What's Past_ Many Splendors (Book 6) - Keith R.A. DeCandido [6]
“Ah, you’re Clancy,” Duffy said, stepping around Sonya with his hand out. “I’m Lieutenant—”
“—Duffy, right,” Clancy finished, grasping the lieutenant’s hand. “Geordi said you’d be helping out. Thanks.”
“No problem. I’m doing the diagnostic on the containment unit while Ensign Gomez finishes resetting the warp drive controls and checks the flow regulator systems.”
“Good,” Clancy said.
Duffy smiled and turned back to the containment unit.
Hoping her cheeks weren’t turning as red as she feared, Sonya looked down at the display and finished the start-up sequence for the reset.
Just as she realized what had gone wrong and had lifted her hand to fix it, Clancy said, “Uh, Sonya, are you sure it’s a good idea to—”
“I know, Ella,” Sonya said quickly. She and Clancy had gotten on a first-name basis fairly quickly, especially since it was often just the two of them working together. Sonya had set the entire engineering system to reset, not just the warp core controls. If she’d done that, they’d also lose impulse. At present, they were heading toward some planet or other at sublight, and losing impulse control would be disastrous, especially with everything else going wrong. As she input new commands, she said, “It was a mistake, I’m sorry.”
“Actually, it was my fault,” Duffy said from behind her. “I was distracting the ensign with the joke about the monk, the clone, and the Ferengi. That’s, uh, why I was laughing—I was trying to get her to laugh, you see.”
With an amused glance at Sonya, Clancy said, “Doesn’t appear to have worked.”
“No, sir,” Sonya said. Then she found herself unable to resist smiling. “I’m afraid I don’t find Mr. Duffy at all humorous.”
“Well, it isn’t really that good a joke. Anyhow,” Duffy said, “it’s all my fault for distracting her. Won’t happen again.”
Clancy nodded. Sonya found herself relaxing for the first time since the Yamato blew up. When Clancy turned her back, she gave Duffy a grateful look for taking the heat. He just gave her a goofy grin in response, and got to work on the containment unit.
Halfway through alpha shift, La Forge had insisted that Clancy and Gomez go off duty. Both women had tried to convince him that they were fine, but when Ella referred to their CO as “Fa Lorge,” and Sonya found herself incapable of remembering the term “warp core,” they both agreed that they needed rest. Sonya paused only long enough to do a personal log, during which she found herself saying how cute she thought Kieran Duffy was once she got past his goofball exterior, and then she crashed.
Lian woke her up ten hours later, at which point it was all over.
Sonya walked over to the replicator. “Hot chocolate, please.” She turned to Lian while the replicator hummed with her order. Her roommate was seated on the couch with a green tea cupped in her hands. “What happened?” The hot chocolate materialized, and she said, “Thank you,” then walked over to join Lian on the couch.
“It turned out that there was an Iconian computer program in the Yamato’s log. It was overwriting our computer sys—”
“I knew it!” Sonya said as she sat down. “I told him it had to be a tribblecom of some kind.”
“This wasn’t just a tribblecom, and who’s ‘him’?”
“Duffy—a lieutenant from alpha shift. La Forge asked him to help me and Ella out. He insisted it was a design flaw, and when I told him it was a tribblecom, he laughed at me. Okay, there was something else, when I misspoke, but still, he was laughing, the big jerk. And what do you mean it wasn’t just a tribblecom?”
“If it was, it was a tribble the size of the moon. This program was rewriting the entire computer system. They finally fixed it by purging the memory and restoring it from the protected archives.”
Sonya nodded. “Makes sense. It means they lost everything from after we downloaded the Yamato log, but—” Her eyes widened. “Oh, no!”
Lian tilted her head. “What’s wrong?”
She bounded up from the couch and went over to the terminal, only to see that her