Relics - Michael Jan Friedman [3]
The ensign shrugged as he got to his feet as well. He had a look of mock resignation about him. “I tried to stop you, sir. But you were just too insistent.”
“Ye’re bloody right I was,” said Scott, heading for the exit and the corridor outside.
Captain James Armstrong sat in his command chair, scanning the starfields ahead of the Jenolen courtesy of his forward viewscreen, but he wasn’t exactly thrilled to be there. He’d envisioned better things when he applied for admission to Starfleet Academy some twenty years ago.
It wasn’t fair, he mused. He’d studied as diligently as anyone else. He’d worked hard, scoring high in every phase of cadet training. He’d held up his end of the bargain.
Sure, he’d flubbed the Kobayashi Maru test-but so had everyone else. Only one man in the annals of the Academy had beaten the no-win scenario, and that had been decades earlier.
Like the other cadets, Armstrong had hoped for adventure, for the excitement of discovery. He’d looked forward to plumbing the depths of the unknown. What he’d gotten was a transport vessel, whose only mission was to ferry Federation citizens from one world to another.
Where was the justice in that?
Here he was pushing forty, his wavy, light-brown hair graying at the temples, and all his old classmates had passed him by. Lustig was in the command chair on the Hood, Barrymore on the Lexington, DeCampo on the newly commissioned Excalibur-every last one of them a success.
Except for him.
And why? He couldn’t say. Bad luck, maybe. A failure to be in the right place at the right time.
Sighing, he looked about his operations center-a cramped complex, which on a larger ship would have been at least three and possibly four separate facilities. This wasn’t just his command center, where he sat daily, bemoaning his fate as he stared unimpressed at the viewscreen. It was also the place that housed the Jenolen’s warp-drive access-a crowded array of engineering consoles manned by a crowded array of engineers-and a modest, two-man transporter platform.
On the Potemkin, where he’d served as ensign, the transporter room alone was bigger than this. Hell, the closets were bigger than this.
“Ready to drop out of warp,” announced tall, dark-haired Ben Sachs from his position behind the main engineering console. There were two other engineers working alongside him-the full complement of Ops center personnel.
Again, Armstrong had occasion to reflect on the inequities of his situation. On the Potemkin, there’d been a crew of more than four hundred. On the Jenolen, all he had were thirty-six-and he could probably have made due with even fewer in a pinch.
“Go ahead, Lieutenant,” he told Sachs. “As we discussed, we’ll proceed at full impulse while we effect repairs.”
“Aye, sir,” said his chief engineerin a vaguely annoyed tone, Armstrong thought. There’d been no need to remind Sachs about maintaining impulse power; they’d only talked about it a few minutes ago.
Unfortunately, the captain wasn’t required to give a whole lot of orders on the transport ship Jenolen-and sometimes he felt that he had to say something.
The vessel vibrated slightly as its warp bubble dissipated and it re-entered relativistic space. Armstrong grunted. He could almost have wished that something had gone wrong-that alarms were going off all over the place, and that it was up to his quick, resourceful mind to get them out of a situation no starship captain had ever faced before.
Not that he wished to endanger anyone-particularly the bunch of older folks headed for Norpin Five. But just once, he wanted to feel like a real commanding officer.
“Sir?” said Sachs, interrupting Armstrong’s reverie.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” He turned to his chief engineer.
The man looked perplexed. “We’re picking up a considerable amount of gravimetric interference,” he noted.
His curiosity aroused, the captain got up and crossed the Ops center to stand at Sachs’s side. “Gravimetric interference?