Captain Archer was bothering Subcommander T'Pol again. The man kept a beagle, but he had the relentless mentality of the bulldog, and nobody had seen that tenacity more clearly than Trip. From the first moment he'd met the man, and every day since, Trip had watched and grown to admire the fierce devotion Captain Archer had to realizing the dream of making Enterprise fly, and being aboard her when she did. It was a dream the two of them had shared for years, and both had nearly killed their careers (and themselves a couple of times) making it finally happen.
To some people on board, this was just a stepping stone, a way to further their careers, or an exciting adventure to go on. But to Captain Archer and Trip, Enterprise was everything. Maybe they'd make a faster ship someday, a prettier one, with extra bells and whistles put in on the recommendations of this ship's crew, though especially her captain and chief engineer… but Trip wouldn't want to be on that ship. Not even if they named it after him. He would live and die with Enterprise if Star Fleet would let him. A sentimental and overly dramatic thought, maybe. But he'd never claimed not to be those things.
But, much as the Captain and Trip loved Enterprise, there were times she could be… well… a little irritating, particularly with how long it took her to get from one place to another. Captain Archer, a man of action and exploration, was clearly bored. So he was harassing T'Pol for details on the planet they were currently aimed in the direction of and traveling towards.
Acid pools. Trip could do without those.
He ignored the Captain and T'Pol for the moment, instead heading for Malcolm's station. Malcolm acknowledged him with a look of guarded curiosity. Malcolm never took it as a good sign when Trip came to him directly. In this case, Malcolm probably already suspected why Trip was up here, because he'd no doubt noticed the issue himself either directly or through one of his subordinates. After all, nobody loved running routine system checks as much as Malcolm did.
"Busy?" Trip inquired, knowing the answer to that even before he leaned over to see what work Malcolm might be in the middle of. Routine sensor scans. Anybody on board could manage it.
Hell, a couple of bread sticks might do just as well, since the computer would send up a flare as it were if anything exciting showed up, and there were multiple other people on the bridge manning scanners at the moment who would get roughly the same information, augmented a bit for their particular specialties. And, so long as nothing exciting showed up, they weren't really needed here either.
Glancing perfunctorily at his console readouts, Malcolm answered, "Not particularly."
Trip nodded and straightened up, raising his voice a little, "Cap'n?"
Captain Archer snapped out of his discussion with T'Pol immediately, looking oddly hopeful. Trip hated to disappoint him, but on the other hand, if he had needed the Captain's involvement, it would be because disaster had struck. No, he only needed the Captain's permission.
"Sir, there's a bit of a hiccup in the power relays on F Deck. I'd like to steal Malcolm to help me find where the problem is and work on it," Trip said.
"Oh," Captain Archer looked disquieted, "Is it serious?"
"Just a little hiccup, sir," Trip reassured the Captain with a brief shake of his head, "Nothin' we can't handle. But I'd like to figure out what's causin' it and get it fixed before it gets nasty on us."
Untended hiccups had a tendency to grow into major malfunctions when left unchecked, and they were most inclined to do so when things were already going poorly. Enterprise was millions of little pieces and relays and subsystems and most of them were supposedly isolated from each other, but the reality was that she was also all one ship, so one hiccup in the Armory on F Deck could lead to trouble anywhere or everywhere, depending on what was causing it. The last thing Trip wanted was to find some hostiles on that planet they were heading towards and wind up not being able to warp out of the situation because the power relays were having themselves a tantrum.
"Besides, I'm pretty sure I know what the problem is," Trip said.
Malcolm glanced up at him, and Trip saw his suspicion confirmed in the tactical officer's gaze. Malcolm was always fiddling and tweaking things in the Armory to try and increase efficiency, with or without Trip's help (or approval), and he tended to get away with it because he was good at it, and nobody knew or cared about tactical systems like he did.
Anyway, Trip had enough to do keeping the ship running, and was more than happy to delegate certain jobs that technically fell under the purview of Engineering to the Armory, especially since Malcolm was a pretty decent engineer himself. But, every now and then, one of those little upgrades or reroutes started to kick up a fuss, and Trip had to come in and patch it. It wasn't anybody's fault really, it was just how the first deep space exploration mission was expected to go. Everything was new, and required new solutions, and many things that had seemed great in simulations had been found wanting out here in space, forcing both Trip and Malcolm to make repairs and install fixes literally on the fly.
"Okay," Captain Archer said, with a playful grin, "But have him home by shift change."
Trip replied, "Yes sir."
Malcolm and T'Pol exchanged a look that said the joke had gone over their heads. Those two had a lot in common if you knew what to look for. Malcolm's literalness and seriousness made it a lot of fun to pull his leg at times, though initially Trip supposed he'd actually been taking out some of his frustrations with the Vulcans on Malcolm, because he'd subconsciously recognized some similarities and taken exception to them. Not that he'd been any big fan of T'Pol's either, but she was a Vulcan, so it was only to be expected. But Trip had begun to see that there were finer qualities in both the Vulcan and the man, which his first impression of them had missed.
Anyway, Trip knew he'd be spending the next couple of hours listening to Malcolm kick himself over it. Malcolm detested his imperfections and lack of omnipotence to an almost crippling degree, and sometimes Trip wondered how the man even found the strength to get out of bed in the morning, for all the unearned weight of guilt he liked to carry around with him. He took his mistakes personally, as if making a bad call made him a bad person. At the same time, Malcolm was eternally the pessimist, meaning that he anticipated that he would make bad calls. It was no way to live as far as Trip was concerned, and he didn't see how Malcolm could operate that way.
Any normal person with that much self doubt and self loathing would be paralyzed by it, but somehow Malcolm didn't let all that ding his confidence or stop him from implementing new solutions, trying to make everything about Enterprise better. He cast fear and doubts aside in order to put his heart and soul into this ship just like Trip and Captain Archer did, albeit probably for different reasons. Trip couldn't imagine Malcolm loved the ship half so much as her captain and chief engineer did.
But sometimes those things just didn't work out the way Malcolm wanted them to. And, when they didn't, he was quick to blame himself for it. It actually drove Trip a little nuts that Malcolm wouldn't just let go of things like that. Even as he moved forward fixing them, the self recrimination would be manifesting as thick and ugly as an unset custard.
First, however, they'd have to discover which of Malcolm's several projects was to blame, or if it might be two separate operations that individually functioned acceptably but interfered with each other if they ran at the same time. It could be as easy a tweak as changing some programming so a specific pair of operations didn't try to pull power from the same relay at once.
As the turbo lift carried them towards their destination, Trip opened the discussion, "I've checked the logs of the changes you've made in the last week or so, and the good news is that I think there's only two or three things it could be."
"Show me," Malcolm said, nodding at the data pad Trip was holding.
Trip and Malcolm had abandoned certain unnecessary formalities within their first few weeks aboard Enterprise. So many things had to be installed, uninstalled, changed and fixed that there simply wasn't time to waste on all the 'sirs' and 'may I's' that normally accompanied a subordinate and superior working together. They were each head of their respective department, and the close connection between the two departments necessitated equally close connection between them in order to solve problems, or recognize potential problems and prevent them from ever manifesting.
Malcolm took the data pad and checked the notes Trip had put together since he came on shift, including each recorded instance of the power hiccup and which relay was being affected. The intensity of his scrutiny was actually welcome, it meant he took the job seriously. Trip and Malcolm had completely different ways of going about it, but when it was game time, they each gave their all, beginning with that unwavering focus on the task before them.
"Forward phase cannons?" Malcolm asked, handing the pad back to Trip.
Trip nodded, "That's my first guess. I think it's either that or one of the polarizers, but that shouldn't give us a hiccup in the Armory. Assuming it's us, of course."
Malcolm didn't even flinch. There had been enough power hiccups in the past which were not their fault. Cloaked ships riding in back of them had happened often enough. Unexpected life forms that sneaked on board were not too rare either. Malcolm had undoubtedly run some specific scans up on the Bridge, looking for signs of a ship, and Trip had assigned his own engineers to check every nook and cranny, just in case. Malcolm would doubtless lend members of his own team to that search. The ship had decent internal sensors, but if something was amiss, it was still often the human eye that saw it.
Each of them were pretending out of strange politeness that this was the first they'd seen of the issue, but both men had noticed it around the same time and done some quiet checking, as well as waiting to see if the problem would sort itself out (a lot of minor hiccups did) before moving to the step of dismantling things and looking for shorted circuits or their equivalent.
"It's probably the phase cannons," Malcolm said, "It makes sense."
The phase cannons always drew a little bit of energy, even when they were technically powered down. It kept certain essential systems warmed up, and allowed the weapons to be charged more quickly. But never quickly enough for Malcolm's liking. Malcolm's latest change to the forward phase cannons saw them pulling slightly more power when they were standing by, and from two sources instead of one.
It was Trip's first guess that the two power sources were actually confusing the systems when they interacted. His second guess was that the additional power pull from the polarizers was causing them to in turn draw more resting power of their own.
"I told you it might not be a good idea to run the power through the hull plating relays like that," Trip said, unable to help himself, "But you just had to go and try it anyway."
Troubleshooting was an aggressive sport, and it was normal to get heated and be adversarial at times. Malcolm understood that was well as Trip did, and he responded in kind.
"As I recall, you said you weren't sure if I could get the power balances right. I believe it can be done," he said, defending his work, then conceding more humbly, "I may just not have gotten it right yet."
Malcolm would defend his upgrade to the bitter end, not out of pride, but protectiveness. The phase cannons would charge more rapidly with the new system than the old, and unless it started causing some other serious damage, Malcolm wouldn't let go of that tactical advantage for all the bread sticks on board. Meanwhile, Trip would defend his engine with the same ferocity. A reoccurring power hiccup was not his idea of a smoothly running ship, no matter how fast the cannons charged.
"We'll see, won't we?" Trip asked as the turbo lift opened.
"I'm sure we will," Malcolm replied calmly, waiting for Trip to exit and then following him.
Captain Archer had complained endlessly that there wasn't enough to keep anybody busy on board this ship. Some sort of recreation room was needed, where people could not just unwind and socialize after a long shift, but actually… play and keep occupied during the lengthy periods between one interesting spot in space and another. Days and weeks could go by, with tension and boredom building throughout the ship. According to Commander Tucker, who supported his captain's view, some fights were inevitable, just because people needed to blow off a little steam, to do something, anything.
But Reed had plenty to keep himself occupied, even at his station with nothing coming in on the tactical sensors. He spent a lot of his time reading spec manuals for one thing or another, jotting down concepts for improving the tactical station and the firearms, trying to make his need to defend the ship fit in with Archer's insistence that this was "not a war ship" despite the fact that it continually met hostile races of all types and levels of technology. This obsessive (and Reed wouldn't have denied it) fixation on the concept of security aboard a star ship had only been deepened by having a mine ram a spike all the way through his leg. He still wasn't sure how to implement a protocol that would prevent something like that from happening again… but he was working on some ideas.
For Reed, the real struggle became his off hours, but not because of boredom.
Everyone telling him to try the spice was starting to get on his nerves. The more they told him to try it, the more reticent he felt. He didn't like being pressured into things, which was partially because he'd been pressured into doing things a lot in his life, and usually with rather disastrous results… such as learning everything there was to know about sailing in the grim hope of fulfilling his father's expectations and losing his fear of drowning. No such luck. Caving to pressure often meant just getting in deeper. Even on trivial things like reading a book, trying a new beer, or breakfast with the Captain set his nerves aflame as he flashed back to all those times he'd done what he was pushed to do by his father, his friends, and his COs, only to find himself worse off than before.
Not only was everyone very keen on the spice, Chef was starting to include it in more and more of his recipes. Reed hadn't set out to avoid the spice exactly, but the more everyone talked about their love of spice, the more it became the enemy in his subconscious. It wasn't everyone liking it that bothered him so much, as the fact that they kept urging him to try it. Even though when he refused they would shrug it off indifferently, it still felt oddly like he was being pressured into something, because it kept coming up. "Have you tried the spice yet?" was the first question anyone asked him in the Mess these days, and it was even beginning to creep into conversation at other times as well.
Just the day before, while Reed and Tucker had been working on a hiccup in the power supply for the forward phase cannons, Tucker had mused about what would be for lunch, which in itself wasn't all that strange. But then he'd wondered if Chef might have put spice on it. There had followed a rather long and one-sided conversation where Tucker tried to engage Reed in guessing what various things would taste like with spice on them. It was a conversational game Reed couldn't get involved in, because so far he hadn't tasted the spice, meaning the only response he could offer was "I don't know," until Tucker finally got annoyed with it and told him he should really try the spice.
Tucker left it at that and changed the subject, but Reed got the impression that Tucker was… almost offended that Reed hadn't taken his recommendation for the spice the first time, in fact seemed more annoyed by that than the fact that Reed's recent alteration to the forward phase cannons had in fact been the source of the power hiccup that had drawn them both to the Armory.
This morning, Travis and Hoshi were at it again. Over the past few days, their idea of breakfast conversation had gradually converted more and more towards simply reaffirming their love of spice on every food imaginable. Reed supposed it was probably the novelty of the thing… and the fact that they hadn't had anything interesting to do in three days. It wasn't at all unusual for the two of them to fixate on something trivial, particularly during long hauls between objects of interest.
But it seemed to Reed that there ought to be a little more to the conversation.
For example, Travis would often take the introduction of a new food as an opportunity to story tell. As a boomer among people who'd spent most of their lives planet side, he had a lot of interesting stories about places he'd been and aliens he'd encountered. Admittedly, a lot of the stories were seeming less exciting the deeper Enterprise got into space, but in some ways that added to their charm. In any case, Reed kept expecting Travis to say that the spice reminded him of some time when something or other happened or got brought on board, or maybe a planet he'd visited… but he never did.
"You know, it really is good in coffee," Travis said, eyeing Reed's cup.
It was the third morning in a row Travis had said those words. It was annoying enough the rest of the day, but first thing in the morning was much harder to take. Reed didn't have his mental defenses in place, didn't have his mind organized yet, wasn't ready to cope with even the most minor problems. He just wanted five minutes to drink his coffee, to get his bearings on the oncoming day…
He sighed. Old habits. He had to let them go. Travis and Hoshi were not going to stop being around in the mornings, and it was unfair to ask them to be dour until he was ready to be civilized.
"Alright," Reed said, finally caving, "Hand it over."
Hoshi and Travis both looked positively jubilant, as they always did when another piece of Reed's old ways broke off and he took another step towards conforming to their way of inhabiting the world. They were young and flexible and naturally upbeat. But, Reed reminded himself, they both knew something about having a difficult time adjusting to a new situation, Hoshi most of all.
Reed sparingly poured some of the spice into the half cup of coffee he had left while Hoshi and Travis watched with completely unwarranted intensity that he'd grown thoroughly accustomed to by now. He didn't know what their preoccupation with his reactions to foods was, but they were both extremely invested in what he did when he tried a new food. He half suspected they had private bets going on whether he'd like one new food or another.
He sipped the coffee. Wow. That was good. The sweetness wasn't in the least like mere sugar, there was a sort of fruity and zesty nip to it, and it did create a sort of tingling sensation that wasn't remotely as unpleasant as it would sound if someone described it.
"Good, right?" Hoshi asked.
"Indeed," Reed managed after thinking far too long about it.
It was really, really good with coffee. He took another sip of the coffee.
"You should try it with eggs," Travis suggested.
"Yes," Reed said, "I think I will at that."