The Voyage Without

The crew of Voyager expected a trip duration of 70+ years, which is actually a serious problem for Zephyr: he's on a time limit before he doesn't fit inside most internal spaces aboard ship.
*slaps Voyager*

"You can fit so many robots in this bad boy."
"But not a dragon."
"The captain disagreed so I work from home these days, I will be building the third frigate to my personal specifications."
 
10
Up on the bridge, I was sure they were discussing something really exciting, such as how to hunt down the Maquis ship, but in engineering things were pretty typical.

When it involves antimatter, you want things to be typical with absolutely zero surprises.

So having put out the thankfully metaphorical fires of the morning, I was now laying on the floor of the upper level in engineering to keep out from everybody's feet while I was reading through the logs of beta and gamma shift.

Nothing had been highlighted for the shift hand off, but it was still good to get an overview.

One thing did draw my eye though. One of the plasma relays had apparently started to show borderline in sickbay of all places. Well, not surprising really. Brand new ship, there's bound to be manufacturing flaws. Even the Federation's manufacturing techniques were not perfect.

Considering it, it likely wasn't critical, but we should replace it. It would mean bringing everything in sickbay offline however as changing it meant removing most of a wall and while I hardly expected a single small Maquis ship to cause anybody to get wounded even if we did manage to find it, bringing the entire sickbay offline during a mission was just a bad idea.

I marked it for replacement as soon as we got back to the station. That'd mean we have a second sickbay in easy access in case of a medical emergency.

Even if the Maquis didn't cause it, somebody could hit their head or something.

When we get back would have to be soon eno-

The flights flared to red and an alarm sounded through the ship, "Red alert! All crew to stations! All crew to stations!"

I surged to my paws, dismissing the report in my HUD, "Carey, report!"

"Bringing it up now, sir," he shouted back from the lower level, "It seems like we're being scanned by a tetryon beam. We- oh shit!"

"All hands, brace for impact!" the voice of Captain Grey rang through every speaker of the ship.

I wrapped the claws on one paw around the railing, digging the rest into the deckplate, "BRACE!" I commanded, "BRACE! BRA-"

"-ir!"

Slowly my little hamster started to run, cobwebs and rust being slowly shaken off the gears as the little thing struggled to get the wheel turning.

I slowly blinked my eyes open, trying to get them to focus on whomever was bothering me, "...Hunt," I said as I focused on the crewman.

She smiled grimly, "Are you alright, sir?" she asked, "You had a pretty awful tumble."

She had blood on the side of her face. The air smelled of smoke, hot metal and blood.

Am I alright?

What the fuck happened? I tried to get a feel for my body as I slowly and carefully rolled onto my stomach. There was a sound of ripping metal behind me and I glanced at it. Apparently one of my horns had pierced a console and I had accidentally ripped it free.

Red alert. Brace.

I glanced up. Oh. I was on the lower level now. Welp, that explains why I hurt.

"...report," I said and carefully shifted each limb. Nothing seems to be outright broken. The wing I had been laying on was hard to move, but it didn't feel broken, likely just tweaked it by landing on it.

Hunt looked up at me, brushing her short hair back, "Davies' dead. So's Berger. We can't reach the bridge and nobody from sickbay is answering."

Fuck.

I nodded firmly once, instantly regretting it as it made it feel like my brain was bouncing around inside my head, "Alright," I said and then raised my head, looking around at everybody, "All stations, report!"

"Sir, we're having a problem here!" Carey yelled from the console by the warp core, "Diagnostics shows a microfracture in the warp core!"

Suddenly I forgot all about my aches and pains and bounded onto my paws, moving over to him while bringing the information onto my visor hud, "Shit, pressure is spiking."

"Eject!?"

"No, lock down the magnetic constrictors, that'll buy us time," I said, "Hunt, get down there with a micro welder!"

"On it," she answered and pulled out a tool pack.

"Sir, if we lock down the magnetic constrictors at this pressure, we may not be able to reinitiate the dilithium alignment," Carey protested.

I growled, "Yes, and if we don't, I'm sure our free floating electrons will be very happy not to have to deal with the issue. Lock it down, we deal with potential problems after the definite ones."

He nodded and got to work.

I looked around, one eye on the readings as I moved over to a console, unlocking the warp core ejection just in case.

I tapped my comm, "Zephyr to sickbay, multiple medical emergencies."

Nothing, comms were still down.

Well, they should soon be up. Everybody not on duty during a red alert or emergency is on the damage control team. Comms were a priority system.

"Bridge to engineering."

There we go.

I tapped my com, "Zephyr here," I answered.

"Zephyr, this is Janeway. The Captain and first officer are dead, I'm taking command of the ship," she said grimly, "Report."

Captain Grey. Commander Cavit.

I pushed that thought to the side, we had more important issues, "We're having a mild warp core breach, we're dealing with it. We have casualties."

"Sickbay is not responding, I have sent a runner."

"Acknowledged, Zephyr out."

"Got it!" Hunt announced and hauled herself out of the well.

I nodded and turned my head in their direction, "Release the constrictors, watch that core pressure!"

"Releasing... now," Carey reported, "Reaction stable... pressure... twenty three thousand kilopascals. Holding steady."

"Alright," I said, "Now, injured, report in!"

I got half a dozen answers. Cuts, burns, a pair of broken arms.

"If you can work, you stay. If you can't hold a tool, get your tails to sickbay," I commanded, "Now, triage and damage control. We haven't blown up yet, so I want a full diagnostic of each system in order of criticality. Carey, I need you to-"

As I watched, he shimmered away in a green mist. As I watched, everybody else disappeared.

What the fu-

"Computer, end program!" I commanded. Nothing happened.

"Computer, arch!"

Nothing happened. Not a holodeck.

"...Well, fuck," I said to the empty room.
 
On the good side, the ship isn't going to explode. On the bad side, it really isn't made with dragon ergonomics in mind.

Of course this does mean that there is someone on the ship capable of commanding it, so something is going to happen soon.
 
...this is a version of Trek with no Alpha Quadrant transporter tech, right?

I can only imagine what Zephyr thinks is going on here.
 
I think the Borg still have transporters, not sure. And the Enterprise would still have encountered the Iconian Gate, so teleportation is not entirely unfamiliar.
Transporters aren't impossible, just very difficult, hense only really old/advanced races use it. I've stated before that I could see the Borg beaming over what are essentially suicide troops (reintergration errors leading to 50% of the beamed Drones dead in minutes, 99% within a week, but the Borg have loads of drones to expend) to disable ships/stations and allow the Cube to board it conventionally at their leisure.

...Oh, I wonder if dragon scales result in transporter immunity...
His scales and especially bones tend to disrupt/scatter scans. He's hard for them to 'see', probably almost impossible for him to be locked on to well enough for teleportation (other than Q levels of 'reality is my bitch' teleportation)
 
That was my thought as well.

The basic function of a transporter in star trek has always boiled down to 'take note of where all your atoms are, turn them into energy/data, and then put them together again somewhere else'.

Which means that since its very, very difficult to scan Zephyr's physiology that first step of 'take note of where all your atoms are' is kaput.
 
One thing that recently occurred to me about transporters, we never see the 'hard pad to pad' stage of development.

Transporters have always needed a special room in the ship, probably for one of those 99.999% vs 99.9999% safety rating things with a bevy of extra sensors mounted in every wall, but can beam someone anywhere in nearly any condition. Complete with mobile 'pattern enhancers' to get a better reading.

And we see in Enterprise that the NX 01 transporter was rated for cargo, but considered questionable for people until circumstances forced its use. And it still allowed beaming from orbit to nearly anywhere.

There has yet to be a stage shown where beaming anywhere other than one transporter pad to another transporter pad is necessary, despite it seeming like a logical stage of the technologies development.
 
On the good side, the ship isn't going to explode. On the bad side, it really isn't made with dragon ergonomics in mind
It's not going to happen, but now I'm imagining Zephyr not being able to get everyone back and he has to fix Voyager to work with a crew of one. Everything would be dragon ergonomics by the time he gets back to the Alpha quadrant.
 
One thing that recently occurred to me about transporters, we never see the 'hard pad to pad' stage of development.

Transporters have always needed a special room in the ship, probably for one of those 99.999% vs 99.9999% safety rating things with a bevy of extra sensors mounted in every wall, but can beam someone anywhere in nearly any condition. Complete with mobile 'pattern enhancers' to get a better reading.

And we see in Enterprise that the NX 01 transporter was rated for cargo, but considered questionable for people until circumstances forced its use. And it still allowed beaming from orbit to nearly anywhere.

There has yet to be a stage shown where beaming anywhere other than one transporter pad to another transporter pad is necessary, despite it seeming like a logical stage of the technologies development.
At risk of being obvious, the out-of-setting purpose of the transporter is to deliver stuff between the ship and the planet-of-the-week. If it can't do that, it's not useful.

Even in-universe, if it can't do that it'd be questionable to mount it on most Starfleet ships - it might be very useful between a space station and a ground station, but a ship spends most of its time away from anywhere a pad-to-pad transporter would be usable.
 
Even in-universe, if it can't do that it'd be questionable to mount it on most Starfleet ships - it might be very useful between a space station and a ground station, but a ship spends most of its time away from anywhere a pad-to-pad transporter would be usable.
You say that, but a teleporter pad would be mighty useful in specific situations, such as, as mentioned, station to ship cargo and personnel transfer.

Just like how doors and boot covers on a car is useless while the vehicle is underway, but when parked it's REALLY useful to embark/disembark its occupants and all the shopping.
 
I'd say it's more likely that Zephyr got mistakenly classified as a wierd animal by the Caretakers scanner. Quadruped sapients are so rare in trek as to be near unheard of, I can only think of two sapient non bipeds even. Tholians and Horta.
Species 8472 has a vaguely centaur body plan, IIRC.

On another note, I think the Horta are neat and I wish they'd show up more often.
 
Zephyr's log:

Woke up, read shift handover notes, got thrown into wall, prevented immediate warp breech, learnt that Captain and First Officer are dead and the rest of the crew vanished into thin air, litterally.

I suspect I might be cursed. End log.
 
I'd say it's more likely that Zephyr got mistakenly classified as a wierd animal by the Caretakers scanner. Quadruped sapients are so rare in trek as to be near unheard of, I can only think of two sapient non bipeds even. Tholians and Horta.
If I remember correctly, the Caretaker was looking for reproductive compatibility. Maybe remote scanning yielded a definite hard nope, or perhaps they revealed he wouldn't go through puberty in time to matter. I would be willing to believe the Caretaker has sensors advanced enough to scan Zephyr - they can scan stuff in detail enough to detect viable targets across the galaxy, after all.

Meanwhile, all the Ocampans wince as a spike of RAGE gets driven into their nascent psionics.
 
That was my thought as well.

The basic function of a transporter in star trek has always boiled down to 'take note of where all your atoms are, turn them into energy/data, and then put them together again somewhere else'.

Which means that since its very, very difficult to scan Zephyr's physiology that first step of 'take note of where all your atoms are' is kaput.
I always thought of this explanation as a bit suspect. If beaming is done in real space then there should be a visible path of glowing plasma (since you just exited it enough to glow by adding enough energy to disassociate a clump of it 60-100kg in mass) between the beam out point and some sort of receiver on the ship.

However me and a few others had a thought. What if you used subspace to transport that matter? There have been episodes where 'stuff' has existed in subspace and returned safely to realspace so it should be possible.

You set up a subspace link between the transporter and a position in space (on a planet is a position in space) and send some sort of subspace constructs down that link to the target coordinates. The constructs each grab a chunk of matter and return to sender. The compensators and massive machinery is all basically there to ensure that each subspace packet reemerges in the same relative position it took that matter from. Site to site is harder to make work simply because that last step has to occur at a distance from all the very good sensors and machinery that guide the constructs to that final spot.

This idea solved a couple of problems we had with the in-real-space beaming.
Problem 1: the plasma trail problem
Problem 2: if matter isn't transported only energy, how can you ensure 100% efficiency? Nine nines efficiency still leaves visible beam trail or an explosion as some energy escapes.
Problem 3: if only information is transported, it isn't you that just materialised on that transporter pad, it's a copy.
Problem 4: why the shimmer of beaming instead of a really bright glow? Enough energy to vaporise a person has been added, where is my earth shattering kaboom? Subspace interacting with realspace could explain the shimmer.

Another thought we had was that the disruptor tech was basically just beaming tech without the reintegration and done slowly instead of all at once, thus the pain. The smaller and simpler make of the construct creation machinery makes up the "beam" of the disruptor as some of the packets emerge into realspace early and loose cohesion, causing a glow. Since the emitter of the beam and the target are so close, relatively speaking, transport jammers would have little effect. When fired on a shielded target you have a violent, uncontrolled, subspace phenomena interacting with the shields and thus they take damage.
 
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