What's Past_ Many Splendors (Book 6) - Keith R.A. DeCandido [16]
Sonya shuddered. “More like a nightmare. I studied some of those old matter/antimatter systems at the Academy. It’s embarrassingly primitive. Plus, they couldn’t recrystalize their dilithium back then. It was a mess.”
“Well, I hope you like cleaning up messes, then, Ensign.”
Whirling around, Sonya saw that La Forge had come up behind her without her noticing. “Sir?”
“Commander Riker’s asked me to come along on the Hathaway, and asked me to pick the engineers. You were at the top of my list.”
“Oh. Uh, thank you, sir.” Her first thought was that this was not what she had in mind when she signed on. She wanted to seek out new life, not seek out something that was abandoned eighty years ago with good reason. But she’d trained her mouth over the last few months to not put her first thoughts to words. Sometimes it even worked.
“There’ll be a mission briefing here in two hours.”
“I’ll be there, sir.”
After La Forge walked off, Kornblum winced. “I’m sorry, Sonya, I jinxed it for you, didn’t I?”
Thinking back to an embarrassed captain saying, “Yes, Ensign, it’s all over me,” Sonya sighed and said, “It’s not your fault, Bernie. I’ve been jinxed since I walked onto this ship.”
Sonya had been staring at the console innards for a full minute.
Forty-one Enterprise crew had beamed over to the eighty-year-old Constellation-class Hathaway, led by Commander Riker—or, rather, Captain Riker. For the duration of this mission, he was in command of the Hathaway, and so was properly referred to as “Captain.” The mission specs called for a complement of forty, but Riker had asked for Wesley Crusher to come along for educational study.
Staring at the underside of this console, where La Forge had sent her once he got the lights working in engineering, Sonya was grateful for Wes’s presence, as they were going to need all the help they could get. She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the unfamiliar duotronic components and wondering how the hell they flew through space in the twenty-third century with this garbage.
In a shipwide announcement, Riker had said that they wouldn’t be getting much sleep, and Sonya could see why. Even if nobody slept and worked double time, she doubted they could get this wreck going in the two days they had.
To make matters worse, Sonya felt like a fifth wheel. La Forge had presumably taken her along for her expertise in antimatter, but the Hathaway was warp-inactive, with no antimatter on board to power a warp drive. Even if they had antimatter, there was no dilithium, either, just some chips of crystals that were of the less-refined variety one got in the twenty-third century when recrystallization wasn’t possible.
“Something wrong, Sonya?”
Sonya looked up to see Helga Van Mayter standing over her. The brunette was holding a tool Sonya didn’t recognize at first. “Is that a magnospanner?” She hadn’t seen one of those since she was a plebe.
Helga nodded. “Yeah, I need it for the manifolds. What’s the matter here? Can’t you get the plasma flow going?”
“You kidding? I’m afraid to touch it!”
“Why?”
She waved her arms. “Look at it! I can’t even find the Shange shunt.”
Helga laughed. “There isn’t one.”
Sonya’s eyes went wide. “How can there not be a Shange shunt?”
“Mostly by virtue of Shange not inventing the thing until sixty-five years ago. Besides, all the shunt does is speed up the reaction time and make it easier to diagnose flaws. It’s not like you really need it to run the ship.”
That went counter to everything Sonya had been taught. In fact, she remembered Professor Naharodny going on at some length about how if you lost your Shange shunt, you might as well blow the ship up.
“Look,” Helga said, “I need to tune up the manifolds. When I’m done, I can walk you through this, if you want.”
“No, no, that’s okay,” Sonya said quickly. Helga had her own duties to perform, and Sonya was tired of people covering for her. “I’ll figure this out.”
“You sure?”
Sighing, Sonya said, “Not really, but I’m gonna do it anyhow.”
Helga smiled. “Good. ’Cause the