Crossover - Michael Jan Friedman [11]
Nineteen faces looked up to watch him walk down the aisle. Apparently, he’d kept them waiting a wee bit. Giving the group a tight smile, he took his seat.
Without ceremony, the ensign sat down behind the controls and ran through the preflight protocols. Ahead of her, the shuttlebay doors opened to the blackness of space.
When he felt the craft lurch slightly, Scott forced himself to look away from Ensign Hammond. He recognized the irony of it. After all his years in space, he was uncomfortable traveling in a ship he wasn’t piloting.
Of course, there were a few others he trusted at the helm of a vessel. But none of them were available, the engineer thought wryly.
Scott tried to distract himself by silently running through his plan, but that didn’t help much. To call what he had in mind a plan was being kind in the extreme. The fact was, he had only the vaguest idea of how he would accomplish his objective.
Well, he mused, he’d simply do what he always did when facing a difficult problem under a tough deadline. He’d just take it one step at a time.
A flash of light from the starboard observation port caught his eye. As he turned, he couldn’t help but grin at the sight. Hanging there in space, the Yorktown was even more beautiful than he remembered.
They were approaching the dry dock from out front, the dock’s lights reflecting off the ship’s command hull. It would have been more efficient to approach the ship from the rear and enter the shuttlebay directly, but this was a tour intended to show off the ship. And despite the lost time, Scotty couldn’t find it in his heart to regret the view.
First, they skimmed along the smooth top of the main saucer section of the ship. Al! eyes in the shuttle, including Scotty’s, were glued to the vessel—which dominated not only the observation ports, but also the viewscreen up above the pilot’s seat. They came close enough to see the letters that spelled out her name.
U.S.S. YORKTOWN, it said. The call letters were NCC-1717.
No bloody letter, Scotty thought, in the old Starfleet typography. What’s more, he liked it better that way.
They dipped down at the end of the saucer to a point just above the engineering hull. This gave them a good view of both the cigar-shaped engineering section of the ship below them and the engine nacelles above them.
Scotty had never taken to the newer starship designs, including those of the new Galaxy-class ship. The damned engine pods just seemed too short.
On the old Constitution-class vessels, the nacelles were long and graceful. Long enough, in fact, that they should have looked unwieldy. But they didn’t. Instead, they conveyed a sense of power that the newer ships seemed to lack.
Of course, he knew that was just an illusion. Modern engine designs were so powerful, the warp speed chart had to be rewritten to account for their performances.
Still, though Scotty knew all of that intellectually, the illusion persisted. As they came around to the rear of the ship, it looked to the engineer as if at any moment she would shake off the dry dock like an old coat and blast out of the system in a blur of light.
Positioning itself directly behind the shuttlebay, their small craft began its approach. As it glided into the bay and took its place on the deck, Scotty could feel the vibrations from the shuttle doors closing.
Then he could hear the hiss of the air re-entering the cargo bay area. And when there was enough air in the shuttlebay to transmit the sound, he could actually hear the air pumps at work.
Scotty noted that the pumps rattled a bit. It was a design flaw that he and every other chief engineer of this type of vessel had corrected. The fact that the Yorktown still had the flaw meant that the museum engineers had returned the ship to its original specs.
Normally, such thinking would have irritated Scotty. After all, the modifications and improvements made over the years by a ship’s engineering staff were part of that vessel. Denying those efforts seemed
disrespectful, somehow.
But now, Scotty had to admit, he was of two minds