Many Splendors Read online

  Again, Sonya’s stomach started doing cartwheels. She had no idea that La Forge had requested her, much less read her thesis. Looking down and smiling, she asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Ten-Forward. We’re gonna forget about work. We are gonna sit, talk, relax, look at the stars.” He pointed a vaguely accusatory finger at her. “You need to learn how to slow down.”

  It was the same thing Lian had said to her on her first night, and she believed it even less now than she had then. “Oh, no no no no, I can’t do that.”

  La Forge stopped walking; so did she. “You know, you’re awfully young to be so driven.”

  This was hardly the first time she’d heard those words, and she gave the lieutenant the same answer she always gave: “Yes, I am. I had to be. I had to be the best, because only the best get to be here. Geordi—” She cut herself off, realizing she’d just committed the latest in a series of faux pas. “Lieutenant,” she amended, lowering her head.

  “It’s okay,” La Forge said. And indeed, most of the people in the engine room referred to the lieutenant by his first name. But most of the people in the engine room hadn’t spilled hot chocolate all over the captain, so she wasn’t sure where her boundaries lay. “Go on.”

  “Whatever is out here, we’re going to be the first humans to see it—and I wanna be a part of that. I want to understand it.”

  “Sonya, relax.” La Forge started walking again, and Sonya kept pace. “You’re here. You’ve made it. But you won’t last long bangin’ into walls. It’ll be there for you, believe me.”

  “Okay,” she said in a small voice.

  “Look, I promise I won’t let anything exciting slip past without letting you know, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said with more authority.

  “Okay.” La Forge smiled as they entered the turbolift. “Deck ten.”

  The lunch had been one of the most pleasant experiences of Sonya’s career to date. One of the many reasons why Sonya had turned down Lian’s offers of eating here or in the mess with other people was that she had some bad memories of family dinners. It all depended, of course, on how Mami and Belinda were getting along that week. When they were in one of their bad phases, Sonya felt as bad sitting at the dinner table as she had in engineering the entire morning. Those memories were hard to ignore.

  But La Forge was an easy conversationalist. He had Wesley’s intelligence, but the ensign’s youthful enthusiasm was replaced in La Forge with a casual happiness. The lieutenant was doing what he loved doing and what he was particularly good at.

  When they returned to engineering, it was back to duty, especially since both the captain and a shuttle had gone missing.

  “Obviously,” Duffy said in a stage whisper to Kornblum, “that hot chocolate that Gomez ordered was actually a gateway to another dimension and it sucked the captain in before he could change his uniform.”

  Before Sonya could say anything, Denny walked up. “Hey, c’mon, leave her alone, Duff.”

  “C’mon, it’s just a joke. She understands, right?”

  Smiling, Sonya looked at Duffy. “Actually, the hot chocolate was really a special acidic compound that only attacks people of the rank of lieutenant or higher. So watch it, or I’ll spill it on you, too.”

  Everyone laughed at that. Sonya felt like someone lifted the world off her shoulders, as she realized they were laughing with her rather than at her.

  “Honestly,” Kornblum said, “that wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that happened on this ship. Remember when the captain got sucked into that energy cloud that killed Singh?”

  “Or when that duplicate captain from the future showed up?” Duffy added.

  “Or when that Ferengi controlled his mind and trapped him on the Stargazer?” Kornblum said.

  “Or Q.”

  “What’s a Q?” Denny asked.

  “All right, that’s enough.” That was La Forge, walking over from the main engineering console. “We just heard from the bridge. The captain’s back.”

  Sonya frowned. “What do you mean, back?”

  La Forge shrugged. “All I can say is, the shuttlecraft’s back in the bay, and the captain’s in Ten-Forward.”

  Sonya shook her head in confusion. “Does this count as something exciting?”

  Chuckling, La Forge said, “If it is, it slipped by me, too.”

  The engineers all went back to work. Sonya saw that the antimatter containment unit needed a bit of an adjustment. She worked on that for a little while, until the warp core activated.

  “What the hell?” The readouts said that the helm was inactive, and that they were moving at quarter impulse, as they had been since the search for the captain had ceased. Yet the warp core was pounding away as if the ship were at warp nine.

  La Forge was by her side in an instant. “What’s happening?”

  “I…I don’t know.”

  From behind her, Kornblum said, “Sir, according to the velocity meter, we’re traveling at warp twenty-two.”

  “That’s impossible,” Sonya said.

  “Yeah, well, so’s the captain disappearing and reappearing,” La Forge muttered, “but they both fit the MO of somebody I really didn’t wanna see again.”

  The next few hours would, Sonya knew, live in her nightmares for the rest of her life.

  The somebody La Forge didn’t want to see was Q. Though Denny didn’t recognize the entity, Sonya did, from her studying of the Enterprise’s missions while at the Academy. He—if the masculine pronoun even truly applied—was a fantastically powerful creature who’d toyed with the ship twice before, including on her maiden voyage. Now he’d sent the Enterprise to the Delta Quadrant, several thousand light-years from the Federation, right in the path of a species known as the Borg.

  Sonya had said she wanted to be here seeing things no human had seen before, and she got a hard lesson in the cliché about being careful what you wish for. The Borg ship had attacked the Enterprise, carving out portions of three decks, costing the ship eighteen people. During the frantic repair cycle in engineering, La Forge had had to keep her on track, as she found herself unable to wrap her mind around the fact that eighteen people, some of whom she probably knew, were dead. The Yamato had been bad enough, but she didn’t know anybody there. What if one of the casualties is Lian? Or Ella? Or—

  La Forge, bless him, had kept her in line. “We’ll have time to grieve later. Right now, let’s get those shields up.”

  Sonya had hoped that “later” would be in her quarters. Eventually Q had taken pity on them and sent them back home to the Alpha Quadrant before the Borg could destroy them. La Forge had let alpha shift—who had all stayed on well into beta—go. Sonya had gone to her cabin only to find Lian crying.

  One of the eighteen people lost to the Borg ship was Soon-Tek Han.

  Finding herself unable to say anything comforting to Lian, and respecting her desire to be left alone, Sonya instead went to the one place where she had felt comfortable since coming on board the Enterprise.

  While sitting in Ten-Forward, watching the stars go by as they flew toward Starbase 83 for repairs, Sonya heard a voice. “Surprised to see you here.”

  She looked up to see Kieran Duffy, but said nothing.

  Looking down at her drink, Duffy smirked and asked, “That’s not hot chocolate, is it?”

  The clear glass had an equally clear liquid in it, so Sonya knew the lieutenant was simply teasing. “Tequila, actually. My papi always kept a bottle of Petròn Annejo for special occasions, which usually meant he only took it out when somebody died. I couldn’t think of anything better to order.”

  “Yeah.” Duffy himself was cradling what looked like a beer or ale or somesuch. Both were, of course, syntheholic. Enterprise policy was that its crew was expected to stick with synthehol where at all possible. Besides, Sonya really didn’t want to get drunk; she tended to lose control with alcohol, and she had enough control problems as it was.

  Realizing how uncomfortable it was having Duffy hover over her, Sonya said, “Have a seat, Lieutenant—unless you’re scared I’ll spill the tequila on you.”

  Duffy chuckled. “Thanks. And I’m not worried about that, unless you meant what you said before about the acid.”

  “No.” Sonya threw back some tequila. While the synthehol version didn’t get her drunk, it didn’t have the same burning sensation as it went down the throat, either, which Sonya found herself missing.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Not really.” Sonya let out a long breath and shook her head. “I just can’t get it right in my head, you know? Eighteen people just—just gone.”

  After taking a sip of his ale, Duffy asked, “You ever have Commander Schönhertz at the Academy?”

  “Well, it’s Captain Schönhertz, but yeah.”

  “She got promoted? Good for her.” Duffy started turning his ale glass in place. “Well, remember what she used to say?”

  Sonya wondered how old Duffy was, if his Academy days were long enough ago that Schönhertz was still a commander. And he’s still a j.g.? That didn’t speak well for his career prospects.

  Aloud, she said, “‘Space is mean.’”

  “Yup. Except that’s not really it. Space isn’t mean, because mean implies malice. What space is is uncaring. It’s a brutal environment, but it’s not a nasty one, because it’s not trying to kill you. It just is the way it is. All we can do is work with it best we can.” He smiled. “That’s why I like to fly.”

  “You’re a pilot?”

  “No, I mean fly. My uncle got me a pair of gravity boots for my birthday when I was a teenager. I loved those things—didn’t stop using ’em until I hurt myself.”

  Sonya winced. “What happened?”

  Shrugging, Duffy said, “Zigged when I shoulda zagged.” He got a faraway look in his eyes. “I should dig them out, try ’em on the holodeck.”

  “What’s the holodeck like, Lieutenant?”

  “Hey, c’mon, we’re off duty, Ensign. It’s Kieran.”

  “Sonya.”

  “Good. And you haven’t been on the holodeck yet?”

  She looked down at her drink. “Haven’t had the time.”

  “That’s crazy. Last time I checked, humans only needed eight hours of sleep, and each shift is only eight hours. That leaves eight hours to do whatever you want, and you haven’t been on the holodeck?”

  Sonya looked up. “It’s not that simple. I have to keep up with the journals and work extra shifts sometimes, and—”

  Duffy got a confused look on his face. “La Forge isn’t making you do this, is he? That isn’t his style.”

  She looked back down at the drink. “Not really.”

  “Trust me, Sonya, you don’t need to beat yourself to a pulp. La Forge is a good guy, and he’s obviously taken an interest in you. That’s a good sign, really. The lieutenant has pretty high standards—which makes you wonder what he sees in me, to be honest.”

  “I’m sure that’s not true,” Sonya said meekly, though she had to admit to have been thinking the same thing.

  “Ah, he’s kinda stuck with me. I was part of the original shakedown crew, I served under MacDougal, Argyle, Logan, and Lynch before La Forge got the promotion, and I don’t really want to go anywhere else. This is a great ship.”

  “That’s true.”

  They kept talking for a while after that—through another drink each—and Sonya found herself unable to recall the specifics of the conversation, but she did feel a lot better when it was over.

  When he tossed back the last of his second ale, Duffy got up. “I gotta go—people to do, things to see. It was nice talking to you, Sonya.”

  “Same here,” Sonya said with a smile. “Thanks, Kieran.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  CHAPTER

  5

  Captain’s log, stardate 42923.4. Despite misgivings, I have agreed to Starfleet’s request that the Enterprise divert to the Braslota system to take part in a war-game exercise. Joining us as observer and mediator is the Zakdorn master strategist Sirna Kolrami.

  “Hey there, HC.”

  Sonya gritted her teeth at Kornblum’s greeting as she entered main engineering. For months, the nickname had modulated from “Ensign Hot Chocolate” to “Ensign HC” and now to simply “HC.” Never mind the fact that she hadn’t touched the stuff since her now-infamous encounter with Captain Picard. Never mind the fact that she’d been responsible for implementing Commander Riker’s plan to save La Forge from the Pakleds who’d kidnapped him, thus saving her CO’s life and earning herself a commendation. Never mind the fact that she’d taken up Earl Grey tea, the captain’s favorite drink, as penance. The nickname remained.

  Even in Ten-Forward, people greeted her thusly. The only exceptions were the fellow members of the “corner office,” as it had come to be named. Trying to take the advice given her by Lian, Geordi, and Kieran to heart, Sonya had finally taken her roommate up on her offer to join the group of friends in Ten-Forward for drinks. The rest of the group included Tess Allenby, who served as a shuttle pilot and the backup conn officer for both beta and gamma shifts; Gar Costa and Helga Van Mayter, both fellow alpha-shift engineers; and later, at Sonya’s own urging, Denny Russell. They took up the port-side corner table. Guinan, Ten-Forward’s enigmatic host, often had their drinks ready before they arrived—for Sonya it was Earl Grey—and other people generally knew not to sit there.

  “You hear the scuttlebutt, HC?” Kornblum asked her now in engineering.

  Sighing, Sonya said, “If you mean about Lieutenant Worf and that Klingon emissary on the holodeck, yes, I did hear.” And she wished she hadn’t. Klingon sex was one of those things about which she felt it was better to live in blissful ignorance.

  “Nah, that’s old news—I mean about the Hathaway. I hear La Forge’ll be taking some people over there for the war game.”

  “Really?” Sonya now noticed Riker was in engineering talking to La Forge about something. “Isn’t Commander Riker commanding the ship for the exercise?”

  Kornblum nodded. “Wouldn’t that be great?”

  “I don’t see why. It’s an eighty-year-old ship. What possible use could there be in crawling around an old wreck like that?”

  “Oh, I dunno, sounds like an engineer’s dream.”

  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.