Lt. JG Geoffrey Teller & Ensign Wil Ukinix - Thinking 4th Dimensionally, Part 2

[brian.cleary]

((“Purple Haze”, Purplewhitehaven Beach, approximately an hour later))

::Wil stood on the multicolored sand with his arms outstretched like a sun worshiper of old, soaking in his surroundings, at peace with the world. Teller huddled in the shadow of a tree on the edge of the beach, shifting every few moments as he tried to find any version of sitting or leaning that was comfortable and out of the sun. Eventually, he gave up and simply sank to the sand, still ruminating at near warp speed.::

Ukinix: ::Shaking his head:: Your mind is still elsewhere isn’t it. This beautiful purple sand, and your mind’s still churning.

::Teller scowled at Wil. He didn’t mind his empathic abilities and usually found them to be an insightful resource, but right now the idea of anybody else in his overcrowded head was grating.::

Teller: Hey, I’m sitting on the stupid beach aren’t I? Look at me relaxing. I’m relaxed. Completely relaxed. 100% relaxed. So relaxed. I’m probably the most relaxed person on this entire god damned planet.

Ukinix: ::Looking around:: I’ll tell you what. ::Standing up, picking up a nearby stick.:: Let’s get these ideas out of your head. It might help.

Teller:...you gonna bust my head open with that? You should find a bigger stick. Or a rock.

::Wil walked forward to the sand, and drew a circle. He wrote the word “Limbo” underneath. He then drew a bigger dashed line circle around the planet, to represent the temporal “bubble” they were in. Inside the Limbo circle, he drew some stick people.::

Ukinix: That’s us…

::Teller chuckled at the crude but accurate diagram::

Teller: Didn’t know you were a cartographer.

::Smiling, Wil walked around to the “top” of the dashed circle. He drew a crude “stick starship” and wrote “USS Veritas” next to it.::

Teller: You’re ready for the Admiralty with a presentation like this.

::Wil turned around to look again at the stick figure. It looked more like an old Constitution class ship. He bent down, rubbed his hand in the sand and then redrew a more accurate version the Veritas.::

Ukinix: ::Cheeky smile:: There you go, fixed.

Teller: Oh yeah, now I see it. Vivid. Who needs the holodeck?

::Wil smiled, walked over to Geoffrey, and handed him the stick. He simply said one word.::

Ukinix: Go.

::Playing along because he could tell Wil wasn’t going to take no for an answer, Teller stood and took the stick, then began scratching out a list::

Teller: Well, we’ve got three problems the way I see it.

Ukinix: ::Cheeky:: Hmm, that’s optimistic.

::Teller kicked sand in Wil’s direction with a grunt::

Teller: Fine, more than three, but lets call these the ‘main’ problems.

Ukinix: Gotchya.

::Geoff began scratching in the sand more actively. Wil stood off to the side with a sly smile.::

Teller: First and foremost - we’re stuck down here. All two hundred of us, plus a few orion pirates and our Fleet command house guests. The escape pods are not designed to take off from the surface and are out of fuel anyway. The few shuttles that made it down are also drained and wrecked, so nobody is leaving in those. What’s left of the Compass wouldn’t get a kite flying.

::Teller scratched the number one into the sand, and wrote ‘stranded,’ which he then underlined for emphasis.::

::Wil smiled::

Ukinix: For now.

Teller: Second. According to the Fleet Captain, the Veritas is stuck up there ::drawing a circle on the diagram:: near the edge of whatever this temporal field is, totally out of deuterium, so for all intents and purposes, dead in space. Even if we could get people aboard somehow, they might be able to get an environment suit, or into one of the parked shuttles, which would give them a little time, but ultimately they’re still in a big powerless metal tube.

::Teller scratched the number two and wrote ‘Power.’::

::Wil put his hands on his hips, looking at the word, nodding. Starting to think about a starship again in this manner was therapeutic for him. The dormant starship Engineering parts of his brain started kicking into gear.::

Ukinix: That’s a big one.

Teller: Third. Even if we somehow solve those first two problems, anybody we get aboard will be outside the field that we’re still stuck in. Lets say they come up with a solution that takes a few days, their time, to implement. That means almost a full year will have gone by down here. Between injuries, simple accidents and our supply situation, that means lives lost - a lot of them.

::Teller finished his list with the number three drawn in the sand, followed by a single word. ‘Time.’::

::Teller looked at his list in dismay. It was one thing to think about this every waking moment, but the stark reality of laying it out somehow made the problem even more depressingly real.::

::Wil could sense Teller feeling the gravity of what was laid out before him. Conversely though, Wil was happy to see it all visualised. He crossed his arms, and put his hand on his chin, and let it all sink in, while his chest rose and fell with deep relaxed breathing.::

Ukinix: Hmm.

::Wil opened his mouth to speak, while ideas ran through his head, but none of them seemed workable. He stopped, considered more, and then opened his mouth again, to re-read the list..::

Ukinix: One. Stranded. Two. Power…. And Three. Time. That’s the killer isn’t it. ::Ironic laugh:: All the time we want on Limbo, yet we don’t have enough of that up there ::looking at “G’Var’s star”:: - time I mean.

Teller:: oO Time. That’s what’s really killing us. That’s the wall of the prison. We can’t beat entropy. We can’t change what’s already happened….but maybe we don’t have to. Oo

::The seed of an idea blossomed in Teller’s mind with the force of a star going nova. From it, permutations stretched backwards and forwards in ways he’d never usually consider. The stick dropped to the sand as Teller’s mouth hung open in shock.::

Teller:: oO EUREKA! Oo

::Teller grabbed the stick and wiped his list clear with his foot, then began rapidly drawing a sketch of his own::

::Wil watched incredulously as his Chief wiped the list.::

Ukinix: Mate, what are you -

::Wi went quiet. He could tell Geoffrey was inspired.::

Teller: Wil, look….I….I’m either about to have a stroke or I’ve got it….look. Here’s the beginning of the timeline ::Teller marked and x in the sand, then extended a line for several meters:: when the Veritas was compromised and the deflector was reconfigured to create the temporal anomaly that crippled the ship and trapped us here. We’ll call this point zero.

::Teller began talking faster and faster, afraid the idea would get away from him before he could get it out. It all seemed so clear to him now.::

Teller: ::drawing another x on the line: Here, the Captain orders us to abandon ship at +3 minutes from zero. The ship is completely evacuated by here, about +10 minutes. :another X:: and then around +80 minutes from zero, the Compass shows up and is drawn down to the planet with us, here, on day 56. ::Teller made another X, then stood back from his drawing.:: Did I miss anything else that’s already happened in space? This is incredibly important.

::Wil put his hands on his knees, to get his eyes closer to what Geoffrey was drawing.::

Ukinix: ::Pausing:: Nup.

Teller: Good. So. Remember your temporal mechanics lectures from the Academy?

::Wil remembered how temporal mechanics had made his eyes water during those sessions at the Academy..::

Wil: ::Unconvincingly:: yeah....

Teller: Those are all of our established ‘fixed points’ in time. They already happened for us, hence, logically, they have to have happened, so we can’t mess with anything before this point or we wind up with a paradox. ::Teller jammed his stick into the sand where the X marked the Compass’s arrival.::

Ukinix: ::Nodding:: Grandfather Paradox.

Teller: Right. So, we know time is passing down here at a rate that’s a lot faster than the outside universe. I think the Skipper and the blue shirts have been working on the math, but the number I heard was something like at least a thousand times as fast as it’s going up there. But time has passed for the ship in orbit. Minutes, hours, a day maybe, but that’s our window. That’s where we beat the bastards!

::Teller stretched his line out further down the beach and ended it with an X titled, Now, Limbo on the bottom and Now, Veritas on the top. Next to the word Limbo, he added +151,200 minutes, accounting for roughly 105 days they’d spent on the surface. Next to the word Veritas, he added +151 minutes. Just a little more than 2.5 hours. A vicious smile was spreading over his face::

Teller: Wil, if we can’t fix this in the present, and we’re not going to fix it in the future, then we need to start fixing it in the past. We’re going to change the paradigm. This is it. THIS IS IT!

::Teller began pacing around his diagram, half formed ideas competing for space in his brain::

Teller: I’m ashamed to say it, but all this time in the jungle must’ve fogged up my brain because I left a tool on the shelf. We’ve got a time traveler with us. One who knows HOW this technology works. What I’m proposing we do is this.:: Teller drew an arc from his label on ‘Today, Limbo’ to just after the Compass crash on the timeline.:: We find Ekal and we use his time travel tech to send him back to the ship ::Teller jabbed his timeline with the stick:: right after the Compass crashed. Once he’s up on the Veritas, he can channel whatever is left in the ships batteries to the deflector for another pulse to dissipate the anomaly and then we’re all going home for supper.

::Teller stood back with a savagely victorious smile on his face.::

::Wil sensed a big change in Teller. Not only had Geoffrey cheered up, he was thinking about how to get off Limbo. Without Geoffrey realising, Wil took a quick glance at G’Var’s star. More hope was flooding back again::

::Teller began rapidly scribbling next to his timeline in the sand, drawing out formulas for battery efficiency and power flow rates to the deflector. Within minutes, the formulas extended in every direction for several meters.::

Teller: With the computer shut down and nobody in engineering, the batteries were never cut in, so they’ll still be at peak charge. Normally they’re only designed to run emergency life support for a few days in a disaster, or maybe give us a few extra minutes in a fight if the warp reactor goes offline. If we tie them all together, route them into the deflector in one big surge...it’ll be barely enough. But it has to be enough.

Ukinix: It should be enough… should be...

Teller/Ukinix together: Because if it isn’t we’re screwed.

::Geoff and Wil looked at each other with a genuine smile.::

Ukinix: ::Waving his hand dismissively, with optimism:: They’ll be fine.

::Wil walked over next to where Teller was madly scrawling in the sand.::

Ukinix: But... Devil’s advocate. Ekal gets aboard the ‘Tas. He cranks up the batteries and fires the deflector. High fives, all good…but the ships not in a good state and he’s not going to be able to transport 200 plus people up. So what does he do after he gets there?

Teller: Afterwards? He uses the emergency evac transporters on one of the remaining shuttles to bring a repair team aboard. Then we pull whatever deuterium we can out of them, dump it into the main storage tanks, fire up the reactor and call for help. The Colonial Marshals service has some patrol ships and they’re only a few days away. Once they’re done, the repair team can bring the shuttle down with supplies and start ferrying our sick and injured back into orbit. Since the anomaly will be safely gone by that point, whoever is still down here can put their feet up and play volleyball until the Marshals gets here.

Ukinix: ::Smiling, nodding:: I will gladly engineer beach volleyball equipment if it means we’re getting out of here.

::Teller continued frantically scribbling, unaware he was now almost twenty meters from where he had started his timeline, surrounded by numbers and formulas etched into the purple and white sands of the beach. For the very first time, the place looked absolutely beautiful to him. With an exhausted, manic grin, Teller looked around and knew what to do.::

::Wil walked back and forth, arms crossed, looking at Teller’s formulas.::

Ukinix: We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Teller: We’ve got to find Ekal and the Captain right now. Nobody else, I don’t want to get hopes up if this is impossible. Damn, I wish Galven was down here - that time traveling nutjob would make quick work of the math. Hell, I’d take Galven’s chalkboard at this point.

::Teller spared a moments though for his old roommate and colleague. Teller hoped, wherever and whenever he was, that he was safe and well. Shaking sand off his hands, he started heading back towards the campsite at a trot that quickly turned into a full sprint.::

::Wil followed Teller, at a good pace to keep up with him, which made Wil smile.::

oO *And* my daily run. Bonus! Oo

((New Risa Resort and Spa - 45 minutes later))]

::Geoffrey and Wil sprinted into the town as fast as they could. During the run, Geoffrey was yelling details at Wil over his shoulder, which at times weren’t decipherable in between his panting. Once in the town, they got down on their haunches, puffing like crazy. Geoffrey sat down for a minute to regain his breath, and Wil joined, leaning back on his hands, smiling. People in the camp turned to look at them with odd, questioning expressions::

Ukinix: ::Panting:: Well - that was - a good workout! You set a good pace when something’s on your mind.

Teller: :huffing:: Yeah...thinking about transferring...to security. Hours are better.

::Wil stood and looked up at the baking sun. He then stepped forward and held his Chief's upper arm, helping him to his feet.::

Ukinix: ::Panting:: C’mon - let’s go find - the Captain. At least - before I have - a cardiac arrest.

Teller: Wil, you don’t have authorization to keel over just yet. Hang on. ::shouting to a nearby onlooker:: Crewman!

Crewman U’rak: Sir?

Teller: Pass the word - we need Jhalib Ekal in the Command Tent, soon as they can be found. Got it?

Crewman U’rak: Aye Aye Chief!

Teller: Alright Wil, break over. It’s time we get back to work.

::Geoff and Wi picked themselves up and headed for the command tent, leaving a small cloud of dust and a few curious onlookers in their wake.::

=================================================

Ensign Wil Ukinix
Engineering Officer
USS Veritas
V239511WU0

&

Lieutenant JG Geoffrey Teller
Chief Engineer
USS Veritas - NCC 95035
Capt. R. Rahman, Commanding
V239509GT0