Chapter 46:

In 2009 we were visiting each Starfleet R&D center to get a sense for trends and where we might want to use Section 31's influence. We were pleasantly surprised by how well Starfleet China was working. The new Confederated Republic of China took the attitude of not what they can get from Starfleet as a whole, but what Starfleet China can contribute, both within China and its affiliated areas, but also to space technology. The national government determined that the number of competent wizards is critical. They worked with their magical ministry to send all children who show magic, to start magical education as soon as possible. They also helped determine who were squibs and evaluated each for potential for working in magical industries, and then sent them for specific education.

China evaluated non-magical students at the university level to determine who could be helpful in magical industries. Those were encouraged with higher paid positions to join those efforts. Then, both parts of Confederated China helped put together industries partially using magic. Their goal was to be more efficient than other places, and sell their products globally, and to be a the preferred low cost supplies to Starfleet.

Work on fusion was done in China, Europe, US, and Japan. Each project was intended to use different approaches, and to be aimed at delivery of extremely high power over distances of about 100 meters. Producing electricity would be simple, if it could produce enough power for a warp field generator, so electricity production was not the main emphasis. All plans aimed at continuously running warp cores that could power ship's environments, beam weapons, anti-matter creation, shield generators, impulse engines, and warp field generators. The last was assumed to be need the most energy, so the generators were to be designed to have adjustable power levels. Energy storage was also considered important, so that critical ship functions could continue when engines were offline.

The super-collider on the asteroid Vesta was running low powered experiments now. Nearby facilities were doing other experiments, but still carefully avoiding anything that could generate a warp field. Near Vesta, several examples of double loops similar to the size of the Vulcan ships on Star Trek Enterprise were built. Various types of particles were tried at medium power, with plans to use much higher power once warp drive experiments will begin.

The Basic Living Centers were actually helping in the design of starships. While they are at one-g, maybe there will be artificial gravity, or continuous one-g acceleration on spaceships. What was being learned was how well material needs can be provided for in a sealed environment. While starship crews were going to be organized by navy ranks, there might be a time when families are sent on ships, and the knowledge of how the social aspects of the centers worked should be useful.

On our visit to Starfleet Bolivia we learned that in some South American cities, the Basic Living Centers were being flocked to as a refuge from crime. Since Starfleet was not willing to venture into helping law enforcement, except to stop terrorism or actual civil war, all it could do was to expand the centers in those areas. Some people were going into those centers and never leaving them, if they had particular threats against them. One area that Starfleet could help is by finding them a job in Starfleet and transporting them out of the area. Anyone working for Starfleet learns about magic.

Space habitation had not yet reached the point of it being a place people could move to in large numbers. The small number of people in Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and the Asteroids, were all highly skilled people doing specific jobs. Plans to build general habitations were some years away.

There was a large meeting at Starfleet to go over how much to rely on magic in spacecraft. Here was some of the debate.

"There seems to be an assumption that magic is less real than technology and therefore cannot be relied upon"

"No, that is not it. However, magic suppression is known. What is not known is how much extra-terrestrials can perform wide area magic suppression. Also, could any natural phenomena have that effect?"

"Then I would tend to agree with survivability, but not mission continuation in the absence of magic."

"Anti-gravity does not need to wait until we have it as a technology. The Arresto Momentum charm can be adapted to do everything needed. It will be digitally controlled, and match ships acceleration. If it fails, the ship will limit acceleration to safe limits and safe rates of change. If there is a battle or collision, the digital control will match the sudden accelerations."

"Warp cores could be rushed into production if needed, with magic. However, fusion research and its related technologies is making good progress. I think ships should contain both types of drives."

"Ships should be able to be survivable for extended periods with no engines working. That means non-magical stored energy, ability to maintain all needed facilities for crew essentials, including temperature, air, food, water, sanitary facilities, protections from space debris collisions."

The rest of 2009 went by with much less happening than expected. We were bracing for backlash from the announcements made to the non-magical world in August 2008. What we got was minor and nothing that we couldn't handle. There were political debates in many countries about their relationship with Starfleet. Many governments asked Starfleet for specific help, and when possible Starfleet did. Starfleet helped when there were floods, earthquakes, extreme storms. It had already solved famine and lack of shelter.

The few countries that were not in a partnership with Starfleet were noticeably behind in living standards and in the competitiveness of their industries. Some became Starfleet partners in 2009, while none left it.

The Basic Living Centers included a sickbay. Starfleet setup training centers for non-magical doctors and nurses to learn how to operate the sickbays. The technician/doctors were not told about magic, but only how to read the displays. Patients would lie down on a medbay, and various displays would show results of scans, including live displays above the patient. Some conditions were treated with enchanted objects, other conditions were documented and the patients could be sent to non-magical doctors, or Starfleet healers. Since there was a limited number of magical healers, the general public got only very limited access to them. After every other step had already been done, the patients are sent to a magical healer, who spends a minimal amount of time performing magic on each patient, with a support staff that were not magical to handle every other step in treatment.

During this year, all of the Basic Living Centers were linked to each other with magical transport methods. For now, it was only for use by magicals, excepts under certain circumstances non-magicals, who do not have knowledge of magic, could be frozen or rendered unconscious, and then transported.

In October 2009, Renée got her wand. She was just under 10 years old, but Starfleet school based it on magical readiness, not age. The Starfleet wand center had an industrial view towards wands, instead of the craftsmen view of masters such as Ollivander and Gergorivitch. Starfleet Wands collected components from all the world's traditions. They tried to cultivate the various woods, and hosted the magical creatures that might yield wand cores, in various magical creature preserves, but purchased components also. When someone arrived for their wand, they did various tests for affinity to different types of woods and cores. There were some experimentation with non-wood wands. They also made staffs. Then they made to order the wand. When it was ready, the customer tried the newly made wand, but also the customer tried existing wands in their stock, and any made to order wand that did not match well to the customer became part of their stock for other customers to try.

Luna and I came home with Renée when she picked up her wand after it was ready. Jean-Laurent had some school friends over, and was making grape jelly sandwiches for them. He was telling them about different grape varieties and having them try jellies made from each. When we arrived, he ran over to see Renée's wand, as did his friends. She showed them the Lumos charm, that made her wand act like a flashlight. Everyone congratulated her. Starfleet school had drilled into all of its students the need to celebrate each other's achievements and not act jealous if it was something they could not do.

Cora, who herself had started Starfleet school a month earlier smiled and told Renée, "You'll learn intelligence revealing with your wand, not just human revealing. You'll try it on whales before you go to Jupiter." Renée and the adults in the room filed away the exact wording of what she said. They weren't considered prophecies when she talked like that, but something closely related to prophecies, but not in riddles, and were not guaranteed to come true, but usually did.

Ekdotis asked Cora, "I old enough to write news when Renée do that?"

Xenophilius answered, "Absolutely, and I'll help you write it if you like."

Luna was teaching Cora when not to say what she sees, but instead write it down to tell Luna about it later. If she tells a classmate, you'll be a great Quidditch seeker, there is no harm in that, but if she says, "Ship explodes, need to do bubble-head without speaking!" it is certainly useful knowledge, but not something to tell a 5 year old.

For the New Years 2010, we decided to host a party in the afternoon of New Year's Day. The timezone would make it easy for those in Kazakhstan to go to out party after any other New Year's celebrations in their time zones.

From Hogwarts, both Albus Dumbledore and Filius Flitwick attended. Flitwick was consulting with Starfleet in addition to being a professor at Hogwarts. There was a huge demand for charm masters. We needed new spells, charms, and enchantments for all sorts of needs. Not just new capabilities, but ways to make magical factories more efficient.

Our kids played with the Longbottoms, Potters, and Weasleys. The Weasley twins kids were trying to prank everyone else. The Potters were saying "Our grandfather was Prongs, we can outprank you." Then they started arguing about the Marauders map.

I went over to Fred Weasley and asked, "Can you make a new map for new places?"

Fred said, "Yes, we have figured out how it was made and Padfoot and Mooney helped."

Then I asked, "Maybe you can teach that, so on an industrial scale every starship and every Basic Needs Center can have its own map?"

Fred answered, "We can do that, but we'll have to get that priority through channels, we are pretty backed up with other projects now."

We later got that done through Starfleet Headquarters, mostly to have the Weasley twins teach some other charms masters how to create maps. Flitwick helped identify how to do so in locations that do not have the wards system that Hogwarts has, although each of these locations do have wards.

There was a research project, led by Starfleet India, on how to design wards for starships. The main unknown would be how would intent based wards work with extra-terrestrials. There already was research on how they would work with drones, with many experiments. For non-human intentions, there were only ideas, not evidence.

Starfleet India also had many experiments on magical shielding versus high energy weapons. There were some breakthroughs on how to divert the power of weapons, rather than directly stop their effects. This worked well, and required considerably less magical power than initially thought.

Starfleet Dakar picked up on protecting starships by avoiding being hit instead of directly counteracting the power of the weapons being used. They came up with a method of teleporting entire ships short distances at random. The idea would be that while not at warp speed, the ship could move around to make targeting of them difficult. At the same time, non-magical methods were being planned. Any ship at warp travel in a possible battle zone would randomly and constantly slightly alter its course. Any ship traveling at impulse speed would also randomly change its course. The course changes would slow its progress towards its destination, but not that much. These all relied on the assumption that weapons fire require plotting a future location of a target and aiming at that, and that all weapons fire has a non-infinite speed of travel. Intelligent drones and torpedoes, however, would not be easily fooled by these methods, but might be countered with teleportation.

Another approach was using magical methods to teleport or otherwise counter drones and torpedoes. It was understood that there would be a constantly evolving balance between offensive and defensive methods, and that Starfleet's initial techniques will likely not work for long, since counter-measures would likely be developed.

Another area of speculation is to what extent Starfleet would face adversaries with magic. Star Trek canon shows that most similar space traveling civilizations do not have much if any magic. Vulcan mind arts might counter-act magical means of stealth. However, it was not expected that the Vulcans would ever be an adversary, although an offshoot civilization of theirs, the Romulans, were likely to be an adversary, and were assumed to have similar abilities.

It was also assumed that more advanced magic is to be found, but mostly by practitioners who tend to stay on one planet. The plan for these, would be to be very aware and alert for magic, and to try to learn as much as possible from any extra-terrestrial magic encountered.