Unworthy - Kirsten Beyer [2]
In truth, B’Elanna didn’t relish spending the rest of their lives in one of the worst areas of space she’d ever known. However, her well-founded fears were quelled when she realized the Delta quadrant was as far from the Warriors of Gre’thor—the renegade Klingon sect—as it was possible to get.
B’Elanna was worried that the quantum slipstream drive might need some coaxing to take them the forty-five thousand light-years they needed to go. The Home Free, as she had privately christened the shuttle officially known as Un-registered Vessel 47658 that had been her and Miral’s home for more than a year, was a technological marvel. In addition to the slipstream drive, it boasted a prototype benamite recrystallization matrix, a communications array that put larger ships to shame, navigation and scanning systems that were boosted beyond normal capacities by Borg-inspired designs, and the smallest possible holodeck for Miral.
Her previous uses of the slipstream drive had been limited to a few short hops where slipstream velocity had never been maintained for more than thirty seconds. The trip to the Delta quadrant was going to take a little over two hours. In the nod to her belief that the worst-case scenario was often the most likely, B’Elanna had set her course and engaged the new drive in plenty of time for her to make numerous stops along the way.
During the last two hours, she had been forced to contend with updates indicating that the phase integrity of the slip-stream corridor was falling. These announcements had come so regularly—every fifteen minutes or so—that B’Elanna had grown accustomed to them. But it had only been minutes since the last warning, which likely meant something was seriously wrong.
“Kula,” B’Elanna called, instantaneously activating the holographic nanny, a grizzled old Klingon warrior based on a dear and now departed friend. When the hologram appeared, B’Elanna nodded to Miral, then headed down a short flight of stairs in the main cabin to the shuttle’s engine compartment.
What she found was that the deflector controls—a key component of the slipstream drive—were beyond maximum tolerance levels.
“Son of a—” she began before biting back the end of that statement. Miral didn’t need to learn any other new words today.
B’Elanna manually reconfigured the settings as patiently as possible, even as the phase integrity had slipped inexorably below ninety percent. At around eighty-five percent, give or take point two percent, the slipstream corridor would destabilize completely and more than likely the shuttle would be torn to shreds when it emerged.
“Computer, what’s our time until we reach the terminal coordinates?”
“Twenty-five seconds,” the computer replied dispassionately.
These were going to be the longest twenty-five seconds of her life.
“Warning,” the computer advised again.
“Mute all audible warnings,” B’Elanna ordered. From her main engineering control panel she could see everything she needed without the computer adding to her elevating anxiety.
She recalculated the phase variance of the corridor using a program she had designed that featured a number of Borg algorithms inspired by Seven of Nine. Compensating for these variances had been the unattainable goal which had forced Voyager to abandon slipstream technology. As her shuttle was smaller and infinitely easier to stabilize, thus far her program had worked. But now it seemed to be at its limits.
Ten more seconds and the slipstream drive would automatically power down.
Just hold it together, B’Elanna prayed as she watched the phase integrity reading creep down to eighty-seven percent.
She held