"Don't you want your coffee, Mom?"
"No. It doesn't taste right. I think the dispenser's on the fritz."
Trip went to his room and dug the old-style machine he'd bought at a neighbor's yard sale. He'd been meaning to take it apart to see how it worked, but then there was Simone, and everything else kind of got put on the back burner – until she broke his heart.
Nope. Wasn't going to think of Simone any more. She didn't deserve the headspace, but Mom did.
He cleaned up the old machine and brewed a pot.
"Do I smell coffee?" Mom followed her nose to the kitchen.
"Yeah. Just remembered I had this. Why not go back to writing, and I'll bring you a cup the way you like it."
"All right," Mom said, and ruffled his hair as though he was still a little kid, and not nearly eighteen. "This might be the first time that pile of junk in your closet has been good for anything except scaring the bejesus out of me when it falls over in the middle of the night."
Trip didn't bother to argue. He just made Mom's coffee and brought it to her – but all the while, there was the beverage dispenser sitting there right by his elbow, looking just like it had every day since Dad had installed it when he was nine.
Only now it wasn't working.
He brought Mom the coffee and tried not to think about what was inside that dispenser. He'd caught hell from her and Dad more than once for taking something apart….
But this was different.
It was broken, anyway.
What would be the harm in just taking a look? Mom could get coffee from that old pot, until Dad got a new dispenser set up.
He was elbows-deep in the workings almost before he knew it. Fascinating, the way the pieces fit together. Kind of like a flow chart he could almost see in his mind. Maybe he'd look up the specs –
"Charles Anthony Tucker the Third!"
That bellow made him jump, and he banged his head on the top of the unit, knocking a nozzle down to smack him in the wrist. Damn! He was going to have a bruise, and maybe worse, by the sound of Dad using his full name.
"What the hell do you think you're doing in there, son?"
"I'm, uh, seeing how it works."
"And how do you expect people to get drinks when they want them?"
"They weren't going to be able to anyway. Mom says the coffee tasted funny – it's broken."
"No, it's not. I couldn't get her favorite blend. I forgot she doesn't like the kind I bought. If you'd taken a minute to ask me instead of barreling ahead –" Dad took a deep breath. "But there's no point rehashing it. We can't go back in time. So I'm going to give you two choices, Trip. Either you put this unit back together so that it works the way it did before you pried the cover off, or buy a new one with your own money, and then this one is yours to squirrel away and do whatever you want with. I'm going to not go have a cup of coffee with your mother."
"But, Dad, you can have a cup. I made some."
"Well, at least you're thoughtful." Dad gave him the crooked smile that said he wanted to be mad but wasn't quite there anymore. "The choice is yours, son – but, either way, you'd better have this mess cleaned up before your mother sees what you've done to her kitchen."
**
"Wow! She's a thing of beauty, all right!"
I ran my hands along the model's casing. No question that was beautiful – but it's not what I was talking about.
It was the schematics in my head, the ones I'd spent the last week memorizing. The ones I'd been dreaming of ever since I was accepted for the Warp Two engineering team.
Warp Two. I'd thought that was a big deal.
But Warp Five…. Warp Five was going to change everything. Anywhere in the system in minutes, not days. Other systems in days or weeks, not years.
And, now that I was best buddies with Jonathan Archer, the son of the man who invented the multiple-warp engine design, I had a damned good chance of being in on the adventure.
I'd be the one keeping this sweet engine humming along, maximizing efficiency, holding the greatest power humanity had ever created in my hands…
"Where'd you go, Trip? You looked like you were about a million miles away."
"Light years, Cap'n. Lots of them."
"Aren't you rushing things? It's a working model – but it's still just a model. And we haven't gotten it to Warp Four in the simulations yet."
"Maybe I'm rushing things, and maybe not. But, let me tell you a story. It all starts with me making my mom a cup of coffee. And it carries me all the way here – and maybe, way out there somewhere we haven't even dreamed of yet. Somewhere even the damned Vulcans have never been."
"You and your stories. Tell me later – I've got a meeting with Admiral Forest, and you're coming with me. It's about time I gave him my candidate for Chief Engineer."
I grinned and gave that model engine one more pat for good measure. It was wise to be good to your machinery. I'd learned that by making the beverage dispenser better than it had been to begin with. It had served me well ever since. Made me the most in-demand intrasystem warp engineer in the Fleet.
If I made it out there into deep space, it was going to serve humanity, too.
And all because Dad got the wrong beans.