• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

And he also found, sloshing in his own desk’s bottom drawer, an all but forgotten vessel that looked substantially similar to Admiral Gregory Black’s silver flask.

THIRTY-FOUR

Thursday, December 4, 2155

Enterprise

CHIEF ENGINEER MIKE BURCH FELT the aberrant but all-too-familiar vibration through the engine room deck an instant before Ensign Camacho spoke.

“Lieutenant Burch, the warp core is making that... noise again.”

Of course it is, Burch thought, rubbing his eyes. It had been yet another grueling night, for himself and most of his engineering staff, and the ship’s night was still barely half over. We’re damned lucky this thing hasn’t already shaken itself apart.

Not that the long, tense hours were remarkable—at least, not anymore. When the engines had to run hot for this many months on end, the entire propulsion system had to be monitored closely, hour to hour and minute to minute. There was no alternative. Captain Archer wanted Enterprise’s return to Earth expedited and the only warp engine downtime was a brief stopover at Vulcan.

Like anyone posted to an engineering position aboard a Starfleet vessel, Burch was well aware that the warp-five engine that provided power and propulsion to NX-class starships was the brainchild of Doctor Henry Archer, the late father of Enterprise’s commanding officer. But the rough treatment to which Jonathan Archer had lately subjected that engine was making Burch wonder whether the captain needed some discreet professional help with some unresolved daddy issues.

I should have transferred when Commander Kelby did, Burch thought. He was a better engineer than I am, and he didn’t think he’d be able to fill Commander Tucker’s boots.

Ever since Kelby’s transfer, on the heels of the Terra Prime terrorist crisis back in January and Commander Tucker’s subsequent death, Burch had played a fill-in role, running engineering by default. At first, Captain Archer and Commander T’Pol had made it clear that they considered him the ship’s “interim chief engineer,” which was just fine with him. But as the days had become weeks, which then had stretched into months—an elastic span during which Enterprise had voyaged to points far too distant to accommodate even the most basic and necessary of crew rotations—Burch had found that his position had gradually evolved into a state of uneasy permanence.

“Let me have another look at those flow regulators, Ensign,” Burch said as he ducked below the work platform for the massive, pulsating engine core, alert for any obvious signs of imminent trouble. He moved between Ensign Camacho and Lieutenant Hess, the former scowling at the plasma flow regulation board while the latter kept a weather eye on the antimatter containment field monitor.

The deck vibrated again beneath Burch’s boots as he ran his handheld scanner carefully over a key conduit, then paused to compare the results to those being generated by the engine room’s internal monitoring system.

A discrepancy emerged almost immediately, this one much larger than anything he’d ever seen before. Something was badly out of calibration. Better double-check it, Burch thought, maintaining a calm exterior mainly because he knew better than to mistake a single reading for a trend. He began to run the scan again, in parallel with the flow regulator’s self-diagnostic program he had activated on the console, and silently hoped to the superluminal gods that he’d merely misinterpreted some basic mathematical function.

His stomach plunged into freefall when he saw that he hadn’t.

“Shut her down,” Burch said, swallowing hard.

“Sir?” Camacho said, saucer-eyed.

“Do it! Take us out of warp, now. I have to contact the captain.”

Jonathan Archer was roused from a deep slumber by something he’d grown almost completely unaccustomed to over the past several months.

Silence.

Curled up at the foot of Archer’s bed, Porthos raised his head and made a