Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [61]
He led them to a table that held a shapeless contraption. It looked like so much scrap, except that a light beam was glowing straight through the middle of it.
“What the hell-” Geordi stepped up to the model and pointed at it. “What’s this hooked up to?”
Wesley’s sheepishness returned. “I was … tapping the antimatter reserve.”
“Goddamn, Wes! You have an acting rank. Don’t you know that means you could be court-martialed?”
“But it’s never used! They don’t use it once in twenty years! How was I supposed to know they’d need it?”
“You do know this area’s off limits to anyone but authorized personnel,” Data said.
Geordi barely let him finish the sentence. “You start screwing around with the antimatter reserve and get a short or something, and suddenly there’s another sun around! It’s dangerous to tap the reserve directly. Don’t you know that?”
“Oh, come on, Geordi, it’s not that bad,” Wesley complained. “Under normal operation, nobody’d notice. It’d be like plugging in one extra lamp in a hotel. But with all the power shut down-“
“You know better than this.” Geordi shook his head, then said, “Then again, maybe you don’t. How long have you had this thing hooked up to the AR?”
“Well, only about four … or five … “
“Days?”
“Weeks.”
“Oh, my God. You gotta be kidding me. What were you trying to do?”
“I didn’t mean any trouble.”
“Well, you’ve got trouble, mister.”
Wesley pulled out a professional whipped-puppy look. “You’d turn me in?”
Geordi looked at the little contraption again and scanned it for invisible leakage. “This is a starship, not a playground, Wes.” The device was working, somehow, doing something, though Geordi couldn’t tell what.
Now what? Report the boy? Wesley was genius material, sure, but not experienced. Had he not been living on a major starship, with all its labs and state-of-the-art technology, where experts in actual applied science, applied engineering, applied mechanics were readily available, some even teaching classes to the kids, he’d be just another smart sixteen-year-old. Living on Earth or such, he’d be bright and showered with opportunities, but not like this. Not to the point of getting his hands on a starship any old day. Geordi knew Wes Crusher had a natural ability to conceptualize the way the universe works, but the only way he could learn to apply it was through all the redundant practice a sixteen-year-old hated even to think about. On the bridge a week ago, Geordi had let Wesley try the helm controls because the boy had so quickly picked up the theories and principles of navigation, only to find that he had plenty of difficulty actually working the controls. Only time, only experience could teach that.
But this-this kind of game-playing was dangerous, and Wesley couldn’t see the danger. Hadn’t had his hands burned yet.
“Shut it down,” Geordi ordered.
“Okay,” Wes mumbled. “That’s what I was doing anyway.”
“Ah-so you knew we’d pick it up. This is wrong and you knew it. What’s the matter?”
“Well … ” Wesley hesitated, then said, “I’m not sure how to break the flow without rupturing the magnatomics. Besides, this could never pull enough power to cause a problem. That’s why I went ahead and did it.”
“Wes, even senior engineers don’t tamper with antimatter. Data, look this over. We’ve got to disconnect it.”
The android moved in, and Wesley stepped aside. “What is the principle behind this device?”
Using his hands to illustrate every little twist and turn of his idea, Wesley explained. “Basically, it breaks down the phaser in its initial cycle, into its increment frequencies and energies until the final cycle, when you recombine the phases all at once.”
“What is the problem with it?”
“It … doesn’t work.”
“I see.”
“But if it did, this model would have almost four times the power of a hand phaser, and draw from a reaction chamber only half the size of standard.”
“This little toy?” Geordi blurted.
Data looked at