The Good That Men Do - Andy Mangels [108]
Then he noticed that this latest diagram was entering what appeared to be entirely new territory- at least to Trip, who was well aware that his own knowledge of the intricacies and nuances of Romulan technology was far less voluminous than Ehrehin’s.
The diagram at first appeared to be a flow-chart description of a fairly standard method of continuum distortion propulsion, which was catch-all engineer-speak for every variation of warp drive known to Earth’s science and engineering experts. But the drawing had taken an abrupt left turn, forcing Trip to work hard to find any familiar reference points.
Okay, that’s the space energy/matter sink, Trip thought, his mind reeling in a way it hadn’t since his first grueling year of Starfleet training. And that dingus has to take care of the warp drive’s magnatomic flux constriction functions, and maybe most of the other asymmetrical peristaltic field manipulations.
But he knew that this explanation didn’t take into account the large numbers of warp-field layers Ehrehin’s rapidly growing string of marginal equations were postulating. Trip found it next to impossible to visualize that many cochranes of raw power coursing through the system without violently shattering every piece of dilithium hooked into it.
Continuing to watch in silence from his chair, Trip ignored the escalating discomfort of his manacled hands, mentally returning to the beginning of the flow chart as Ehrehin continued his deliberately vague and circuitous lecture. As before, the old man wasn’t showing enough to give away his secrets entirely. But he was handing over some tantalizing hints, assuming that either Ch’uihv or any of his people were bright enough to pick up on them.
There’s the deuterium supply. Standard stuff. It goes into the matter reactant injector, then into the magnetic constriction segment. Easy-peasy. But the dilithium crystal articulation frame ought to come next, and it’s missing. What the hell?
To Trip’s surprise, the next destination for the drive’s deuterium fuel and its reaction products was a black box that would have corresponded to a standard matter/antimatter reaction chamber were it aboard Enterprise- except that this chamber apparently wasn’t equipped with the high-gauss magnetic bottle that was always used to prevent stored antimatter from experiencing a catastrophic, mutually annihilative reaction with the positive matter out of which the entire ship was composed. Instead, the reaction chamber contained something that yielded a mysteriously powerful stream of tightly focused particles that Trip figured for either high-energy gravitons or chronitons, or maybe even both, which was apparently being deposited into yet another intermix chamber.
From the look of this thing, it ought to go “boom” big-time right after the “on” button gets pushed.
But there had to be more to it than that; after all, Trip was well aware that his knowledge of Romulan technology was far from complete. And Ehrehin’s presentation would have to ring true enough to prevent Ch’uihv from picking up his disruptor pistol, which he would do if the old man were just weaving a tapestry out of pure, extemporaneous gibberish.
He’s not Scheherazade, for Christ’s sake, just making all this stuff up as he goes, Trip thought.
Making an intuitive leap based on Ehrehin’s deliberately incomplete presentation, Trip could see that such immense energy flows- assuming they were possible- might indeed accelerate a starship to warp six or seven. But how that could be done with neither a textbook matter/antimatter reaction nor a dilithium crystal array through which to channel it lay beyond his grasp.
Until the epiphany hit him with the intensity of an old-fashioned Louisville Slugger swung