Intervention

Chief Engineer’s Personal Log
Stardate 982.2

The intervention was successful, at least as far as we can tell. Brissid is mostly undamaged, Starbase 21 was unaffected, Duboz was unaffected. Communication into the nebula is unsurprisingly rather difficult. Neither Thuln nor Silik can be contacted. That may be due to the interference, or there may have been some effects from the wave. The former would be, by far, the preferable situation.

The last three days have been a blur. Fine-tuning the layout for each site based on local geography and conditions, getting just the right amount of dilithium to the surface, checking the placement and adjusting the calculations for the next site based on all of the previous sites. We’ve logged more shuttle hours in three days than in the last three months.

All through this vivid energy flares were dancing around the planet in a near-continuous display of colour and light. I’ve seen aurora on Vulcan, on Earth and on other worlds, they pale in comparison to the display over Brissid. I haven’t checked the sensor data, but I suspect the energy in each of those flares would dwarf the entire output of their star for a day, if not far longer.

The Yonggi came when it was all over, apparently just to tell us that the danger was past, using the same ocean metaphor as they did previously. They clearly knew more than we did about the situation, why then did they not intervene? Unable? Unwilling to involve themselves? Were they testing us in some way?

Their communication was easier to bear this time. Did they learn the form of our minds from the previous ‘conversion’, making this one easier, and if so, is future communication likely?

Standing at the precipice

Chief Engineer’s Personal Log
Stardate 979.8

We’ll be at Brissid tomorrow. I’ve redone the calculations several times. I keep looking for the one combination of inputs and variables that will have everything come out well. But there are too many unknowns involved, too many assumptions, too many chaotic aspects, too many opportunities for everything to go wrong. We’re pinning all our efforts on a foundation of assumptions and guesswork, and the consequences of failure could be terrible. The consequences of doing nothing could be worse.

What if we’re wrong?

Even if we’re right, the precision demanded is extreme, in some cases to mere meters. Which doesn’t sound too bad, except that it’s meters of precision while working on the scale of entire continents. At the extreme end of possible consequences, millions of lives could depend on getting every single aspect perfect.

Are we up to this?

 

 

 

Meeting the Yonggi

Chief Engineer’s Personal Log
Stardate 963.1

I believe the humans have a saying, ‘Be careful what you wish for, you may get it’.

We have been wishing for a way to communicate with the Yonggi for some time now. Now we have at least some idea how, although I’m not certain I can define today’s events as ‘communicating’, that word implies two way discussion. What we got were instructions and, I suspect, the telepathic equivalent of a recorded message.

They’re telepathic. I suspected something like that since I read one of the dinosaurs in the mountains on Silik. That impression of something cold and distant, watching. Then the discovery of the Yonggi ship hidden in the area. I wonder if they’re some form of hive mind as well. The way the dinosaurs acted in perfect unison, the way the three Yonggi acted in perfect unison, the similarities of all their ships.

I thought at the time that the headache from exposure to the Zenian’s psychic gas was the worst a headache could get, but it paled in comparison to what the start of the Yonggi’s message was like. Their message was incredibly strong. Even hours later I was getting flashes of cold, of underwater sounds, of being underwater. It may well be that they set the message at a high ‘volume’, not knowing who the recipient would be or how sensitive they might be.

Was the circuitry in the box solely to store the message, or could there have been another component to it, one reading and measuring the recipient? And does this mean that further conversations with the Yonggi may be possible, or was this a once-off event?