Chapter Text
Lieutenant Trent Wilkins stood in front of the replicator as it whirred to life and synthesized his girlfriend’s breakfast. After it finished, the 28-year-old human engineer carefully picked up the plate, then turned and carried it a few steps over to the small dining table in their shared quarters.
“One stack of buttermilk pancakes with maple syrup for the lady,” he announced with a smile.
He set it down in front of Lieutenant D’Vana Tendi, who was already seated at the table.
“Why thank you, kind sir,” she replied, returning his smile.
Wilkins bent over and gave her a quick peck on the lips. While Tendi picked up her fork and began digging into her pancakes, Wilkins returned to the replicator and tapped a few buttons to synthesize his own meal: a steaming pile of scrambled eggs with bacon and toast.
“Mmm!” Tendi remarked around a mouthful of pancakes, while Wilkins sat down across from her. “These taste even better than usual!”
“See?” Wilkins asked rhetorically. “I told you cleaning those EPS taps would make all the difference.”
He had taken the replicator apart last night, after his shift. His girlfriend had returned to their quarters earlier than he’d expected and caught him reassembling it. He’d told her that he’d cleaned the EPS taps to improve the replicator’s performance, and that was true, but it wasn’t the whole truth.
Six months ago, he’d asked her out on a date. Four months ago, they’d started having breakfast together regularly. Two months ago, ‘regularly’ had become ‘every morning’ after she’d moved in with him. He was hoping today would mark another, much bigger milestone. But he didn’t want to tip his hand yet.
He picked up his own fork and took a bite of eggs. “So, did they draft you back into medical yet?”
The Cerritos was en route to Margolis VII to deliver urgently needed medical supplies and help contain an outbreak of andorian flu. So far, the planet’s government had only confirmed a handful of cases, but everyone was bracing for a full-blown pandemic.
Tendi took another bite of pancakes. “Not yet. But we’re still half a day away. The situation could be a lot worse by then.”
Wilkins shoved a piece of bacon into his mouth. “Let’s hope not. One of my cousins caught andorian flu last year. Spent a week on a biobed fighting for his life.”
Tendi nodded as she swallowed another mouthful of pancakes. “Yeah, it’s really bad for non-andorians. Luckily, Starfleet Medical managed to synthesize a vaccine for it a few months ago.”
Wilkins arched an eyebrow at her as he took a bite of toast. “If there’s a vaccine, why didn’t the colonists on Margolis get it?”
Tendi took another bite of pancakes. “Same reason as most other vaccines. The molecular pattern is too complicated for the replicator, and distribution always goes to planets with higher populations first since they have more risk.”
Tendi pushed her fork into the pancakes again, intending to carve off another bite, but her fork hit something hard.
“Huh,” she commented with a perplexed look on her face. “That’s weird.”
Wilkins said nothing and did his best to suppress a smile, allowing Tendi to focus on the mystery. She carefully used her fork to dig out the object buried in the middle of her pancakes: a small, felt-covered box.
Tendi gasped in surprise and stared at the box, barely even noticing as Wilkins stood and moved around the table to her left. Human and orion courtship rituals were wildly different, but she’d done her homework, and didn’t need to open the box to understand what was happening here. She looked over at her boyfriend, who now had a hopeful smile on his face, as he started to kneel down beside her.
But his knee only made it halfway to the deck before Ransom’s voice came over the comm. “Lieutenants Wilkins, Tendi, Mariner, and Rutherford: report to conference room three immediately.”
Wilkins froze, and he and Tendi stared at each other for a moment before Wilkins let out a chuckle, almost unable to believe his bad luck. “I guess this’ll have to wait until later then,” he said sheepishly.
“Uh, y-yeah,” Tendi replied with a disbelieving chuckle of her own. “I guess it will!”
Wilkins picked up the felt box and set it aside. Then he picked up their plates and returned them to the replicator to recycle them, while Tendi pushed back her chair and stood by the door to their quarters, waiting for him.
The replicator whirred to life and their plates vanished. Wilkins turned around and joined Tendi by the door. He smiled and took her hand, gently threading his fingers between hers.
“Ready?” he asked.
Tendi nodded with a matching smile on her face. “Ready.”
When the pair arrived at the conference room, they found that all of the others had beaten them there. Ransom was standing at the head of the table. Mariner was seated on the left side, with the windows behind her offering a view of the stars streaking by. Rutherford was seated opposite her.
Tendi and Wilkins moved to sit on the left, in the chairs beside Mariner. Ransom, noting their arrival, got straight to business.
“I’ve got some good news and some bad news for the four of you,” Ransom began. “The good news is: you won’t have to worry about any flu-infected colonists puking all over you. The bad news is: you’re going to have to deal with a complicated engineering mission without any support.”
Ransom turned to face the screen on the wall behind him and tapped a few buttons. The screen came to life, showing an infographic of a fusion power plant. The facility was large, about the size of three city blocks. None of them recognized the design.
“This is a power plant in the capital city on the planet Rudigar,” Ransom explained. “Apparently, the rudigarans are having some trouble with it, and they’ve asked Starfleet for help. Since Rudigar is on the way to Margolis, Admiral Vassery wants us to drop off an engineering team to assist them.”
“Do we have any idea what the problem is?” Rutherford asked.
“Not really,” Ransom replied. “All the rudigarans know is that the output levels are below normal and continuing to drop. They haven’t had to start rationing electricity yet, but if the output keeps dropping at the current rate, they’ll have to initiate rolling blackouts in a few days.”
“That’s it?” Wilkins asked incredulously. “That’s all that their own engineers have figured out?”
Ransom sighed. “Apparently, the whole plant was maintained by one guy… who died last week.”
Mariner’s eyes bugged out. “One guy ran this whole thing by himself?!”
Tendi was equally alarmed. “Even if the maintenance is heavily automated, there’s no way that one person could keep up with everything that needs to be done!”
“According to the rudigarans, ‘it’s never been a problem before,’” Ransom flatly informed them.
Mariner facepalmed and groaned. “Oh no.”
Rutherford shared Mariner’s sentiment, though he was less dramatic about it. “Sir, I don’t think this is going to be an in-and-out job. From what you’re saying, I’m guessing the whole plant is really just a pile of hackfixes and emergency patch jobs. There’s no telling how long it’ll take to straighten this out.”
“It gets worse,” Ransom informed them. “Rudigar isn’t a Federation member. Most of their technology is decades behind ours, and this plant is decades behind that. So if you need to replace any parts, you’ll have to fabricate them on-site using the rudigaran schematics. To top it off: the Cerritos can’t stay. We have to continue on to Margolis.”
“Oh boy,” Wilkins commented, then paused before looking over at his girlfriend and smiling. “Well, at least it’ll be an interesting challenge!”
Tendi smiled back at him. “I do love an interesting challenge!”
Ransom grinned. “And that’s why I picked the four of you. We’ll arrive at Rudigar in two hours. You have until then to get prepped. We’ll beam you down along with anything you might need. After that, you’re on your own, at least until the situation on Margolis is under control.”
Ransom paused and turned to Rutherford. “Mister Rutherford, can you assemble a list of supplies and equipment for the mission?”
Rutherford didn’t answer, and a moment passed in awkward silence. He seemed to be blankly staring down at the conference table.
“Uh, Lieutenant?” Ransom prompted again with a frown.
“Huh?” Rutherford abruptly realized that Ransom was talking to him and jumped slightly in his seat. “Sorry, sir, I kind of zoned out there for a second. What were you saying?”
“I was asking if you could assemble a list of supplies and equipment for the mission,” Ransom repeated in a concerned tone.
Ransom wasn’t the only one who was concerned. Tendi’s smile disappeared and her eyebrow furrowed slightly as she tried to make sense of Rutherford’s uncharacteristic behavior. She’d first noticed it several days ago during game night. At the time, she’d figured it was just fatigue. He’d stayed in engineering past the end of his shift to finish fixing some problem and then left game night early, saying he was tired. But his distractedness had persisted, and now she was starting to worry.
“Oh. Yeah, of course,” Rutherford replied. His tone of voice was oddly flat. “I’ll put together a manifest and coordinate with Billups to get it ready for transport.”
“Okay! Meeting adjourned,” Ransom announced. “Good luck!”
Six hours later, the four of them were hard at work inside the power plant. As they’d predicted, the plant’s systems were a mess and it was astonishing that any part of it worked at all. Fixing it properly would take weeks, even with a full engineering team, but they’d managed to identify the most immediate problems.
Tendi tapped a few buttons on the industrial replicator they’d brought down from the Cerritos. It whirred to life and a new waveform guide module appeared in front of her. Rutherford had asked her to fabricate one an hour ago. It had taken twenty minutes just to find the right schematic in the rudigaran database and then another forty minutes to reprogram the replicator to understand the rudigaran file format.
Tendi tapped her commbadge. “Rutherford, I finally managed to replicate that waveform guide you wanted.”
“Great,” he replied. “Bring it to control station four.”
She picked up the module and began her trek through the power plant, arriving at the control station several minutes later. The control station was a hexagonal room with a semi-circular computer console in the center. Two corridors connected to it in a V shape. As she approached, she could see that Rutherford had pulled most of the panels off the walls, exposing the machinery behind them. His arms were elbow-deep inside one section of the wall, but her footsteps prompted him to turn his head to glance at her.
“Install it over there,” he instructed, inclining his head towards a different wall on the other side of the room.
“Got it,” Tendi affirmed. She set the new module down on the ground, then reached into the wall and began disconnecting the existing one.
It was the first time they’d been alone together since the briefing, and although it wasn’t the optimal place to talk, Tendi decided it was good enough.
“Hey, Rutherford, is something bothering you?” she asked gently while pulling various power connectors out of their sockets. “You’ve seemed kind of preoccupied for the last couple days.”
There was a brief pause before he answered. “Uh… no, nothing’s bothering me. I’m okie-dokie!”
He’d injected some cheerfulness into his voice, and to anyone else, it might’ve sounded genuine. But she could hear the slight strain his voice always had whenever he was lying about something. In the past, the only time she’d ever heard it was when they’d played bluffing games at game night. She’d never expected to hear it in a situation like this. She was stung by the realization that, whatever was going on with him, he didn’t want to talk about it with her. That had never happened before, and she reminded herself that he was under no obligation to discuss anything with her if he didn’t want to. Still, she was glad they were on opposite sides of the room with their backs to each other, because she had no doubt that her sense of hurt was written all over her face.
She pulled the old module out of the wall and slotted the new one into place. She could hear Rutherford’s footsteps behind her as he moved over to the computer console and started pressing buttons.
“Huh,” Rutherford thought aloud while Tendi started re-socketing the power connectors. “How could the flow rate still be under thirty? That doesn’t make any sense… unless…”
As she pushed the last power connector into place, Rutherford’s voice suddenly became much more urgent. “Tendi! Don’t—”
The rest of his sentence was cut off by the waveform guide module exploding in her face. She found herself being flung through the air by a huge fireball, and she screamed in pain as her whole upper body was scorched by the flames. The entire facility lost power and was plunged into darkness as she landed on her back with a bone-jarring thud. A moment later, a handful of emergency lights came on and a warning siren began to blare.
“Tendi?!” Rutherford’s alarmed voice came from somewhere to her right. The agony caused by her burns was so intense that the only reply she could manage was a pained whimper, and she could feel herself teetering on the edge of consciousness.
She heard Rutherford scramble towards her, and his terrified face appeared above her. “Tendi!”
It was the last thing she saw before she passed out from the pain.