Chapter 9

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He watched as his wife answered question after question from the reporter, handling each topic with a sense of grace and composure that he had never mastered. Occasionally, Erika would use her hands as she talked, but most of the time they remained in her lap, tightly clasped together, the only outward indication that she was nervous. He had told her that there really wasn't any reason for her to be nervous. They had both done hundreds of interviews over the past decade and at least this time no one would be asking her when she was due or how her pregnancy was going. Erika had just thrown a pillow at him and frowned.

"This next question is for Admiral Hernandez," the reporter began looking directly at Erika. They had been sitting in this studio for the majority of the last hour and even though about 25% of the questions so far had been for him, the young interviewer felt the need to clarify each time. Jon tried not to roll his eyes.

"We know that the early part of your career was spent in Starfleet Communications, among other projects," the reporter continued. "Can you tell us a little more about that?"

He felt rather than saw Erika straighten her shoulders before she responded. "When I first joined up, space flight technology was far outpacing communications technology, that is our ships could go faster than the speed of light but our transmissions could not. Our entire exploration strategy, through the UESPA and the UESN, was based on that serious limitation. Ships were designed to be self-sufficient because the chances were if they sent out a distress call, it would be nearly four or five years, based on their distance from Earth, before anyone received it."

"Correct me if I'm wrong, but Admiral Archer, weren't some of your early missions on Enterprise designed to track down a few of these missing ships?" Erika squeezed his hand gently as if to remind him to be on his best behavior.

"That's right," he said with a smile, grateful to have something to talk about finally. "Starfleet would receive a distress call, sometimes half a decade old, with no way of responding quickly. Once Enterprise was built with subspace communications capabilities, we finally had the resources available to solve those mysteries. Unfortunately, we were often too late," he said, remembering the destroyed vessels that he had recovered. "Which was why Erika's work back then was so important." He gave her a gentle nudge with his shoulder and saw her make the tiniest of scowls at him before continuing.

"Even before Starfleet was founded," Erika said, "there was a fairly ingenious solution developed that helped move Earth ships towards real-time communications. They developed automatic warp message torpedoes that could reach their intended target in only a couple of months. Front line patrol ships could dispatch messages about deployment strategy, new intelligence reports or even supply statuses simply by launching a torpedo on a trajectory towards the nearest command base. The only problem was when it came to tactical engagements. A commander would detect something, launch a torpedo and then go off to intercept or investigate. By the time the message was received by the command base, the action would be over and the ship might not even be in position to receive a return signal." Erika looked up at her husband and he could tell that she was remembering all the times when Columbia had sent Enterprise a priority message, thinking they would be in one location only to find out afterwards that they had been forced to reassemble their task force somewhere else. Jon gave her a sympathetic look. "Still," Erika said, her voice clear, "it was better than nothing."

"So by the time I joined up, Starfleet was trying to work on a practical application for subspace transmitters. The first ones were nearly ten times bigger than any of our ships and there was no way we would be able to fit one on board even the largest cruisers. One of my first assignments was deploying a series of subspace arrays that nearby ships could use to send almost instant messages back to their base. Of course, they had to be in range. Eventually, the technology progressed to the point where we were able to have a ship with a transmitter in it and absolutely nothing else. They were sent as a supplemental ship for each task force, so that they could send and receive subspace messages."

"But there was a very serious limitation to those ships, wasn't there?" the reporter pressed and Jon saw Erika press her lips together tightly. He decided that he could answer this loaded question better than her.

"They could send and receive messages while at warp. Every captain's worst nightmare," he laughed. "You stumble into an enemy, high tail it out of there and then you are forced to chose whether to drop out of warp, call for help and then face a direct engagement on their terms, or keep running, hoping they don't catch up to you and hoping that when they do, you can handle them on your own."

"And this is still a decision captains face today, isn't it? To run or to engage?"

"Definitely," Jon answered. "Actually, Columbia and her escorts ran into a very similar situation during the war."

"But we had the benefit of being able to use our sensors and transmitters while we were still at warp," Erika added.

"Still," Jon nudged her in the shoulder encouragingly.

"So," the reporter continued, "subspace ships joined various task forces throughout the fleet. At what point did their role become absorbed into a regular ship?"

"Well, it was all dependent on reactor technology, something neither Jon nor I specialize in. Our matter/anti-matter reactors were powerful enough back then to create a warp field, but only just. Some ships still had other power sources on board to run their other systems. And a subspace transmitter used a lot of reactor power. So it was an either or situation for quite a while. No middle ground. Eventually, our efficiency levels got good enough that a captain would be able to transmit and be at warp at the same time, but not at the maximum operating capacity of either."

"You could transmit at say 75% and drop down to warp 1.2 or jump up to your highest cruising speed and hope that your weak signal gets through," Jon added, holding his hands up as if they were a scale.

Erika nodded. "It was a guessing game and there was a lot of discretion given to the captains of those ships back then to make the best call for the situation."

"The NX class was really the first to be able to operate with full capacity simultaneously on just about every system and that was due to the warp five engine."

The interviewer's eyes turned back to Jon. "Admiral Archer, your father designed the warp five engine correct?"

"Yes he did," he smiled and his wife leaned her shoulder gently into his.

"How much did that influence your decision to join the NX Project, as opposed to one of the other theoretical design bureaus that needed test pilots around that time?"

"Oh I would say my father's work completely influenced my career trajectory back then. I was so focused on breaking the next warp barrier that I often forgot that speed was the only thing you needed on a ship. It really wasn't until Erika transferred back to communications that I realized, 'Oh yeah, we've got to be able to talk to people out there!'"

Erika gave him a smile. "Jon and I came from very different backgrounds. His training was in experimental ships that had to be independent and self-sufficient so they could operate on their own for months at a time. Whereas my experience was with intelligence and communications ships that were always in contact with their home base at all times in order to ensure our latest reports were accurate."

"We used to get into these big arguments when we were designing the Alpha," Jon said, laughing at little as he watched Erika's eyes fall to her lap as she tried not to laugh as well. "We were always running up against the limitations of weight, space, computer processing power, and always, always crew ability." Now Erika actually did laugh as she looked up at him. "Erika would always suggest that we follow the old NASA models and have the majority of our telemetry data be processed and interpreted back on the ground so that the pilot could focus on flying."

"It was after the third or fourth bail out when the boys just couldn't keep that reactor under control that I thought it would be a smart idea," Erika clarified, giving him a look.

"But we didn't want to just be test pilots. We wanted to be able to do it all. The last thing we wanted was to be dependent on a room full of controllers back home."

"And when they were, the results were pretty bad," Erika said, patting him on the chest.

"Who would have known then where you would both be right now," the interviewer nodded at them.

"We've had a lot of help over the years," Jon said. "Neither Erika nor I could be where we are today without the help of all the people who came before us, our crews and our colleagues."

"We left the design and testing side of things when our ships were launched," his wife added, "but technological advancement continued. Each time Columbia would come into dock there would be a new upgrade or system for us to try out."

"Every time Enterprise came in it was all about repairs," Jon said with mock embarrassment.

"But now you that are the Chief of Staff you are back on the development side of things, no?" the reporter asked.

Jon shook his head and smiled. "Among many, many, many other things."

The reporter took the hint. "Well, we promised we wouldn't talk to you about the ongoing unification conferences, but can you tell us about any other major projects that you are both working on right now?"

"Actually," Jon said, sitting up a little straighter. "We are working on developing a new rapid response cruiser to take advantage of the latest advancements in warp propulsion. Since we are building more and more manned stations and outposts, we want to have a ready alert wing for each of them. Right now we want a ship with a fifteen minute standby window, that is fifteen minutes from receiving the order to being on their way to respond."

"What is needed to make that possible?"

"Well, you've got to have a very different type of engine that doesn't need a long power up procedure and you've got to have smaller crews based on the outposts with access to all the resources their ships will ever need."

"We are working on sending them out in pairs of two," Erika said. "And with any luck, they'll be on the frontier within the next six months."

"I want to call them the Archer-class," Jon said with a smile as he nudged Erika in the shoulder again. Erika just shook her head.

"Well, we are certainly looking forward to that." The reporter turned back to face the camera and Jon knew it was almost over. "Admiral Jonathan Archer is Starfleet's Chief of Staff. He was also the first captain of the NX-01 Enterprise. His wife, Admiral Erika Hernandez, is the commander of the 2nd Fleet's Third and Fourth Battalions and she was also the captain of Enterprise's sister ship, the NX-02 Columbia. Thank you both for coming down today to help us celebrate the 30th anniversary of Starfleet."

Jon looked over at Erika and reached for her hand, squeezing it tightly.

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