“Captain, we’ve got a bit of a problem.” Garion said as he walked through the door to Scott’s office. 

“What is it, Lieutenant?” asked Scott looking up from his PADD. 

“They’re headed for Deep Space 12, Sir.” Garion replied with a look of concern on his face. “And we can’t catch them as long as our warp is inoperable.”

“Gather my senior staff, and the Rangers, we need to find a solution. Conference room, 5 minutes.” Scott said, standing to follow Lieutenant Beckett out the door.

The air in the conference room felt heavy as the senior staff gathered. Tholak and Dathasa were the last to arrive, and everyone else was already seated at the table when they entered, panting slightly, through the door. “Thanks for coming.” Scott said, motioning the two Rangers to take their seats. “I’ll get right to it. Garion has been monitoring Vaadwaur comm traffic, and has discovered that they mean to take Deep Space 12. It also sounds like the invasion is far more widespread than we thought. These invaders have taken over the Alpha and Beta quadrants by interrupting subspace communications. This also means, sadly, we cannot travel using Warp, so we need another way to get there with speed.”

“Can we build a Quantum Slipstream Drive?” Vail said, raising her hand. 

Theoretically?” Garion asked, raising an eyebrow, “Yes. Practically? Unsure. I’ve never actually done it. The biggest hurdle is the need for real time course correction. I’m good, but I don’t know if I’m that good. There is a lot that can go wrong if we mess it up.”

“Can the computer handle it?” asked the captain, leaning forward onto the table and tenting his fingers in front of his face. 

“As it stands? No, I don’t believe so.” Garion said flatly.

“Alright, are there any other ideas?” Scott asked the room. 

“We still have that fighter.” Tom said. “It should have access to the Underspace Corridors, shouldn’t it? Can’t we jury rig that like we did the communications array?”  

“That – might actually work.” Garion said. “It would certainly be easier than attempting a Slipstream drive and getting it wrong.”

“Then that’s the play.” Scott said. “Get on it right away, Lieutenant. You have 24 hours.” He nodded to Garion. The group stood and began to file out of the room. Garion and Bema headed straight for the Shuttle bay, where the Vaadwaur fighter was stored, to begin working on it. 

“I’ll follow you, so I can pull you out of there if you need.” Bema said, matching pace with Garion down the corridor to the turbolift. 

“Sounds good to me.” Garion replied. The doors to the turbolift hissed closed behind them. “Shuttle Bay.” Garion said out loud, and the lift began to move. “I can’t believe I have to do this again.” he grumbled.

“I thought it went well last time.” Bema said with a smile, “aside from scaring the daylights out of Ensign Frisk.”

Garion smiled back. “She does seem extra jumpy recently.” The turbolift came to a soft stop, and the doors opened again. Sitting in the middle of the cramped shuttle bay was the fighter, sleek and angular. Garion ran his hands over the carbon scored hull plates before finding the one he was looking for, under the starboard nacelle. With a grunt of effort, he forced the panel open, exposing a web of wires and conduits. “Here goes nothing,” he said, flicking on his flashlight and burying him inside the opening. “The schematic said it would be here” came his muffled voice from under the hull as he swam further into the ship. 

“You’re gonna fry yourself if you touch the wrong relay.” Bema said with a chuckle, settling himself against a stack of crates. “I don’t think they built these things to be taken apart.”

“Yea, thanks Commander.” Garion replied sardonically, “I’m glad you’re here to help.” More muffled grunts came from under the hull plates. “Oh!” he called, his voice still heavy with sarcasm, “here it is. Right where they didn’t say it would be.” 

Inside the hull, Garion whipped out his tricorder, opened it and stuck it against the inside of the hull plates. Holding his flashlight in his mouth, he began carefully removing the connections that held the device in place, isolating the phase current nodes first. Then he removed the field collar, which hummed like a tuning fork when he removed it. The fighter gave a shudder and the lights flickered in the shuttle bay. 

“Hey, that thing isn’t going to explode and kill us all, is it?” Bema called from outside the hull. 

“Don’t know yet.” Garion replied, wiping sweat from his forehead. He gave the micro-field wrench one last delicate turn. “Easy… easy” he said under his breath. With one final click, the gyroscopic cradle disengaged, and the navigational device came free. He retrieved it from its opened cradle and held it in his hands, staring at it. It was about the size of a cantaloupe, crystalline in structure and shot through with pulsing veins of violet light. Tucking it safely under one arm like a football, he made his way carefully back out through the tangle of wires and conduits. With his feet safely back on the deck plates, he crouched out from under the fighter. Opening a containment case, he set the piece gently inside and closed the lid. 

“You sure that thing isn’t going to melt a hole in the deck?” Bema asked, raising an eyebrow. 

“Nope, but I’m pretty sure I can get the ship to follow it.” Garion replied with a smile. 

Main engineering was dark. Not from power failure, but intentionally. Garion dimmed the lights to remove as much interference as possible. Only the soft blue glow of the interface panels and the pulsing violet light of the navigational device gave the room illumination now. The device hovered in a data-link scaffold he had cobbled together. Garion rubbed his eyes, cracked his knuckles and took a deep breath. “Okay, sweetheart.” he said to the glowing purple crystal, “Let’s see if you speak Federation.” He tapped some commands into the console.

Input initialized. Subspace navigational link protocol variant forty-seven beta. Said the computer’s cool, monotonous voice. Warning. Foreign device detected. Classification, unknown. Proceed? The disembodied voice asked. 
“Proceed.” Garion confirmed. The device reacted instantly, filling the room with a low, predatory hum. Symbols were scrolling in non-linear bursts across the screen, shifting through dimensions even the screens struggled to contain. 

Warning. Interface instability. Pattern recognition error in navigational schematic. 

“I know, I know.” Garion said. “The Vaadwaur don’t map space, they interpret it.” He inserted his translation matrix, built off of hours of studying quantum telemetry logs and sheer guesswork and overlaid it on the transmission stream. “Whoa, signal spike.” he said to himself in surprise. “Didn’t like that, did you?” he asked the device. Talking to the device seemed to help him think, so he continued. “Okay, what if I switched to passive telemetry filters and integrated the astrometric relay to interpret the feed?” The screen flickered a couple times, and then resolved itself into a map, but it wasn’t like any starmap Garion had ever seen. A web of pulsing lines and radiant nodal points that stretched through subspace like a spider’s web. It was the Vaadwaur underspace network. “Ahh” he said in realization, “Now I’ve got you.” He sighed deeply again, ready to start the real work. “I’m going to route your decoded output through the ship’s astrometrics core, maybe we can get the two to line up close enough to plot coordinates.” A chime sounded as the Erikson’s systems began to adapt to the new tech. 

Conduit pathway synchronization at seventy-eight percent compatibility. Navigational overlay calibrated.

“Ship? Meet device. Device? Meet ship.” Garion said with a laugh. “Now that the two of you have met, I’m going to activate the deflector control interface, and tie it into your harmonic input. I don’t want to force it, I want it to resonate. A whisper, not a knock.” The device pulsed brighter. 

A warning light flashed red suddenly. Warning. Device internal field fluctuating at dangerous levels. Said the computer’s voice.

“No, no, no–” Garion stood to reach another console, slamming his hand down it to raise an emergency stabilizer field. The pulse from the device dropped low, then leveled out. The red light went out and the room went quiet again, save for the soft purring of the systems adjusting to a new language. Garion collapsed back into his chair with a deep, shaky exhale. “That…was not playing nice, ladies.” he said to the room. After a moment to collect himself, he tapped the combadge on his chest. “Engineering to bridge. The device has been integrated successfully. We can now chart the conduit paths.” 

Scott’s voice replied from the badge, Are we ready to follow one?

“Define ready, Captain.” He replied with a smile. 

Understood, Lieutenant. Find us a course through the conduits to Deep Space 12. Scott’s voice said, and then he added, well done, Garion. Thank you.