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Everyone on the bridge knew what Corsi’s words really meant. With the Tholian ships only minutes away, the da Vinci was, for all intents and purposes, a sitting duck. There was no way they would be able to outrun the enemy vessels without warp drive.

“Dammit, dammit, dammit!” Duffy launched himself from where he had knelt next to Stevens and raced to the turbolift’s doors. He was carried at first by instinct, but his sense of duty to the da Vinci’s crew kicked him into an even higher gear. As it was, he had to brake himself so as to avoid slamming bodily into Corsi, who had materialized between him and the turbolift with the efficiency of a transporter.

“Where the hell are you going?” she demanded, her eyes boring into Duffy’s.

“I can have warp back on-line in three minutes,” he said, moving to push past her. The turbolift doors hissed open at his approach, but he was halted by Corsi’s hand clamping down on his arm with the strength of a vise.

“You can’t leave this bridge,” she said, her icycalm voice belying the force she was exerting to keep him in place. “The Tholians will be here any minute.”

Duffy wrenched his arm free from Corsi’s grip and backpedaled into the waiting turbolift. As he stepped into the car, he met the gazes of the bridge crew and at that instant felt certain that he was doing the right thing. Captain Scott had said it himself: An engineer’s job was to keep his crew safe.

Well, that was a captain’s job as well, Duffy decided. The da Vinci was hardly safe from the Tholians without the power to jump to warp speed, and no one knew those engines better than he did. Acting as captain or engineer, Duffy knew there was only one place for him to be right now.

“Three minutes!” he said to Corsi, hoping the urgent volume in his voice would slow her down. When it didn’t, he finally resorted to the words that would stop her dead in her tracks.

“Commander Corsi, you have the conn.”

And stop she did.

With a grim smile on his lips, he called out “Engineering!” and the turbolift’s doors slammed shut. He felt the customary lurch in the pit of his stomach as the car dropped him from the bridge into the bowels of the ship.

CHAPTER

7

Sonya Gomez regarded the master systems display panel in the Defiant’s engineering section and marveled once again at the antiquated controls. Though the systems she was used to overseeing were vastly more advanced, she still perceived the echoes of function and purpose in the consoles around her. The admiration she felt for the engineers of this vessel and the bygone era it represented grew with every hour she spent here. More than once during this mission, she had imagined a younger Montgomery Scott, more than a century before he would come to lead the Starfleet Corps of Engineers, proudly riding herd on massive engines like the ones that had once powered the Defiant. The thought brought with it a momentary twinge of envy.

The 23rd century, Gomez decided, had to have been a more challenging time to be an engineer. With ships out of contact with command bases for weeks and sometimes months at a time, no SpaceDock facilities or starbases could be relied upon for repairs. Ships’ engineers were the ultimate masters of their vessels’ fates. The crews of ships like the Defiant had pushed back the frontiers of unknown space and expanded the storehouse of knowledge that she and many modern-day Starfleet officers took for granted.

“The modifications to the generators are complete,” Pattie reported, moving from the main engineering area to stand next to Gomez. “They are tied into the warp drive, and I have programmed a new start-up sequence into the main computer.”

Gomez nodded in satisfaction. Their preparations were finished, and with any luck they would all be back on the da Vinci within thirty minutes. She, for one, would be glad for that. Despite what she might feel for this ship and the 23rd century, she had grown weary of traipsing around the derelict ship in near darkness and chancing upon the scattered