What's Past_ Many Splendors (Book 6) - Keith R.A. DeCandido [17]
Letting out another sigh, Sonya went back to peering at the inside of the console.
Four hours later, Sonya was grinning ear to ear. Helga, it turned out, had been right—all the shunt did was streamline the impulse drive. She’d doped out the entire system and figured out what needed repairing, what needed replacing, and what couldn’t be repaired or replaced but still worked around.
La Forge came up to her at almost a dead run. “Sonya, just the person I’m looking for.”
Clambering to her feet, Sonya brushed several locks of hair out of her face and wiped sweat from her brow with her sleeve. Holding up the padd she’d been taking notes on, she said, “I’ve done it, Geordi, we’ll have full impulse as soon as—”
“That’s great, Sonya, but we need you for something else.”
Sonya blinked. “But if the impulse drive—”
“Did you do up a schedule like I asked?”
She stared down at the padd. The haphazard notes she’d doodled could, she supposed, be translated into something resembling a schedule. “Sort of.”
“Give it to Costa and Sherman, I need you at the core.”
Again, Sonya blinked. “Geordi, the warp core’s inactive, what do you—”
“Just—come with me, Sonya, okay?”
Sonya shook her head. “O-okay. I’ll be right there.” She looked around, saw Gar Costa, handed him the padd, and then walked off.
“Criminy, HC, is this even in English?” Gar asked, but Sonya ignored him, walking over to where La Forge and Wesley were working with some kind of widget that was hooked up to where the antimatter injectors would be were there any antimatter.
When Wesley moved out of the way, Sonya saw the widget more clearly, and realized it was a module designed to channel high-energy plasma reactions with antimatter. She also realized that she’d seen it before, and not on the Hathaway. “Isn’t that your plasma physics homework, Wes?”
Smiling sheepishly, Wesley said, “It was.”
“Now it’s our best shot at warp drive,” La Forge said as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I need you to calculate the best thermal curve to give us a controlled reaction.”
“And then what?” Sonya asked. She’d been thinking purely in terms of impulse engines for several hours, so it took her a second to reboot her brain, as it were. She ran over the specs of the module from what Wesley had told her. (She also wondered how the hell he smuggled it over here, since they weren’t supposed to bring things over from the Enterprise. If they could have, Sonya would’ve brought a Shange shunt and saved three and a half hours of her life.) “That thing doesn’t have more than a few micrograms of antimatter, right?” she asked Wesley.
He nodded.
“You think the chips we have will be enough to channel the reaction?”
La Forge shrugged. “If it doesn’t, we’re stuck at impulse, which is where we were in the first place. But the Enterprise won’t be expecting it.”
“They won’t be expecting us to blow up, either.” Sonya grinned. “But it should work, yeah. I’ll get right on it.”
“Good.”
She went off to a computer terminal to start working up the equations. Then she stopped. “Uh, Captain Riker did okay this, right?”
Both La Forge and Wesley said “Right” a little too quickly.
“O-o-o-okay.” This once, she was more than willing to let someone else take the heat.
By the time they were two hours out of the simulation, Sonya was ready to cry.
The impulse engines were up and running as expected. Gar said that “once we translated your notes,” the schedule was spot-on. The problem was that the control systems they had available to them were limited, especially since they had to adapt components from the impulse drive in order to accommodate Wesley’s module, which meant that the impulse and warp drive components were doing double duty instead of being separated as usual.
“It’s only a simulation,” La Forge said, “and it’s only for a couple of hours. Even the duotronic circuits can probably handle double duty.”
“That’s not the problem,” Wesley said. He had that open-mouthed expression of his that Sonya had learned meant he was scared