Subject: Grail: "Unexplored Space"-`Let the Stars Be Our Guide 3'- Kyp

At 03:47 PM 4/1/98 -0500, you wrote:

> Hillary was impressed by the wonder in the younger mans eyes. He

>seemed to possess a genuinely romantic soul and the youthful perspective

>that only the youthful possessed. She had been without that perspective

>for longer than this Alterian had been alive.

> But, she felt herself affected by him.

> "I understand that you and the Chief Flight Officer are working on

>a plan to pass through this star cluster."

> "Still working on it.", he said with something akin to frustration.

> "Well, maybe I can help. I have been a stellar cartographer for

>most of my Starfleet career and I understand a great deal about stellar

>phenomenon."

> Kyp smiled tightly in gratitude.

> "Perhaps we can convince the Captain to launch a probe into the

>cluster when we are nearer. I am imagining the gravimetric currents in

>such a cluster must be enormous. However, and I must consult the Chief

>Science Officer on this, the discoveries, in raw materials and energy,

>might make such a quest worth the gamble. What lies on the other side,

>besides a shorter route to the Delta Quad?"

> "Kerestia.", Kyp Firespray replied. "She is a world whose

>commercial enterprises extended all the way to Gamma Alteries, over

>20,000 light years away. There is much there to gain if we have anything

>worth bartering."

> "Perhaps within the Great Brightness, we will find something that

>no one has ever seen." Hillarys youthful sense of adventure was waking

>up. She was exploring, truly exploring. No one from the Federation had

>been there before. She was a young girl again.

> "I'm really looking forward to working with you, Ambassador."

>

"I'm really looking forward to working with you to. Now as for

finding anything in their, I seriously doubt it. We, Alterians, have done

servays of the interior of the cluster, but our scans have shown that

nothing could survive that kind of gravitational force within the cluster."

He stopped for a minute and scratched his head. "Although every ship that

has ever tried to pass through the cluster has never been heard from again,

our astropyhsictists calculated the probability that there should be a path

or a least a spot within the cluster where all gravitational forces are

negated. If we could find this it would seriously help our efforts of

surviving such a trip." He turned to look at her. He was amazed by the way

he could challenge hsi intellect, he actually enjoyed it. *Finally someone

I can talk science with* he thought. "What do say shall we begin number

crunching to find this 'backdoor'?" He looked at her with the bright light

of hope that he still carried. He was damn determined to get home and

reestablish his planet from the Borg, and this woman was his ticket to

getting into the Delta Quandrant.