Distant Shores - Marco Palmieri [34]
B’Elanna considered it. Then she brushed past Kes, racing back to the sensor controls. By the time Kes approached, she’d already examined several screens.
“The rate of their power increase has stayed exactly constant, even when we’ve slowed down to try to shake them off and then sped back up again.” She scrolled the display forward in time and then pointed. “Until here. Two days ago at 0200 hours, their rate of power growth decreased by point two three percent and has stayed at that rate since then.” She switched to the Engineering status screen and her heart rate sped up. “Here it is. Two days ago at 0158 hours we adjusted the warp coils as part of normally scheduled maintenance. That increased the efficiency of the warp drive from ninety-six point five percent to ninety-seven percent even.” She grabbed Kes by the wrist. “Let’s go see the captain.”
B’Elanna and Kes didn’t speak as they jogged toward the turbolift, but B’Elanna’s mind continued to work. Who would have thought to compare the routine maintenance schedule to the limited sensor readings they’d gotten from the alien ship? Maybe they should tweak the artificial intelligence settings so that the computer would alert them when such “coincidences” appeared in seemingly unrelated systems. If she’d received such an alert this time, she would have immediately realized what the power rate decrease with warp efficiency increase meant.
As soon as the turbolift doors opened onto the bridge, B’Elanna called, “Captain,” and strode across the expanse of carpet toward the captain’s chair. Kes hung back near Harry Kim’s ops station. “I think I might know why the alien ship is following us so closely.” She proceeded to explain Kes’s eddy-to-energy conversion theory. When she finished, Captain Janeway narrowed her eyes and then nodded.
“It’s a good hypothesis,” she said. “So you think they’ll eventually go peacefully when their power stores are full?”
B’Elanna smiled. “I was thinking we might help them along.”
“Tune the warp field out of phase to make the eddies more powerful?” Janeway guessed, crossing her arms across her chest.
“Exactly,” B’Elanna said. She loved it when she and the captain operated on the same wavelength. “The trick will be to find the balance between giving them power as quickly as possible and not making the eddies so powerful that they’ll knock the ship off its course.”
The two women went to the engineering station and fussed with calculations for a short time. Then B’Elanna nodded and Janeway said, “That should be close to the optimal adjustment. Do it.” Then she added, “Good work.”
“It was Kes who figured it out,” B’Elanna said, turning to smile at her.
Captain Janeway looked only mildly surprised. She also turned and nodded to Kes. “Good work.” She gestured to her own seat. “Why don’t you wait with us while we see how it goes?”
Kes sat, and B’Elanna turned back to the engineering station. The captain hovered at her shoulder, but did not interfere with her work. It wasn’t long before B’Elanna was able to report that the warp field had been tuned out of phase by zero point seven two percent. She was sensitive enough to her engines to feel the deck shake just a bit but doubted anyone else noticed it. From ops, Harry called that the alien ship’s power was increasing at a rate ten percent higher than either of the previous recorded levels. After only thirteen minutes, the alien ship dropped back, its power stores apparently saturated.
“Captain!” Harry cried. “They’re hailing us!” Stunned looks were exchanged around the bridge.
“Put them through,” Captain Janeway ordered.
Harry did so, and a short squawk reached their ears, rapidly replaced by a computerized voice stating, in Standard, “Thank you.” Another squawk and Harry reported that the channel had been closed. They could see on the view screen that the little ship immediately sped away.
Captain Janeway smiled first and, having been given tacit permission, Harry, Tom, and Chakotay began to smile and cheer. B’Elanna looked over at Kes and the two of them grinned