Chapter Four

U.S.S. TITAN,STARDATE 56941.4

“Iofficially pronounce her fit and ready to fly, sir,” Lieutenant Commander Nidani Ledrah said as she replaced the access panel to the Armstrong’s port engine nacelle. She rose from a crouch and strode alongside the spotless new type-11 shuttlecraft, and beamed with professional pride.

Riker returned Ledrah’s smile, delighted by her enthusiasm.

“I’m curious about something, Captain,” Ledrah said, her voice echoing across the high, vaulted spaces of Titan’s primary hangar deck. Nearby was parked the runabout Irrawaddy,which had brought Admirals Ross and Akaar aboard. Shuttlecrafts Ellington, Gillespie, Holiday, Handy, Beiderbecke, Marsalis,and Mancewere all arrayed neatly beyond, positioned farther away than both the Armstrongand the Irrawaddyfrom the forcefield barrier that prevented Titan’s atmosphere from rushing out into the airless void. Beyond the hangar’s yawning aperture, Mars presented its ancient, sanguine, crater-pocked face.

“Ask away, Commander,” Riker said, slowly walking around the sleek auxiliary craft, admiring its simple, tapered lines. Of the eight shuttlecraft aboard Titan,the Armstronghad already become his hands-down favorite.

“I heard you’re taking her to Earth, sir.”

“You heard correctly, Commander. Why? Are you that eager to have her back?”

“No, sir, not at all,” Ledrah said, sounding almost flustered.

Riker raised a hand reassuringly. “Don’t worry, Nidani. I promise not to scratch her up.”

“No, sir, that isn’t what I meant at all.I was just wondering if you were coming back with a new exec.”

Riker nodded, understanding. “As opposed to offering the job to somebody who’s already aboard.”

“Not that I was planning on spreading it around, sir.” Ledrah had grown beet-red. She clearly wished she’d approached this conversation with half as much care as she’d just taken getting through the Armstrong’s preflight checklist.

“Of course not, Nidani,” Riker deadpanned. “I like to think of Titanas a 350-person village. So you can imagine how shocked I’d be if any gossip started making the rounds.”

Ledrah looked embarrassed. Changing the subject, Riker returned his attention to the Armstrong’s white hull metal, which was utterly smooth and unblemished.

“She’s a real beauty, isn’t she?”

Ledrah seemed relieved at the shift in conversational trajectory. “She certainly is, sir. Cruising speed of warp nine, warp nine-point-four max. She can even manage warp nine-point-eight for up to thirty-six hours in an emergency. Though I wouldn’t recommend it if you don’t absolutely have to.”

“Good to know. But with any luck I won’t have any need to reach near-transwarp speeds between here and Earth orbit.”

Ledrah now looked abashed by her brief technological rhapsody, though Riker assumed such things to be an occupational hazard to chief engineers everywhere. “Right, sir. Of course. I was, ah, just trying to say she’s definitely worthy of her name.”

Guessing what was coming next, Riker suppressed a mischievous smile. “Her name?”

Ledrah returned the smile with an enthusiastic grin of her own. “Yes, sir. Armstrong. The first human to leave his bootprints on Luna. Makes sense, since Titanis a Luna-class vessel, after all.” She was clearly proud of her knowledge of Earth’s aerospace pioneers.

Riker manually entered his access code into the keypad located on the forward starboard hatch, which obediently hissed open. “I’m afraid that’s not who she’s actually named after, Nidani.”

“She’s not named after Neil Armstrong, sir?” Ledrah’s grin suddenly dimmed by several hundred gigawatts.

“Nope. Neil was already spoken for when Starfleet issued us our shuttlecraft. There’s already a Challenger-class starship named after thatparticular Armstrong.” Riker entered the cockpit and took a seat behind the spotless black flight controls. He looked through the open hatchway and relished the engineer’s escalating confusion.

“So…which Armstrong isshe named for, sir?”

Riker quickly tapped a series of commands into the flight console. “Louis,” he said a moment before the hatch hissed shut, mercifully cutting off whatever response Ledrah might have made. He wondered briefly whether she recognized the reference, or if she would immediately run to a computer terminal to look it up.

Shortly thereafter the great Satchmo’s namesake glided with a momentary flash through the atmosphere-retention forcefield of the hangar deck, cleared Titan’s drydock, accelerated, and took wing across the ruddy face of Mars, quickly leaving her mothership and Utopia Planitia behind. Then Riker guided the craft along a graceful, gentle arc down the Solar gravity well toward Earth.

Earth grew quickly from a pale dot to a small blue disk to a great azure orb. Descending to an altitude of about three hundred kilometers over the eastern coastline of Africa, Riker matched the shuttlecraft Armstrong’s velocity with that of the orbiting McKinley Station. As the open space-dock facility drew steadily nearer, Riker began to make out fine details on the hull of the great Sovereign-class starship inside. The majestic leviathan was suspended, gently cradled between the drydock’s duranium struts and girders.

He had a visceral sensation of having come home, if only for one last visit. But theEnterprise isn’t my home anymore,he thought with a wistfulness that surprised him.

At least a dozen environmental-suited repair techs could be seen working at various points on the dorsal area of the starship’s saucer section, while nimble one- and two-person work bees methodically transported personnel and components to and fro. Though the exterior repairs and inspections were clearly continuing, there remained almost no trace of the hideous damage inflicted on the Enterpriseduring her head-on collision with Shinzon’s flagship, the Scimitar.Angling the Armstrongbeneath the starship’s ventral surface, Riker noted that the captain’s yacht, the Calypso II,was back in its customary place, integrated seamlessly into the saucer. The auxiliary vessel, the replacement for a predecessor that had been destroyed during the previous year’s disastrous Rashanar mission, displayed not so much as a scratch.

It’s good to see that the repairs to the captain’s yacht went so well.Riker smiled, thinking back to the honeymoon he and Deanna had begun on Pelagia less than a month ago. As a wedding gift, Captain Picard had lent them the Calypso IIfor that excursion, a voyage that had subjected the craft to more than a few bumps and bruises. Though Picard hadn’t made any mention of the damage afterward, Riker would have been able to sense the captain’s displeasure even without the help of Deanna’s Betazoid empathy.

A message from the saucer’s aft hangar deck interrupted his reverie, and he swiftly acknowledged and brought the Armstronginto line for final approach and landing. Less than three minutes later, after setting the shuttlecraft down and securing it within the familiar cavernous hangar, Riker strode across the busy deck toward the inner pressure doors, noting the presence of perhaps a dozen engineers who were going about various shuttlecraft-maintenance–related tasks. Each of them paused and adopted attentive postures as he passed, and he told them all to remain at ease. Though almost all of them looked quite young, they struck him as an efficient, disciplined group of officers. But that wasn’t the first thing he noticed about them.