew. Better, stronger and more efficient primary weapons for Voyager, improved targeting systems, ship computer AI, Iron Man suits for Security, improved shuttles that would make the Delta Flyer cry in envy, anti-Borg weapons, and so, so much more.
The ideas were all there, sorted by most immediately useful or most likely to come up sooner rather than later, and waiting for me to use my gift to make them reality. Spoiled for choice, however, it left me wondering where to start.
My partial failure with the replicator helped give me some clarity, but did I really want to just focus on making my Arc Reactors even better? Voyager needed the energy, but not desperately so yet. We'd passed by the living nebula with nary a peep, and stopped Janeway from digging ourselves even deeper into our energy deficit trying to heal a likely non-sapient stellar phenomena. On the other hand, Equinox was out there somewhere and they did need the help.
If we could find the Equinox, that is.
Just like that, my indecision was rectified. Taking a slow, deep breath, I reached out for Inspired Inventor and made my choices.
Marvel: Arc Reactor (3 charges)
Again.
Marvel: Arc Reactor (4 charges)
As I allowed the information to slip through the back of my skull and settle itself around my existing knowledge of the subject like layers of an onion, a smiled slowly stretched across my face. I'd grabbed those from the MCU but there were so many more variants, some I'd never even heard of. Prototypes, one-offs, and discarded ideas, the tolerances required out of Tony's range, but not mine.
That should handle my future power needs for the foreseeable future, once I adapted them to the ship's systems. Still not as powerful as the single APD-01 Warp Core the ship ran off of, but I wasn't seeking to replace it, merely support it and lengthen the duration of our current supplies would hold. More than that, that last point finally started to latch onto what I already knew, no longer working in a vacuum. More than the prototypes, I could use the tech available to me to make it even more powerful, rugged, and versatile then the prototypes already were. Already new ideas were popping into my head about the various directions I could push this technology, even if I didn't have access to Starkanium or Tesseract derived energy powers.
Not to say I couldn't get them, just that it would require more points specifically used to get that information. Walk, run , fly, I told myself. Once I'd started working out the bugs in my new understanding of them, taken them in new ways, I'd push forward down Stark's development path, not just limiting myself to his vision, but using it as a springboard.
With that settled, I turned my attention to the problem of the Equinox. I know from the show that by now the Equinox had already had half of its crew killed. I'd suggested working on finding a way to contact them myself with Janeway, only to be told that this was an Engineering matter, not a Security one. As much as I wanted to save those people, I wasn't about to burn what goodwill I'd built up on it, when I'd likely need it later to save the ship from Janeway's incompetence. We'd already altered out path, who knew what we'd find instead?
Ever since the subject had been broached, at least once a day a subspace message would be sent out by ops looking for any Starfleet vessels in the area. However, without an existing subspace relay network in place, the range of one of those messages was limited to a dozen lightyears. The Federation relied on the various relay amplifiers and maintenance stations back in the Alpha Quadrant to provide near instantaneous communications.
There was nothing like that here.
The fact that it was nothing more than a seemingly token gesture hadn't sat well with me, and, if I was reading the situation right, the rest of the crew either. No one would say anything, and given time it would be forgotten, but my HumInt training told me that the time to move on that was fast approaching.
What I needed was a way to get a message back to the Equinox. It couldn't be anything too alien or lacking in understanding as I wouldn't be able to get Janeway to agree to install it if I couldn't explain, in detail, exactly what it would be. I'd considered a single use device, powerful enough to be heard but burning itself out, but resources were at a premium and I needed something that would help going forward if I wanted a hope in hell of Janeway agreeing.
That only left one real avenue left if I wanted to contact the Equinox prior to them turning to murdering space dolphins. So, once again, I closed my eyes and reached out with my power.
Subspace Communication (1 charge)
Subspace Communication (2 charges)
With the points to burn, I splurged on the more expensive option. Rather than receiving a singular device or piece of equipment, like I'd been expecting, my mindscape exploded with scientific concepts as data filtered down, over, and through what I already knew. Like a computer trying to download a file, but finding it already existing, waves of such information charged at me, most vanishing into the either when it saw it wasn't needed. This happened over and over, bringing to mind the various stages of subspace communication techniques, models, and rules that Starfleet had discovered since it'd first stumbled across the concept. Hitting the edge of my knowledge, like a diver on a particularly long board, the new information started to come in, faster and deeper than it'd started. Ways to improve what we already used, special repeaters that could be built to increase signal range, frequencies that shorten the bandwidth, and so much more. It was so completely obvious, I felt like an idiot for never noticing it before!
The nature of subspace, so different than normal space, could carry the arguably massless waves of energy in ways that would never work normally! You could bounce, twist, and direct it, with the proper transmitters. If travel through subspace, which I only knew the tiniest fraction more about, was different than in normal space, why wouldn't transmissions be different as well? We knew that, of course, but had only made the smallest of improvements, favoring transmission power over all else. Even my own idea was just 'do it but louder', discarded because I didn't think I could justify the expenses to Janeway. Our own efforts, which the Federation was so proud of, were akin to cupping one's hands and yelling. Better than nothing, but with room for so, so , so much more!
It was minutes before I realized that the download had stopped, but I didn't care. The information was impressive, groundbreaking in almost every sense of the word, and I found myself lost in it. The surprising part was how some of the technology built on other bits of information I had, actually creating traces that could be tracked through subspace, and I wanted to learn it all. The best part, in my opinion, was that unlike the narrow fields of Subspace Fractures and Temporal Paradox Mechanics, this was broad enough for me to get the underlying math and science behind how it worked instead of just a knowledge that some things would work and others wouldn't, without really knowing why.
If my knowledge was a physical territory, they were small islands of clarity in an ocean of fog that was my ignorance, the continent of my pre-existing knowledge nowhere to be found. Efficiency had come with the opposite problem, so incredibly broad that, while undeniably useful, was like taking a few steps in twenty different directions instead of this catapulted leap forward, with a clear trail of reasoning leading back to where I started.
The best parts, the kind that would help change everything and get the Equinox to safety, I was going to need some help to implement. "Looks like another project for Torres and I."