Star Trek - TOS - 67 - The Great Starship Race by Diane Carey

Author:Diane Carey [Diane Carey ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-06T16:27:22.117000+00:00

spine grated against the edge of the stove.

The smell of a thousand stews, chili pots,

sloppy joes, egg dumplings, hush puppies,

corn chowder, chicken puffso--all clinging somehow

to the air of her galley--reminded her suddenly

of a thousand meals, one at a time. A thousand,

maybe two thousand, maybe ten. Most served in

the midst of boredom. Her meals, one after the

other, day after day, watch after watch, had been the

only respite from drudgery for the crew, so she'd

made 'em good.

She focused on the bottom of her old

blackened oven as it shuddered above her head. A

grim laugh jumped up in her throat and

vibrated against her teeth, and suddenly she felt

almost giddy. Something was wrong, but what?

How could they do her harm with her own oven? They

didn't even figure that her oven wouldn't hurt

her.

Almost a generation of cramming overstuffed

turkeys into that oven, of casseroles tilted up

on one end so they'd fit, of crews sparse and

crowded, bulky with layered clothes and steaming with

sweat, surviving off the fare of that long-suffering

oven. Seasoned crewmen expected heavy chow

to see them through a cold, long watch; young and

confused deckhands wondered if this was what

they wanted to do with their lives--how many of those young

ones had she warmed with a hot home-cooked meal

to help those confusions sizzle away?

Plenty.

On its inside walls, cooked hard beyond any

hope of scrubbing, was evidence of those ten thousand

meals. Her knuckles were brown with old burns,

each toting a memory.

The oven shivered on its housing and came loose

on one side. Louise saw a knot of

cooked-on white gravy somehow splattered on the

underside of the unit. She wondered if she took

a knife to it could she maybe just chisel it off,

maybe get one more inch of the galley put away

right--

She was thinking about getting out her scrub

bucket and borrowing a common iron from the engineers

when the oven suddenly caterwauled like a pig,

tore off its broken housing and fell, and drove

one pointed corner through Louise's left eye and

into her brain.

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