Piggy Back Ride

The *Firefly* was currently in grey mode as Harper put it with all but the essential systems still running. They were adrift close to the Gamma quadrant end of the Bajorian wormhole and awaiting a vessel.

The vessel they were waiting for was a large transport, most likely an ore mining vessel who’s course would bring them close to the *Firefly*. They had been tracking it for about four hours using passive sensors. They’d also been watching the patrol vessels which constantly monitored traffic passing through the wormhole.

“The transport is coming into range.” Trance announced.

“OK Dylan, take us in nice and slow.” Jack ordered. “Harper, let’s get our cloak running.”

“Switching all primary systems over to emergency power.” Harper reported. “Diverting all warp power to the cloaking device…..cloak online.”

On the viewscreen the crew saw the transport loom ever closer, as Dylan used the reaction control thrusters to gentle push the *Firefly* towards it. Ten minutes passed before the crew finally saw the transport stop moving, they had managed to fly into the shadow of the transport and establish a parallel course.

“The patrol is approaching the transport.” Trance announced, watching the passive sensors readings. “Level two sensor sweep underway.”

There was no way of knowing if the sensor sweep would pick up the now cloaked *Firefly* or not. Everyone just hoped that the bulk of the transport would hide them. But the crew gave a sigh of relief when Trance announced that the transport had been cleared to proceed through the wormhole.

An hour later, they were back in the Alpha quadrant and slowly moving away from Deep Space Nine at half impulse. The cloak was operating well, although Harper was constantly having to make adjustments. The plan was to attempt to reach one of the outer moons of Bajor, where they’d de-cloak undetected and then progress onwards back to Serenity, but things were not going as planned.

“Boss, we have a problem.” Harper announced. “There’s an instability in the power couplings between the warp core and the cloak.”

“Can you fix it ?” Stryker enquired.

“No, we’ll lose the cloak in about five minutes.” Harper reported.

“Dylan maximum impulse.” Jack ordered. “Get us as close to that moon as you can. Harper, how long until we can jump to warp ?”

“Depends on how much damage the overload does.” Harper replied. “Could be a couple of hours, could be a week.”

The *Firefly* was pushed to the limits as its impulse engines were pushed, sending it into the shadow of the moon just in time. Everything went black for a moment, the ship was dead. Then as if someone had breathed new life into the ship, the lights and then the sounds of a functioning ship re-emerged.

“I’ll be in Engineering.” Harper stated, heading quickly off the Command deck.

Five minutes later, Harper relayed the bad news to Captain Stryker.

[The warp core has been damaged.] He announced. [I can make repairs, enough to get us on the road back to Serenity, but some of the power relays had been destroyed. We won’t be using the cloak for a while, I’m going to have to replace most of the power couplings.]

“Dylan set a course away from here, maximum speed.” Jack ordered.

[We’re going to have to make some major repairs once we’re back on Serenity.] Harper added. [Good job we’ve got all these spare parts.]