War Stories (Book 2) - Keith R. A. DeCandido [2]
Fabian blinked. “Really?”
“No, not really. Actually, we gad about the galaxy fixing things, saving machines in distress, and getting no glory whatsoever, but what the hey—it’s a living. And sometimes what we have to fix is written in another language or it belongs to someone else, so people like Chan and Carol come in handy.” They walked up to a door. “Here you go.”
Shaking his head, Fabian said, “Bunking up with someone else—it’ll be like old home week.”
“How so?” Duffy asked with a slight frown.
“I used to serve on the Defiant under Chief O’Brien. We—”
A huge grin bisected Duffy’s face. “You know the chief?”
Laughing, Fabian said, “Know him? He ran me ragged for two years. Actually, he was great to work for.”
“I bet he was. He and I were both on the Enterprise together. Hey, look, the quarters are pretty boring, as quarters go, and we’ve both got half an hour—let me buy you a drink, and we can compare Miles O’Brien stories.”
“Sounds good to me, Commander.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, Fabian was halfway through a cup of coffee—he hadn’t really gotten a good night’s sleep since leaving Mars for Starbase 375, thence to meet up with the golf ball and Pattie and then report to the da Vinci—and Duffy was on his second quinine water with a twist of lime. Fabian was hearing all about the chief’s wedding.
“We had a pool going as to how badly Data would screw up the dancing, but he was sure-footed as all get-out. You would believe an android can cha-cha?”
“Where’d he learn?” Fabian asked.
“Rumor had it that Dr. Crusher taught him, but I never bought that. Crusher never seemed to me to be the dancing type.” He gulped down the remainder of his water, then asked, “So what’s your story, Stevens? What brought you back into Starfleet after two years under the chief’s thumb?”
“Well, my tour ended right after we lost a good friend of mine—Enrique Muniz. Good guy, great engineer, awful poker player.”
Duffy smiled. “Everything you want in a shipmate.”
“Something like that. He died on a mission to salvage a Jem’Hadar ship.” Fabian shook his head. “It’s funny, I always knew the risks, but it never seemed real until Muniz died. So I decided I’d had enough. I didn’t re-up, went home to the Rigel colonies, and helped my parents out with their shuttle service while I tried to figure out what to do with my life.”
“And you figured you’d come back to Starfleet?”
Fabian nodded. “The war kind of figured it out for me. I was bored to death on Rigel, and I realized I missed Starfleet. And then, when the war kicked into high gear, I—well, corny as it sounds, I figured it was my duty to sign back up. Besides, I figured there’d be a need for engineers.”
Duffy grinned. “You got that right.” He looked up. “Computer, time?”
“The time is 1457 hours.”
“We’d better get going,” Duffy said, getting up. “Don’t want to be late for your first meeting.”
“That would be bad, yes,” Fabian said, also rising.
“We’ll pick this up later. If nothing else, I want to know exactly how it is that the chief had a second kid by way of a Bajoran major.”
“Okay, but only if you tell me how Commander Worf, of all people, midwifed Molly.”
Another grin. “Deal.”
* * *
“The device was found in the wreck of a Jem’Hadar ship that was taken from Chin’toka three weeks, four days ago,” Salek said as he stood next to the golf ball.
The da Vinci’s main lab was a good-sized room—for a ship this small, anyhow—currently occupied by Salek, Duffy, Pattie, and Fabian, as well as two short, dark-haired humans, one male and one female, and a Bynar pairing. The latter wore civilian garb; Fabian had had no idea that there were any Bynars working with Starfleet, though he was grateful. No better computer experts existed in the galaxy.
First Duffy had performed the introductions. The humans were Chan Okha, ship’s linguist, and Carol Abramowitz, the cultural specialist. The Bynars had the designations of 110 and 111, though Fabian knew it was going to take him weeks to remember which was which. They didn’t look alike, of course, but they were sufficiently similar—and