Alpha shift hadn’t been as bad as Sonya had feared. Although Geordi La Forge was a perfectionist, he wasn’t an unreasonable one, and he never asked his people to do anything they couldn’t. He was very hands-on, to the point where Sonya wondered why he bothered even having a staff, but he could delegate when it was called for.

She also saw a lot more of Wesley Crusher. Although nominally assigned to the bridge as the alpha-shift conn officer, Wesley—partly in preparation for his Academy studies, partly due to the kid’s sheer brilliance—also did quite a bit of work in engineering. The icogram he’d requested had been the right call, as had Sonya’s caveat. It would indeed take more dilithium than had ever been recorded to have it be the reason for the geologic stresses wracking Selcundi Drema, but that’s just what the icogram found on Drema IV. The Enterprise was also able to prevent that world from being destroyed, thus saving its native civilization. Sonya had heard a lot more rumors like the one Lian told her about Data talking to a girl on the surface, and several people had said they saw Data walking the corridors with an alien child nobody recognized, but again, Sonya didn’t put much stock in the rumors.

She did, however, put stock in Wesley. The kid was the genuine article. They’d spoken a few times since she switched to alpha, regularly interrupting each other and throwing ideas back and forth.

When she had her first break on her third day on alpha, she walked over to the replicator near the corridor entrance and requested a hot chocolate.

Laughter from her left caused her to look up to see La Forge chuckling and walking over to her. “We, uh—we don’t ordinarily say ‘please’ to food dispensers around here.”

Sonya smiled. Lian had said much the same thing when she ended her first dinner request with a “please,” and she gave La Forge the same answer she had given Lian then: “Well, since it’s listed as intelligent circuitry, why not?” However, with Lian, she’d stopped there. Now, she went on. “After all, working with so much artificial intelligence can be dehumanizing, right? So why not combat that tendency with a little simple courtesy?” Turning to the replicator, she reached for the hot chocolate and said, “Ah, thank you.”

“For someone who just arrived, you certainly aren’t shy with your opinions.” As La Forge spoke, he walked into main engineering.

Sonya absently followed him, gripping the hot chocolate with both hands, and realizing she should’ve cut herself off. Lian was used to her babbling, as was Ella, and Wesley had been babbling right back. But with La Forge…“Have I been talking too much?”

“No.” La Forge said the word emphatically, but Sonya wasn’t having any of it.

“Oh, I do have a tendency to have a bit of a motormouth, especially when I’m excited.” Or awake. “And you don’t know how exciting it is to have gotten this assignment.” And then, suddenly, before her brain could tell her mouth to shut the hell up, her mouth barreled forward with The Speech. “Everyone in class, I mean everyone, wants the Enterprise.” Wanted, you idiot, you’re not a cadet anymore! “I mean, it would’ve been all right to spend some time on Rana VI, do phase work with antimatter—that’s my specialty.”

“I know,” La Forge said, “that’s why you got this assignment.”

Sonya’s stomach started doing cartwheels. He knows my specialty! Then she mentally berated herself. Of course he knows my specialty, he’s the chief engineer. He doesn’t just take people sight unseen. Shaking her head, she said, “I did it again. It’s just that—”

La Forge’s voice was soothing. “I know—you’re excited. Look, Sonya—”

Eager to receive whatever wisdom the chief engineer was going to provide, she said, “Yes?”

“I don’t think you want to be around these control stations with that hot chocolate, do you?”

She looked down at the hot chocolate, as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t even have this in engineering. It’s just, we were talking, I forgot I had it in my hand.” She started to back away from La Forge with almost the same speed with which she was digging herself into a hole verbally. Just shut up and walk away. “I’m gonna go finish it over here.”

Realizing as she walked that that probably wasn’t the best way to end the conversation, she stopped, turned, and faced her CO. “Lieutenant La Forge?”

He nodded.

“This is not gonna happen again.”

Again, he nodded. Satisfied that she hadn’t embarrassed herself too terribly much, and at the very least pulled it out at the end, as it were, she nodded back and turned around, intending to take the hot chocolate to the corridor.

As she turned, she crashed right into someone wearing a red uniform.

Great, that’s all I need. Someone on the command track getting hot chocolate all over their uniform wasn’t exactly going to help Sonya do better with La Forge.

Then she looked up and saw the bald head, hawk nose, and stern expression of Captain Jean-Luc Picard.

Sonya had, of course, seen the captain before. He’d come down to engineering once or twice—not as often as Commander Riker or Lieutenant Commander Data—and she’d passed him in the corridor. On the latter occasions he had given her a nod and a curt, “Ensign,” obviously not knowing who she was personally, but able to discern the single pip on her uniform denoting her rank.

This was, however, their first face-to-face encounter.

And she spilled hot chocolate on him.

She spilled a lot more on herself, but that somehow seemed not to matter so much.

“Oh, no! Oh, I’m sorry, oh, Captain—”

“Uh, actually, it’s my fault, sir.” That was La Forge, coming to her rescue. Great, first Duffy, now La Forge. Is everybody on this ship going to have to cover for me every time I do something stupid?

“Indeed?” said the captain, sounding dubious.

Of course he sounds dubious, you idiot. Sonya started wiping at the captain’s uniform with her hands. “Oh, I wasn’t looking—it’s all over you.”

“Yes, Ensign, it’s all over me,” Picard said in a voice that could’ve frozen the hot chocolate, which, somehow, he was now holding in his right hand.

“At least let me, sir,” she said, still wiping at his uniform shirt.

The captain grabbed her wrist with his left hand to arrest her futile attempts at drying him off. “Ensign, uh—Ensign—?”

Realizing he was making a request, Sonya straightened. “Oh! Ensign Sonya Gomez.”

La Forge added, “Ensign Gomez is a recent Academy graduate, Captain. She just transferred over at Starbase 173.”

“Is that so?” the captain said to La Forge. Then he looked at Sonya with an expression that wasn’t as harsh as Sonya feared it would be. “Well, Ensign Sonya Gomez, I think it would be simpler if I simply changed my uniform.”

“Captain,” La Forge said emphatically, “I must accept full responsibility for this.”

“Yes, Chief Engineer, I think I understand.” Picard looked at La Forge, then at Sonya.

And then it happened again. Sonya’s mouth took off at a full run before her brain knew what was happening, and the rest of The Speech—which had been cut off by La Forge telling her he knew her background—came pouring out.

“I just want to say, sir, that I’m very excited about this assignment, and I promise to serve you, and my ship—your ship—this ship—to the best of my ability.”

“Yes, Ensign, I’m sure that you will.” The captain didn’t sound in the least bit sure, and Sonya couldn’t really bring herself to blame him. You don’t call it “my ship” to the captain!

Turning to depart, Picard said, “Carry on.” Then he stopped, looked down at his right hand, and then offered the hot chocolate cup back to Sonya. Meekly, she took it, and the captain exited.

Never in her life had Sonya Gomez more wanted the earth to swallow her up. Except, of course, they were on a starship, so she’d have to settle for something else—a warp core breach, maybe?

“Oh, my—” She looked at La Forge, whose VISOR made it difficult to read his expression, which came to Sonya as something of a relief. “First impressions, right? Isn’t that what they say, first impressions are the most important?”

“I’ll give you this—it’s a meeting the captain won’t soon forget.”

La Forge walked off. Sonya stood there for several seconds. My career’s over.

In the time it took Sonya to return to her quarters and change into a fresh uniform, the entire engine room was alive with gossip. Several people referred to her as the hot-chocolate demon, everyone cringed when she walked near the replicator, and she overheard Cliff Meyers describing the spilling of hot chocolate as “the Picard Maneuver.” By the time the lunch break rolled around, Sonya was about ready to crawl into the warp core.

It was La Forge who again came to her rescue. “Sonya, how’d you like to get some lunch?”

From behind him, Duffy said, “Don’t let her order a hot chocolate, Geordi!” Next to him was Denny, who snickered.

“I’d like that very much, Lieutenant,” Sonya said meekly.

As they walked down the corridor toward the turbolift, Sonya said, “I can’t begin to tell you how sorry I am, sir. If you want to transfer me off—”

“Now why would I do that?” La Forge chuckled. “If I transferred everyone who did something embarrassing, the engine room’d be empty in a week. All I care about is the work, and your work is excellent. I read your graduating thesis—now I wouldn’t have requested you if you weren’t the best.”

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.”