Star Trek: The Next Generation: Starfleet Academy #2: Line of Fire by Peter David

Author:Peter David [David, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Star Trek, Science Fiction
Publisher: Minstrel Books

Several of the colonists, both Terran and Klingon, were nodding approvingly, and making no effort to hide how impressed they were. Tania, who was facing Zak, had been moving backward. Now she had stopped though, and her hands were mirroring Zak’s careful labors. “Sloooowwwwly,” she said. “Verrryyy slowly. We don’t want to botch this up, Zak. This place powers everything from food processors to planetary defenses.”

Zak allowed a brief grunt to escape his lips, but other than that he did not acknowledge, in any way, the weight of the component he was carrying.

The Starfleet Academy cadets were inside the main power-source building, where the crystal-driven generators that supplied the colony with its energy were stored. The generators were not especially state of the art, but they got the job done. There were older, backup generators as well, stationed in a relatively small shack just outside the main supply plant. The hope, however, was that there would be no need to use them.

The large equipment that Zak was handling thumped squarely back into place. Only then did Zak let out a sigh, giving the slightest hint of just how much of a strain the thing had been on him. “Out of curiosity,” he grunted, “wasn’t there any way that you could have repaired this thing while it was still in its receptacle? Did I have to move the entire thing?”

“It was the only way to get at the connectors,” she said. “That’s why they kept having fluctuations in the energy flow; because the original connectors were faulty.”

One of the Terran colonists on the tech crew stepped forward. “So this means that we don’t have to worry about those spot blackouts anymore?”

“Right,” said Tania. “What was happening was that you were managing to compensate for the outages by rerouting through other systems. But it was always temporary patches, and whenever you had the slightest overload, you’d blow out again. This beast,” and she looked at the generator ruefully, “is not the greatest design. It’s a powerful package, but not all the parts are as accessible as they should be. The couplings are designed to last for at least twenty years, but these were faulty and wore out in no time. Now lifting out the processor is fairly easy if you have anti-grav lifts—”

“Which we do not,” acknowledged one of the Klingons, “since they didn’t seem particularly necessary.”

Tania turned to the tech crew. “All right. Fire ’er up. Let’s see what we’ve got.”

Several colonists headed over to the array of control panels that lined a nearby wall. They worked quickly and efficiently, which Tania was quite pleased to see. When she had first arrived to work with them on improving energy consumption, she had encountered bickering and hostility. The Klingon and Terran colonists seemed interested not so much in repairing what had gone wrong as assigning blame to someone for why something had gone wrong. It was not terribly constructive. Both groups had indulged in the unproductive pastime, and had even accused each other of mucking with the systems deliberately for some unknown purpose.

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