Daedalus (Mass Market Paperback)

But on the eve of her maiden voyage, a maintenance engineer, Ensign Charles Tucker III -- "Trip" to his friends -- discovers a flaw in Daedalus's design. When he confronts Brodesser, the scientist -- as charismatic as he is brilliant -- eases Trip's concerns. The ship launches on schedule, and as Trip watches in horror, it explodes in a catastrophic ion cascade reaction, killing all aboard.

Thirteen years pass. Still haunted by memories of that disaster, Trip now serves as chief engineer aboard Enterprise. When a freak explosion cripples his vessel, leaving her helpless before a surprise attack, Trip is forced to abandon his ship -- and his shipmates. As he is on the verge of mounting a desperate rescue attempt, however, a shocking turn of events forces him to confront the ghosts of Daedalus one final time.

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Chapter One

"Commander?"

Trip looked up from the intermix chamber, where he'd been monitoring the composition of the matter-antimatter stream. Engineer Second Class K. P. Ryan -- tall, lanky, usually quiet to the point of reclusive -- stood on the access ladder below him.

"Ryan. What's up?"

"You have a moment? It's about the cell-ship."

Trip -- Commander Charles Tucker III, chief engineer aboard the Starship Enterprise -- frowned. He had a systems status meeting with the captain in a few minutes, and he was already running behind schedule.

But the cell-ship...

Analyzing the captured Suliban vessel had been a priority for Trip over the last several months. First on his own, then with key members of his department -- including Ryan -- Trip had turned the cell-ship virtually inside out, trying to plumb the secrets of the Suliban's superior technology.

"What about the cell-ship?" Trip asked.

"Their warp drive. The propulsion system." Ryan's eyes gleamed with excitement. He looked more animated than Trip had ever seen him. "I think I've figured it out."

"You're kidding."

"No, sir." Now Ryan actually smiled. "I'm not."

"Sonuvagun." Trip set down his diagnostic spanner on top of the intermix chamber. "Come on. Show me."

Ryan led him out of engineering and down to Launch Bay Two. The cell-ship sat in the far corner -- looking like nothing so much as a multisided dice cube precariously balanced on one edge, perhaps a third as big as one of Enterprise's shuttlepods. Its forward hatch was open, and portions of the hull had been removed, exposing layers of exotic-looking circuitry. Cables of varying thickness and color -- most of them supplying power, but some more diagnostic in nature -- ran from various nodes in the circuitry to a diagnostic station nearby. One of those nodes was the warp-drive module -- a rectangular box roughly the size and shape of an old orange crate -- which had been pulled out from the instrument panel and now lay on top of the cockpit console.

Trip hadn't gotten very far in analyzing that module -- but one thing was clear. Unlike Enterprise, which used a series of controlled matter/antimatter explosions to achieve warp velocity, the Suliban drive depended on an exotic series of reactions between charged particle streams -- the exact composition of which had defied decipherment.

At least until now.

"We've been doing a black-box analysis on the module the last few days," Ryan said. "Feeding different particle streams in, measuring the energy that comes out."

"Yeah," Trip said impatiently. He knew that -- he was the one who'd started the bla