New Power

[Nick Ryder]

Nick sat on the edge of his workbench, a cold beer in one hand and a small device in the other. A loupe was attached to work his glasses as he examined the device in between sips of his beer, every so often placing the cold bottle on a floating hard light holographic 'shelf', adjusting something on the device and then examining it, beer in hand.

"So you going to drink that or just hold it until it gets hot like some shitty Brit beer?" Victor said as he walked into Nick and Alice's lab.

"I'm almost done with both." Nick said and took a sip of his beer and smiled. "This is going to change a lot of things. Ten thousand of these are going to power this planet for the next decade before they even need a recharge. We won't need to strip mine the planet to keep it powered. We won't need to mine asteroids to keep the lights on and the factories and other industry moving. Entirely sustainable and rechargeable. A version of this already powers the Compound, has for a while now, but I've never quite figured out how to get it to be deployable on a large scale. Then I was captured, turned into a human battery and it hit me."

"You just unlocked the mystery of clean, cheap unlimited power." V'Pier said as he looked at the device. "It's so small."

"This is enough to run a small community. Hooked into a proper power system, it'll scale up and can run a city. A starship can be run on this for years. We can lose a ship like Voyager with just this core and they'll have enough power to get back to the Alpha Quadrant and still have the juice to do a tour around the Core worlds." Nick said as he placed it in a box. "I wanted to launch this last year but I feared it would make it seem like an 'election year promise' although even last year I didn't quite get it this small. Essentially it's powered by the same chemicals that run through my body producing fire. Except it's self sustaining, any heat source will power it, even it's own use will power it. We could actually use this to go to the nearest galaxy and still have fuel for a survey trip before it needs to be swapped out."

"Impressive, but you do realize if our enemies got a hold of this technology it could change the balance of power." V'Pier warned him.

"Oh I know, the beauty of it is, only this system works in our ships and our power systems, since I designed it that way. You try to graft it into old Starfleet, Narlin, Romulan, Klingon, even Dominion tech, it won't work, it'll actually fry the systems before it has a chance to even power up." Nick said as he gestured to a wall panel. "Like you always taught me, proprietary technology is sometimes the best security."

"So... when do you launch?" V'Pier inquired. "We may need this tech... Gorvan attacked an Imperium ship and destroyed it. We're trying to hunt them down, be helpful if we could have one of our stealth ships ready to go with this."

"Cross has one of my long range, long term mission ships, it just looks like a standard Defiant, but it's got this new system as well as a traditional, also figured out how to fire while under cloak and still scatter the exhaust." Nick winked at him. "Be a shame to waste years of hard work."

"What if the Dominion IS behind all this... I can't do another virus like last time." V'Pier said as he ran a hand through his grey hair. "We need to stop them or find a way to get them to return to the Gamma Quadrant without incident."

"Enemy of our enemy is our frenemy... not 'my' government anymore, don't have a ton of say anymore, but there are parties that we should be reaching out to, that have a lot to lose if the Dominion starts another war." Nick said and crossed his arms. "While we were fighting the Imperium wars, we still ran across wreckage and damage left over from the Dominion War, my children were just infants at the time, it's been that long and the scars remain" he smiled and made the device box float. "Plus... we have allies we did not have before... like the Jase."

[Rebecca Talon]

"I believe the power cell for my kliden is a primitive ancestor of this," Rebecca added.

She was sitting on a stool off to the side, a bag of potato chips in her hand. She removed a chip and bit into it, an expression of ecstasy on her face. "Do you know how long I've been craving these? No junk food whatsoever on Monastery. Healthy mind and body garbage. You know that proprietary technology is only good until they figure out how to reverse engineer it. If I was an enemy I'd figure out how to capture a ship, and bam we got it too."

[Nick Ryder]

"That's why all our ships have an AI of some kind." Nick said as he held up a MIKI ball. "Unauthorized user takes control, the first thing the AI does is slag the 'good' tech."

"I remember when it was just BECKI as your personal AI." V'Pier mused "You name it after her?" he gestured to Becca.

"Actually no... but I did make her a strawberry blonde because of Becca." Nick said with a smirk as he watched her practically orgasm because of the potato chips. "I've been building in safeguards into our new tech, as has AlphaTek. Imperium took over, Tony sent in a custom virus, basically killed anything AlphaTek they were using, had to revert to using old tech just to function."

[Rebecca Talon]

"I was there. Well, on Earth Spacedock when it happened. I enjoyed that thoroughly seeing them racist pricks panic. And, well that was my cue to officially defect."

[Natalia Ryder-Singh]

"Oh it was an impressive sight... you should have seen the feeds from the Mars facility when it basically crumbled." Natalia said as she walked in and handed Becca a small container of ice cream. "You need to eat this so I don't... " she patted her ever growing belly. "Little girl is always hungry which means I'm always hungry and I'm eating way too much junk food. I'm going to look like my mother before too long."

"Oh you look fine... trust me, it'll come off. Look at mom after she had Tasha." Nick reminded her.

"She was still super curvy... Becca... you need to get me on the same regimen you did after you had Ethan." Natalia said with a wink and hugged her. "I missed you too y'know. I did set up a scholarship in your name. The first recipient is a girl that was designing starships since she was like 5 years old making them out of clay and dried pasta and beans. She starts at the Academy next term."

[Rebecca Talon]

"I shouldn't be eating this either," but she obligingly went to work of the semi-frozen cream. "For the record I..." She swallowed, "I wasn't designing ships at five. I started doing that at the Academy when I saw how flawed the current fleet was. They were trying to put on the pretense of a scientific fleet, but at times of war pressing them into warships. It doesn't work that way. What's the old saying? 'Jack of all trades, master of none'? That was Starfleet. A few officers like Benjamin Sisko knew that, and got the Defiant class produced, which I consulted with him on. I wasn't in Starfleet at the time, but I'd served with him on the Saratoga."

[Natalia Ryder-Singh]

"Multi-purpose is fine for some things, but Starfleet got stagnant." Natalia agreed. "I didn't make it too well known but I did agree with some of the Imperium's thoughts on the matter. The Federation turned everything into grey, boring boxes. Any time anyone made anything even slightly different, they found some excuse why they couldn't use it or it was one of those 'well, we can experiment with it on one of our ships...' like holographic communication. It's been around since we've been able to make hard light holograms in the 23rd, but during the Dominion War it was still considered 'experimental' a century went by and it's still 'well, we'll test it out...' Tony and Nick tried to get me into their company for years, but I resisted because every time I'd present something it took years if ever for it to be even considered. And this is for purely civilian purposes too. So I went on a Science network and became a pretty face blowing things up in the name of science and making stuff out of scrap. 'Natalia the Science Chick' at least got stuff done. I consider myself a scientist first, an educator second and a business woman third. Although that episode you and I did together was a lot of fun, testing how anti-grav plating works. Most fun those Marines on your flight deck probably had while in uniform. Bouncing fighter jets around and trying to pick us up and failing miserably."

[Rebecca Talon]

She smiled with a shrug, "All too true."

[Nick Ryder]

"Well since I'm not spending most of my day keeping this planet spinning, I can spend more of it doing what I do best. Creating." Nick said with a smile as he walked over to what looked like a warp core in the center of the lab and inserted the power cell he was working on. His fingers dancing across the display panel and then a set of lights lit up around the room. "Ladies and gentlemen... Capitol City is now powered from this room. I just sent the word to the power company to shunt power to the Compound. Relay stations set up in the existing power substations will store the excess. Every resident and business will get a credit. All houses and apartments now include free power."

[Rebecca Talon]

Rebecca clapped, and went to him. She kissed him on the cheek, "Congratulations Thomas Edison, well no this is more like Nikola Tesla in innovation."