TELLOK

Ah, the mission to the Badlands.

The day we left Deep Space Nine started the same as any other. With me turning up the environmental controls in Engineering. Why do you humans like it so cold?

We’ll get along just fine.

Unfortunately for me, and the Lakota. That was about the last bit of routine I got for the rest of that day. Every time we had gone back to Earth in the past few months the Lakota had been getting piecemeal upgrades. I kept telling the crews at the San Francisco yards and the Captain that at some point, something was going to break if we kept trying to bring the ship up to date on the fly. But did they listen? Of course not. They just thought I was being argumentative for the sake of it.

You humans are a fan of your biases. Just because most Tellarites like to argue, does not mean that the reason for every argument is invented.

I had been pushing for us to have a few weeks minimum, but ideally a few months in spacedock for the full range of upgrades to be installed for well over a year when things finally did go wrong. It all started with Velik, the helmsman, reporting an anomaly in the warp field when he tried to push the engines higher than warp 8. I told him to stop trying, but the Captain was in a hurry to get us to the Badlands at the request of a visiting Admiral. The phrase ‘there’s not a second to waste’ kept being thrown around, as though I was telling them to ease off the engines for my own health rather than the good of the ship.

As so often is the case, the push to go faster ended up making us go much, much slower. The Captain and his Admiral friend made it to Engineering just in time to see my ingenious solutions that were keeping the ship in high warp fall apart like a soggy blood truffle biscuit under the weight of too much sour gravy.

As a console sparked to the right of me, another console pinged to my left telling me that my diagnostic was complete. At long last. At least I could give the now grumpy looking Captain an accurate diagnosis of what was causing the issue. It turned out that the warp coils in the starboard nacelle hadn’t been locked down properly when the odd numbers were being replaced while we were in the Sol system. They had been steadily falling further out of alignment since we left, but the computer had just been ramping up warp power to compensate. The process was so gradual that none of the automatic warnings had kicked in to alert anybody.

Still, I should have checked their work before I let the Captain take us into warp. There were many mistakes that day, but that one was definitely mine.

Because this had been going on for weeks, the nacelle had stress fractures all along the housing. I told the Captain that I could patch the problem by reconfiguring the warp drive to only use the starboard nacelle to balance the field, rather than the standard configuration. Where both port and starboard would generate the field equally. It would give us Warp 5 to limp home, with the possibility of warp 6.

A travesty for a ship like the Lakota. Once she was the pride of Starfleet. At that point even Starfleets first Enterprise may have been able to outrun her!

All due to a careless, avoidable mistake on my part.