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

well.”
    “A gravity peak?” Barclay asked.
    “Right. We’ve nicknamed it a subspace gravity spike.” Leah leaned forward and adjusted the hologram. The ghostly image came to life, stretching upward in a mirror-image of the gravity well. “An object at the peak of the gravity spike will experience
accelerated
time.”
    “In the case of
Intrepid,
two millennia . . .” La Forge nodded understandingly.
    “Exactly,” Brahms said. “And if we project a course between where she was lost, and later found, I’m willing to bet we’ll find a large gravity well at some point, probably closer to her original position than here. But that’s not the real mystery. This effect was discovered during the development of the slipstream drive. And it happened to
Intrepid
two hundred years earlier.”
    La Forge froze, his features settling into a granite mask. “There were no slipstream drive experiments in the twenty-second century.”
    Scotty grunted. “Not by any known Alpha Quadrant species. Nobody had technology at that level back then . . .” he said, pausing for emphasis, “that we know of.”
    “But there are a lot of people we don’t know . . .”
    “Ye’ve hit the nail on the head, Geordi. That’s what Starfleet is interested in, and that’s why they sent
Challenger.”
Scotty cleared his throat. “Where did
Intrepid
originally disappear?”
    “In the vicinity of star system G-231,” Qat’qa reported.
    “That’s a fair distance from here,” Hunt pointed out.
    “About four hundred light-years.” Leah tapped a point on the display, which obligingly wobbled and flashed. “I thought as much. On the other side of the black hole in the Bolus Reach. It’s only about six parsecs from G-231.”
    “It could never have drifted so far,” Hunt said, “evenin two thousand years. It would take millions of years for an object to drift even the tiniest fraction of that distance.”
    “I agree,” La Forge said. “But it didn’t. It would be nice to know how.”
    “And what about afterwards?” Nog asked. “Are you suggesting that
Intrepid
somehow negotiated its way through a black hole, and out the other side? That’s insane.”
    “The ship’s existence is insane,” Vol countered. “The gravitational stresses should have torn her apart.”
    “Perhaps Starfleet built them out of sterner stuff in those days,” Qat’qa said facetiously.
    “No, lass,” Scotty said, “they didn’t. The NX-class was ancient history when I was chief engineer on the
Enterprise,
but we still had all the blueprints on file.”
    “We still do, actually,” Leah reminded him.
    “Aye, but in those days we still read through the old files now and again. There were enough old ships still around, dating that far back, that we might run into.”
    “Not so much nowadays,” Barclay said.
    “Not with twenty-second century ships, but Starfleet was still using the old
Miranda
- and
Oberth
-class ships until a decade ago, and they were from my era. And the
Hood
is still in service, isn’t she?” Scotty asked.
    “Yes. And private owners can run ships of any age, if they can prove they’re spaceworthy,” Vol stated.
    Barclay nodded. “And the Klingons still use the
B’rel-
class Bird-of-Prey, and there are a few
K’t’ingas
left in service.”
    La Forge sat back, staring at the hologram. “The
Intrepid
couldn’t have flown through a black hole. It’s physically impossible to survive falling into the singularity . . .”
    “Unless it’s a rotating black hole,” Barclay suggested,“and they somehow managed to orbit the singularity and slingshot back out.”
    “Impossible,” Leah said flatly.
    “Similar things have happened,” La Forge said.
    “Aye, lad,” Scotty said with a grin, “the old
Enterprise
that I served on survived two slingshots round a black star, but that was only Warlock Station’s Type 3 singularity, not something with the gravitational power of a true black hole.”
    “But if their orbit was far