What's Past_ Many Splendors (Book 6) - Keith R.A. DeCandido [13]
“Okay,” she said in a small voice.
“Look, I promise I won’t let anything exciting slip past without letting you know, okay?”
“Okay,” she said with more authority.
“Okay.” La Forge smiled as they entered the turbolift. “Deck ten.”
The lunch had been one of the most pleasant experiences of Sonya’s career to date. One of the many reasons why Sonya had turned down Lian’s offers of eating here or in the mess with other people was that she had some bad memories of family dinners. It all depended, of course, on how Mami and Belinda were getting along that week. When they were in one of their bad phases, Sonya felt as bad sitting at the dinner table as she had in engineering the entire morning. Those memories were hard to ignore.
But La Forge was an easy conversationalist. He had Wesley’s intelligence, but the ensign’s youthful enthusiasm was replaced in La Forge with a casual happiness. The lieutenant was doing what he loved doing and what he was particularly good at.
When they returned to engineering, it was back to duty, especially since both the captain and a shuttle had gone missing.
“Obviously,” Duffy said in a stage whisper to Kornblum, “that hot chocolate that Gomez ordered was actually a gateway to another dimension and it sucked the captain in before he could change his uniform.”
Before Sonya could say anything, Denny walked up. “Hey, c’mon, leave her alone, Duff.”
“C’mon, it’s just a joke. She understands, right?”
Smiling, Sonya looked at Duffy. “Actually, the hot chocolate was really a special acidic compound that only attacks people of the rank of lieutenant or higher. So watch it, or I’ll spill it on you, too.”
Everyone laughed at that. Sonya felt like someone lifted the world off her shoulders, as she realized they were laughing with her rather than at her.
“Honestly,” Kornblum said, “that wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that happened on this ship. Remember when the captain got sucked into that energy cloud that killed Singh?”
“Or when that duplicate captain from the future showed up?” Duffy added.
“Or when that Ferengi controlled his mind and trapped him on the Stargazer?” Kornblum said.
“Or Q.”
“What’s a Q?” Denny asked.
“All right, that’s enough.” That was La Forge, walking over from the main engineering console. “We just heard from the bridge. The captain’s back.”
Sonya frowned. “What do you mean, back?”
La Forge shrugged. “All I can say is, the shuttlecraft’s back in the bay, and the captain’s in Ten-Forward.”
Sonya shook her head in confusion. “Does this count as something exciting?”
Chuckling, La Forge said, “If it is, it slipped by me, too.”
The engineers all went back to work. Sonya saw that the antimatter containment unit needed a bit of an adjustment. She worked on that for a little while, until the warp core activated.
“What the hell?” The readouts said that the helm was inactive, and that they were moving at quarter impulse, as they had been since the search for the captain had ceased. Yet the warp core was pounding away as if the ship were at warp nine.
La Forge was by her side in an instant. “What’s happening?”
“I…I don’t know.”
From behind her, Kornblum said, “Sir, according to the velocity meter, we’re traveling at warp twenty-two.”
“That’s impossible,” Sonya said.
“Yeah, well, so’s the captain disappearing and reappearing,” La Forge muttered, “but they both fit the MO of somebody I really didn’t wanna see again.”
The next few hours would, Sonya knew, live in her nightmares for the rest of her life.
The somebody La Forge didn’t want to see was Q. Though Denny didn’t recognize the entity, Sonya did, from her studying of the Enterprise’s missions while at the Academy. He—if the masculine pronoun even truly applied—was a fantastically powerful creature who’d toyed with the ship twice before, including on her maiden voyage. Now he’d sent the Enterprise to the Delta Quadrant, several thousand light-years from the Federation, right in the path of a species known as the Borg.
Sonya had said