Chapter 35: Chapter Twenty-Nine Warp Five

Williams cursed. That damn machine was letting aliens near the engines. If the Cathamari were any indication, you can’t trust aliens. He should have destroyed the other alien ship, not stuck around to help them. Hell, they shouldn’t have been out here in the first place. Thankfully there were a few people who seemed to understand. Unfortunately, they were all a vast minority, and none of them were in a position to really do anything about it.

She cursed again, as she remembered the news. Sanchez her aide had just informed her that their damage control plan had failed. The young man they gave the job to had even gotten himself arrested. Worse, it had happened quietly with no one even noticing. If it wasn’t so laughable an idea, she would have assumed that the machine had somehow known about their plan. That was ridiculous, she and Sanchez were the only two people who really knew what the plan was. She had taken every precaution, even checking for bugs. She also highly doubted Sanchez would have told him. Sanchez hated everything going on here as much as she did. Williams had made sure of it. Yet somehow that machine knew enough about their plan to stop it without anyone noticing. Almost as if nothing actually happened.

Glancing out the viewport, she glared at the alien ship simply sitting there. She knew that like the Cathamari it was simply a menace hiding a knife. These Krall simply had more guile than those scaly brutes. She just had to get them to show it if plan A failed. Perhaps they needed a new plan. Then maybe people would take these threats all around them seriously. Just she wasn’t sure what else she could do. Ah she would figure it out, but in the meantime, she had to figure out how that machine had known what she was up to. It was the only explanation for how badly her first plan had failed.

---

Tika watched her screens. It had been a few days since the battle, and the meeting. The Humans however seemed to be quite industrious. She had monitored several tests of the new configuration, and they were already almost done modifying their engines to the new specs. In the more immediate vicinity, they had cleaned up all evidence that a battle had taken place. Every Cathamari ship in the area had been broken down and processed. In fact, if she looked out the window, she could see the makeshift cargo barge, they had put together to stow most of the salvage on. Anything they couldn’t fit in their own cargo holds was stowed on that barge.

The barge wasn’t anything special. It was nothing more than an assemblage of bulkheads and hull plating that he had been put together to hold its dense cargo of salvage cubes. While it had no engines of its own, or any life-support either, they had outfitted it with a couple of fuel pods, a reactor, and structural integrity generators. They had also bothered to armor it, a light layer of their dispersion plating around the entire thing about a half meter thick. Apparently, they put the plating on it to protect the barge from possible translight impacts.

Apparently, these humans never heard of deflectors. Their ships didn’t even have deflector shields, either. As such their solution to the problem of translight particle impacts was actually rather unique. Instead of fitting their interstellar ships with a deflector, they went the more complicated and expensive route of giving them armor that could easily withstand those impacts.

Speaking of their armor, it was reasonably impressive. Very strong, and quite resilient. It was not however invincible. It had only seemed that way at first, since the Cathamari had used up most of their torpedoes on the Teketh. Keeping the shields up had not been easy because of that. Even with the shields up they had taken hull damage, and hull breaches. Mainly due to the Cathamari focusing their attacks on any grid that showed signs of failing. It was a testament to her crew's skills that they had survived as long as they had. Although they likely wouldn’t have lasted much longer, if the Enterprise hadn’t intervened. The suddenness of her intervention may have also caught the Cathamari off guard as well. It certainly left them in a bit of disarray, allowing the Humans to inflict a fair amount of damage, and then the Cathamari flagship went down just as they were starting to reorganize. Perhaps if the Cathamari had been able to coordinate their own attacks more effectively they might have done better.

In fact they had out of curiosity run a few simulations, and learned a few things about that dispersion plating in the process. While a ship’s best and most potent defense is to simply not be where the enemy is shooting, shields and armor are what a ship relies upon when she does take a hit. That plating makes for a potent defense, comparable to the defensive shields of the Valorians, who excel with energy shields like no one else does. Like any shield it could also be overwhelmed with a heavy bombardment. The plating relies on an energy field being run through the hull to maintain armor integrity, and with each hit that field slightly depletes. Enough hits in a short enough window will deplete the field, and the ship would start taking damage just like any energy shield. The other option just like a shield would be a potent focused attack, something the armor was specifically designed to prevent. The best bet for that would actually be a torpedo, and that is something the Humans seem aware of. As all three of their ships have potent point defenses, and an interception grid. Overall, she would rank the Humans as defensively competitive with the major powers, their weapons while also impressive actually marked lower. Their particle cannons, and beam arrays while intriguing were more in line with what the Krall were using about five hundred years ago.

Their torpedoes and mines were more interesting due to their shield penetration ability. She knew there were certain people who would be quite interested in her scans of those devices. The Krall had no real equivalent to that modification for their own projectile weapons. The warheads were also interesting, they were using a fusion-based cascade detonation warhead, in other words they were photon warheads, designed to unleash a massive photon burst upon detonation. The key to that detonation actually lay in the casing which was composed of specially selected polymers and a metal lining. When the fusion core undergoes a cascade reaction the casing breaks down unleashing the photon burst. The resulting yield is several magnitudes greater than any fusion-based weapon she had seen before, and rivals an antimatter warhead in terms of yield. The yield seems to be variable, but those mines had each detonated with a force equal to several ‘gigatons’. That massive yield was why that first battleship simply exploded after being hit by only one mine, and if it hadn’t gone through the shields in their weakened state the ship would have been crippled by that blast. Their torpedoes exhibited a lower maximum yield, but that was largely due to the fact that they mounted a much smaller warhead. That made them no less impressive though.

Seeing those weapons, and what they had done with simple fusion based explosives. It made her wonder what they could do with an antimatter warhead. Given what they had, she figured she would likely find out in a few years. They already have the technology for one. She had no doubt the results would be impressive. Maybe they would even devise something that could rival her own spatial torpedoes. Those were some of the most powerful torpedoes known to Krall science. The warhead didn’t exactly detonate though, instead it generated an intense spatial distortion field that ripped ships apart. In many respects spatial warheads were terrifying weapons, but they struggled to penetrate energy screens. The humans however had shown her both a solution to that, and a counter. They were clearly a race worthy of respect, and already she could see they were destined for great things. A race that would if given the opportunity make an excellent ally or terrible foe. With the bonds forged here today, she was going to bank on the former. In addition she planned to do what she could to give them the opportunity to rebuild, and one day become the major power they were meant to be. Tika already had a few ideas that the port she had mentioned would provide the opportunity for.

---

Countryman settled into his command chair. He had recently finished his paperwork, and it was fast approaching time to depart. The test ships for the new warp configuration had as promised actually reached the coveted speed of warp five. Interactions with these Krall had certainly been a great boon. It gave him hope for the little bit of input they had given Ruri for her weapons project as well. They had not yet tested the proposed modification to the experimental compression modules, but that was largely due to the hurry they now had to get underway. The prototypes were already completed however and sitting in his launchbay waiting for testing. He planned to have that done later when the opportunity presented itself.

At the moment, the Umikaze was taking up position to tow their new salvage barge. It was more stuff than they could take with them, but he certainly wasn’t going to leave it here for the Cathamari to find. Not to mention when they got here to find and empty system it would leave them with a bit of a mystery on their hands.

At the moment, however, he was much more looking forward to the moment they made the jump to warp speed. In many respects, this was something he had been working towards for much of his life. Not to mention this was going to be a truly historic occasion, and it would mark the Enterprise as one of humanity's first warp five starships, alongside the Coto and Umikaze. A thousand times the speed of light, it was like a dream come true, and it would open up the galaxy. Warp three was barely sufficient for interstellar travel, and while it did expand their range of travel immensely it was limited to the local sector. Warp four was much faster, and would allow them to explore more than just one small sector of the galaxy in their lifetime. Afterall to travel twenty lightyears at warp three would take two years, at warp four you could do the same in just 73 days, which is a little over two months. At warp five that same twenty lightyears could be crossed in a week. A mere week for twenty lightyears. That made the prospect of finding a new world that suited their needs infinitely more likely. It would have taken lifetimes crawling along at warp three. At warp four, they stood a chance of finding one in their lifetime, but at warp five the number of systems they could visit in a year would be greatly expanded. Giving them a much better chance of finding a new world to call their own in their own lifetime, especially when one considered that modern humans could easily live to be a couple hundred years old, and if the math was right he would likely be around a good deal longer.

The prospect of traveling at warp five reminded him of his own youth when he once dreamed of exploring the galaxy, and now suddenly that dream was very real. It would take a lifetime to truly explore the galaxy, especially at warp five. The galaxy was a hundred thousand lightyears across and encompassed over a hundred billion distinct star systems. Given it would take a century just to cross from one side of the galaxy to the other at warp five, he would never be able to explore its entirety, not in his own lifetime. That didn’t make this moment any less momentous though. Thanks to a little help from the Krall, they now stood a chance of finding a new world to call their own. One that would be safe from further Cathamari aggression, at least until their empire expanded some more, or they developed better engines. Hmm perhaps there was a way to buy more time, they had enough junk, and knew a fair bit about Cathamari design. They also recovered a few intact transponders. Already a plan was forming in his mind, although he would certainly want a more intact Cathamari hull than they currently have. That would help, in addition, he would need some more components for this plan, components that he had every reason to believe he could obtain from the Krall. They were heading for a Krall port afterall, and if there was a military port in the system, chances are there was a civilian one nearby as well. They certainly had enough junk to trade.

Finally, he received the report he was waiting for. He gave the order, and moments later they took the crippled Teketh in tow and made the jump to warp speed. He watched the speed indicator on his own side console, as the ship rapidly accelerated. He couldn’t help but smile when they reached warp five without issue. A whole wealth of systems were now open for them to explore.

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