“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.

“Look,” Helga said, “I need to tune up the manifolds. When I’m done, I can walk you through this, if you want.”

“No, no, that’s okay,” Sonya said quickly. Helga had her own duties to perform, and Sonya was tired of people covering for her. “I’ll figure this out.”

“You sure?”

Sighing, Sonya said, “Not really, but I’m gonna do it anyhow.”

Helga smiled. “Good. ’Cause the manifold’s gonna take at least three hours.” She walked off.

Letting out another sigh, Sonya went back to peering at the inside of the console.

 

Four hours later, Sonya was grinning ear to ear. Helga, it turned out, had been right—all the shunt did was streamline the impulse drive. She’d doped out the entire system and figured out what needed repairing, what needed replacing, and what couldn’t be repaired or replaced but still worked around.

La Forge came up to her at almost a dead run. “Sonya, just the person I’m looking for.”

Clambering to her feet, Sonya brushed several locks of hair out of her face and wiped sweat from her brow with her sleeve. Holding up the padd she’d been taking notes on, she said, “I’ve done it, Geordi, we’ll have full impulse as soon as—”

“That’s great, Sonya, but we need you for something else.”

Sonya blinked. “But if the impulse drive—”

“Did you do up a schedule like I asked?”

She stared down at the padd. The haphazard notes she’d doodled could, she supposed, be translated into something resembling a schedule. “Sort of.”

“Give it to Costa and Sherman, I need you at the core.”

Again, Sonya blinked. “Geordi, the warp core’s inactive, what do you—”

“Just—come with me, Sonya, okay?”

Sonya shook her head. “O-okay. I’ll be right there.” She looked around, saw Gar Costa, handed him the padd, and then walked off.

“Criminy, HC, is this even in English?” Gar asked, but Sonya ignored him, walking over to where La Forge and Wesley were working with some kind of widget that was hooked up to where the antimatter injectors would be were there any antimatter.

When Wesley moved out of the way, Sonya saw the widget more clearly, and realized it was a module designed to channel high-energy plasma reactions with antimatter. She also realized that she’d seen it before, and not on the Hathaway. “Isn’t that your plasma physics homework, Wes?”

Smiling sheepishly, Wesley said, “It was.”

“Now it’s our best shot at warp drive,” La Forge said as if it were the most natural thing in the world. “I need you to calculate the best thermal curve to give us a controlled reaction.”

“And then what?” Sonya asked. She’d been thinking purely in terms of impulse engines for several hours, so it took her a second to reboot her brain, as it were. She ran over the specs of the module from what Wesley had told her. (She also wondered how the hell he smuggled it over here, since they weren’t supposed to bring things over from the Enterprise. If they could have, Sonya would’ve brought a Shange shunt and saved three and a half hours of her life.) “That thing doesn’t have more than a few micrograms of antimatter, right?” she asked Wesley.

He nodded.

“You think the chips we have will be enough to channel the reaction?”

La Forge shrugged. “If it doesn’t, we’re stuck at impulse, which is where we were in the first place. But the Enterprise won’t be expecting it.”

“They won’t be expecting us to blow up, either.” Sonya grinned. “But it should work, yeah. I’ll get right on it.”

“Good.”

She went off to a computer terminal to start working up the equations. Then she stopped. “Uh, Captain Riker did okay this, right?”

Both La Forge and Wesley said “Right” a little too quickly.

“O-o-o-okay.” This once, she was more than willing to let someone else take the heat.

 

By the time they were two hours out of the simulation, Sonya was ready to cry.

The impulse engines were up and running as expected. Gar said that “once we translated your notes,” the schedule was spot-on. The problem was that the control systems they had available to them were limited, especially since they had to adapt components from the impulse drive in order to accommodate Wesley’s module, which meant that the impulse and warp drive components were doing double duty instead of being separated as usual.

“It’s only a simulation,” La Forge said, “and it’s only for a couple of hours. Even the duotronic circuits can probably handle double duty.”

“That’s not the problem,” Wesley said. He had that open-mouthed expression of his that Sonya had learned meant he was scared he was going to get yelled at.

La Forge folded his arms. “So what is the problem?”

Sonya picked it up. “We’re still not a hundred percent sure the warp drive will work right. We’ve only got enough antimatter for a short warp-one jump, and a lot of these components are old and worn out. They haven’t been used or maintained in eighty years, and they’re not as adaptive as our tech is now.”

“The worry,” Wesley said, “is that we’re going to overload the control systems, at which point the impulse and warp drive will both shut down.”

La Forge sighed. “Great.”

“Sir,” Wesley said with a pained look at Sonya, “I know you signed off on this because if it didn’t work we’d still have impulse power. So if you want to—”

“Wes, we can’t give up now. We’ve already hooked everything up.” He sighed. “All right, the captain’ll be down in an hour for a status report. I want to quintuple-check everything. Wes, you look over the crystals and the reaction chamber. Sonya, you do the injectors. I’ll handle the control circuits. Let’s move it, people.”

Sonya went to check the injectors. She ran every diagnostic she could think of, then realized that the standard diagnostics she was used to didn’t take everything into account—like, she thought with a dark smile, the lack of a Shange shunt. She found herself rewriting the diagnostics, which was wise, as she found four programming flaws and one bad hookup she would have missed otherwise.

As she knelt behind the warp core realigning the injector after fixing the bad hookup, she heard Riker’s voice booming out over engineering. “The simulation begins in one hour.”

“You’ll have warp drive, Captain,” La Forge said, “though it may not be what you expected.”

That’s the understatement of the decade, Sonya thought.

“I think that deserves some kind of explanation.”

“We’ll have warp one for—”

Wesley cut in. “Just under two seconds.”

Sonya thought that was generous. One-point-four was her best guess, but Wesley seemed to think he minimized the excess flow of the antimatter.

“That’s not long enough for an escape,” Riker said thoughtfully, “but used as a surprise, it may give a strategic advantage.”

“Sir,” La Forge said, “all of this is theoretical.”

“And if your theory fails to pay off?”

Here it comes, Sonya thought as she fit the injector back in.

“Have you ever driven a Grenthamen waterhopper?”

“Sure.”

“Ever pop the clutch?”

Sonya barked out a laugh and almost dropped her tools. One of the things she loved about La Forge was his way of explaining things. Given half a chance, Sonya would babble for half an hour in jargon before even getting to the interesting part. With two questions, La Forge had conveyed the appropriate information to Riker without getting overly technical.

“You’re saying we’re gonna stall the Hathaway?”

With remarkable calm, Wesley put in, “And the Enterprise will waltz right over and pulverize us.”

Sonya walked out from behind the warp core with a nod to La Forge. Riker smiled at her. “Ensign Gomez.”

“Captain Riker.”

“It’s going well, I hope.”

“I think so. And…and I’ve learned a lot, sir. These old ships have a lot of fascinating technology. It’s impressive, really, they have no Shange shunts, duotronic circuitry, dilithium crystals that break down, no EPS conduits, no isolinear chips, and I’m babbling again, aren’t I?” That last was added when Riker broke into what could only be described as an indulgent smile.

“That’s all right, Ensign. As long as you keep the hot chocolate out of the engine room, we should be fine. Carry on.”

Sonya let out a long breath through her teeth.

 

An hour later, Sonya sat in engineering, working up a new diagnostic program while keeping an eye on the engines. The war-game scenario had gone rather badly. Lieutenant Worf had hacked into the Enterprise security computer and tricked them into thinking a Romulan warbird was attacking. In the confusion, the Hathaway got several dozen simulated hits on the Enterprise. Then, just when La Forge had run into engineering to tell Sonya to help him and Wesley implement the warp jump, a Ferengi warship, the Kreechta, showed up and attacked the Enterprise. The latter vessel was unshielded, since its tactical systems were in simulation mode for the war game, and so was especially vulnerable. Transporter and weapons were down.

The daiMon in charge had given the Enterprise ten minutes to give up the Hathaway, which they had erroneously concluded to be a prize of value to the Enterprise in order for the Galaxy-class ship to be firing on it.

La Forge and Wesley had gone back to the bridge to talk to the Enterprise. La Forge had left Sonya in charge of engineering, telling her in no uncertain terms to make sure the warp drive worked, as it was now likely their only means of escape from the Kreechta.

Now she was monitoring the conversation between the two ships. Data was speaking at the moment. “Premise: The Ferengi wish to capture the Hathaway, believing it to be of value. Therefore, we must remove the ship from their field of interest.”

Kolrami, the Zakdorn observer and moderator, spoke up. “And they will soon relocate it after a two-second warp jump.”

“One-point-four,” Sonya muttered. She still didn’t think Wesley’s module had enough antimatter for two whole seconds.

“There is a way,” Picard said. “Number One, can you hear this?”

“Yes, sir,” Riker said, “we’re all here—waiting for you to pull another rabbit out of your hat.”

“Gar,” she said to Costa, “check over the inertial dampeners. With this warp drive, the last thing we want is to lose that or gravity.”

“Right—wouldn’t want to escape the Ferengi just to go splat on the bulkheads.” Gar ran off to check that.

“Mr. Data?” Picard prompted.

The android said, “On the captain’s command, we will fire four photon torpedoes directly at the Hathaway.”

They actually have torpedoes. That’s something, Sonya thought as she finished off the diagnostic program.

Data went on: “One millisecond after its detonation, the computer will trigger your warp jump.”

Sonya started running the program, and then immediately opened up a new program file on the terminal in front of her. If this is going to work, we’ll need to get this cranky old computer to do it.

La Forge said, “I think I hate this plan. Data, we’re not even sure our warp jump will work.”

“If the warp engines fail to function,” Data said, “the result could be—unfortunate.”

“Very unfortunate—we will be dead.” That was Worf, as ever the voice of bluntness.

Sonya, however, was pretty sure she could do it. She’d spent two days navigating these silly old duotronics, and she was fairly confident that she could make them tap-dance if she had to. Tying the warp drive-execution into the detection of a torpedo explosion was something she should be able to do.

“Captain Riker, I cannot order you to do this,” Picard said, which struck Sonya as remarkably generous. Were she in Picard’s place, she wasn’t sure she’d stop short of giving that order.

“What the hell.” Riker sounded rather morbid. “Nobody said life was safe.”

Sonya looked around, saw that Chao-Anh Aleakala was sitting nervously. “Chao-Anh, I need a fresh set of eyes on this.”

Looking almost relieved, Chao-Anh came over and eyeballed Sonya’s padd.

Picard’s voice sounded over the speakers. “The advantage is that it will appear from the Kreechta’s perspective as though—as though you were destroyed in the explosion.”

As she read over the program, Chao-Anh muttered, “Unless of course we are destroyed in the explosion.”

“We’ll be okay,” Sonya said. To her own surprise, she believed it.

“I hope you’re right, Sonya.” Chao-Anh, for her part, didn’t sound like she did.

Worf said, “That will deceive them only for a few minutes. Their sensors will soon locate us.”

“We’ll only need a few minutes, Mr. Worf,” Riker said, “because you’re going to prepare another surprise for them.”

That confused Sonya. She knew that Worf could get into the Enterprise computer by virtue of being the ship’s chief of security. I guess he has an equal facility for Ferengi computers. Chuckling to herself, she thought, They probably get their security protocols on the cheap anyhow.

Chao-Anh said, “I’m not sure about the timing. I’d go for one-and-a-half milliseconds to play it safe.”

“We can’t fine-tune it that much,” Sonya said. “Besides, Data’s the one who said one millisecond. You’re gonna doubt him?”

“Then we’re agreed,” Picard said on the speaker. “On my mark—four minutes.”

Data added, “Remember, Geordi, if the implementation is off by one millisecond, the Hathaway will not survive.”

Sonya gave Chao-Anh a “see?” look. The other engineer simply shrugged.

Sounding more worried than Sonya had ever heard him, even during the Borg attack, La Forge said, “Data, that’s the one part of this plan we’re all absolutely sure about.”

One minute later, La Forge and Wesley entered engineering. Both Sonya and Denny Russell walked up to them with padds in hand.

La Forge looked right at Sonya. “Tell me the warp drive’s okay.”

Handing him the padd, she said, “Okay, and already programmed to go off when the Enterprise tries to blow us up, per Mr. Data’s plan.”

Briefly, La Forge smiled. “Bless you, Sonya. What’ve you got, Russell?”

Denny held up his padd display. “I’ve plotted a course that minimizes risk of gravitational fluctuations from either Braslota or the planet when we go to warp. With your permission, I’ll send this to Ensign McKnight on the bridge.”

“Do it.” He walked over to the core. “Let’s get this party started.”

Wesley went over to the injector control systems, Sonya right next to him. The kid looked nervous as hell. “I hope this works.”

“If it does, we owe it to you, Wes,” Sonya said. “If you hadn’t smuggled that thing over, we’d be stuck.”

“And if it doesn’t work, the Enterprise will blow us up.”

Sonya shrugged. “Like the captain said, nobody said life was safe.”

“Yeah, but with these old control systems and the duotronic circuits, and—”

“Hey, don’t count the Hathaway out. There’s some life in these old circuits.”

Wes smiled. “Weren’t you the one who was afraid to touch anything two days ago, HC?”

Pointing an accusatory finger, Sonya said, “Don’t you start with the ‘HC.’ And…well, let’s just say I’ve been converted.”

Sonya had only been half-listening to the monitored communications between the Enterprise and the Kreechta, but then she heard Picard say, “You believe the Hathaway has value? We deny you your prize. Fire!”

“Here it comes.” Sonya held her breath.

The ship rocked for a second—Dammit, Gar, Sonya thought, you were supposed to fix the intertial dampeners if they weren’t working!—but then steadied.

Then the walls seemed to stretch for a second. Looking down, Sonya saw that her hands were doing the same thing. It looked similar to the visual distortion of the stars one saw at warp speeds, but of the ship, not what was outside it.

Looking over at Wesley, she saw that his face was also distorted, like it was in a fun-house mirror. But oddly, Sonya didn’t feel any pain.

Then everything snapped back to normal. This time there was no jerking of the ship. Good work, Gar.

She checked the display. “Warp speed operational for one-point-nine seconds.” She looked over at Wes. “You were right.”

Now Wesley was grinning ear to ear. “Looks like I was, yeah.”

 

When they arrived in Ten-Forward, the “corner office” already had an Earl Grey tea, a green tea, a synthehol Scotch, a birch beer, a synthehol bitters, and a raktajino sitting in front of each place.

Lian raised her green tea as they all took a seat and said, “To Ensigns Gomez, Costa, Van Mayter, and Russell for earning commendations on the Hathaway!”

“Here, here,” Tess Allenby said, hoisting her Scotch. She and Lian were the only ones from the corner office who hadn’t been assigned to Captain Riker, though they had been sent to the battle bridge after the Ferengi attacked, in case the Enterprise needed to do an emergency saucer separation.

They all sipped from their drinks and cheered. “You all did amazing work,” Lian said. “Everybody’s talking about it.”

Denny shrugged as he swallowed his birch beer. “Just another day at the office.”

“C’mon,” Tess said, “doing what you did with an eighty-year-old ship? I’m amazed the thing didn’t fall apart when you blew on it.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Helga said. “Those old systems’ll surprise you—right, Sonya?”

Grinning at her Earl Grey, Sonya said, “Yeah, okay, so I took a little while to get the hang of it.”

“More than a little while,” Helga said conspiratorially.

“All right, all right, more than a little while. But we did it, didn’t we? We made a warp drive and we beat the Ferengi.”

Gar held his raktajino near his face, as if ready to sip it at a moment’s notice. “We made a warp drive with spit and baling wire.”

“And the Crusher kid’s experiment,” Helga added.

Tess made a face. “Not that little twerp again.”

Sonya was surprised by the vehemence of her reaction. “Tess?”

“Look, Sonya, I know he’s your friend, but…I mean, c’mon, he’s a kid. He hasn’t taken one class at the Academy, and Picard’s got him doing alpha-shift conn duties. I’m never gonna get on the bridge during alpha as long as he’s on the ship, especially if he keeps pulling miracles like this.”

“Tess, I…” Sonya hesitated. She’d really grown to like Wes over the past few months, but she hadn’t realized that the “acting ensign’s” position might have had a deleterious effect on the not-so-acting ensigns.

“Look, it’s okay.”

“You should say something to Riker,” Helga said. “He’s a good guy.”

“Please—he’s the one in charge of the kid’s ‘education.’ Who do you think put him in charge of that mineral survey in Drema? The worst thing I can do is complain to Riker about his precious boy genius.”

An uncomfortable silence descended over the corner office for a second before Gar said, “Hey, I hear La Forge is doing rotations again. He’s putting Kieran on warp diagnostics.” He waggled his eyebrows at Sonya. “So now you two can flirt all shift.”

Sonya almost spit her tea. “What?”

Lian gave Sonya an accusatory look. “Flirting? With Lieutenant Duffy? Sonya, you didn’t tell me.”

“We are not flirting.”

“Coulda fooled me,” Denny muttered.

“Don’t you start,” she said with a glower at her classmate.

“Hey, I wasn’t the one giggling during the maintenance cycle.”

Tess shot her a look. “Giggling?”

“He—” Sonya sighed. “He told a funny joke. The law of averages was bound to catch up to him eventually, and he’d say something funny. I was just being polite.”

“During a maintenance cycle,” Denny deadpanned.

“Look—”

“And then there was that time during the Mariposa mission,” Gar said.

“And when you two were on the damage-control team when that old Klingon ship attacked,” Helga added.

“And when—”

“All right!” Sonya said, interrupting Denny. “Maybe we are flirting…a little.”

“For very large values of ‘little,’” Denny muttered.

“But that’s all it is. I’m not interested in Kieran Duffy. He’s not nearly as funny as he thinks he is—in fact, nobody’s as funny as he thinks he is—and besides, he’s still a j.g. He’s been in Starfleet for years, and that’s as far as he’s gotten. That’s a classic case of career dead-endedness.”

“So?” Lian asked.

Sonya hesitated. She stared at Lian for a second. All her reasons were true, of course, but that wasn’t the overriding factor. She had, over the past months, taken it easy, and allowed herself to have a social life.

But she hadn’t taken the next step with Kieran Duffy for one simple reason: she didn’t want to go through what Lian went through when the Borg attack took Soon-Tek from her.

Tess used Sonya’s mention of career dead-endedness to rant about Wesley again, which in turn led to Denny speculating about his parents, which led to Lian and Helga telling Sonya, Denny, and Tess about Beverly Crusher, which led to a discussion of Dr. Pulaski and her transporter phobia, and soon nobody was talking about Tess’s bitterness or Sonya’s love life, which suited Sonya just fine.