The crowds on in both of the ships’ officers lounges crew quiet with excited anticipation as they watched the shuttle launch and head to its destination exactly halfway between the two ships. Before seven minutes were out, the imager had to switch to long-range view as it the distance chosen was determined to be a minimum of safe distance for an unknown factor of reactivity the substances might have to each other or to the tests about to be performed.
When the shuttle made a full stop, their feed then switched to the internal monitors of the shuttle, while each bridge crew still monitored the shuttle on long-range viewer for any sign of trouble.
On queue, the robotic arm the Chief designed unsealed the lid of the storage container for the orb and lifted the orb out and onto a lighted tabletop in the middle of the shuttle. Its sophisticated set of omni-drive servos manipulated the orb and sample with finer dexterity than a human hand. Ezri smiled and looked over at the Chief, who was grinning as if he’d won the Starfleet Engineering Achievement of the Year Award. The first experiment began when a tiny optical drill shot a fine beam of particles, barely visible to the naked eye, at the orb’s equator for a period of 3.8 seconds at a pulse range 0.31 microns. The data indicated a very low coherence wave pattern forming on the surface. As each setting increased to the next level, still no dent or disruption of any kind was noticeable to the naked eye. The raw data indicated that the coherence pattern was growing exponentially with each new setting, but only at the upper limits of the energy output, within expectations, but still as astonishing to witness as when they first made the preliminary calculations together late the previous night. Ezri yawned at the thought of remembering how little sleep she had gotten.
It was only at the last two highest settings that a slight coherence pattern appeared on the orb’s surface. “Would you look at that…” Miles commented distantly.
“Care to fill the rest of us in on exactly what we’re seeing, Mr. O’Brien?” Captain Hernandez asked.
“Well… it’s nothing short of astonishing. I refitted the optical drill with duranium capacitors to be able to handle a thermal load of up to 5.2 gigajoules… we’ve just hit that ceiling.”
Many of the room’s inhabitants looked quite shocked. A few who did not quietly whispered to their neighbors to clarify and soon were counted amongst that statistic. ”And it only produced that?” Hernandez replied. ”Impressive!”
The next two subset experiments tested the sphere’s reactivity to intense pressure and gravimetric energy. The former yielded similar low-effect results, but the latter was a lot more interesting. As predicted, the orb was much more sensitive to gravimetric flux. But to be as careful as possible, Miles and Ezri had set up a gravimetric microprobe to measure the graviton capacity of the sphere and then conducted a series of brief graviton bursts over the orb’s surface. It began to show lit cracks along the surface and light up like a firecracker before Miles made a frenzied cutting motion with his hands at the same time Ezri began to enter the command to shut down the controls. The room heaved a collective sigh of relief.
Out of the corner of eye Ezri saw Erika raise a brow. ”I don’t know what you two get away with in your century, but please try not to blow up any of my shuttles.” Erika commented dryly.
“They get away with quite a lot, actually.” Julian chimed in with a teasing grin, earning a defensive look from both Miles and Ezri.
Finally, the last experiment was the one that everyone had been anticipating the most. The two doctors took over the show from this point on as it was their brain child. Miles took over the controls from Ezri and followed the directions given by Drs. Crusher and Bashir.
