Hole-In-One

[All decks. Red Alert]

The sound of that command over the intra-ship and the klaxons woke Lieutenant Barker from his light sleep. It had been a long couple of days, but it had been worth it. He'd been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant Junior Grade and made Chief Science officer. The promotion was good, the new position wasn't such a thrill, have come about by the death of another Starfleet officer. Walking into 'dead-mans shoes' was something that most officers dreaded.

The last few hours since the conference he'd spend with the new intelligence officer Lieutenant T'Kul, going over the latest intelligence on the Borg. There had been very little new information over the past few years about Borg vessels, their defensive and offensive weapon systems, and weaknesses. The only weakness known was the one Captain Picard had used to destroy the Borg cube that was approaching Earth. Whether he Borg had adapted their vessels to overcome that weakness was not known.

However, there was a great deal of information about the Borg drones themselves. Most of this information had come from examining the Borg technology that was onboard the *Enterprise-E* when it had returned from the past.

The rest had come from Annika Hansen or 'Seven' as most people referred to her. These included penetrating the personal shields of Borg drones by using random phaser variations. Borg cubes and spheres used totally different shielding systems, so that technique won't work on them.

Between us, we decided that attacking the Borg vessel directly would have little effect, even with the Leviathan's powerful weapons. Our best strategy would be to attack the Borg drones inside.

If we could detect the subspace frequency that the drones were using to communicate with each other, we could use a wide spread particle beam modulated to the same frequency. I hope that this will cause the shields to resonate at the same frequency and confuse the drones. Then we could hit the vessel with all we have whilst they are trying to hear each other. Once that had been decided, Chu had been working on the refractive shielding systems. We will need every advantage that we can get, maybe a technology that had it's origins in Earth's 20th century would be something that the Borg would take a little time to overcome.

Getting up, he grabbed his uniform and headed for the Bridge.

Location: Bridge

Chu shared the turbolift with Kirk Ambrose, who was also reacting to red alert.

By the time they had reached the Bridge, the red alert had been canceled and then the ship had been put back onto yellow alert.

The Bridge crew consisted of the Lieutenant Shaka, and three Ensigns The female Ensign Jaq Lloyd was at the one remaining Science station on the Bridge, but the two at the Helm and Ops. Chu didn't know the names of. From to open door to the Ready room, Chu saw the Captain and Lieutenants Harris and T'Kul (Or Rashad as she'd asked to be addressed as).

Kirk took over from the Ensign at the Helm and Chu took over the Science station from Ensign Lloyd.

"Lieutenant Shaka prepare the SS drive for warp 21. Helm set your course for the Neutral Zone maximum warp. What is the estimated time of arrival?" Devore said.

[1 hour 15 minutes, Sir.]

Devore and Lieutenant Harris walked out of the ready room. Devore stood and looked over the crew, four members at different positions, noticing the replacements at Science I and the Helm. Lieutenant Shaka was already entering some information into the slip stream computer.

"Mr. Ambrose. Enter the stream! Grant. May God help us."

"God help us all Captain." Harris said to Devore.

Noticing Lieutenant Barker on the Bridge, Captain Devore requested his presence in the ready room. "Mr. Harris, you have command."

Walking back into the Ready room, Lieutenant Barker followed his Captain and after Devore had sat, so did Chu.

"Lieutenant, I've heard about the plans that you've helped to draw up wit Lieutenant Rashad and to be honest, I don't like the idea. I very much doubt whether it will work at all. However, that's not what I wanted to talk to you about, what's the status of the refractive shields." The Captain inquired.

*Lieutenant, I still can't get used to being called that.*

"Captain, the refractive shielding is operational and so long as we keep to full impulse and only use passive sensors, I think we can enter the Tares system undetected." Chu reported. "Captain, there is one thing that you've not mentioned or asked."

"And what is that Lieutenant ?" Devore asked.

"If there is a wormhole, natural or artificial what do you intend to do about it."

"That is a good question Lieutenant. We have been concentrating on fighting the Borg threat that the wormhole itself seems to have been overlooked. The most obvious answer would be to close it. However, the crew of the Voyager introduced Starfleet to many cultures in their journey home. A wormhole to the Delta quadrant could be of some value. I guess I have a difficult decision to make at some point over the next few days."

"If we're going to even consider closing the wormhole then we need to make modifications to the main deflector dish now. If the wormhole is similar to the Bajoran one, then we should be able to close it by sending out phase conjugate graviton beams at the terminus. But we'll need to reconfigure the graviton emitters to produce these beams and install additional EPS conduits to the dish."

"Good, I'll get Engineering to start on all that. Dismissed".