by Carey, Diane
“Diverting, sir,” she acknowledged. “We have impulse ignition. We’re alive, sir.”
A shudder of anticipation moved across April’s shoulders. He glanced at George, but kept his command-level cool.
“Seal all magnetic hatches.”
“Hatches sealing, sir.”
“Verify integrity of all safety and containment systems.”
“Safety systems read green, sir.”
“Carlos, establish helm control.”
Carlos Florida gestured to Drake to sit down in the navigation chair—where Drake was completely useless but could probably not do much harm—and settled into his own post. He ran his hands over the control board, taking his time in spite of the obvious rush to get under way. “Helm answers, sir,” he said with a subdued pride.
“Majestic,” April whispered. He gripped the arms of his command chair and beamed at George. “Well, First Officer . . . go ahead. Move us out.”
George snapped around. His eyes asked the silent question.
“Please,” April said with a nod. A nod toward open space.
George stared at him for several seconds. Only when April nodded once more toward the viewscreen did George become sure that the captain really did want to shift this honor away from himself and onto his exec. That was it, of course. Neither one of them actually had to steer the ship; Florida would be doing that. But the honor of giving the first order, of being logged as the first person to issue the go-forward—it was Starfleet’s version of being the one to break the champagne bottle against the keel. And on top of it all, George knew April truly wanted it this way. There was no martyrdom here.
With a long, deep, steadying breath, George moved stiffly forward. “All right,” he said. “Let’s see if the empress will fly.”
Everyone felt the electricity. The first movement of the first starship.
George wasn’t officially a Starfleet pilot, and he certainly didn’t know how to drive a ship like this. He knew he was guessing. If he was wrong, he hoped Florida would quietly compensate without pointing out the missteps.
Resisting one more glance at April for reassurance, he riveted his eyes on the forward viewer and said, “Ahead twenty percent sublight, Mr. Florida.”
“Twenty percent sublight, aye.”
The helm console hummed under Florida’s hands.
Perhaps the sense of surging power behind the primary hull was imaginary, but they all sensed it. Though he knew he was surrounded by brilliant minds, George sensed a distinct childish excitement in the air about him that made him feel a little better about his place in this puzzle. They were just like him when it came to this ship and the promise it evoked. He hadn’t even seen the starship before today and these people had been working on it for a long time, but sheer astonishment had jolted him into involvement. Body and soul, he was part of it now. And a little bundle of pioneers was waiting for him. If he had failed his own family, this would be his moment to make up for it.
His hands tightened with impatience. In the viewscreen, the spacedock was pulling slowly back. The ship was moving.
Then, quite abruptly, the ship made a nauseous groan—a sound so mournful it was nearly human. Brrrrrrooooooooo . . .
The lights flickered; the lights died. The bridge went pitch black. All motion stopped.
Standing in the dark, George didn’t dare move.
Out of the darkness, out of the silence, came a voice from the navigator’s seat. Drake’s.
“I didn’t touch a thing, George. I swear I didn’t touch a thing.”
Then, from behind, came the click of an intercom at the captain’s chair, and the sound of April’s voice in the blackness.
“Bridge to engineering . . . Dr. Brownell? Are you there?”
Seconds passed before an answer came, a blunt statement delivered by a squeaky voice.
“The power source completely uncoupled itself.”
“Batteries too?”
“ ’Course the batteries too. What do you think ‘completely’ means?”
Surprised by the disrespectful tone, George automatically turned toward April’s chair, even though they still couldn’t see each other in the dark. “Who’s that?” he demanded.
The emergency backup lights popped on then, a runner of tiny lights along the bridge deck, and two small lights in the ceiling, running on their own internal battery system. The bridge was still very dim, but at least they could see.
April’s features were blurred by shadows as he hunched over the intercom. “What does that mean, doctor?”
“You want me to spend time explaining it to you, or you want me to start fixing it?”
Even April blinked at that one. He parted his lips to respond, but never got the chance. The horrid shriek of emergency alarms interrupted him, whooping throughout the ship like the sound of impending disaster.
George involuntarily grabbed the bridge rail and swiveled around, shocked.
“What is it?” April shouted into the intercom, his voice nearly drowned out by the klaxons. “Engineering!”
“—goddamned screwed-up hunka—”
“Dr. Brownell! What’s happening?”
There was a shuffle of activity inside the intercom that added to the nerve-racking blast of alarms all around them, and when a response came, a different person was talking. “Bridge! There’s been an accident! We’ve got to reestablish power to the containment devices within fifteen minutes or we’ll have to jettison the warp units!”
“Good God,” April murmured. He vaulted to his feet and headed for the turbo-lift. “George! Come with me!”
Chapter Six
ENGINEERING WAS JUST as dim as the bridge. Specialists scurried about, bumping into each other in spite of the broadness of the deck, which was still missing walls in a few places. Everyone was running, including the captain and first officer.
George followed April through an obstacle course of transport crates and disconnected machinery, which evidently was supposed to have been installed when the ship was under way.
They skidded to a stop at a group of technicians who were crowded around an access junction to a vast computer board that stretched the length of engineering, interrupted only by a ladder that led up to more panels.
“Dr. Brownell?” the captain began.
From within the bundle of engineers, up popped an animated face that was at least seventy years old, topped with a thick wave of white hair and wearing glasses—though nobody wore glasses anymore. It swiveled around until it found April. “What?” it snapped.
“What’s the matter with the ship?”
“It’s broken.”
“Might you be more specific?”
“Could if I had time,” the old man said, bobbing wintry eyebrows as he twisted a dial on some kind of hand-held conductive unit and shoved it deep into an outlet. “Can’t trust anything under fifty years old anymore.”
“Is there a danger?” April pressed, leaning over the cluster of technicians.
“Woody!” the old man called, ignoring the captain.
From across the deck, a very young man appeared behind one of the separator grids. In blatant contrast to the relic who summoned him, this fellow could hardly be twenty years old. Blond and smooth-faced, he looked very out of place among the seasoned engineers around him. “Yes, sir?”
“Get over here and explain it to August.”
“Yes, sir, be right there.”
George pulled on April’s arm. “Robert, who is that antique?”
April stepped away from the engineers and lowered his voice. “That’s Dr. Leo Brownell from Starfleet Academy. He’s a Starfleet institution, George. He’s the one who formulated the combination of dilithium thrust with the new duotronics system that allows for continuous warp,” he quickly explained.
“I thought Zefram Cochrane did that.”
“No, Cochrane discovered the warp formula itself. But warp couldn’t be used continually in uncharted space because sensors and compute
rs simply weren’t fast enough. Brownell managed to marry duotronics to the sensors. It eases our ability to move through uncharted space because we don’t have to keep stopping to see if we’re about to pile into somebody’s planet. Please don’t antagonize him, eh? He’s absolutely brilliant.”
“He’s obnoxious!”
“And this is Anthony Wood, his assistant,” April said, gesturing to the infant who was crossing the deck even now. “Equally brilliant. He graduated from college when he was all of seventeen. He’s twenty-one now.”
“Where do you find these people, Robert?” George complained under his breath as he watched Anthony Wood approach.
“Captain,” Wood greeted.
“Woody, this is our first officer, George Kirk.”
Wood made a little bow with his blond head. “Sir.”
“What’s happening, Woody? What’s wrong?” April pressed.
Wood took a deep breath. “There’s been an accidental misrouting of circuit coolant and for some reason the computer backup wasn’t on line to that junction, so it all fused and everything shorted out. The batteries and the impulse drive are both fine, but there’s no way to deliver the power to the warp containment hatches.” As Wood talked, George recognized his voice as the one they’d heard from the bridge. The one who said something about jettisoning the warp units . . .
“You said something about a deadline,” George urged.
“Yes, thirteen minutes now,” Wood said, stepping out of the way as two engineers ran by at full tilt. He moved along the deck quickly, forcing George and April to follow him as he checked readouts and adjusted dials and did incomprehensible things with surface controls, only glancing back at them once or twice as he moved. “The safety hatches weren’t meant to hold without magnetic seals, and we’ve already started the warp drive intermix. They’re hot, and there’s no cooling them down. If we don’t reestablish connectivity, those units are going to have to be blown!”
April gasped.
George headed him off. “The engines themselves?”
“Yes, the nacelles themselves,” Wood confirmed. “There’ll be a complete meltdown without those seals, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. I’m sorry, sir, but could you excuse me, please?” The young man scooted past George and climbed halfway up a ladder to where he could reach a section of toggles. “It couldn’t have happened at a worse time. Fifteen minutes ago the engines wouldn’t have been hot enough to do any damage without a power source to the seals. Fifteen minutes from now, we could’ve gotten the power directly from the warp engines. A year’s construction is going down the drain, and all because we don’t have any way to reestablish power.” Frustration added a slight whine to Wood’s voice. His smooth face shriveled as he interpreted the readouts in front of him.
“Why don’t we just hook back up to the spacedock?” George asked.
“They don’t have enough external power to feed the system,” Wood said. “There’s just not enough for what the seals need. There’s not enough anywhere that we can route fast enough.”
“Woody, get down from there, you punk!”
George and April turned in time to be met by Dr. Brownell, who was wiping dirtied hands on his worksuit, which was just as dirty. He was at least a head shorter than April, but that didn’t seem to have any effect on his attitude. He and Wood reached them at almost the same time.
“One constipated starship,” the old man said. The antiquated glasses made his eyes look twice their normal size, and exaggerated his expression to cartoon proportions.
“There’s nothing you can do?” April breathed. “Nothing at all?”
“Oh, sure. We can sit here and blow up.” Despite his manner, Dr. Brownell couldn’t hide his own deep disappointment. “You better get ready to blast those units free. At least we can salvage the hulls.”
April paled. “Damn it all,” he whispered, “damn it all.”
George pushed through to April’s side. “But those people on Rosenberg!”
“We can’t add to the death toll by letting all these engineers be killed,” April said cryptically.
“So you’re giving up?”
“We haven’t much of an option.”
“No!” George said. “You’re not.”
All eyes struck him.
April grasped his shoulder. “You have an idea?”
“I have an idea that you’re not giving up,” George said, and even he was a bit surprised by his own ferocity. “Find an alternative.”
Leo Brownell raised his wrinkled face and leveled a finger at George but looked at April. “Who is this?”
“Lives are on the line,” George said, horrified by the idea of giving up so easily when lives were at stake. He wouldn’t let them. He couldn’t. “Find an alternative!”
The finger waggled, so close to George’s head that it ruffled an auburn strand of hair. “Who is this? I want to know who this is before I die.”
George turned to Wood. “Find a way to feed power to those hatches.”
The young engineer blinked. “There’s no way to do it, not in ten minutes. We could rebuild the circuit, but not in ten minutes.”
Bristling, George closed the space between himself and Wood. “I don’t accept that! Listen to what I’m saying. Forget about the circuit. Forget about the whole ship if you have to. Just the hatches! How can we feed power to just the containment field long enough to keep from blowing the warp units? Just long enough until the warp engines have enough power to keep the seals up themselves.” He stepped to Wood and grasped the young man’s arm. “What’s the alternative?”
“I—I told you. There isn’t one,” Wood insisted. “The circuit is a mass of melted—”
George pressed closer. “There is. Pretend there’s no way to blow the warp units. You’re going to die. What do you do about it?”
Wood shrunk back against the engineering panel. His helpless stare was pathetic, but behind it there was a hint of hard thought. He never blinked, not once. He simply stared back into George’s raving glare, trying to come up with a wild card. And no one looked more surprised than he did himself when he muttered a single word.
“Shuttlecraft.”
Brownell pushed April aside and nosed up to Wood. “What? Shuttlecraft!”
April smacked his hands together. “Of course! Doctor!”
George was forced to back away a half step as Brownell whirled around faster than seemed possible for his degree of ripeness. “Outa my way, August. Thompson! Disconnect all power to the external feed except relays to the hatches. Chang! Run a power transfer device down to the hangar bay and hook it into the shuttlecraft engines! Hook it right up to the external power outlets for the magnetic hatches in the pylons. Woody, set up those connections. And find Marvick and tell him to nursemaid those engines till they’re stabilized. Hop to, boy!”
As Wood slipped away and ran into an anteroom, George realized he was panting. He forcibly calmed himself while the engineering deck burst into organized insanity. Beside him, April’s voice was so quiet it seemed out of place.
“Still think you don’t belong here, George?”
A touch of color rose in George’s cheeks. Fury or humility—he couldn’t tell which. He shrugged. “They think like engineers. It can be a handicap.” He glanced off in the direction Wood had disappeared. “I didn’t mean to scare him.”
“You scared him into saving the ship,” April said gently. “I’m grateful.”
“Think it’ll work?”
“Well, it won’t hold forever, but certainly long enough to repair the system,” the captain assured. Only a film of sweat across his upper lip remained to show the panic of a few moments ago. He wiped it away with a forefinger and indulged in a deep sigh. “Let’s get back to the bridge.”
He stepped away, hands back in those pockets again as though to show everything was all right, but stopped when he realized George wasn’t following. He turned back. “George?”
George said nothing,
but frowned at the engineering controls.
“George? What’s the matter?”
“Too much coincidence, that’s what.”
“I beg your pardon?”
George turned abruptly. “Something happens to go wrong in the one cooling tube that happens to be connected to a circuit with no backup system operating, at just the right moment when nothing can be done but abort the mission. Not fifteen minutes before, not fifteen minutes after. I don’t like it.”
“Oh, George, come now,” April protested. “Who would want to sabotage a rescue mission?”
“Not the mission,” George said. “The ship.”
“Now, George, you don’t understand. There are hundreds of cooling units aboard, and probably a score of them aren’t working yet, on top of the thousands of computer connections, any number of which will have bugs to be worked out—”
“I don’t care. I don’t like it. It sounds wrong.”
“But the collapse of the power grid wouldn’t even have been a problem if we hadn’t been in such a hurry to energize the warp engines.”
“That’s what I mean. The right circuit, the right moment.”
“George, you’ve got to lax up on this military way of thinking.”
“I thought that’s why you wanted me on board.”
“Only in part. You’re being paranoid.”
“Am I? A malfunction like that could scuttle your whole starship program and sink it under a sea of bureaucracy, and you know it.”
“Well . . . that’s true. But you don’t understand the incredible tangle of engineering behind these consoles—”
“And it’s a good thing I don’t, too. Brownell and Wood didn’t know how to think of something radical. Somebody knew how to use that against them.”
April scratched his head, trying to come up with the right words. “You’re overreacting, my friend.”
April spoke so rationally George couldn’t avoid being embarrassed. He licked his lips and forced himself to bury his suspicions for the moment, even though he knew April could still read them in his eyes.
“What would make you happy, George?” April asked with a placating tilt of his head.
“Who’s in charge of security?”