Broken Bow - Diane Carey [11]
“Starboard, aye. But thanks anyway.”
Reed nodded. “We shall see.”
“Okay, Alex, give it some juice!”
Trip Tucker danced his own kind of ballet through the outcroppings and knotholes of the cramped engineering deck, a complex scaffold made to support experimental technology of the most skittish kind. This was the red-light nerve center of the new ship, busy and tightly fitted, a place where a thousand adjustments had been bolted on where they were needed, from circuit breakers to flow quenchers, some just to see if they helped at all. Tucker swung and dropped, hooked and monkeyed through the arrangement rather like a child on playground equipment or a zoo monkey on the run. Malcolm Reed winced as Tucker’s foot slid on a rung, but the engineer succeeded in barely keeping a heel-hold with the other foot and hovered in place to check whatever he was doing.
“Beautiful!” he cried to someone among the many crewmen rushing around this area. “Lock it off right there!”
His voice, so high against the chamber’s ceiling, carried an echo. Reed, with Mayweather at his side, stood watching Tucker in his engineering flight suit dance about the ladders and support structures for the mighty and prelegendary warp core. Yes, the massive shipborne power plant already was a legend across space—the clever, useful, and somewhat shocking development, all-human, in spite of holdbacks from other races who already had faster-than-light speed. Apparently humanity had surprised everybody, coming up with warp power on their own, then developing it so quickly. For other cultures, it had taken centuries to get from point A to point B in this technology, but once humans had seen what others could do and knew they could do it, they wouldn’t be left behind now that they had a grip on the possibility. When the Vulcans held back, humans had surged forward with even harsher relentlessness. Spite? Perhaps, and wasn’t it joyfully irritating?
“Look at him,” Reed commented. “The very embodiment of glee.”
“I would be, too,” Mayweather sighed, “if this baby were all mine the way it belongs to its chief engineer.”
“Oh, or its primary watch helmsman, I dare say. Don’t sell your role short. You are the first, after all.”
“You’re determined to make me self-aware at the wheel.” A bright smile broke within Mayweather’s face. “But you’re right—it’s giving me butterflies to realize what I am, and where I am. Do you think all the men who came before us on ships felt like this?”
“Unless they were shanghaied.” Reed muttered his comment, then realized he had failed to fan the mystique. “Ah,” he added, “but each age has its Enterprise ... and always has. This is ours, for all our own people, and any other who wishes our friendly hand.”
Mayweather accepted the heartfelt sentiment. “Or our firm fist.”
“Amen to that.”
The two stood together, in their ship, among shipmates, and embraced this moment of charm.
A dash of spritely humanity came as Trip Tucker swung downward toward them, finally to slide down the handrail of the last ladder and land with a thunk on the deck not ten steps away, proudly eyeing the warp core. At last he pulled out an engineer’s cloth and relieved a smudge of its misery.
“I believe you missed a spot,” Reed charged.
Tucker turned, and seemed immediately proud, then eyed Mayweather.
“Commander Tucker,” Reed introduced, “Ensign Travis Mayweather.”
Tucker stuck out his hand eagerly. “Our space boomer!”
Mayweather seized the hand and tried to return the enthusiasm—helmsman and engineer, the right and left hands of any ship—but he couldn’t keep his eyes off the stunning warp core.
“How fast have you gotten her?” he asked, finding a compromise that excited them both.
“Warp four! We’ll be going to four point five as soon as we clear Jupiter. Think you can handle it?”
Reed buried a grin at the two children who had found each other in the midst of fantasyland, each wanting to do the other’s job, just for a few minutes.
“Four point five ...” Mayweather gazed hungrily at the power source, openly awed and not