Invasion by Gadgets

Posted on 06 Mar 2013 @ 1:20am by Benjamin Dale Ph.D. & Lieutenant Lilou Zaren

3,728 words; about a 19 minute read

Mission: Episode 03 - Frontier
Location: USS Galileo: Deck 4, Dale's Lab
Timeline: MD04: 0630 hrs

[ON]

Dale muttered to himself, stalking down the corridor to the Chief Science Officer's office, but found her not in residence. It was early yet, still in the dregs of Gamma shift, but that didn't matter. There was a woman* in his lab! Not only in his lab, but using his equipment! And she'd scattered PADDs and all kinds of strange, glowing, tinkering things all over what had previously been a pristine, sanitized space in preparation for the coming materials from Rojar 1. It would take him hours to re-sanitize and prepare the space. He tapped his commbadge, "Dale to Chief Panne. Are you there?"

"Yes, Liyar, what is it?" Maenad yawned, not moving to turn on the lights or adjusting the blanket over herself, or even opening her eyes.

Dale scowled at his combadge. First the tattooed reporter and now the diplomatic officer. He didn't really care what she did with her time, but he didn't need to hear about it. "Dale to Panne. There is an intruder in the laboratories. I repeat. An intruder. And she won't leave."

Maenad shot up. It wasn't Liyar. She flicked on the table lamp beside the couch, her eyes finding that her bedroom door was still closed. Dale? Had he heard what she'd said? She hoped not. "Uh," she nervously choked as she moved her feet onto the floor. Dale was new here and she had only spoken to him a few times, but Maenad was used to his hysterics. "An intruder?" Her voice was skeptical. "Is security on the way?"

"She's using my macroscopic lens to look at circuits or something equally dull," Dale continued, as though he hadn't heard her. Security. As if he would risk getting involved with the department that seemed to be on the look out for new people to test its brig. "Says she's a department head. Just... get her out, would you?"

Maenad swore under her breath and ended the comm. She threw off her blanket and marched impatiently to the door, stuffing her feet into her shoes. Fortunately, she was already in uniform because she'd readied for the day when Liyar had come to take her to self-defense training. Instead, he was passed out in her bed. She laughed to herself as she found the turbolift and was directed to her office on deck four, where the the irate Dale was to be found.

She saw him standing outside her door looking as furious as ever, but she mused that that could have just been his default expression. Maenad didn't care, either way. "What is it?" she asked, stifling a yawn. She looked deathly ill with her purple-ringed eyes and ghostly skin, she wasn't getting any better with once again having forgotten to take her medicine. "Do you know what time it is? Mister Petrov is the duty officer right now," she scolded him.

"He's not answering his comm," Dale looked at her with a pitying expression. "You look terrible. Just-" he pointed down the corridor. "Just look what she did to my lab. Just look!"

Maenad sighed and touched behind an ear with her fingertips. "Show me, then," she gestured him to get moving.

He strode down the corridor and tapped the panel by the door. As the swished open, the first thing they noticed was the alien punk music that poured out at them. The lab was indeed full of strange. There were cylinders floating in the air all through the room, glowing oddly, as little machines shot pellets at them. In front of the giant macrolens scope, a tiny Trill in sweat pants and tank top was talking to herself, her hands held just so manipulating an apparently microscopic set of something on the otherside of the lens with what looked like six very long, skinny pipes between her fingers.

Absolutely shocked was Maenad to learn that Dale was entirely right. She exchanged a glance with him and held up her hands, saying both shut up and I'll deal with this at once. As she walked up behind the smallish Trill woman at the table, Maenad quickly felt a dredge in her chest as she realised it was Lilou Peers. She didn't want to do this. "Computer, pause playback," she said loud enough to be heard. "Miss Peers," she said, audibly confused, "What is it that you're doing?"

"Tttttt-" Lilou shook her head almost infinitesimally, elbows held aloft so as not to mar the work she was doing. One more... there. And then another... she exhaled, staring through the lens and twitched another microcircuit into place by hand, sitting back with an exhale like a surgeon after hours over a dying body. "For the last time, this is hard enough without you yelling at-" she flexed backwards, stretching, and actually fell off her stool as she saw it was Maenad. She looked like she'd just rolled out of bed. And also like she hadn't slept in one for days. There was a heightened, excessive energy to her that spoke of an adrenaline informed wakefulness more than anything else. "Lieutenant Panne," she scrambled to her feet, carefully gathering the thin displacement rods in one hand.

Maenad wasn't smiling, but she wasn't quite frowning either. Peers didn't look well, but Maenad knew better than to judge how people looked. She knew first hand that people could look sick without being sick. "What are you doing?" she asked again, craning her neck to get a better glimpse of what the frayed Trill was working on.

"Ah... Captain wanted the Gal to knock about faster and it hit me last night that I could extrapolate the shield tech I've been working on to make it possible for us to manipulate kinetic energy source material into extra disposable power for the shields, engines, and core. Circuitry is a bitch - sorry, a pain in the ass - sorry, highly difficult and involved - and this is the best macrolens on the ship-"

"And it's mine-" Dale interrupted.

"You weren't using it." She rubbed her cheek, yawning behind flexing fingers. "Just have a few more prototype circuits to build - there's what - hours, right, until you need it for anything?"

Dale scowled at her, "It needs to be sanitized so none of your... mess... denigrates the quality of the samples I'll get from the planets and their moons."

"So sanitize it. Sanitize me while you're at it; I haven't had a shower since I don't remember."

Maenad pressed her eyes with the tip of her thumb and forefinger as the two bickered. "Alright," she said finally. "Stop it." Maenad lowered her hand to her side and looked at Dale. "What exactly is the problem? Ensign Peers is allowed to use the lab. Captain Saalm ordered her, just as she said," she tried to hold disposition in her voice, but this was beginning to look like just what she'd originally thought: Dale being hysterical over nothing.

"It's my lab!" sputtered the Australian, looking between the women as though they were intentionally being obtuse.

"I'm not planning on keeping it," Lilou rested the micropipes on the counter beside the lens and stretched her arms back, up, and over her head on a little whine.

My lab? Maenad stuck out her chin from behind her pursed lips. She crossed her arms now, and finally her battle to stay neutral was lost. "Mister Dale," she said, "does your work demand the use of the macrolens right now?" She tilted her head, as though to study him, and added "What is it that you're working on?"

"I'm- well, I- that is to say, I'm preparing for the samples- do you know how long it takes to clean that lens plate?"

Maenad nodded sharply as she pressed her tongue against the backs of her teeth. "Step outside with me for a minute," she said after several seconds. "Excuse us," she said to Peers.

"Sure thing," Lilou yawned again. The punk music blasted again as they stepped outside.

In the corridor, after the doors to the lab had closed, Maenad looked over her shoulder to make sure that no one was coming. Deciding that they were alone, Maenad raised her eyebrows. "Dale," she dropped the respectful title, "What is wrong with you?"

He pointed to the door, "Invasion! By... gadgets," he said the word as though it were some sort of horrible disease.

Maenad narrowed her eyes. She sighed. "What?"

"She's got little catapults all over the place! What if one of those little clips they're tossing hits a lens disk- those are irreplaceable until we reach a starbase again. What if the... drippings from her strange little... contraptions destroy the functionality of the macrolens? She's not even in our department!"

"Dale, Ensign Peers is a senior officer and, if you haven't noticed, our chief engineering officer," Maenad spoke shortly. "She's been ordered to make our ship go as fast as it possibly can, and she's working on something in there to do just that, and she's almost done." She licked her lips. "She has every right to be in there."

"But- but-!"

"No," she held up a finger. "No buts! Nobody else is doing any work at the moment, so you're free to use any of the other labs." She rolled her eyes. This was like talking to a child, she thought.

Dale's jaw flapped a few times like a fish out of water. Women were insane. That was the only explanation. He shook his head, flummoxed, threw his hands in the air. "Just pray she doesn't break anything," he grumbled.

Maenad eyed him for a moment. She had accomplished all that she needed to and, as far as she was concerned, their transaction had completed. She held his eyes as she moved past him and into the lab.

Lilou had folded over, arms wrapped around her legs as the punk music poured over her.

Whatever it was Peers was listening to, it made Maenad cringe. "Computer, pause music," she said. She walked up to the table alongside the engineering chief. "I'm sorry, I have sensitive ears," she sort of lied to justify the interruption. She looked the young woman over. "Have you been up all night?"

"Sleeping's not something I do very easily," Lilou admitted, craning herself upright again. "And my cycle got all wonked during the repairs on Vega." She absently swiped at hair that had stuck to her face during the forward bend, "I apologize, Lieutenant, for the wake up call."

She dismissed the apology with a wave of her hand before resting a it on the Trill's back. "I was already awake." It was sort of true. "And, it wasn't your fault," she smiled, looking down Peer's work from over her shoulder. "What is it you're doing, exactly?"

"Building a feasible power resource from kinetic blowback," Lilou did her best not to twitch at the physical contact, and simply stepped away towards one of the floating cylinders. "No internal engine," she explained, pointing to where the little ice flakes were being catapulted at the cylinders holding them aloft.

"I see," Maenad said, but she didn't really get it.

"Look." The engineer turned off one of the ice chip catapults. The cylinder that had been bettered by the rain of frozen water slowly lost its vibrant glow and dipped to the side before falling out of the air. Lilou dodged forward to catch it before it could hit the ground. Holding it out to Maenad on her palm, she flicked it. The glow fluttered. She flicked it again and it began to right itself. She flicked it again and it stood up straight on her palm. "Kineticism as propulsion."

"How does this work with a warp drive?" asked Maenad, curiously puzzled.

"It's a work in progress," Lilou set the cylinder to the side and pushed past six PADDs with running console updates to a transparency of the ship's schematic, pointing. "See my idea was we funnel the excess energy generated by the kinetics either through the impulse engine or into an auxiliary backup reserve and then if an additional push is needed, we just flush the whole system through routers into the EPS and off we ride into the sunset. My projections make it look like we can get up to about warp 9 for three straight hours if we build up a big enough reserve and run emergency shipboard functions only. Good in a pinch. At least let us keep pace with the Romulans for a little while until we figure out another option. For something faster than 9... that's when we get into my highly speculative projections which are only math and have zippo on the feasibility front in my mind, but I'll let my team look at that later. For now, it's warp 9 and the basics for a sprint, as requested." She wanted to sit down, but she couldn't with Maenad standing. "The most simplistic and mostly inaccurate way of putting it is we use the ship's movement and shield kineticism as a generator to amplify the core's power."

Not wanting to take the risk of sounding like a moron, Maenad didn't say say she didn't know Galileo couldn't go warp nine. At least she understood what Peers was telling her, however. "How much longer until you're done and can get some sleep?"

"With something like this?" Lilou's eyes nearly crossed, but she had enough sense left in her to not do that in front of her superior officer. "I'll be lucky if it's done by the time we need it. Retrofitting a ship in space is hard. We can only do a small section of the hull at a time, in zero grav, shutting down the shields one array at a time to install the new systems... and you meant this morning." She sagged a little. "I'll be out by start of Alpha. Take what I've finished back to the engineering lab. Finish up some more circuits Gamma tonight, unless you guys need the macrolens then."

"Oh," Maenad said simply. She thought she should leave; she knew how annoying it was to have people standing over your shoulders while trying work. "Well, I suppose I should leave you to your work. I am sorry that Mister Dale bothered you."

"I bothered him," she chuckled, smothering another yawn behind her hand. "Did you sleep?"

"Yes," Maenad said quickly. "Of course."

"Early for you. Hope he didn't wake you up." The engineer looked sleepily abashed. "I tried to say I'd be out by Alpha but he was all up in arms, I guess."

With her lips together, almost being sucked in actually, Maenad nodded. She didn't like Dale at all. "If he gives you any more trouble, tell me about it," she said more sternly than she'd meant. She didn't add that his demeanor at the briefing had left much to be desired as well. Dale was lining up to be a serious problem, Maenad thought.

Lilou shrugged. "He's harmless." He was. Nothing about the tall, odd-looking human set her internal sensors on red alert. He was noisy was all. She had a nose for people who might or could hurt her; Benjamin Dale would not. "To me, anyway. Did he wake you?"

"Oh," Maenad frowned. "No, I was already awake." It was true, after all... in a way. After Liyar came for her and she instead put him to bed, she'd only started dozing off when Dale called. But she was never up this early. Ever.

"There's tea if you want it," Lilou mentioned, pointing to a pot. "I'm just gonna..." she pointed to the macrolens that was the cause of all the trouble. "If you don't mind?"

"No, no," Maenad hurried to where the pot was. She didn't want to keep Ensign Peers from more work, so she poured each of them a cup. "Here," she said as she passed it to her. Maenad sat down on the other side of the table and held up her head with a fist. She stared into the steaming cup of tea as she played with the string of the bag, looking like she were about to pass out.

"Thank you," Lilou gulped at the cup handed to her. Mostly boiling water that seared her throat. She coughed and set the emptied cup aside, staring through the lens. "Ever seen a microcircuit built from scratch?"

For a second, Maenad had no idea what a microcircuit was. "No," she said, as it came back to her.

"Want to?"

Maenad smiled, but didn't really sit up any. "Sure."

Lilou pressed a button on the side of the lens and a blurrier image of the precision work she was doing through the lens projected onto the wall opposite Maenad. She said nothing more, simply bent back to her work, switching microscopic wires and connectors into place.

"And once this is done, how do you integrate this into the warp drive?" Maenad asked after a few minutes of watching Peers' bafflingly complicated work. Maenad's own lifework was devoted to the microscopic world as well, but hers was somehow easier to imagine. It wasn't hard to imagine DNA and tiny microorganisms making their way through amino-acids and primordial soups; it was hard to imagine macroscopic organisms, like Peers, building microscopic things to make their macroscopic world work the way they wanted it to. She sipped her tea, playing around with the thoughts in her head.

"Layer the circuitry into the existing shield generator arrays in the hull," Lilou muttered out of the corner of her mouth as she continued to work. "Then, if the networking is all spic and span, it should simply reteach the ship how to interpret and manipulate its own kineticism."

"Hm," Maenad sipped at her tea, watching the microscopic connections being made on the wall.

Lilou looked up from the lens. "What?"

"I didn't say anything," replied Maenad from over the brim of her mug, then took a sip.

"I'm hearing things," Lilou wrinkled her nose. "What is it - oh, it's quiet. That's why- shield efficiency should be bolstered not impeded-" she made a few quick notes on the PADD beside her, looking back through the lens. "Then we could repel instead of merely sustain, of course that was always a possibility, but there's the potential power overflow and that needs to be compelled to..." she trailed off, working on the circuitry again.

Saying nothing, Maenad took a certain delight in watching Peers work. It was always refreshing to see an expert doing their thing, and it had always impressed Maenad that there were so many types of genius. In a way, she was envious of people who did the real work; she could not for the life of her do anything that Peers could do. Maenad was a thinker, an academic who toiled on semantics and perspective. There was no perspective in Peers' world. There were things that would either work or not. And Peers could see the physical result of her work. There were no maybes or perhapses about it. Maenad's work was all on paper and in people's minds. She loved her job, of course, but sometimes she wished that she were a little more practical.

As the circuit was completed, Lil bit her tongue between her teeth and carefully transferred it to a slide. Moving the slide out from under the macrolens revealed the microcircuit to be about the size of the head of a nail. She transferred it to a little tray on the other counter, stretched her arms and made a loud cracking sound with her back, then grabbed the empty tea cup. She attempted to drink from it, looked down, saw it was empty, and went to refill it. "You guys head down to Rojar 1 today, right?"

Maenad flashed her eyebrows as a nod. "In a few hours."

"They pre-test the EV suits? Want me to run a scanner over them?"

"They did," Maenad yawned. "I'm sorry," she excused herself. If it weren't for Liyar, she would still be in bed. It struck her then that it wasn't fair that he could be in bed, in her bed while she sat around in a science lab biding her time. At least there was something interesting to watch. "Is there anywhere in particular you would like to see? Have you been thinking about getting off the ship and coming with us?"

"Well, yeah, who isn't? I'd give my... well. Something important, to walk around on a fresh planet. But-" she waved around the lab. "Got, you know, a ship to retrofit."

Maenad only smiled as she sipped some more tea. She liked the expressive way that Peers talked. She was so small, but she hardly knew it. Or she did and just didn't care. "Your shuttle, I put it on the shelf in my living room," she said after a few more minutes of watching.

Lilou looked up, a wide smile blossoming in her eyes, "Really?"

"Really."

Lilou ducked her head, a flush warming her cheeks and ears.

Maenad gave a little smile and finished her tea. "Are you almost done?" she nodded to the projection of Peers' work.

"With this part, yeah. Just this last one."

"And then you'll get some rest," Maenad told her.

The Trill laughed, "And then I'll clean this up, haul the bits and pieces back to the engineering lab, put the schematics together and try to make sense before my team shows up and I have to explain all this to them." She sagged a little, leaning her forehead against the eyepiece. "It's entirely possible none of this will work."

Maenad stood, taking her cup with her. "I'm sure it will," she smiled. "I should go get ready for my shift now, I think."

"Good luck- peace follow you in your journey."

"Thanks," Maenad smiled. "Good luck to you as well."

[OFF]

ENS Lilou Peers
Chief Engineering Officer
USS Galileo

Benjamin Dale PhD
Chemical Engineer
USS Galileo
(pNPC Lilou Peers)

Lieutenant (JG) Maenad Panne
Chief Science Officer
USS Galileo

RSS Feed

Comments (1)