Unlimited (Nerd) Power!

Posted on Sun Feb 22nd, 2026 @ 10:47pm by Lieutenant Tork & Ensign Noah Balsam

Mission: Port of Call
Location: Fusion Reactor Control
Timeline: Mission Day 16 at 0900

Lieutenant Tork stood gazing up into the star field that stretched out beyond the confines of the Sojourner's hull. The stars did not, as they did when viewed through a planet's atmosphere, twinkle. They were instead steady pinpoints of light that dotted the inky void in random patterns that painted a picture of the past, interrupted only by the forward most portions of the nacelles of the ship itself. Battered and worn, the two outcroppings of metal from the main hull had suffered a great deal of punishment and had yet borne the crew to safe harbor before channeling their last warp field. The Ferengi could see worker bee shuttles going about the task of removing plating that would reveal couplings and connections that would need to be severed to replace the failing machinery, his environmental suit offering no obstruction in the vacuum between him and the sight he was looking at.

Behind him, technicians were busying with another removal task, though not as monumental as the nacelles, but still equally critical to the ship in other ways. The fusion core that the Sojourner's impulse engines relied upon to do their own part in helping the ship do what it needed to do had also reached the end of its operational lifetime, though not because of damage but from the sheer volume of obsolete parts it contained. Fusion was by no means a new technology, but even something old could see spikes in innovation from time to time, and advances had come about that would enhance reactor output, performance, and most of all longevity, which made replacing the one already installed a priority on the list.

"How are we coming along, Ensign?" Tork asked, switching from star gazing to people watching as he addressed the senior-most person in the compartment next to himself.

Noah's breath was shallow with focus, stooped over and bent, taking knees, in observation. He desperately was focused down- very much down. Down at the stripped down hull. What was normally a Federation greenish-bluish-white tritanium shell was a dull bronze poly-duranium alloy color. "We're doing OK, sir..." It was a holding action- in every sense true, but Noah was giving an intermediate report. His focus here was overseeing the very delicate interfaces of the ship's nervous system- the swarms of optical data matter that formed the Sojourner's ability to "sense itself." Without them installed- or removed- precisely, the Sojourner's ability to detect environmental anomalies, damage, even temperature variations, would be flawed.

And the impulse manifolds and fusion systems, the main and auxiliary batteries, were triply important to get that data right. "I'd guess we-we're about... a third of the way through." Noah had moved to depress the comm badge analog on his suit. His head prickled with the awareness that behind him was terrifying open and supremely beautiful but terrifying space. Noah had not been a fan. He liked ceilings and dome and well-enclosing, cozy Human trappings. But at least he had his suit.

Another breath. He checked his oxygen levels. Stable, within normal. So at least he wasn't doing some subconscious hyperventilation. He passed his hand over a particular "trench" from which a "main artery" of the optical nodes would be laid down. "You know," his voice cracked almost pubescently. "I-I got a look at these new nodes we're adding. Call me, um, crazy. But they kind of remind me of Borg technology..." Meanwhile as he began to walk very slowly along the trenchline, he scanned. "Ah, hold on g-guys. We missed a few. plate epsilon-theta-... uh..." He twisted his head and knelt down. "Theta 41091."

"On it, Sir," a disembodied voice stated in his comm.

Tork snorted within the confines of his environmental suit at the Ensign's self-proclaimed 'crazy' statement, "I wouldn't be surprised by that, Ensign. I've used parts from Borg ships several times when I've gotten lucky enough to find them. Say what you want about their nihilistic outlook on individuality, but the tech they cobble together is top notch. My one complaint about it would probably be that it doesn't like to just... do the thing it was made to do. I've had to beat the adaptability out of several pieces of gear I've acquired.They always want to turn your ship into a Borg's dream home, and as much as I like humidity, the depressing green is just... well... depressing."

Noah tilted and nodded his head in silent agreement- not that he disliked green, but he wasn't found of temperatures that high. And he didn't have a strong desire to join a collective. "Tha-that's the Borg... the ultimate users." For a moment Noah considered showing the Ferengi the piece of Borg tech he'd found a few months back when they were rescuing Kaldri. It was still sitting in his desk, inert. He'd determined it was some kind of adaptive regeneration node.

The Ferengi plodded over to where Balsam had knelt down, his magnetic boot thunking against the hull with each step he took, the only mechanism currently keeping him from floating aimlessly through the void. "I've already taken a peek at the output numbers the techs threw together on this new reactor we're getting, comes close to making some of those singularity cores the Romulans are fond of look almost under-powered. Makes you wonder if their refugee program wasn't just 'good will'," the engineer said as he watched technicians below removing plating to reveal more of the interior of the ship to the vacuum of space.

Noah's brows rose, "Ju-just as long as they aren't using the actual Romulan singularity designs. Those things are hellish to decommission. You-you have to literally collapse a small black hole." Noah shook his head. He remembered from one of his History of Warp and Impulse Propulsion Theory classes that the Chin'toka system was still rife with anomalies and subspace instability because of the sheer number of Romulan vessels destroyed when the Breen joined the Dominion. It turns out when you simply turn off a system by robbing it of power that was never designed to do that, bad things happened. "No wonder the Romulans hate the Breen so much." He frumped. "Not that I'd justify that level of hate... you know..."

The status bar in his monitoring suit switched from red to yellow. The removal teams were working on it. It stated, 'in progress.' "How does the Ferengi Alliance power their ships? I've heard its a little different than us." He asked. Noah was fishing a bit. Ferengi might have been mostly-allies now, but they were still Ferengi. He just waited to hear the term 'proprietary technology clause.' So he tried to fish through his memory for a good counter-Acquisition but came up dry.

"Our energy source is a little different, sure. We use... dirtier materials because they are cheaper to acquire, but the end result is the same. Minus the more rigorous health and safety standards, I have the burns to prove it. Thankfully I never had a lobe-related accident, a Ferengi just isn't quite the same after one of those," Tork said in response as he turned his attention to the rather large 'package' slowly drifting toward them.

"I-I think that would probably hurt a lot... too." Noah commented. He imagined Tork was probably referring to Theta radiation. Messy stuff.

"That thing looks impressive, even from a few thousand meters out," the senior engineer said with a chuckle, "Guess the yard figured they could haul it out to us and just do the swap all in one go... unless another worker bee is behind it and I can't tell."

Noah had to turn his entire body to see to what Tork was referring. Inbound was a massive module which would, in time, be situated, aligned and calibrated right in the empty socket that they stood. "Whoa..." Was the only term that initially seemed to escape the throat of the young Ensign. he watched it. "It-it looks... uh... contiguous." Noah squinted at the vision, trying to discern areas where it would be designed to deconstruct like a puzzle.

A green light pinged on Noah's monitor. The team below had finished the job of prepping the nerve-like pathways of the ship to accept this... new organ. Noah tilted his head in his suit and considered, as he occasionally had, how medicine and engineering had distinct parallels. Noah stood again and began to diligently walk the line slowly, scanning, perfecting. This required precision. This was surgery, not art.

"When I studied at um, Ishikawa Station..." Noah said. "It seemed to we-we were always designing interfaces that needed to be modular and hot swapable. There's not a lot in Starfleet that seems custom made for a particular class of ship anymore. Just the skin and muscle is different." Noah glanced briefly toward Tork. He wondered how the Ferengi felt about that. In their short time being aboard the same ship, Noah knew next to nothing about the man save that he seemed focused on supplies and well... acquisitioning. Repurposing. Jury-rigging.

"Seems like, these days, being able to cram the bleeding edge of technology into everything with a hull is all the yard technicians care about. They confuse interchangeability with superior engineering, and I can tell you from experience that those two things aren't just different but diametrically opposed. Take our ship, for instance. You could shove one of those protostar drives in this ship if you wanted to, tweak a few things to here and there, and it might work a few times, sure... but it wasn't meant to use something like that. We've got a better chance and not crumpling nose first into a ball from the sheers that those kinds of speeds create than... say... a Galaxy-class would... but we'd probably only get about halfway across the quadrant before it crapped out and we were no better off than Voyager was when they started their stint out here on their own," Tork said as he scanned the silhouette of the reactor as it slowly grew closer to them, meter by meter.

"New directives..." Noah murmured. Fleet Admiral Shelby had taken the reins of starship tactical designs when Noah had been at Ishikawa. He remembered seeing the very boiled down, very 'you can show this to an ensign' memorandums.

"Don't get me wrong, being able to make something fit is something I'm no stranger to doing," the Ferengi chuckled, "Hell, you could call it a hobby of mine. But nothing square that I've ever jammed into the triangle hole couldn't handle what it was being asked to do. Theorizing a thing can work and having seen something do it under stress aren't even close to the same thing. Plus there's the fact that some of the things we're being asked to put in our ship right now hasn't exactly been through enough rounds of quality control for a Ferengi to want to market it as 'reliable'. Say what you want about my people's greed, but only an idiot sells something the Federation just moved from the drawing board to the fleet. Part of the reason why I went around pulling parts out of the ship and replacing them with things I know actually work."

It was a philosophy in action that... well, Noah understood the thinking. He came from a colony that focused on the Precautionary Principle. Tried and true technology over the bleeding edge. But Noah had been through a program that he'd had to unravel himself from that philosophy. "I-I..." He blinked his eyes closed and had to fight those two opposing forces at each other. It just ended up making him trail off.

The engineer patted Noah on the shoulder, "I want to see kids like you make it to become seasoned engineers without the weird plasma burns and other assorted radiation scars that come with screwing around with things that don't work when you need them to."

"Uhh thanks... I guess. I think." He smiled, a little uncertainly that turned it into a grimace. "I'm not sure how to reply to that... so... thank you?" Noah's mouth twisted in to a knot. "I was raised to understand technology from an ethical... uhh... w-what advantage it has to society. And I guess Starfleet. And its good to have it advance... and you don't trust... ban it... when it gets misused by evil people...." He was obliquely referring to positronics there. "I get why Starfleet wants their ships to be hot-swapable. We-we lost all the resources and brain power at Utopia Planitia. And they're wanting to make ship coordination more fluid... but..." He shrugged. "I guess a lot of it, I don't see where it's leading."

"It was a tragedy, to be sure," the Ferengi said with a somber lilt to his voice, "But that shouldn't have driven things in the direction it did. It's almost too unnatural that suddenly, everything has to be carbon copied and uniform. If I cared to indulge in conspiracy theories like one of the females on my last ship was obsessed with, I might say there was something sinister going on behind the scenes."

What was sinister about swappable parts, modularity, Noah wondered? It was efficient, if not particularly creative. It was... cheaper... even in the post-scarcity economy of the era. It took less resources and energy. A cookie cutter fleet made sense in a short-term: easy on personnel, easier to get back in the field. But it destroyed innovation and specialization. Starfleet had done it before. But that was decades ago, and had been nearly a century before that. Each time followed a war or major loss. So... why now?

Tork paused for a moment, though whether it was for effect or simply because his thoughts had wandered wasn't immediately clear, "I think a healthy amount of skepticism is good for the soul, keeps you from being swindled by imitation Slug-o salesmen and the FCA. But some hew-mons can take it to the extreme."

Noah hehed quietly. "We-we've still got the same DNA-coded instincts of our tree-swinging ancestors. It hasn't caught up to our minds."

The fusion reactor was now close enough that the Ferengi could pick out individual subsystems on the device. He frowned just a little at seeing some of the changes they'd made to the design. Leave it to the drawing board engineers to dream up designs that were needlessly complex for the sake of squeezing a few more joules out of something that was already pumping out an amount of power unfathomable not too many centuries before.

"I think we're going to need a bigger hole, Ensign," the senior engineer's tone dripped with exasperation.

Noah swung at the waist to examine their space and then to took at Tork. "Uhh..." He stalled with a mild notion of anxiety tensing his arms. "You're sure, Sir? We're to their exact specifications they sent us. It should slot right in. As soon as we move."

"Us moving won't fix the space that the armchair engineers didn't account for that the worker bees will need maneuver the reactor down into the hole and then back out of it. Which I guess I shouldn't be that shocked about..." the Ferengi explained while shaking his head a little inside of his helmet, "I should have taken my own advice and been more skeptical of the specifications they sent over. Thankfully, we only need an extra meter on both side, which won't take long."

Mild panic. It tensed Noah's limbs and crawled through his chest. He wanted to protest. He didn't have the rank. And... well... he was neither a structural engineer, nor a power systems engineer. He did software and the nerves of the ship. "Um." Crackled through his comm to Tork. He looked at his schematics and frowned. "S-sir, I don't think we can sacrifice that meter you want to aft. Its right up against the impulse manifold... well, I-I mean, the redundant systems protections between the reactors and the engine manifolds. But we-we need that right?"

"Yes..." Tork said absentmindedly, "But who said we could only go forward or aft? Port and starboard work just was well and give us plenty of wiggle room..."

Noah blinked and twisted to look behind him. "Oh uh. Y-yeah that might... work. With some realigning of power systems. Conduits. We-we will need to relocate the bio-neural node hub but that's not hard. There's a-a jefferies back there we could convert."

The Ferengi stopped himself and looked back at the younger engineer, "Are you alright, Mister Balsam? Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you seem to get agitated when something doesn't go the way you envisioned it in the planning stages. Were you yelled at a lot as a cadet or something? I mean... I got yelled at practically every other week because I was always inventing new ways to do assignments that met the objective but didn't follow the manual in the least... but you seem like you didn't let it fall off of you like mud in a Ferengi rain shower..."

Noah grimaced. "N-no sir... not agitated. But um... anxious... when I have to redeploy. And-and I'm not a structural engineer, um, sir. I mostly work with systems. Dabbled, um, a little in propulsion with Lieutenant Parsons." He turned to look. "I guess... I just need it to work right if I'm going to sign off on it. One of things Starfleet does best is its very precise engineering. Its made to work together, seamlessly. Materials, hardware, source code, all designed to work as one. Not as a jumble of parts knit together with a prayer and patches."

"If only it actually all worked the way it's supposed to on paper," Tork lamented openly, "But I'm afraid that just isn't what happens. Any engineering, structural or otherwise, is a battlefield, the parts are our soldiers and we're the unlucky medics that have to use those very same patches you'd rather not use to keep them from giving up the fight. It will never be pretty, it will never be clean, and it will always fail the second you think you've got it all figured out. A good engineer will adapt when things go wrong and do what they have to to make sure it doesn't all come crashing down around their lobes. A great engineer looks for points of failure before they happen and already has three ways to fix it stashed away somewhere waiting for a spare moment to sneak it in."

Tork turned to look directly at the young Ensign, "Being proud of what you do is a good thing to hold on to, Mister Balsam. Understanding that it won't always look like the drawings in the manual but it can still be 'right' is when that pride actually means something."

Noah hadn't meant to wince when Tork described engineering as a battlefield. He'd had quite enough of those for awhile. "I-I prefer to think of them as a puzzle..." He admitted. "Maybe that's... static... of me. I'll work on it, Sir." He agreed with a nod that engineers had to adapt. Noah felt like he could adapt or at least... adjust. "I-I guess I come from a colony that always made sure it was clean and neat... and did exactly as it was designed to do. I was told those things matter because it shows it matters to the engineer to make sure those... touches... are there. As a craftsman." He breathed in. He held it. And he sighed. "Well at least until someone has to come along and repair it or replace it and then... it all happens again."

"You're not wrong about it resembling a puzzle sometime," the Ferengi commented, "I think that's a fitting metaphor from the programing perspective anyway. But colonies are given tried and true equipment to work with, things that people like me have already thrown parts at to see what actually works under stress. What Starfleet has us doing is the same thing, really. We're the testers for the new and improved. We take the stuff that those engineers who crank out stuff off the drawing board and see if it really does do what they imagined it would do. It's great when something works exactly as designed. I personally love when something comes straight out of a cargo container and doesn't need me to do more than slot it into place. Highlight of my day, even. But even the best manufacturing engineer is still only a person, they can't see the future or anticipate every variable that could ever exist. Thinking that you can simply crack open an engineering manual and everything will fall into place is a comforting thought... but it's not realistic. If you think of the manual as a framework, like I do, and look for ways that you can make the framework do more, do it better, make it safer for the next guy that has to use it, you'll find yourself adapting better, worrying less, and enjoy the job for more than the mental stimulation."

Noah chewed his lip, his eyebrow surreptitiously rising at Tork's assertions about colonies and Starfleet. "Um. Nnnnot always Sir. My colony was before Starfleet. And... we-we didn't agree with a lot of things United Earth did. We aligned to the Outer World Commonwealth. Back in uh the old days. We were on our own with technology and parts. And-and my colony is very good at science and engineering. We're a bunch of..." He grimaced and smiled wryly in to a cheek, "Um, misfit rogue scholars and... scientists. The-the kinds who tell politicians where to stick their hyperspanners." His brow rose, "I was always taught that when something wasn't right for the job, you redesign it so you can. But. I do get what you're saying. Out here, its a little more... make do... just um... somewhere in my head I didn't expect a make do to be in a shipyard." The Ensign chuckled and glanced at the looming module. "Should I start moving those bio-neural nodes out?"

"Yeah, probably should get started on that," the Ferengi nodded, "Shout if you need any help. In the meantime, I'm going to give the pilot of that worker bee a few instructions on how I want him to slot that thing in when you've made the space for him."

Noah smiled a wide smile. "Good-good idea, Sir.." He tapped his communication controls. "Balsam to Team 2... change of-of plans guys. Report to Jefferies Tube Junction 6-Beta-3... and bring a neuro-incubator."


A post By

Lieutenant Tork
Chief Engineer

&

Ensign Noah Balsam
Systems Specialist