What's Past_ Many Splendors (Book 6) - Keith R.A. DeCandido [11]
“No.” La Forge said the word emphatically, but Sonya wasn’t having any of it.
“Oh, I do have a tendency to have a bit of a motormouth, especially when I’m excited.” Or awake. “And you don’t know how exciting it is to have gotten this assignment.” And then, suddenly, before her brain could tell her mouth to shut the hell up, her mouth barreled forward with The Speech. “Everyone in class, I mean everyone, wants the Enterprise.” Wanted, you idiot, you’re not a cadet anymore! “I mean, it would’ve been all right to spend some time on Rana VI, do phase work with antimatter—that’s my specialty.”
“I know,” La Forge said, “that’s why you got this assignment.”
Sonya’s stomach started doing cartwheels. He knows my specialty! Then she mentally berated herself. Of course he knows my specialty, he’s the chief engineer. He doesn’t just take people sight unseen. Shaking her head, she said, “I did it again. It’s just that—”
La Forge’s voice was soothing. “I know—you’re excited. Look, Sonya—”
Eager to receive whatever wisdom the chief engineer was going to provide, she said, “Yes?”
“I don’t think you want to be around these control stations with that hot chocolate, do you?”
She looked down at the hot chocolate, as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t even have this in engineering. It’s just, we were talking, I forgot I had it in my hand.” She started to back away from La Forge with almost the same speed with which she was digging herself into a hole verbally. Just shut up and walk away. “I’m gonna go finish it over here.”
Realizing as she walked that that probably wasn’t the best way to end the conversation, she stopped, turned, and faced her CO. “Lieutenant La Forge?”
He nodded.
“This is not gonna happen again.”
Again, he nodded. Satisfied that she hadn’t embarrassed herself too terribly much, and at the very least pulled it out at the end, as it were, she nodded back and turned around, intending to take the hot chocolate to the corridor.
As she turned, she crashed right into someone wearing a red uniform.
Great, that’s all I need. Someone on the command track getting hot chocolate all over their uniform wasn’t exactly going to help Sonya do better with La Forge.
Then she looked up and saw the bald head, hawk nose, and stern expression of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Sonya had, of course, seen the captain before. He’d come down to engineering once or twice—not as often as Commander Riker or Lieutenant Commander Data—and she’d passed him in the corridor. On the latter occasions he had given her a nod and a curt, “Ensign,” obviously not knowing who she was personally, but able to discern the single pip on her uniform denoting her rank.
This was, however, their first face-to-face encounter.
And she spilled hot chocolate on him.
She spilled a lot more on herself, but that somehow seemed not to matter so much.
“Oh, no! Oh, I’m sorry, oh, Captain—”
“Uh, actually, it’s my fault, sir.” That was La Forge, coming to her rescue. Great, first Duffy, now La Forge. Is everybody on this ship going to have to cover for me every time I do something stupid?
“Indeed?” said the captain, sounding dubious.
Of course he sounds dubious, you idiot. Sonya started wiping at the captain’s uniform with her hands. “Oh, I wasn’t looking—it’s all over you.”
“Yes, Ensign, it’s all over me,” Picard said in a voice that could’ve frozen the hot chocolate, which, somehow, he was now holding in his right hand.
“At least let me, sir,” she said, still wiping at his uniform shirt.
The captain grabbed her wrist with his left hand to arrest her futile attempts at drying him off. “Ensign, uh—Ensign—?”
Realizing he was making a request, Sonya straightened. “Oh! Ensign Sonya Gomez.”
La Forge added, “Ensign Gomez is a recent Academy graduate, Captain. She just transferred over at Starbase 173.”
“Is that so?” the captain said to La Forge. Then he looked at Sonya with an expression that wasn’t as harsh as Sonya feared it would be. “Well, Ensign Sonya Gomez, I think it would be simpler if I simply changed my uniform.”