Echoes … They had been on his mind, during this process; more lately than in the earliest stages, when they had stripped Enterprise’s skin off her and begun the serious reshaping of her most basic structural members. Then he had felt more like a surgeon overseeing a desperately radical rebuild of an unconscious patient: pulling the “chest cavity” of her secondary hull apart and increasing its length by half, while increasing the size of all the contained organs and adding a few new ones; chopping the nacelle “legs” off at midthigh and attaching newer, longer ones; increasing the capacity of her primary-hull “skull” by thirty percent and installing bigger, newer brains (and an equivalent amount of empty deck- and other space, for unlike the way human brains were arranged these days, Enterprise’s redesigners wanted to leave her room to expand in hardware as well as software). It had been a harrowing period, including a three-month stretch when there was no part of her that held the vacuum out, a long cold time when Enterprise’s skeleton shone spidery, bare, and baleful in the starlight, and in his little bunkie in the spacedock facility Will would wake up in the night shivering, for no good reason. But when they put her hull back on, and pressurized and warmed and reinstalled the interiors; when there were corridors again, and rooms; then, when Will had first started prowling these corridors late at night, he had started to hear the whisper of old voices.
At first he had resented them. But Will had swiftly put the resentment aside. Over the years, that had become his particular talent—the art of dealing with the raw hand the universe dealt him, and not getting too upset about it until after a given crisis was over and there was leisure for that kind of thing. Captains could not afford to nurse grudges or throw tantrums. Too many lives usually depended on the captain for such indulgences of temper, and between times they also looked bad … and summoned up ghosts better left resting, especially in Will’s case. He knew how miraculous it was that he had been given this command at all, considering his father’s final tour of duty in Starfleet. Fortunately, Command had not—this time—been so vindictive or blinkered as to judge the son by the father. And also … Kirk had been plugging for him. That by itself had probably made the difference.
Not that the man’s influence could not be felt here, inevitably, all through the refit. Will stood up and stretched, looking around the bridge at the new computer interfaces, the new paneling and screens … and still it was as if the impress of Kirk’s personality lay deep, soaked right into the substructures of the reshaped hull, into the gamma-welded metal of Enterprise’s infrastructure. There was no denying the history that had been made here. Will had spent much time going through her logs while in the pre-deconstruction stages, the time when everyone looked at the ship to evaluate the stresses she had been through, when the initial 3-D imaging of her present hull and skeleton were being done preparatory to the strip-down stages. Will had been thorough, had spent a long time insisting that certain details be checked—the results of the stresses inflicted on the ship at Eminiar 7, in Tholian space, in the encounter with the Gorn, in so many others; brushes with Romulan plasma weaponry in the Neutral Zone, with this powerful alien tractor beam or that holding field, the one that had looked like a god’s giant hand….
But more than mere physical details had come up in the logs. There had been the voices—stressed, outraged, triumphant, defiant, dejected, thoughtful, amused, afraid: the voices of Enterprise command crew, caught by the bridge recording devices over five years. And even now the memories, in the quiet dogwatches of the night, sometimes spoke surprisingly loudly—Red-Alert alarms howling at dangers the ship had seemed to survive almost by miracle; voices raised in anger, in surprise, occasionally in wonder; “… we will not kill today.” … “Get these things off my bridge!” … “Would it really have hurt us just to burn a little incense?” … “Decker, no!” …
Will shook his head, and the echoes receded. There were nights when they were so strong they drowned out the sound of his own breathing. An overactive imagination…? he thought as he left the bridge, listening to the sound the lift doors now made when they closed, and noting with approval that the annoying squeak that had been coming from one of the hydraulic units had now been repaired. “Deck 12,” he said, and the lift scooted along sideways briefly on its way to the main lift shaft.
Maybe not precisely overactive, Will thought. But this ship had so much history with her old crew, a truly astonishing group of people. Easy to feel overshadowed, sometimes, by so much experience, so many experiences. He knew he would have his own chances to make history with this ship: years of chances, if Command was kind to him, and he didn’t screw up. That fear was his particular shadow to fight with for the moment … and to that fear, evenings made no difference. Any small mistake made now might turn into a bigger one later, and he would be blamed for it: and his career would be over. There were too many people in Starfleet for whom the name Decker was still poison.
The lift stopped, opened. Will stepped out and heard voices coming toward him down the hallway, ones he immediately recognized. He grinned a little as they came around the curve of the corridor toward him. It was the specialized engineering team delegated by Scotty to work on the weapons systems: Wirth, Hanlon, Torsten, and Odanga, known casually to some of the other engineering people as “the Ineffables” for their tendency to speak to one another almost exclusively in technological terminology so abstruse as to make even Scotty shake his head. The Ineffables might speak to lesser beings, such as their captain, in English, but it was apparent that this cost them some strain.
“Captain,” said Wirth as Will came around the corner, and the others behind him nodded courteously to Decker.
They looked dog-tired, the whole lot of them; haggard. “Thought you folks should have been off hours ago,” Will said.
“Oh, you know how it is, Captain. It got … interesting.” Wirth smiled at him, and Will grimaced. The gunnery team’s work had become much more than usually “interesting” with the installation of the new gunnery conduits that sourced their power directly from the warp engines. The original specs had suggested “heretofore impossible” increases in phaser output due to the new design. Will (and the gunnery team) suspected that the word “heretofore” could be safely dropped from the description, because no one had been able to get the damned things to work even in simulations once they had to interact with the ship’s warp engine in situ. Will had found himself once too often crawling up the butt end of a Jefferies tube alive with the raw energies of the universe and cursing all the “paper engineers” in the world, the ones convinced that everything would inevitably run smoothly as long as both sides of all the equations balanced. Those were the people who were going to be responsible for sending the Enterprise out into her new life with weaponry that was going to have to he “run in” on live mission time.
“It’s not too bad though, Sir,” said Torsten, pushing away the wisp of blond hair that seemed perpetually to be falling in front of her eyes. “Now that we’re getting close to launch … a lot of people are finding things more ‘interesting’ than they have been. Not just the installation problems.” She grinned at him. “It’s just exciting. A lot of extra time going in, all over the place. Those crazy guys down on the computing team, even the furnishings and fittings people…”
Will grinned. “Well, okay, but don’t try to tell Fleet I made you do it. But the phasers…” He shook his head. “Is this system ever going to work?” Will said, possibly sounding a little more desperate than he meant to.
Wirth shrugged. “In my depressive moments, I think maybe on the Greek kalends, sometime. But one way or another, we’ll get ’em going for you, Sir.”
Will clapped him on the shoulder and headed away. “Good man … I appreciate it. You people go get some sleep, now!”
“You do that too, Sir….”
Their chatter resumed as they headed for the lift, making for the transporter room, and Will smiled at the sound as the lift doors cut it off. He had few words for how intens
ely pleased he was that his people were as concerned about this ship’s readiness as he was. Weaponry in particular was something of an issue for Will. Not that Fleet’s purposes were not peaceful … but peace was sometimes best achieved and maintained by carrying a very big selection of very big sticks which could be set for “brandish” or “clobber” as necessary. This one, though, would apparently be a while before it was ready to clobber anything. We could have gotten this sorted out a long time ago, he thought. If only, as Scotty says, we were running shifts….
Unfortunately, Starfleet was taking the leisurely approach to Enterprise’s refit. To Will’s annoyance, they had some justification for this: most of the “dedicated” construction crews were busy at the main spacedock facility on the other side of the orbital facilities’ path around Earth, deep in work on Yorktown and Congo, two new ships at a much earlier stage of development. This made Will grouse sometimes to his refit staff, but there was no point in it. He had tried to get Fleet to understand the importance of having this ship ready in the minimum possible time, but they were simply not seeing things his way. “What if something happens?” he had said to Admiral Nogura, knowing that he had nothing but a hunch to go on; and Nogura had told him in that bland way of his that there was no reason for alarm, that there were plenty of other ships in Starfleet in case “something should happen” … and that Will should get on with his work and stop bothering him. All very avuncular and jolly, in Nogura’s usual manner: but the message was sharp.
So Will went back to his ship, understanding the subcontext—that Matt Decker’s son had better not get caught showing any significant eccentricity—and got on with work. Everyone else had as well. The kind of report he had just now from the gunnery people, who had been receiving most of his attention these past few days until the sensor and viewing systems had started to act up, had been routinely duplicated elsewhere … dedication, exercised to nearly insane levels by people who were proud to be working on this ship and were determined to do their best for her. Will had heard often enough before about the obsessiveness of the computer installation crew, down there working themselves to pieces all the hours that God sent; he had certainly initialed enough of their overtime manifests, and with pleasure, since they deserved them. Those computers were Enterprise’s nervous system, more and more important with every passing day to the ship’s function. Already many, many more functions were handled by them than had ever been handled on a starship of this class … but that was inevitable, as the ships themselves became endlessly more intricate, the product of billions of man-hours of labor in terms of design and installation. Must go down and see those folks, Will thought. First things first, though…
He swung down the corridor toward sickbay. The new facility had a wider, airier, roomier design than the last one, as much for psychological reasons as ease of care and access, so Christine Chapel had told him during another of these late nights. She too was determined to understand her new facility completely, and to be complete in mastery of it by the time the ship went active and was likely to start routinely presenting her with patients. She had already been receiving them, of course, ever since Enterprise’s keel was “sealed over” again and she went airtight. Any naval construction site has a certain “budgeted” number of accidents—even (though this was less frequently discussed) an expected number of construction-related deaths, though Decker thanked the Great Bird fairly frequently that there had been none of these yet—and Fleet saw no reason why injuries should be treated off-site when the ship had a perfectly good sickbay even partially in place. Christine, for her own part, agreed; transit time to other facilities would imperil the survival chances of the seriously injured. And she plainly intended to keep any serious casualties from going more serious, or fatal, on her watch. She had been spending more time down here than was probably strictly necessary, getting sickbay readier than it would normally have been at this stage of things.
The sickbay doors parted for him. He glanced around. “A bit stressed, Captain,” said the mild voice from the next room.
“You don’t need the machines to tell you that,” Will said.
“No, but you walked through the scan field,” Doctor Chapel said, and came through the glass doors from her office. “The blood pressure again. You haven’t been working out.”
Will snorted. “I’ve been doing bench presses with a two-million-ton starship,” he said. “Should do something for my abdominals eventually, if nothing else. How are things shaking down in your neighborhood?”
“No complaints.”
He smiled in disbelief at that one, standing in the midst of sickbay and looking around. Chapel had gone some ways beyond the original consultation documents which McCoy had provided, shifting equipment around and insisting on the addition of some extremely new and expensive items to the design; additions that had taken some fancy footwork to implement, and some quiet favors done up in the more senior ends of engineering and in the Surgeon General’s office. But everything had eventually gone as Christine had wanted it, despite the budget overruns. It helped to have Scotty chewing on the upper-ups from one side, and on the other, McCoy descending from one of many other consultations to exercise his usual tact and discretion on the SG in an unscheduled lunchtime “meeting.” Will very much wished he had imagery and sound on that encounter.
“‘Blood pressure,’” Will said to Doctor Chapel. “You must not have had a lot of time to evaluate that data thoroughly.”
“Don’t try to wriggle out,” she said. “And on the contrary: I had all I needed. I’ve been seeing how hard I can push this creature.” Doctor Chapel patted the wall behind which lived the managing computer for the medical scanning hardware and software. There was a tremendous amount of computing power in there, since it had become plain that there were advantages to keeping the sickbay computing resources as independent as possible from the ship’s “main” ones. McCoy had been militating for similar design “splits” which would ensure sickbay did not lose its power when the rest of the ship did, for example during battle situations: but this was a more involved issue, one which might not be resolved in this refit.
“And is it satisfying your requirements?” Will said.
“So far.”
“But seriously, you read me down the hall? Might be some confidentiality issues there.”
“If the people using it weren’t responsible,” Christine said, “yes. Not that anyone of that description is ever going to work in here, not if I can help it.” She sighed. “Now about your b.p.…”
“Christine, please,” Will said, “I’m going to bed, honest. And I told you I stopped putting salt on things. It’s even starting to taste strange to me, now.”
“Good.”
“And as soon as I look in on the computer people—”
“Not right to bed, then.” She gave him another of those potentially grim looks.
“Just half an hour more, honest. I might ask what you’re doing here so late.”
“Oh, well…” The grimness fell off her expression, and a shade of smile crept in. “Tell them all they should go to bed, too.”
“It was on my mind. I’m going to sneak up and surprise them; their work habits are starting to pass into legend. And what about you? All work and no play…”
Doctor Chapel grinned at him. “Will,” she said, “what makes you think this isn’t play? All these lovely toys… You in particular should understand.”
He had to laugh at that. “Okay, right,” he said. “I’m going down to 16 … then to bed. Don’t make me send some poor ensign for you.”
She snorted. “Get out of here,” Doctor Chapel said, “before I find some interesting new elective surgery to perform on you.”
Will chuckled, and headed out.
Deck 16 was where the computer core lay, and Will took the turbolift nearest to sickbay and headed down that way. The lift system was presently being “polished” and debugged on the starboard side between decks 11 and 20, after some inter
ior flaws in the tubes became evident, so that this lift would not deliver him right down the hall from the core as the fully functional one would: Will would have to walk a few hundred meters to get where he was going.
The lift doors opened, and Will stepped out. The doors closed behind him, and he stood there for a moment. Silence, and the echoes: the whisper of voices from a long time ago…
Will walked through the silence and the faint, far-off sound of the voices. They were mostly benevolent, down here, for this was part of Scotty’s realm, and most of the echoes had the accent of the Glasgow shipyards. “They canna take the strain…” he could hear Scotty grousing. But somehow “they” always did. He trailed a hand along one corridor wall as he went, remembering, with slight amusement, the dream he’d had a couple of weeks ago in which he’d done just this, and the wall had absently pushed back against his hand, like a cat being stroked….
All of a sudden the spirit of mischief woke up in him. I’m just going to have a little look at what they’re doing, he thought, before I go in there, Pull the “omniscient captain” number on them a little. They deserve a laugh.
Will hung a right at the next corridor junction and headed off down that corridor to one of the ancillary computer access/control facilities that served the core. There were seven of these dotted around the ship on various decks, places where engineering or computer staff could get a “look” at the operating systems and runtime parameters of the computer control network. The multiple facilities were an indicator of the way the net itself had now been decentralized, in response to events in old Enterprise’s history when one or another invading force had temporarily mastered the ship by mastering her computer. Will had approved heartily of the idea of making this kind of stunt more difficult by restructuring the system so that it was both holographic in nature and multiply redundant, with the heuristic parameters set to take away control from any “rogue” part of the network, analyze the roguery, and self-firewall against it while attempting to resume control of the hostilely abstracted functions. It meant the system was much more complex than it had been, but Will was willing to accept that problem in trade for not having the ship’s computers routinely taken over by alien beings with alien agendas.
Star Trek: Enterprise Logs Page 14