Seeing Double

Posted on Thu Jun 30th, 2016 @ 11:48pm by Captain Tim Williams & Lieutenant Commander Horatio Hawke & Lieutenant Commander Jean Reynard & Lieutenant Ryan North

Episode: Lost Property
Location: USS Highlander - Bridge

"You have something?" Tim asked, walking over towards the bank of large consoles and screens at the back of the bridge, where Reynard and Ryan had been working for the last few hours.

"Maybe," Jean said, frowning at the displays. "There's something wrong with their warp engines. Not 'mysteriously turning on and off' wrong, fortunately, but 'subspace physics doesn't work that way' wrong."

"Wrong might be putting it mildly," Ryan replied. He crossed quickly back to his science station and pulled up the same data that Jean was looking at. "There is no way that can be a correct reading."

"I don't know about the rest of you," Jean said, looking at the captain and Hawke, "but I prefer my ghost ships to obey the law of conversation of energy."

Ryan tapped in a few more commands and then looked up to address the rest of the bridge staff. "This can't be right, I've been monitoring the ships systems and some how the engines are creating a subspace field that is double what he ship SHOULD be putting into it with her current power levels. I'm no engineer but given the ships current condition and the technology on board, I'd say that's pretty impossible."

"I am, and it is," Tim commented, looking closer at the readings. "The sensors are also reading the ship's mass as twice what it should be. Have you run a diagnostic on the sensors?"

Jean looked at the captain like he'd just asked whether Jean'd eaten any puppies for breakfast. "Yes, sir. I have checked the sensors, and the software, and the computers."

"Well according to this, we're reading two ships."

"That's... huh," Jean said. "You know, you're right. That's the sort of turbulence you see when you've got two active sets of warp nacelles nearby, like a shuttle and a mothership. The mass reading is practically double what it should be, too."

Ryan turned to the side display on his science station before tapping in a few commands. "There is also a heavy increase in background stellar radiation and some very odd subspace field readings."

Jean pointed at the display of the ship. "It's only showing on the sensors pointed toward the De Salle, though. Almost like there's a little extra coming from somewhere else. This could be some sort of residual interdimensional effect, left over from when the ship was displaced and stirred back up to noticeable levels when the warp drive was reactivated."

Ryan glanced at the readings. "I don't think that a residual effect would be putting out oscillating subspace band emissions, those typically only occur when subspace fields of two warp cores are interacting with each other at extremely close range."

"Extra mass, extra engine..." Jean said slowly. "Extra ship? This could be the result quantum entanglement with duplicate of the De Salle out of phase with our level of space-time, either created by the displacement or pulled from another universe at the moment of the event."

"That's an entirely plausible explanation," Ryan stated, looking up from his displays. "And it would explain a lot of things. Hang on, let me run a multi spectral sweep. Maybe that will yield something."

"This sounds similar to one of the mission reports I remember reading from the USS Voyager's time in the Delta Quadrant," Tim said, moving to an adjacent monitor while Ryan ran his sweep to try and find the report he was half-remembering. "Yeah, here it is. The Voyager passed through a subspace divergence field while trying to avoid a race called the Vidiians in a plasma drift. The ship was duplicated, with each ship and crew slightly out of phase with each other, but their anti-matter wasn't duplicated, and so one of the ships started a series of proton bursts to keep their warp core going, but had to stop when they learnt it was damaging the other ship." He rubbed his hand across his jaw as he tried to piece the two events together. "A subspace divergence field would be one explanation of how our sensors could be showing two ships, but it still doesn't explain the irregularities you guys saw while you were over there."

"When I first noticed the throttle safety switch back," Hawke said, thinking aloud and following the train of thought through, "it was as though somebody had physically switched it back. Is it possible that the ... well, the other crew is still alive and someone on that crew switched it back?"

Ryan's eyebrows went up with that statement. "That's not something that I previously considered, although if they are still alive and just out of phase with our reality it brings up the question how were they to physically manipulate something in our reality. Unless of course, they've managed to rig some sort of device in their own state that would allow for such a feat."

"Not necessarily," Jean said, tapping his fingers idly on the rim of his console. "Metallic objects or electrical currents in the wiring would be more subject to interaction due to subtle bleed-through of magnetic fields. That'd be why weren't not bumping into people, but things like switches or the control mechanisms are being affected."

Ryan considered what Jean had said before responding. "Assuming that's the case, do you think it was some kind of message? Maybe they were trying to tell us something."

Before anyone else could answer, Ryan's sensors brought back a flood of information. He typed in several commands before glancing back at his displays. "I think I've got something, I ran the short range sensors through the lateral array and then applied a multi-spacial scanning pattern recognition system," he typed in a few more commands. "I'll punch it up on the main viewer."

"Am I seeing what I think I'm seeing?" Tim asked, as he turned to look at the viewer.

As the bridge crew watched, the readings on the viewer played out, indicating very clearly that there was definitely a second ship, exactly the same as the De Salle, in the same place in space as the De Salle. The energy readings from this other ship indicated that the phantom ship was likely to be fully powered, and there were indications of more readings besides that - potentially life signs, though with the ship being out of phase, the sensors weren't able to give a clear enough reading for it to report a positive.

"Copy what we've found down to engineering," the captain said, as he started making his way towards the turbolift. "Jean, you're with me. If there is somebody over there, we need to try and figure out a way of talking to them."