Iskander al-Kwaritzmi looked at the bolt, turned it, and looked at it from the other side. Then he turned it again upside. Then he rotated it slowly.

He became keenly aware that Ensign Diran Koli was standing next to him, looking exactingly.

“Have you discovered something, Lieutenant?” asked Diran Koli.

“Yes. It is –” Iskander took a long breath, “broken.”

Diran made a frustrated noise. “I know it is broken! But –”

Iskander cut them off. He knew that the Betazoid, every now and then, could pout.

“This is what happens when your gravitic calliper is set on 430 and not 372 nanometers. I have to tell you, Ensign, that this isn’t the first time that I correct you.”

Diran made a somewhat frustrated expression.

“I – don’t get it, Lieutenant. It shouldn’t make any difference. The manual – ”

“ – is wrong. I, Iskander al-Kwaritzmi, tell you that the official Starfleet EPS manual is wrong. At least on board of the Redding – which is normal, since we use a modified EPS grid. But every Starship modifies their EPS grid. Listen, when our turn ends, we’ll go over it together. We’ll mount a bolt following the manual, and another following my way, and we’ll blast them with plasma. Agreed?”

Diran sighed, but before they could answer, the intercom spoke.

“This is Commande Vistia Xi. All crew brace for – eh – ”

The communication stopped.

“Brace for what?” tapped Lieutenant JG Z’Xak on their thorax with their vestigial arms. They had been silently tapping at the Warp Core control panel with their many spidery limbs.

The intercom spoke again.

“All crew brace for turbulence, it is our best guess.”

“We guess?” repeated Diran Koli. “The Commander had to get a second opinion on that? And I hope that it is not Klingons again. Repairing the hull is such a chore!”

Iskander sighed. Diran was being very pouty.

“Just hold unto something, Diran” mumbled the human, while grabbing a railing with both hands.

Diran was so dedicated to pouting that, when the ship shook a couple of seconds later, they were the only person to fall on their bum in Main Engineering.

The ship shook again, and again. Iskander could swear that for a couple of seconds the artificial gravity didn’t work.

Yellow alert. The lights dimmed. The ship shook again.

Commander Mir Durbus, excellent engineer and jovial Bolian that she was, didn’t wait.

“Well, don’t stand there waiting for the bridge to inform you!” she said. “Keep holding onto something, and give me a report. Trinni, have we sustained damage to the hull or to the main systems?”

“Negative, Commander.”

“Oh, it can’t be that bad.”

Lieutenant Z’Xak however started tapping on their thorax.

“I see misaligned chronometers of the nacelle,” they tapped. “I measure time differentials in the order of the picosecond per second.”

Now, this was concerning.

Iskander turned to face the big spider. “But – the warp field can’t be maintained if the warp manifolds in the nacelle aren’t perfectly synchronized.”

Z’Xak had no facial expressions that could be parsed by a human – Iskander wasn’t even sure that their species thought in terms of having a face – but the movement of their limbs seemed to suggest worry.

“I predict a collapse of the warp field within thirty seconds”, they tapped.

“Can you compensate before it happens?” asked Diran Koli.

The spider took more than a second to think.

“No” they tapped.

This was bad, thought Iskander. The Ukarimi was basically a genius of warp theory. They had on their own invented warp travel on their home planet; they had excelled at Starfleet Academy; they took care of the Redding‘s warp core as if it was their child. They never undersold themselves, and in Iskander’s experience they had never misdiagnosed. If they said “no”, then the warp field would collapse.

Commander Mir Durbus took the statement in stride and tapped her communicator.

“Mir Durbus to the bridge. We might lose warp within twenty seconds.”

“That is not an option” answered the discorporated voice of Commander Vistia Xe.

“Now, yes, sure, it is not an option” agreed Mir Durbus. “Please tell the crew to brace for a rough exit from warp.”

“We absolutely need warp to get out of here” said Vistia Xe, nervousness creeping into her Deltan self-control. “You have to try to maintain it.”

Where is here? thought Iskander.

“Collapse” tapped Lieutenant JG Z’Xak.

Up became down as the Redding tumbled out of warp.