Star Trek: TNG Indstinguishable From Magic by David A McIntee Page A

were too many responsibilities as captain for him to be down there as often as he liked.
    Since the ship could be controlled from the master systems console in engineering, he had been tempted, when he took command of the ship, to move everything to there. Back on the old
Enterprise,
with Jim Kirk, he had been able to tell the state of the ship by the vibrations from the deck plates. On a
Galaxy
-class ship, he couldn’t, but he could tell how healthy the engines were from the sound the warpcore made, just the way a doctor could listen to a person’s heartbeat if there were no medical tricorders around.
    At least he could sit by the bridge’s engineering station, and keep an eye on things from there. He was pleased by what he saw, and could tell that Vol was doing him proud. A chronometer chimed on the display, reminding him that it was time for the briefing.
    Scotty settled into the chair at the end of the briefing room table, which was, to his mind, the most comfortable chair in any of the ship’s working areas. Perhaps it wasn’t as comfortable as his favorite chair in his quarters, but it was a damn sight better for his back than the center seat on the bridge.
    He cast a look around at the people gathering round the table. On his left, in front of a wall displaying models of previous vessels named
Challenger,
were Tyler Hunt, then Nog and Ogawa. On his right, sitting by the curved windows that looked out on one of the cluster’s orange suns, were Leah, Geordi, Barclay, and Qat’qa. Vol sat at the far end of the table. “Mister La Forge,” Scotty began, “you’ve been on
Intrepid,
so how would ye describe the state of the ship?”
    “The hull is more or less intact, barring a few punctures, and the interior has been left as it was on the day she was lost. The thing that throws a spanner into any normal salvage plan is that, physically, the structure of the ship is a couple of thousand years old, not a couple of hundred.”
    “That’s impossible,” Barclay protested. “Unless someone was building NX-class ships before we did.”
    Alyssa Ogawa shook her head, and tapped the padd that was in front of her on the table. “I’ve got Doctor Crusher’s report here. The DNA analysis of some of theorganic matter coating the interior surfaces matches known medical records of a number of her crew. It’s definitely the
Intrepid
which was lost in 2161.”
    “Could it have traveled back through time?” Vol asked. “Something like what happened to the
Columbia
.”
    Hunt shrugged. “Maybe, but surely it would have been found before.”
    “Space is pretty big, and the ship pretty small. It was pure chance that the
Enterprise
detected it,” La Forge reminded them.
    “Aye, there is that,” Scotty said. “But Leah and I have had a wee chat about this, and run some numbers.” He touched a control set into the tabletop, and a holographic display sprang to life in the air above the center of the table. It showed a standard illustration of a gravity well as a weight dragging down the center of a rubber sheet. “Everybody knows time runs slower at the bottom of a gravity well.”
    “Starfleet Medical uses the effect quite extensively when stasis fields can’t be used,” Alyssa said with a nod. “A few hours for the patient near a suitable gravity well can give his doctors weeks, or even months, to prepare his treatment.”
    Leah spoke up. “Exactly, and what
Intrepid
encountered was the reverse of that effect.”
    “Gravity can only get as low as zero,” Nog pointed out. “Even what we call negative
g
s are just gravity pulling a change of direction. How can it reach such negative numbers to have an effect like this?”
    Scotty leaned forward. “It canna, in normal space.”
    “I sense a ‘but’ coming,” Hunt said.
    “But . . . in some of the quantum slipstream experiments, we found that slipstream matrices intersectin’ a gravity well in subspace sometimes created the opposite or the reflection of a