Ghost Ship - Diane Carey [89]
“Sir,” the teenager blurted, “I can build the crystal focusing system myself just as well as any of them.”
The captain glared at him. “We’re going to let the professionals handle it, Mr. Crusher. What you’re describing will take pure antimatter feed, and that’s nothing to play with.”
He stepped away, but Wesley followed, slipping out of Geordi’s grasp at the last second. He snapped the words out like spitballs. “You always treat me like a kid, even though I’m on the bridge.”
The captain turned. His voice took on an iron resonance.
“You’re on the bridge,” he said, “because I chose to put you here, not because you earned it. Your ability exceeds your wisdom, young man. You’ll eventually learn the unforgiving lesson that the people around you are worth more in their experience than you are in your gifts, and you shall, like everyone else, have to wait your turn. Now mind your place, close your mouth, and follow me to engineering, where you will put your gift to use and let others do the same.”
Wesley was understandably subdued thereafter, give or take the minutes it took him to spell out the phasing idea. The engineers gawked at him, frowned, rolled their eyes, squinted-it looked like a cornea convention. By the time they filed down to the main phaser reactor room, they already had half the mechanics and most of the formulae worked out in their heads, and Picard stood back to watch the machine of intelligence at work. He watched too as Wesley caught a first glimpse through his own brilliance and youthful smugness of the resourcefulness and conceptual ability of experienced engineers. The boy’s face lit up with both amazement and humility each time the engineers shot him a question as part of a discussion that had simply left him behind. Picard could tell from Wesley’s expression that the young man didn’t even know why the engineers had to know some of the things they were asking. And for every question asked, there were two more problems to be solved that he hadn’t thought of. After a time he began to catch a glimpse of why his own idea seemed so foreign. The engineers weren’t looking at the phasing unit as a unit. They saw it as part of the whole ship, all the intricate systems, lines, circuits, energies, fluxes, coils, and capacitors, each affecting all the others. It wasn’t enough for the phasing unit to work; it had to work in concert with a thousand other units.
As soon as the engineers understood his idea, they were at work troubleshooting it. After several false starts, and even a complete rebuilding of the strange new system, all the theoreticals became applicables. Problems Wesley had never foreseen were discovered, then sidestepped or solved on the spot. The harmonics hummed, the antimatter feed had its safeties hooked up, and all in less time than it had taken Wesley to build his original mock-up. He circled the new contraption, a hulking unit attached directly to the main phaser couplings, and shook his head. It looked like nothing he’d imagined. He could see what parts did which duty, but it simply didn’t look the way he thought it would look.
Picard liked that look on a young face. He liked the look of growth.
Finally the chief of phaser engineering came toward the captain and Wesley, wiping his hands on his worksuit, and shrugged. “Good as it’s gonna get, Captain.”
“Will it work?”
“Can’t tell you that, sir. Half of it’s theory and the other half’s guesswork. All the systems hook up cleanly, it’s got power, it’s got antimatter flow, and it’s got safeties. As for working, only testing can tell.”
“We’ll test it in combat,” Picard said ruefully. “We seem to have little choice. We can’t-“
“Riker to captain! Emergency!”
Picard snapped at the nearest intercom.