The Long Crawl: Part VI

Posted on 20 Jan 2026 @ 9:51pm by Lieutenant Commander Elias Harlan

3,199 words; about a 16 minute read

Elias was up early the next morning—freshly showered, uniform crisp, two cups of coffee already down before he left his quarters. The run-in with Jorik still lingered like a low-grade plasma leak, but he pushed it aside. Today wasn’t about old wounds. Today was about the test.

His stride had purpose as he walked the corridors. Junior officers and crew subconsciously parted for him—serious Lieutenant Commander, unknown face, quiet authority that didn’t need words. A couple of ensigns nodded as they stepped off the turbolift he entered; he turned, faced forward, and said simply, “Main Engineering.”

The Excelsior’s engine room wasn’t cavernous like a Sovereign’s, but it wasn’t cramped either. It was busy in the best way—efficient, purposeful. Engineers moved between panels with checklists, the warp core looming in the center like a blue-lit heartbeat, its controlled annihilation casting a steady glow across every surface. Magnetic constrictors hummed in perfect rhythm, radiation shielding doing its quiet miracle.

“Ah, Mister Harlan—good morning.” Captain Harrington greeted him from the forward pool table console, standing beside Lyra Voss. The Bajoran chief engineer gave Elias a quick, approving nod.

“Captain. Commander.” Elias took position beside them, eyes already scanning the readouts.

Harrington’s voice was calm, measured. “The goal is simple: a controlled sprint. Bring the engines to max power, open the plasma injectors, and see what the stress tolerances actually are. Nothing more, nothing less. Lyra’s been running simulations on some of your warp-field geometry ideas. She had a few of her own.”

“I haven’t seen concepts like this outside theoretical papers,” Lyra said, a small grin tugging at her lips. “I’ve been testing them in sims, and I think we can shore up the field stress with the main deflector.”

Elias blinked, glancing at the proposed warp-field overlay on the screen. It was one of his more outlandish Academy-era ideas—variable nacelle geometry with asymmetric modulation to reduce subspace drag. He’d sketched it for ships like Voyager, with her articulated nacelles. On an Excelsior? It shouldn’t have worked.

“The nacelle angles play a part,” Lyra continued, tapping the console to zoom in, “but the deflector can help coax the field into shape. Modulate it just enough to smooth the transition through subspace instead of brute-forcing it. If it works, we might even pull higher efficiency—less stress on the coils, fewer points lost to drag.”

Elias watched her overlay his original equations with her tweaks. The field shifted—subtler, more elegant. Less pushing against subspace, more flowing through it. He saw the numbers change: reduced subspace shear, lower thermal load on the injectors, and—possibly—a few extra tenths of a warp factor.

“I see it,” he said quietly. “It’s reshaping the geometry just enough to let the field slip through instead of fighting. We might get a couple points faster out of it without cooking the struts.”

“So we’re all agreed?” Harrington asked, looking between them. He wanted consensus—this test didn’t move without it.

“Yeah,” Elias said after a beat. “Looks good to me.”

“Agreed,” Lyra nodded.

“Very well.” Harrington tapped his combadge. “Harrington to bridge. Resume course, Warp 2. Transfer speed control to engineering.”

“Understood. Helm, resume course. Yellow Alert.” Rebecca’s voice came back crisp and calm over the channel. The lighting shifted to amber.

Nobody was taking chances.

“Holding at Warp 2,” Lyra called out as the ship settled into warp. “Bringing deflector modifications online.”
Elias tapped his console, manually entering the new field parameters so the coils could adapt. He watched the warp field begin to reshape—subtle at first, then clearer. The overlay showed the deflector pulsing in sync, smoothing the subspace transition.

“Flow rates at established norms for Warp 2,” he reported, “but actual speed is Warp 2.5.”

“2.5?” Lyra asked, eyebrows climbing. “That’s better than sims predicted. Increasing to Warp 6.”
She entered the command and executed.

“Speed climbing,” Elias said, eyes on the readouts. “Holding at Warp 6.7.”

“Increase to Emergency Flank. Maximum warp,” Harrington ordered.

Lyra tapped it in. The warp core’s drone deepened as reaction rates ramped up. The ship accelerated steadily—slowly at first, then faster.

Elias overlaid programmed speed against actual velocity. The new field was already outperforming the preset limits.
“Warp 8… 8.5… 8.8… passing Warp 9,” he called out, a trace of excitement creeping into his voice despite himself. “Flow rates still within tolerance.”

He pivoted to the wall panel behind him, pulling up the power transfer overview—conduits, injectors, relays—all green.
Glancing back at the main monitor, he blinked. Then double-checked.

“Just passed Warp 9.8,” he reported. “Expected velocity at this stage should be Warp 9.4. And…”

He stared at the numbers again as the ship settled into what it thought was its emergency ceiling of Warp 9.5.
Actual velocity: Warp 9.89.

The room went quiet except for the core’s steady thrum.

Elias looked up at Harrington and Lyra.

“We’re beating the class limit by almost four tenths,” he said, voice low but clear. “And the field is stable. Thermal load on the injectors is lower than expected. The deflector modulation is… working better than the sims showed.”

Lyra let out a low whistle. “That’s not just a couple points. That’s rewriting the envelope.”

Harrington’s eyes sparkled, but his tone stayed measured. “Hold steady at current velocity. Monitor all systems. Let’s see how long she’ll give us before we ask for more.”

Elias nodded, fingers already dancing across his console to lock in the field parameters.

The old Excelsior was singing a new song—one he hadn’t thought possible.

And for the first time in years, Elias Harlan felt like the starry-eyed cadet might still have something to say.

“So far so good,” Rebecca’s voice came over the open comm from the bridge, laced with that familiar smirk Elias could picture even without seeing her face. They’d held Warp 9.89 steady for five full minutes now, and nothing had gone catastrophically wrong. Thermal readings on the injectors and coils were behaving as if the ship were at its rated emergency maximum and simply idling there. Technically, with the refits, she could sustain this velocity for hours before needing to throttle back to a safer cruise.

“Voss,” Harrington said, eyes flicking across the readouts one last time, “I’m eager to see what happens if we open it up a little more.”

“Agreed,” Lyra replied. “Numbers are rock-solid. Let’s do it gently.” She glanced around the engine room, nodding to the key personnel already poised at their stations like they’d been waiting for this exact moment.

“Manually increasing injector output—five percent over the red line,” she announced.

Elias watched the changes cascade across his console in real time. Plasma flow spiked, field geometry shifted to compensate, and the core’s hum deepened by a subtle octave.

“Keep it incremental,” he said, voice low but firm. “Slow increases. If we start shearing, we’ll know exactly where the wall is.”
Lyra nodded and eased the injectors up. Everything held—for a while.

At 7% over red line, the ship began to tremble.

It wasn’t violent, just a low, persistent vibration that ran through the deck plating and up Elias’s spine. He eyed the readings.

“Deflector modulation is starting to drift,” he called out. “It’s brushing against something—sensors are reading clear space
ahead, but the field’s getting pushed back like it’s hitting a wall that isn’t there.”

“Reroute power from auxiliary fusion reactors to stabilize,” Lyra ordered instantly.

“Already on it,” Elias replied, fingers flying across his panel. “But it’s not responding like a normal eddy. Whatever this is, it’s matching our output—almost like it’s reacting to us.”

Lyra glanced at Harrington. “One more percentage point over red line, sir?”

Harrington stepped up beside Elias, eyes on the main overview screen. “Let’s see what we’re brushing up against. Full sensor sweep, all bands. And yes—take us to 8% over.”

Lyra executed. The tremble intensified, but structural integrity remained green across the board. The warp field, however, was another story.

“Deflector drift is worsening,” Elias reported. “Speed holding at Warp 9.97. Subspace resistance is climbing, but it’s not drag—it’s opposition. Like the field is being… countered.”

“Try a short resonance burst,” Harrington suggested, voice calm. “Increase to 10% over red line. If we punch through whatever subspace anomaly we’re generating—or encountering—it might stabilize the field.”

Lyra hesitated for half a second. “It’s also possible we’re the cause. I’m reading a slight feedback loop in the coils now—nothing critical yet, but since this has never been done before, we could be inducing the instability ourselves. Subspace shear is increasing in direct proportion to our output.”

“Understood,” Harrington said. His hands moved across the auxiliary controls. “Just a quick look through the looking glass, hmm? If it doesn’t work, we drop out of warp. Agreed?”

Elias met Lyra’s eyes. She looked as uncertain as he felt—this was well beyond theoretical now, into uncharted territory where equations met reality and usually lost. But the ship was holding. All critical systems green. No immediate red flags.


He gave a short nod. “Agreed.”

“Agreed,” Lyra echoed.

“On my mark,” Harrington said, thumb hovering over the execute control. “10% over red line. Resonance burst on the deflector. Ready… three… two… one… mark.”

He thumbed the control.

The warp core surged with a deeper, throatier drone. Injectors opened wider. The deflector dish fired its short, focused pulse.

Then it was pure pandemonium.

The ship lurched—hard. Not structural stress, not hull shear. Something else. The warp field snapped like a taut line suddenly cut, then recoiled. Alarms screamed from every console at once. The blue glow of the core flickered wildly, magnetic constrictors whining in protest. Gravity plates stuttered, sending a brief wave of disorientation through the deck.

The ship went to Red Alert.

“Field collapse imminent!” Lyra shouted over the noise.

“Compensating!” Elias yelled back, hands blurring across his panel to reroute power, stabilize the constrictors, dump excess plasma—anything to keep the core from breaching.

But the readings didn’t make sense.

The ship was still accelerating.

Warp 9.97… 9.98… 9.99…

And climbing.

The external sensors screamed impossible data: subspace ahead wasn’t empty. It was folding. Warping. A ripple effect spreading outward from the deflector burst, like a stone dropped in a pond—but the pond was subspace itself, and the ripple was pulling the ship toward its center.

“Captain!” Elias barked. “We’re not pushing through—we’re being pulled! The resonance burst interacted with the modulated field. It’s creating a localized subspace shear wave—and we’re surfing it!”

Harrington’s eyes widened for the first time. “Drop out of warp!”

“Trying!” Lyra snapped. “The field won’t disengage cleanly—the deflector modulation is locked in feedback with the coils!”

The ship shuddered again—harder this time. The core’s drone pitched into a high, keening whine. Gravity flickered once more.

Then the stars outside stretched, twisted, and snapped into something that wasn’t stars at all.

Elias stared at the sensor readings.

The warp field had torn open a hole. And they were falling through it.

“Field stresses are over tolerances!” Lyra barked, her voice cutting through the rising whine of the warp core as the deck plates vibrated under their feet.

Elias’s hands were already moving, fingers flying across his console. “I’m remodulating the deflector. If I can get it back in sync with the warp field, we might regain control. Whatever this is—whatever subspace layer we’re in—it’s completely incompatible with our current configuration.”

“Wait,” Lyra said, eyes widening as she slid in next to him. “If it’s incompatible, maybe we can make it collapse.”

“I don’t want to risk structural failure,” Elias countered, voice tight. “We’re already pushing every limit we’ve got.”

“Invert the deflector,” Lyra shot back. “I’ll close the matter and antimatter injectors manually. The inversion should bleed off the field gently before the coils run dry on plasma. We drop out clean instead of tearing ourselves apart.”

Captain Harrington didn’t hesitate. He tapped his combadge. “Bridge—full power to inertial dampers. Transfer everything we have to structural integrity field—even life support if you have to. All hands, brace. This is going to be rough.”

“Ready,” Lyra said, hand hovering over her board, eyes locked on Elias.

“Do it!” Harrington ordered.

“Inverting the deflector,” Elias said, entering the sequence and hitting execute. The console lit up with warning indicators, but the field inversion command locked in.

“Manually closing the injectors,” Lyra replied, overriding safety interlocks with a series of rapid inputs. The warp core’s deep drone began to wind down, the plasma flow throttled to a trickle.

Several things happened in rapid succession.

The reduced fuel starved the reaction chamber; the core’s output plummeted toward idle. The inverted deflector pulse rippled outward, clashing with the already unstable warp field. Subspace shear screamed across the sensors as the field began to destabilize—not violently, but inexorably. The blue glow in the engine room flickered, constrictors whining in protest as magnetic fields fought to hold the reaction in place.

Then—pop.

A single, sharp acoustic shock rolled through the hull, like a distant thunderclap inside the ship. The warp field collapsed in a controlled cascade, folding back into normal space with a shudder that rattled teeth and loosened a few unsecured tools. Gravity plates stuttered once, then steadied. The core’s whine dropped to its familiar low hum.

The ship dropped out of warp.

Silence—real silence—settled over main engineering for the first time in hours. Consoles blinked back to green one by one. Inertial dampers eased off. The red alert lighting faded back to standard illumination.

Elias exhaled, long and slow, hands still braced on the console. He stared at the readouts: Warp 0.0. Impulse only. Position… somewhere.

Lyra let out a shaky breath, then a short laugh that was half relief, half disbelief. “We’re… out. Field collapsed clean. No breaches, no overloads. Structural integrity at 98%. We’re intact.”

Harrington straightened, glancing between them. His voice was calm, but the adrenaline was still there in the slight widening of his eyes. “Status report.”

“All systems nominal,” Elias said, scanning the board again to be sure. “Core at idle, injectors closed, deflector back to standard configuration. We’re in normal space. No residual subspace anomalies on short-range scan.” He paused, then added quietly, “Whatever that was… it’s gone.”

Lyra leaned on the pool table, wiping sweat from her brow. “We punched through—or it punched us through. I’m not sure which. But the deflector inversion worked. It bled the field off before we tore ourselves apart.”

Harrington gave a small, satisfied nod. “Well done, both of you. Bridge—confirm our position and status. And stand down from red alert.”

Rebecca’s voice came back over the comm, tight but steady. “Confirmed, Captain. We’re… not where we should be. Astrometrics is running a fix. Stand by.”

Elias looked at Harrington, then Lyra. The excitement from earlier had burned away, replaced by the cold clarity that comes after you’ve just danced on the edge of disaster.

“Sir,” he said quietly, “whatever we just did… we didn’t just break the envelope. We might have torn a new one.”

Harrington met his eyes, the merry glint tempered now by sober respect.

“Then let’s find out where it led us, Commander.”

“Captain, you aren’t going to believe this,” Rebecca’s voice came over the comm, steady but edged with disbelief. “We’ve confirmed our coordinates. We’re just outside the Lathira system. We’ve set course for Lathira IV at full impulse—we’ll be in orbit in a few minutes.”

The engine room went still. Every head turned toward the comm panel. Elias blinked. Lyra froze mid-tap on her console. Harrington’s eyebrows climbed slowly.

“Understood, Commander,” Harrington replied, a grin spreading across his face despite the calm tone. “I’ll be up shortly. I need everyone on the sensor logs—let’s understand exactly what we just did, and more importantly, if we can do it again. Harrington out.”

He turned to Elias, eyes bright with something close to triumph.

“Well,” Harrington said slowly, “I think you may have solved a question that’s been lingering since the original transwarp experiments of the 2280s, Commander Harlan.”

“That’s impossible,” Elias said immediately, voice flat.

“Yet here we are,” Harrington replied, the grin refusing to fade.

Lyra looked up from her own console, voice soft but stunned. “The ship’s official registered top speed was Warp 9.991—which is technically impossible with current technology. But here we are.”

She scrolled through the logs again, as if double-checking would change the numbers. “We’re going to analyze the data and start compiling reports. It’s going to take a while, but don’t be surprised if you get a call from one of the think tanks later on.”
Elias shook his head, words failing him for once. He’d spent years chasing shadows of what-ifs, buried under cynicism and transfer orders. Now the what-if had just happened—on an old Excelsior, with a deflector tweak and a resonance burst and equations he’d scribbled as a cadet.

Harrington clapped him on the shoulder—firm, reassuring. “Well done, everybody. I’m arranging a small respite here at Lathira IV before we continue on. We’ll take a couple of days—give everyone some time off, let the warp core cool. Voss, make sure you take at least eight hours during what I’m sure will be a very detailed diagnostic of the propulsion system.”

“Aye, sir,” Lyra said, still staring at her screen like it might change its mind.

“Mister Harlan,” Harrington continued, turning to him, “I believe you have some packing to do. Well done, Commander. Let the bridge know when you’re ready to depart.”

“I will, sir,” Elias replied, voice quiet but steady.

The walk back to his quarters felt strange. The corridors were the same—same bulkheads, same lighting, same faint hum—but everything else had shifted. They’d done something this morning. He’d been part of it. The ship was intact. No one was hurt. And a major breakthrough—unplanned, untested, impossible—had just happened.

Something he’d drawn up years ago, pure fantasy from when he was young and the galaxy still felt conquerable, had done something remarkable.

He didn’t have time to brood on it. He had duties. His official ship still waited—new command crew, new beginning, new engines to tame. All with a faint, unfamiliar spark of hope flickering under the weariness, courtesy of the events of this morning.

Perhaps that starry-eyed young officer wasn’t completely gone after all.

He stepped into his quarters, the door hissing shut behind him. For the first time in years, the weight on his shoulders felt… lighter.

He picked up his duffel and started packing.

 

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