When We Were Young
Part Five in the "Jon and Erika" series. Jon, Erika, Adalie, Frankie and Ben are on Andoria while Jon is serving as Ambassador. A series of sweet moments with the children interwoven with Jon and Erika's memories of the NX project.
Chapter 1 – Ben, FTL and Reactor Tests
A/N: Hi all, its been a long time (insert pun here) but I've finally started to put together the fifth and final part of the saga. It combines stories of the NX project with sweet moments with the three Archer kids. I'm probably taking a lot of liberties with the canon but bear with me. Hope you enjoy and please review! As always, I don't own them because if I did things would have turned out just like this. - Amelia
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"Ben. You've got to stop jumping on the bed and go to sleep."
"Why?"
"Ben…"
"Why?"
"Jumping boy, hit the deck!" Ben landed on his bed with a thud. Jon tried not to smile as Ben looked up at him cautiously. All his kids knew 'that voice.' It was his captain's voice and he only used it when he really had exhausted all his other options. And tonight as he tried to get his three-year-old son into bed, Jon figured he had definitely exhausted all his other options.
"Lay down flat on your back and I'll tuck you in. Stop wriggling around little man or we're going to have to strap you down."
"Why?"
"So you don't fly off into space."
Ben looked puzzled as he watched his father fold down the covers. "Back in the old days, long before you were born or even I was born, our ships didn't have artificial gravity."
"Gravity," Ben repeated the word as if he understood. His most recent jumping off the roof experiment with his sisters proved just how little he understood the concept.
"Now gravity is what keeps you on the ground. If it is too strong, you can get smooshed to the floor." Jon dropped to the ground dramatically and lay flat while Ben peered over the edge of the bed, laughing at his father's antics. "But," Jon said hopping up, "if it isn't strong enough, you'll float up to the ceiling like this…" he started to stand up as if he was being pulled up to the sky, but before he got to his full height, Ben grabbed one of his hands and pulled him down again.
"Stay!" Ben commanded.
"Well, that's the idea. But back in the day, they didn't have it so when you slept, they had to strap you to the your bed or else you'd float away. And then you'd never get any sleep."
"Never!" Ben shook his head emphatically.
"But, you've also got to remember that ships couldn't go very fast back then. It might take you years to get across a solar system. So you'd go to sleep and when you'd wake up, your ship would be at your new home."
Ben was starting to lose interest in stellar history, but Jon didn't really care. Maybe stories about sleeper ships would be boring enough to put his toddler to sleep. Maybe if he kept mentioning the word sleep.
Sleeper ships had always fascinated Jon. They represented a moment in time where humanity's desire to explore space far outpaced their technological development. They were so desperate to see what was out there that they built ships that couldn't go faster than the speed of light, put everyone into cryofreeze, except for a sorry few who had to keep the ship going on their own, just for the chance to wake up years later and colonize a harsh new planet.
He had seen other civilizations where it had been necessity, not a curiosity that had driven them to take to the stars. Worlds choked by pollution or contamination, devastated by war or simply over populated had forced people to board starships barely worthy of the name. Despite the difficult conditions of slow engines, recycled air, and not enough supplies, these cultures had survived. But humans on the other had had thrived.
His people had gone through all of that by choice. They wanted to explore and they wanted to colonize. To them, it didn't matter how long it took to get there, it was the fact that they were even going at all that made it exciting. They were true pioneers.
By the time Jon had joined the fleet, the journey had become something more manageable, something to be accomplished in months, rather than years. The invention of the warp drive meant that instead of sending ships out on one-way colonization missions, there could be two-way transit for the first time in Earth's space history. Trade between Earth and her colonies developed as space lanes began to form. Starfleet was created out of the older space organizations to help patrol those lanes and continue exploring, but once again, ambition outpaced technology. Warp speed was fast, but no one was able to create an engine that could break the warp two barrier. Until his father came along. The world was a different place after that.
Ben held his hand tightly and Jon knew the drill. He had to wait and wait and wait and wait for the little guy to fall asleep.
"Dad?"
"Yes, buddy?"
"Will I wake up in a new solar system?"
"Not likely. We're already in a new one. You are one of the first human children to live on this planet in this solar system. I think that is pretty special."
"Me too."
"Special enough to go to sleep?"
"Maybe."
Jon sighed and sat down to wait.
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The absolute most boring part of his job was turning on a reactor and waiting; waiting to see if it was still going strong in three hours. Of course, he couldn't leave and come back in three hours. No, there was a chance the reactor would blow up and if he didn't get the exact readings, several engineers might actually kill him. If he didn't get blown up by the reactor as well. But really the chances of all that were slim. Or so he kept telling himself as he nervously eyed the scram switch.
One of the first things they had to be able to do before the test flights was prove that the warp engine was safe to run for hours on end. They couldn't even do efficiency testing until they had done this. So they dragged the reactor up to the spacedocks, evacuated everyone but the essential personnel and the idiots dumb enough to volunteer for this important mission and flipped the switch. It had been pretty epic.
A crumpled up piece of paper hit him square in the forehead, reminding him that he wasn't alone in this unique form of torture. There was someone else up here, but he had the attention span of a three year old. Jon sighed and reached down to pick up the piece of paper AG had thrown at him. He unfolded it and smoothed out the creases.
"Looks like a flowchart," Jon said looking it over.
"That's because you are holding it upside down."
"It still looks like a flow chart."
"It's a command chart. Once we finally get the go to strap this thing to a cockpit, we're going to need some procedures."
"Procedures?" Jon asked.
"Yeah, like who gets to talk to the pilot, order of operations for checklists, take off procedures, final authority to scram a flight or abort a flight, pyro charge control for out of control craft, what we call the folks on the ground, you name it."
"I thought we'd just call them Houston."
"They're in California. Jon, as much as it pains me to say this to you, your daddy's engine isn't the end-all-be-all of this program. Once we know it works…"
"It does."
"Once we know, we've got 30,000 more problems to solve."
"And you're gonna solve them?"
"I'm bored."
"Well, this is better than some of the other things you do when you are bored." Jon looked closer at the paper. "Capcom? That's straight out of NASA, isn't it?"
"Yeah, one guy to talk to the pilot. So you don't have a million people shouting orders at once."
"And it'll be one of the other pilots?"
"The only person who can understand what is going on in the mind of a pilot is another pilot. The only person I want shouting orders at me while I'm flying faster than the speed of light is someone who has flown a ship faster than the speed of light."
"What about Erika?"
"Okay, Erika or another pilot. No one else. Not any of those science types. They couldn't fly a barge on autopilot."
"You know, Erika's been talking to me about this for a while. She wants the control people on the ground to have active telemetry links and control over what we are doing."
"What we are doing or what you are doing?"
"Hey!"
"Well, if we all flew like you, I'd want someone in control on the ground too."
"Thanks, AG."
Beep.
"What was that?"
"Timer. Three hours are up."
"Thank god. Log the readings then standby for shut down."
They had made it to three hours. Next time it would be six. And next time, he wouldn't sign up to babysit a warp reactor.
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Jon looked up, shaking the memory, only to realize that Ben was staring back at him, wide-awake.
"I see you aren't asleep yet," Jon muttered.
"Nope."
"Are you going to make me wait here all night?"
"Maybe."
Jon groaned and put his head in his hands theatrically. Ben laughed at his father's display.
"Well, while we are waiting for you to decide that sleep is something worthwhile, would you like to hear a story about when AG and I had to wait for a reactor test?"
Ben nodded, resting his head down on the pillow.
"Okay then. Here goes."
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