d=v(i)*t + 0.5*a*t^2

Posted on Mon Jul 29th, 2019 @ 8:15pm by Lieutenant Commander William Rogers & Lieutenant Alexis Aenera

Mission: War and Peacekeeping

One of the plus points of Starfleet vessels as opposed to those of the Department of Temporal Investigations is the broader range of scientific disciplines available on the former's ships. It finally afforded Bill the opportunity to start looking into something which had been bothering him since he first learned about his situation.

Finding himself with some time to spend on his own projects, the current location of the chief science officer and a PaDD tucked under one arm Bill set out to begin his investigation.

Alexis was, as usual, in her own personal lab that she'd all but told her people to stay out of unless she was there. It wasn't like she was going to be doing anything important, just the research that stemmed from her own personal studies. The 3-D image in front of her was of an anomaly which actually looked more like a black hole in reverse: Instead of pulling everything into a gravitational dead end, it was ejecting microparticles away. The readings on the side of the screen gave a breakdown of the elements and their properties. Her face was nearly blank as she stared into the image.

It would be difficult to say that Bill had memorised the layout of the ship, especially the layout of the labs which he'd never had cause to visit until now. After a quick stop for directions he strode through the laboratory doors. A frown ghosted across his face when he caught sight of the white hole image. Hopefully it wasn't something that lay in wait for the ship, he'd certainly not seen any warnings about them in the area. Still, it did mean he'd come to the right place to talk about spacial anomalies. "Keep staring at it like that and you'll go blind." The joke was meant to serve as a better announcement of his presence than the whisper hiss of the doors, and spoken from far enough away that he wouldn't be intruding. "Are you Lt. Aenera?"

“That would be me..” Alexis looked up to see the person standing in the doorway, left hand shutting down the image with a single stab of a finger and a smile made its way to Her face as if it were an afterthought, but then became genuine as she stepped around the console and began to make her way towards him, heels clicking on the deck as the skirt bounced slightly with each step, “Alexis Aenera, at your disposal, Lieutenant...?”

"Rogers. William Rogers." The heels couldn't be regulation, even in this supposed 'culturally liberal' future. Not that Bill was about to complain about the view, although he did make sure he wasn't staring. "If you're not busy, I was hoping I could pick your brain on something."

“Of course!” Alexis modded, then pulled off a formal curtsy, “It’s what we Science types are here for, to have our brains picked clean from all the knowledge we have stuck up there!” Her tone of voice made it apparent she was having a good time with the telling, not that she was bitter, like some of the science officers she’d met would have been. “What are you having trouble with?”

Bill spun his PaDD around in his hands while talked. "I'm trying to work out how a ship with a top speed of 1/10 light is able to travel around 250 light years in under 400 years."

Without taking the PADD, Alexis laughed, “Is that all?” She shook her head slightly, “To be honest, that’s actually rather an easy solution with a few different answers to it. I’m assuming, of course, you’re talking about a cryo-ship on autopilot? Well, they could have gotten a boost from an itinerant wormhole, come across an anomaly that compressed an area of space, though that wouldn’t get them all that far each time, or even had some well-meaning ship give them a jump across portions of that space.” She grinned, “And those are just the easiest answers, of course.”

"The ship's an old DY-100. Crew in cold sleep, no autopilot." Bill explained. He put the PaDD down and leaned against the edge of a work bench. "I've already ruled out assistance from another ship: it would have triggered the awakening of the crew. How would you go about proving passage via wormhole? The flight logs never recorded anything, but they also ran out of memory after 50 years."

"Difficult at best, especially under those conditions." Alexis mused, pursing her lips for a few seconds, "Depending on what point the wormhole took them, there may be some particulate residue on the hull plating, but due to the volatility of wormholes, especially itinerant ones, decay might have erased all that, or if it passed close enough to a star or other radiation source." She gestured to the PADD, "Can I assume that has detailed scans of the ship in question?"

"Amongst over things." Bill picked up the PaDD and offered it to Alexis. "Got the initial scans performed when the ship was recovered as well as the specialised scans the DTI performed on the vessel. I've also included the sensor readings the ship took and what I've managed to piece together of the course after the sensors died."

"Straight-line course?" Alexis asked, raising an eyebrow as she skimmed the information very briefly, "This is definitely going to take some time to go through." She admitted.

"Not initially." Bill explained. "Started off with an gravitational assist around the moon for Martian orbital insertion but missed the correction to achieve a slingshot around Jupiter."

“And four hundred years later ended up 250 light years away?” Alexis started back to the beginning of the document, “Any reason why observers back on Earth didn’t get a correction burn after it missed the Jupiter rendezvous? There would still have been time for computer commands to either try to redirect around Saturn or Neptune or even initiate a flipping maneuver and stop the ship or even recalculate for recovery.”

"Damaged comms array on the ship." Bill explained, a slight sigh huffed through his nose. "No way for Flight to transmit new instructions when the burn failed to trigger. Couldn't transmit the wake up codes to the crew either."

Alexis nodded as she mindlessly stepped back to the console she'd been working on an reactivated it before clearing it and inputting the date of the initial voyage and bringing up a map of the Sol system and tapped in the course information, "Clear of the gravitational eddies of the rest of the planets on this course..." A line trace of the course took it out of the system and she swiped out for a larger view, "When did the sensors finally give out?"

Bill followed her to the projector. "Flight recorders ran out of memory here." He indicated a point of space in the middle of the triangle of stars formed by Sol, Babel and Alpha Centari. "The senors kept recording data until the ship was recovered, but ran out of memory in their logs at around the same time.
They just overwrote the old data, so what we have is information on the final 50 years before the ship was recovered by the USS Venture." He moved his hand, this time indicating an area of space in the Delta Triangle.

"So from here," She pointed at the point where the ship had been last observed entering interstellar space, then to where the data point began as she input the sensor data, "Until here, we have no idea of what happened. A wonderful span of about two hundred and thirty-nine odd light years where anything could happen." She gave a mischievous smile at the flight officer, "And not on a direct course. We've got a trajectory change that looks to be too great to be caused by the gravitational forces of stars and other masses. If you followed the original base course, this ship would never have been found."

"Pretty sure if the Venture was looking for us, the defrosting wouldn't have been so fubar." Bill laughed and shook his head. "So any ideas about what could generate such a gravitational force without breaking the ship in two?"

Alexis gave a very sympathetic smile, “At least a dozen from the top of my head. So long as the ship didn’t come close enough to a planet or a star or something else to be pulled into its gravity field exclusively, it could have been anything with a decent mass. If you leave this PADD with me, I’ll see what I can do to map what I can out and make a few hypotheses.”

"By all means." Bill nodded. "That'd be a great help."

“Then I’ll make this my top priority.” Alexis beamed up at him, “I figure that I should have a few thoughts and something to go with them by tomorrow evening? I’m not going to just throw unsupported theories out there without saying as much.”

"Sounds good. Just give me a yell when you want to meet up to talk it over."

Lieutenant Alexis Aenera
Chief Science Officer
USS Astraea
&
Lieutenant William "Buck" Rogers
Chief Flight Control Officer
USS Astraea