The Sky's the Limit - Marco Palmieri [0]
Michael Schuster & Steve Mollmann
Historian’s note:
This tale is set in late 2363 (Old Calendar), sometime before “Encounter at Farpoint,” the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation
MICHAEL SCHUSTER & STEVE MOLLMANN
Michael Schuster lives in Austria on the other side of the pond and believes himself to be only the second nonnative speaker of English to write a Star Trek story after Jesco von Puttkamer. His love for science fiction in general and Star Trek in particular began somewhere around his twelfth birthday. While he always wanted to be one of the authors of such adventures, he never really believed he would eventually become one. The fact that this did indeed happen is generally attributed to his collaboration with Steve Mollmann, which is unlikely to end anytime soon. At the time of publication, the two will have been on the same continent four times.
Steve Mollmann lives in Colerain Township, which is a suburb of Cincinnati, Ohio, best known for possessing a large garbage dump, but he loves it all the same. He has been a Star Trek fan since before he can remember, for which he blames his mother, but he has to admit it’s probably led to some good things. He is a graduate of Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and like all twenty-somethings, he has no idea what he is going to do with his life. With Michael Schuster, he has previously penned an entry in the Star Trek: Corps of Engineers—What’s Past arc of eBooks, titled The Future Begins.
Visit them both on the web at www.exploringtheuniverse.net.
THE FIRST TIME CAPTAIN THOMAS HALLOWAY SAW THE U.S.S. Enterprise, the starship was nothing more than a simulation displayed on a designer’s terminal. Even back then, he had been impressed by her size, although he had no illusions that a computer model ever would be able to do the real thing justice.
The third time he saw the Enterprise, she had gone through every preliminary test imaginable, and the first struts of her space-frame were about to be welded together on the Martian surface, to be lifted into orbit later on.
The seventh time he saw the Enterprise, construction had progressed far enough to enable people to work inside her without having to depend on space suits. That had been the day the life-support systems had been switched on, only weeks after Thomas had been chosen as the right man to supervise the construction efforts. It was also five years before the ship would leave the orbital dock under its own power, using only maneuvering thrusters.
And that had been eight years before the commissioning ceremony that was just minutes away.
It was quite a turnout; Thomas had the feeling that nobody would notice if he suddenly disappeared. This was an event that had drawn hundreds from all over the Federation to this place: the orbital docks of Utopia Planitia Fleet Yards, Mars. It was a celebration of Starfleet’s desire to explore the unknown, an affirmation of one of the basic ideals of the Federation: the constant and never-ending quest for more knowledge.
What more fitting embodiment of this ideal was there than the Galaxy-class ship itself? So grand and impressive—swanlike and almost alive. It dwarfed everything else in orbit, with the exception of the spacedock cradling it. “Traveling cities” they had been called by some of their designers, and Thomas was tempted to agree with this assessment. Their purpose was to trawl the regions beyond known space, always on the lookout for interesting and curious new discoveries, be they alive or not.
On the other side of a crowd of dignitaries, Thomas caught sight of a familiar figure. “Orfil!” Thomas shouted and waved at his erst-while colleague. “Try to come over here, will you?”
A throng of wildly gesticulating Guidons almost prevented Commander Orfil Quinteros from crossing the distance of only a few meters, but eventually he succeeded and shook Thomas’s hand. Orfil had worked with Thomas for almost ten years, serving as his right-hand man on the construction team (not to mention best friend), but he had been gone for