Engineer Dawson took a deep breath as she sat in the test mission control room. The newest test ship for the Intrepid class project was slightly bigger with a much more robust-looking nacelle ring.
Roper, La Forge and Scott, or Scotty as he was nicknamed so famously, the legendary 23rd-century engineer walked over to where she was. Dawson looked over her team. They were experts, veterans. Scotty was a 23rd-century veteran, who had spent 80 years in a stasis tank, drifting near an artificial planet after a tractor beam snagged his ship down to a massive crash. Geordi La Forge was here to help supervise the latest experiments with the newest warp drive ships, and between the four of them, they had used their experiences and insights and their creative sparks to create a twisting warp drive that could warp space into a wormhole.
"We're in business," Roper said.
"The warp drive will fold space, but we don't know how much space will be folded. We might get 18 lightyears out of it, maybe more, we don't know," La Forge said, loving every minute of this. The chief engineer of the starship Enterprise was an expert in warp physics and he'd had a front-row seat during the discovery and the groundwork of study that went into the Barzan wormhole; it might have been a failure, but it was still a wormhole and the space/time scans had given them a lot of knowledge of how the wormhole worked.
Dawson nodded. "Yeah, I can see it from here," she nodded at the screen. "Are there any dangers?"
"Aye, but the space lane has been cleared of activity. We've got the monitoring stations, deep space probes and observation posts ready," Scott replied. Dawson nodded, absently wondering how the engineer was coping with the newer advances. "Good, what about the rescue ships?"
"They dotted along the path, every 6 light years," La Forge replied.
"That will reassure the test flight pilots," Dawson said.
"When are we launching?" Roper asked.
"Now," Dawson gestured to the screens.
T minus, 30 minutes. For the next half an hour, preparations for the launch of the test ship went underway. Finally, when the countdown neared zero, the test ship came to life. The four engineering officers watched as the test ship moved slowly away on fusion power, moving slowly but rapidly away from the star base's space station.
"Engaging hyperdrive," the pilot was saying over the communication band, using the traditional slang/nickname for a faster-than-light drive. "NOW!"
The space around the test ship warped and shifted before it vanished.
Scot grinned. "Tis a thing of beauty, isn't it?" He asked his fellow engineers.
"Yeah, it is," La Forge replied.
Roper checked the engineering bandwidth. "Where are they? I'd have expected we would have heard from them by now."
Quickly the other engineers checked the scopes. Scott's smile had faded, replaced by a frown of worry. "There's nothing there," the old engineer said.
"Hold it," La Forge grinned as his scopes picked up the transponder. "It looks like we were wrong with the calculations. Instead of sending the test ship 5 light years, we've sent it 9 light years away. A rescue ship is already heading there."
"9 light years away?" Roper repeated.
"Which system did it drop out of warp in?" Scott asked.
"It would be more accurate to say the test ship travelled 9.71 light years, to Ross 154. The test ship's onboard computer is already broadcasting its telemetry to us now. The pilot is safe and sound. A ship is heading to the system now," Dawson read from the screen.
"Do you guys know what's hard to believe? We might have come an inch closer to building a wormhole. Not a warp drive, but a wormhole," Geordi said.
"Yeah, if we play our cards right, within the next few years we could have teleportation from planet to planet, we won't even have to use shuttles anymore," Roper said.
"It will happen," Dawson replied. "Anyway, we'd better get on; we want to carry out more experiments ands test flights. We've still got a helluva lot of work to get done."