Knowledge Equals Profit: Part 2

<<<Part 1 --- Part 2>>>
 

Part 2: Depths

 

Summary:

After a long day on the bridge, Lieutenant M'Rell spends an evening with her wife in their quarters. Afterward, her contented sleep is interrupted by a Red Alert.....

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M’Rell yawned as she entered her quarters, a sometimes disturbing thing for many humanoids to witness, wide open jaws revealing a predators fangs. She tended to try and avoid it while on the bridge. As the doors hissed closed her wife, F’Min, emerged from their small work station in the next room.

 

“Sounds like a long day.” F’Min commented, striding across the room to wrap her arms around M’Rell.

 

M’Rell purred wordlessly as she rested her head on her wife’s shoulder. A full head taller than her and most other Catians, F’Min’s powerful arms comforted and calmed her. It had been a long day on the bridge, but with the gravitic rip-tide showing no signs of ending, Commander Mudell had decided to move forward with the shift-change.

 

“Lets get you out of those clothes.” F’Min said, and started undressing her.

 

M’Rell cooperated as her doting wife undressed her, led her to the bed, and began brushing her. All the low friction, breathable, high tech fabrics in the galaxy couldn’t make up for having your fur compressed against your skin by a uniform all day. M’Rell hardly noticed it after 7 years in Starfleet, except at the end of the day when relief came in the form of a soft brush and an attentive wife.

 

“Your mane is coming in beautifully.” M’Rell noted through her purring.

 

“It is.” F’Min agreed. “By next week, every woman on the ship will be jealous. It’s truly a pity our males don’t have this. Imagine, gloriously maned boys, with their fine features and long tails.”

 

“Truly a paradise.” M’Rell agreed. “Then you’ll be returning to the lab early?”

 

“My final injection was today. The transition is complete.” F’Min confirmed.

 

“Mmm…then you’ll be just in time to start the deep analysis of this anomaly.”

 

“I’ve seen the shipwide reports. It sounds fascinating.”

 

“You haven’t been working while on medical restriction have you?”

 

“The doctor cleared me for desk duty, love, and my physical therapy is far more strenuous. Besides, I’ve just been planning out work assignments. I can’t just lay about and do nothing. I’ll get restless.” She set the brush aside and stretched out atop M’Rell, whispering in her ear, “And you know how I get when I’m restless.”

 

“Mmmmm…yes, I do.” M’Rell purred. "I like it when you get restless." But before she could make her move, F’Min stood.

 

“But before that, dinner.” And she strode off to the kitchen, tail waving enticingly as M’Rell watched.

 

Later…..

 

M’Rell lay in bed, dozing in a state of deep satisfaction, when suddenly a heavy impact rocked the ship. She jolted upright and was scrambling out of bed for her clothes as the klaxons went off.

 

“Red Alert. Senior officers to the bridge.”

 

Being rudely awakened by alert klaxons and the first officer’s voice was a less than ideal bookend to M’Rell’s perfect evening with her wife. She hissed at the ceiling before scrambling out of bed to dress....

 

...."Report!" Captain Nog ordered as he and M'Rell entered the bridge together.

 

"Three probes registered sudden catastrophic impacts." Mudell reported, "We barely had time to route emergency power to the shields before we hit...whatever this is."

 

"It appears to be a...pressure boundary." Yadav added as M'Rell took the station next to her. 

 

"Confirmed." M'Rell scanned her instruments, "We seem to have reached the end of the riptide, but...this is not normal space. I read nebular gasses, water, organic material, life forms...." She studied the readings more closely, wrinkling her nose in a perplexed expression.

 

"Lieutenant?" Nog prompted.

 

"Captain, this zone should not exist. The density of gas is like that of a jovian body, but there is no gravity source. It should be collapsing to one or several gravity well, but I'm reading no such source. Something is preventing the gasses from coalescing."

 

"Captain, I'm receiving a transmission, audio only." Ops reported.

 

"Put it on."

 

The sound that came through the com system sounded, and felt, like the most ethereal music M'Rell had ever heard. Long slow notes overlapped. Harmonics blended, faded, and returned. There seemed no end to them but when M'Rell looked at her scans, she realized there were dozens of sources, transmitting in ways nobody could hear. It was like a communications signal, a song, and a scanning signal all in one.

 

"Well now, I'd say things just got interesting." Nog said, and M'Rell didn't have to see his expression to know he had that particular gleam in his eyes. The kind of gleam most Ferengi got when facing down a mountain of latinum. "Have all science teams report to their stations. I want to know everything about this phenomenon."

 

 

 

Switches disply style....

 ....to dark.

Ye gods, the relief. 

Knowledge Equals Profit: Part 3

 <<<Part 2 --- Part 4>>>

M'Rell eyed her captain at the head of the briefing table. He still had that gleam in his eye, as they waited for the other section heads to arrive. The same gleam he'd had when she'd met him teaching command classes at the academy, and he'd share stories about his days at Deep Space 9 with Captain Sisko, Worf, Kira Nerys, the trill Dax, Chief O'Brian, Doctor Bashir, and the rest. That gleam that'd prompted her to request this post when Command had given command of the newly refitted Prometheus to Nog. That gleam reflecting a unrelenting thirst for knowledge and discovery that helped turn skeptical, more traditional, officers into loyal crew ready to follow the diminutive man into any anomaly they came across. Even Commander Mudell, for all her complaints of adventurism, would follow him to the other side of the galaxy if there was something to be learned from it.

Finally everyone arrived and began delivering reports. Routine reports came first, per the Captain's policy. The ship's doctor, the counselor, and Mudell all reported on the crew and general ship's functioning, and there were no special medical or disciplinary reports today. Communications with Starfleet were cut off at the moment, but that was nothing too strange in deep space. The small outbreak of Aphasiatic Flu, while inconvenient to it's victims and their language centers, had finally burned out in the midst of ship-wide inoculations.

Engineering reported all systems operating at peak efficiency. The gaseous contents of the anomaly were highly corrosive, but the upgraded hull of the Prometheus wasn't likely to degrade any time soon. Even without maintenance, they estimated the first hull breach was likely to occur in about a century at least. 

M'Rell's own report on the composition indicated not just a nutrient rich environment, but the strange nebula seemed to be positively teeming with life.

"And not just simple life." She continued, "We've detected large, complex organisms, diverse in size. Though scanning is somewhat difficult, and we've been careful to avoid using strong active scans so as not to disturb the environment too much. We don't know enough about zone to do more, and as experience has taught past vessels, recklessly scanning at full power can have adverse effects."

"Such as attracting large, hungry predators the size of dreadnoughts." Mudell was always willing to cut right to the worst-case scenario. "To say nothing of polarizing the hull or, stars forbid, raising shields."

"Or harming the native life." M'Rell added, and continued, "The zone we've entered is something very like an ocean. There are currents, pressure zones, large solid bodies of what we suspect are zero-gravity reefs. And we seem to be very close to what could be called the surface. Particle density is not uniformly distributed. We are currently in the lowest density zone we've been able to detect, and there are high-density zones nearby."

"Fascinating. Just, astonishing, really." Captain Nog grinned as he took the report in, eyeing the mapping data M'Rell's team had assembled so far. "As so, much like an ocean, what we do here could have far reaching effects."

"Yes, sir, we need to minimize our effect on the environment, not just to study it, but to preserve it. To that end I've ordered minimal use of thrusters for station keeping relative to our point of entry, and a hold on impulse engines, emergency use only." Mudell said. "It's possible this ecosystem is extremely robust and resistant to new elements. Who knows what else gets pulled in by that riptide effect. But until we have more data, there's simply no way to judge it's overall health. We don't even know how big this phenomenon is."

"Well, we might." M'Rell corrected, " The Special Anomalies Team has a...promising hypothesis."

Everyone turned to F'Min. Chief Warrant Officer Grade Four, F'Min. The adoption of Warrant Officer grades to denote non-Starfleet mission specialists was a new thing for Starfleet, only 20 years old, but it had yielded wildly successful results in a somewhat short time.

F'Min stood, and at just about 2 meters tall she towered over the assembled staff, and went to the head of the table, tapping a control on her PADD to alter the display. What appeared seemed to be an approximation of a star cluster, though everything was marked in symbols and text.

"My team and I suspect we've entered a dark-matter star cluster."

The room was silent as officers either stared at the display, or began opening files on their own PADDs to read her more detailed report.

"My instinct it to tell you that's impossible but..." Mudell trailed off.

"This is Starfleet." Nog finished for her. And the rest of the staff nodded or murmured in agreement. "So, explain this hypothesis."

F'Min waved her hand and the textual display was replaced with representations of stars and planets, through their colors were muted. "It's a hypothesis that's never been tested, because dark matter nebulae are so rare. We don't even know if Dark Matter is anything like normal matter or even anti-matter, we don't know if it has, for example, elements."

"So we can't assume the existence of something analogous to say..hydrogen, in dark matter?" Nog asked.

"Just so. However, if we were to assume such elements could exist, we could then extrapolate analogues to all the other activities open to normal matter. Fusion, for example. Dark matter fusion."

"Now this is starting to sound like science-fiction." The chief engineer, whipcord lean Idanian of indeterminate gender scoffed.

"We live in space, Kel." said Doctor Zeela Vhall, a joined Trill woman with dark brown skin, and even darker, very dense spots.

"What does that have to do with anything?" Lieutenant Rauviid Kel, asked.

"Lets stay on topic." Captain Nog spoke up before the discussion could drift any further. "I assume you have a plan to testing this hypothesis?"

F'Min motioned to Warrant Officer Grade Two, a Romulan woman by name of Kavell, head of Astrometrics.

"We need to be able to scan dark matter and dark energy." Kavell said casually.

"And how will you do this?" Mudell's skepticism seemed to deepen the longer the discussion went on.

"We're going to invent a dark matter spectral imager." Senior Chief Petty Officer Kuruk answered, just as causally. The head of the Special Engineering Team, a mixed-blood Human-Klingon, could be cocky to say the least, and arrogant at worst. But, he had the 28 years of engineering experience to back it up.

"Oh, just like that?" Mudell asked.

"Chief O'Brien invented the differential magneton scanner in about four hours. Assuming between myself, Lieutenant Kel, and the other special team heads, we can measure up to half his skill, it shouldn't take more than a couple of days."

Mudell looked somewhat dissatisfied with the Chief's answer but the Captain spoke before she could make her displeasure known.

"I always like your style, Chief, get to work on it. I want everyone else looking for alternatives to navigating, and on a way out of this region, just in case." He stood, "Dismissed."