What's Past_ Many Splendors (Book 6) - Keith R.A. DeCandido [36]
“I’m sorry, I wanted to tell you sooner, but I didn’t know how.”
“Did okay just then,” he muttered.
“It’s a great opportunity, and—”
“Yeah, it is, and you’d be stupid not to take it.”
Her mouth hanging open for a moment, Sonya finally said, “Really?”
“Of course. Geez, Sonnie, I don’t expect you to be a slug like me for the rest of your career. I mean, yeah, you’re on the Enterprise now, but you’re one of dozens. That’s fine if you’re me and don’t want to stand out in a crowd, but on the Oberth? You’ll be sitting pretty. I bet you’ll be running the place inside a year.”
She smiled, relieved more than she could adequately express that Kieran understood. “I hope so, since it’s only a one-year project.”
Kieran laughed. Sonya had never been so glad to hear that wonderful sound as she was now.
“Come on,” he said, getting up for real this time. “We’ve got work to do.”
They arrived at a crawlway just above engineering on deck thirty-two, after three hours of crawling around, a journey that should have only taken one hour at the most. Yes, the Enterprise was large, but they had started out fairly deep in the saucer section. Unfortunately, the damage from what Sonya was morally certain was a quantum filament had been extensive. Many of the crawlways were cut off for one reason or another.
“Genry, we’ve crossed the ice!” Kieran said when they arrived over the corridor outside engineering.
Sonya looked at him with confusion.
“Sorry,” he said, “old book I read when I was a kid. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula Le Guin. There’s this long journey, and at the end—”
Before Kieran could finish, he was interrupted by a tapping on the floor beneath them.
Kieran and Sonya exchanged glances, then shifted so they weren’t kneeling on the hatch. Sonya tried to open it, and saw that it was jammed. “Somebody must be stuck down there.”
“And me without my P-38—it’s in the same pants as my tricorder.”
Figuring she had nothing to lose, Sonya yelled. “Is somebody down there?”
A muffled voice said something, but she couldn’t make it out.
“Lousy duranium—too soundproof,” Kieran muttered.
Sonya started looking around the crawlway. “There’s got to be some way to open the hatch.”
Kieran reached into his pocket. “All I’ve got is this weed-whacker.”
Looking at the long, cylindrical item that was used to remove weeds at the root without overly disturbing the ground, Sonya started turning over possibilities in her mind. “What we need is a sonic enhancer.”
Frowning, Kieran said, “How would that—” Then he brightened. “Oh, right! Perfect! Except we don’t have a sonic enhancer.” Then he grinned. “But we do have the Elllix bafflers. They’re running along the ceiling there.”
Glancing up, Sonya grinned. Reaching up, she pried a panel loose, then looked at the components running through the wall. “Now that’s ironic.”
“What is?”
She grinned and looked at Kieran. “We need the weed-whacker to pry the baffler out before we can modify it so that it will turn the whacker into a P-38.”
“Life’s full of little ironies,” Kieran said as he handed over the weed-whacker. “We make a good team.”
Sonya found she had nothing to say to that.
Within two minutes, Sonya had gotten one of the bafflers out. Four minutes after that, they finished the modifications to the weed-whacker. Ten seconds after that, the hatch was open.
Six engineers stared up at Sonya and Kieran: Chao-Anh Aleakala, Robin Lefler, Martin Kopf, and the other three who were on duty with them, whose names Sonya was embarrassed to realize she didn’t know.
It doesn’t matter, she thought sadly. I’m leaving.
“I am so glad to see you two,” Chao-Anh said. “We’re running out of air down here, and I don’t know what’s happening in engineering. We heard someone raise the blast door, but we can’t get in there, and we couldn’t get the damn hatch open.”
Kieran grinned. “Let’s see what we can find out up here. Care to join us in Leg Cramp Central?”
A few hours later, it was over. Riker and Data—or, rather, Data’s head, since his body had been electrocuted—got to engineering,