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  Lian joined in, doing her even better impersonation of their former Academy professor. “‘—within the first month of it being in space.’ Sonya, you’ll have plenty of time to study it while you work on it.”

  “I can’t do that—I need to be ready to do this job right now.”

  Letting out a long sigh, Lian said, “You haven’t changed a bit, Sonya.” She chuckled. “No, I take it back—you’ve gotten worse. Sonya, you’re already here.” Before Sonya could say anything else, Lian held up a hand. “All right, if you don’t want to come, I can’t force you, but I need to relax, so I’m going. If you want to join me—”

  “—just take the turbolift up one deck, go right, keep on down that corridor until I get to section 2B, make a left, then make an immediate right, go straight until I hit Ten-Forward.”

  Laughing, Lian said, “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you already know your way around. We’ll talk later, okay?”

  “Count on it.”

  After Lian left, Sonya went into her room, stared at her duffel for a moment, then sat at the computer desk and called up the up-to-the-minute specs on the Enterprise’s warp core. Lian had said that engineering had been a mess, which tracked with the letters Sonya had been getting. The Enterprise had gone through an unprecedented four chief engineers in its first year. With that, the fact that the ship was the first off the line of a new class of vessel, and the types of things the flagship dealt with on what seemed to be a weekly basis, the engines had probably gone through a lot. She needed to know what the engines were like.

  She also wondered who that guy was on deck thirty-one.

  CHAPTER

  2

  Captain’s log, supplemental. As happened with our sister ship, the Enterprise is beginning to experience a series of system failures. So far they are random, but I fear they could be early symptoms of what happened to the Yamato.

  “Need some help?”

  Sonya looked up with bleary eyes to see a vaguely familiar officer, wearing a junior-grade lieutenant’s pips on a gold uniform. “I’m sorry?”

  “I asked if you needed some help.”

  It took Sonya a minute to remember where she was. “God, I must’ve drifted off. I’m sorry, I—” She inhaled through her nose, exhaled through her mouth—a stress-reduction technique her sister, Belinda, had taught her when they were kids, and one that occasionally worked. This was not one of those occasions.

  She’d worked two straight shifts, having come on early during beta shift, and worked all the way through gamma. Ever since downloading the log from their sister ship, the U.S.S. Yamato—which had subsequently exploded, killing all aboard—the Enterprise had been suffering from massive systems failures.

  La Forge had put her and Clancy in charge of making sure nothing untoward happened with the warp core. It was a catastrophic collapse of the Yamato’s warp core that had led to its destruction. Clancy was currently in the upper core, testing the diagnostic systems.

  Finally, she placed the face of the lieutenant in front of her as the one from deck thirty-one her first day on board.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, holding out his hand. “Kieran Duffy. I just came on, and Lieutenant La Forge thought you could use a hand. You’re Clancy?”

  “No, Sonya Gomez,” she said, returning the handshake.

  “Ah, okay. Sorry, I’ve been on alpha and beta, so I never got to know you gamma folks. Never much of a night owl, myself.” He grinned. “Not that it matters, since it’s always night out here. So, uh—do you?”

  Sonya blinked. “I’m sorry?”

  “Need help?”

  “Oh.” Sonya picked up her padd, as she found she had no recollection of what she’d just done or what she had to do next. “I just ran a diagnostic on the antimatter control systems. They’re fine, amazingly enough. Now I have to reset all the control functions on the warp drive, since right now they’re reading that the core’s been ejected.”

  “You sure it hasn’t been?” Duffy made a show of looking over at the warp core. “No, wait, there it is. Guess we’d better reset it, then.”

  Sonya rolled her eyes. “Honestly, Lieutenant, I don’t.”

  Now it was his turn to blink. “Don’t what?”

  “Need help. I’m perfectly capable of doing this myself.”

  “Maybe, but the ship’s falling apart at the seams, and you’ve been working for two straight shifts. I just got out of bed, so I’m a lot more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed than you.” He looked at the top of her head. “Okay, with that hair, maybe you’re more bushy-tailed, but you get the idea.”

  “Lieutenant—”

  “Look, Lieutenant La Forge ordered me to help you out, and he sorta kinda outranks both of us. For that matter, I technically outrank you. So let’s just assume that whole ‘need help?’ thing was rhetorical. What’s after the reset on that little list of yours?”

  Sonya stared angrily at Duffy for a second, then finally looked back down at the display on her padd. “Make sure the flow regulators are still functioning.”

  “Fine, I’ll do that.”

  Where did La Forge find this idiot? “No, you can’t, because you need the computer for that, and I’ll be resetting it.”

  Duffy frowned. “No, I won’t. I can just—”

  Her voice rising, Sonya said, “Lieutenant, you can’t check the flow regulator systems if the computer’s being reset!”

  “Uh, Ensign?” Duffy was staring at her with a concerned look.

  “What?” she snapped.

  “You didn’t say flow regulator systems, you said flow regulators, which I can check by opening up the antimatter housing and taking a gander.”

  “The regulator’s completely okay,” Sonya said, “I just checked it—” She looked down at the padd again. “—half an hour ago. It’s the systems.”

  “You didn’t say the systems.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  He walked closer to her. He was a lot taller than she, and he was now staring down at her. “Ensign, the word ‘systems’ never escaped your lips.”

  “Fine, if you say so,” Sonya said, though she was sure, absolutely sure, that she had said “flow regulator systems.” “After that is a diagnostic on the containment unit.”

  Sounding almost triumphant, Duffy said, “Which is a separate system, and which I can do while you reset the computer.”

  Letting out a long breath, Sonya said, “Whatever you say, Lieutenant.” She walked over to the computer and started up the reset sequence. “It can’t be the flow regulators, anyhow. This is a computer problem, not a mechanical one.”

  Duffy was now standing over at one of the wall consoles and calling up the diagnostic for the containment unit. “Or it’s a design flaw.”

  Looking up sharply, Sonya said, “It’s not a design flaw.”

  “How do you know? The Galaxy-class has only been out for a little over a year. Sure, they ran every test possible in Utopia Planitia, and the shakedown went okay, but a ship this size has about a thousand things that can go wrong.”

  “This isn’t a design flaw. I’ve studied this ship from stem to stern, Lieutenant,” Sonya said angrily, “and there’s no way this is due to a design problem. For one thing, like I said, it’s the computer that’s having a malfunction. It could be an invasive program—a tribblecom.”

  “Oh, come on.” Duffy turned away from the containment unit diagnostic to look at her with amusement. “The Enterprise is protected against that kind of thing. Besides, tribblecoms don’t do this kind of damage. I think you’re letting your imagination run away with you, Ensign.”

  Sonya couldn’t believe she was listening to this. “I don’t have an imagination, Lieutenant,” she said before she realized what words were actually escaping her mouth.

  Duffy burst out laughing. At her aggrieved look, he got control of himself. “I’m sorry, Ensign, that was just too good.”

  “I miss something funny?”

  Mortified, Sonya whirled arou
nd to see Clancy standing behind her. Bad enough this idiot was intruding on her work, now he was making fun of her. “Uh, sorry, Ensign Clancy, I—”

  “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 personal log wasn’t there. In fact, everything after stardate 42609.1 was gone: her last two personal logs and the log of all the repairs she did on two and a half shifts. “Now I’ve got to write all that all over again.”

  “So’s everyone else, I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Thinking back over what she wrote in the more recent personal log, she decided it was best. What was I thinking, talking about how someone’s cute in a personal log? What if somebody reads that?

  Shaking it off, she sat back down while Lian told the rest of the story, about the Romulan ship, the Iconian base they found, and the away team peculiarly led by Captain Picard himself, and how Data was almost killed by the same program that invaded the Enterprise. Sonya was relieved at that. While she had yet to be formally introduced to the android, she’d seen him in engineering a few times, and had of course heard about the captain’s defending him on Starbase 173, helping establish the android’s sentience, which Sonya had actually thought was a given, though Lian hadn’t. She was glad he was okay, and that nobody was seriously hurt.

  “But that’s not the really good part,” Lian said with a smile. “I’ve got a date!”

  Sonya blinked. “Huh?”

  “You know Soon-Tek Han in security?”

  “No.” Sonya didn’t even know who any of the other engineers besides Clancy, Duffy, Russell, and La Forge were. She had far too much work to do to pay attention to security people.

  “He’s very nice, and he’s invited me to have dinner with him in Ten-Forward tomorrow. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  “I guess,” Sonya said hesitantly. She couldn’t imagine the notion of having time to go on a date. She had her duties, and then she spent her off-duty time going over everything, to make sure she hadn’t missed something, or catching up on the technical journals so she wouldn’t lose track of what was going on while she was out here, or sleeping. Plus, there was always extra work. Geordi La Forge ran an efficient engine room. He had been working with some noncommissioned kid—Lian had said he was the son of the former chief medical officer, and was an “acting ensign,” whatever that meant, due to his great genius—to adjust the deuterium control conduit, even though it was well within specified norms, and if he was going to nitpick the engines that much, Sonya had to stay on her toes. The notion of a social life seemed utterly alien to her.

  “Well, I hope you two have fun,” she said gamely, wishing the best for her roommate.

  “Thanks. He said he was going to pick the cuisine. Can’t wait to see what it is.”

  Sonya smiled, then checked the chronometer and frowned. “Ugh, I’m back on shift in twenty minutes.” She looked down at herself. “I gotta shower and change.”

  Both women rose and moved to their respective bedrooms.

  “I need sleep,” Lian said. “Talk to you later, Sonya!”

  Sonya started removing her uniform as she entered her bedroom. Heading toward the commode, she ordered the computer to read her the table of contents from the Journal of Applied Warp Mechanics. The latest issue of JAWM had been released the day before, but in the hustle and bustle of the Iconian mess, she hadn’t gotten to it. As she showered, she instructed the computer on which articles to flag.

  She was not going to be caught out without knowing everything.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Captain’s log, stardate 42737.3. It has been six weeks since our entrance into the Selcundi Drema sector. Each system has revealed the same disturbing geological upheavals on every planet.

  Sonya was reading an article on her padd while exiting her bedroom and trying not to scream. “I don’t believe this!”

  Lian was eating breakfast at the large table. Swallowing her steaming oatmeal, she asked, “Don’t believe what?”

&nb
sp; “This idiot is writing an article on subspace accelerators.”

  Frowning, Lian asked, “Didn’t you write a paper on that?” before scooping more oatmeal into her mouth.

  “Yes, and this Doctor—” She touched a control to get the article header, with the author’s name. “—Xe’r’b’w’r’s’o is talking through her fur. The magnetic containment unit she has will break down after the first time it’s used, and her alignments are all completely off-kilter. Anybody builds an SA to these specs is just asking for trouble—it’s more likely than anything to just fall apart. I proved that in my paper, but she doesn’t even cite it!”

  Lian shrugged. “So write to the journal and complain.”

  Walking over to the replicator, Sonya shuddered and said, “Oh, I can’t do that.” To the replicator, she added, “Hot chocolate, please.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  “I’m just a Starfleet ensign—when I wrote the paper I just was a third-year cadet. Dr. Xe’r’b’w’r’s’o is the leading authority on subspace at Thelian University—I couldn’t just write in and say she’s an idiot. I mean, sure, in our cabin, that’s one thing, but I can’t write a letter.” She looked at Lian. “Can I?”

  Shaking her head, Lian said, “I don’t understand you, Sonya. You’re one of the brightest people I’ve ever met, and you push yourself to be better than the best—but you refuse to realize it.”

  Sonya almost shrunk in her chair. “I’m not anything special.”

  “Yes, you are.” She held up a hand. “Forget it, I’m tired of beating my head against that particular wall. I have to go. Soon-Tek and I are having breakfast.”

  Staring at Lian’s now-empty bowl of oatmeal, Sonya asked, “So why did you just eat oatmeal?”

  “Because he wants to have a Vulcan breakfast. Vulcan food makes me gag, but he likes it, so I agreed, and stocked up on oatmeal first.” She smiled. “Hey, listen, what’re you doing after your shift?”