Star Trek: New Frontier

Chapter 8

Commander Ian Snowe was already nodding by the time Captain Paris came down to have a "fire side" chat with him over the latest updates on repairs to the engines.

"I know what you're going to say, sir, and I know you'll want it done in less than the allotted time schedule like—say--your wife for example, but I have to be staunchly realistic: This isn't going to be done in or one two double shifts."

"How long?" Paris inquired lightly—looking at the pandemonium of the Engineering crew—deep in their very own bowels of hellish Purgatory—as everyone was hard at work getting the ship ready and back in action as quickly as humanly possible.

"I'd say...best guess? A week. Maybe a week and a half."

"So we're...stranded in the Delta Quadrant till our Slipstream Drive is fully repaired?"

Ian nodded with a helpless shrug of his own. "That looks about right, Tom. I mean, I really wish I could stand here right now—before you—and give you the better news, but we did some real damage to the quantum slipstream matrix and some of its connecting support systems. Those...are going to require some creative guesswork at most. Not an easy fix by any means, Captain."

"With slipstream tech still fairly new," the other man mulled quietly. "Nothing really is."

"But we have warp drive." Ian said with a chuckle. "I can give you Warp 4 for the moment—but that's to keep the stress down on all affected systems. Anything more and you're looking at a real rodeo ride from hell—from here on out."

"With Communications limited to subspace at best—calling for help would be a fool's errand—to say the least."

Ian nodded in sympathy. "That would definitely not be on my bucket list for the time being, Tom. The Co'jin really did a number on all of us..."

The other man nodded as well. "You know what they say back home, Ian: There's a good First Contact situation and then there's a really, really, bad one."

"Yeah: The Borg, Species 8472, the Hirogen, the Vidiians...?" The Chief Engineer ticked off with a quiet sigh.

"Can't really tell how much we miss those days—minus myself of course. I was on the Ulysses at the time you guys came back from what the media news services enshrined as "The Journey"."

Tom laughed quietly in fond memory of that event. "It was a damned near thing, Ian. I honestly couldn't tell you if we were going to live or die at the last possible second—when then Captain Janeway gave me the order to slips inside the Borg Sphere and use the space between the deflector array and the torpedo launcher as a shield against its own attacks."

"I heard you somehow managed to squeeze this ship in somehow—then launch the fatal salvo which destroyed the Borg ship...?"

Tom grinned at that moment. "Harry didn't call me Captain Proton for nothing. I spent a lot of time with him on the holodeck—playing that scenario and honing my piloting skills at the same time. Same with the Delta, Theta, and Echo Flyers sitting placidly in the Main Shuttlebay right now."

Ian nodded with genuine appreciation. "Wonderful toys Starfleet R&D comes up. Some really wonderful toys..."