Chapter 2: Trial by Diagnostics
[USS Enterprise-D — Main Engineering — 2364, Morning]
Argyle didn't waste time.
"Secondary plasma conduits need pre-launch diagnostics. Standard sweep—flow rates, junction integrity, pressure tolerances." He tapped the console behind him without looking. "Station four. Handbook's in the system if you need it."
"Understood, sir."
Cole crossed to station four. Twelve steps. Each one deliberate, controlled, while his brain ran calculations at a speed that should have been impossible. Plasma conduits. Okay. Energy transfer medium in a starship's power distribution network. Carries superheated plasma from the warp core to subsystems throughout the ship. Flow rates should be—
He didn't know what they should be. He'd watched this show a hundred times, argued warp theory on internet forums, even written a college paper comparing fictional propulsion systems. None of that had covered the actual operating parameters of a Galaxy-class secondary plasma conduit.
The console waited. LCARS interface—the colored panels and touch-responsive surfaces he'd seen a thousand times on screen, now solid under his fingertips. Or they would be, once he touched them.
The handbook's in the system. He could pull it up. Read through the diagnostic procedure step by step. Any new officer might do that, and no one would question it.
His fingers settled on the console.
The world dropped away.
Information hit him like a wall of water—not through the screen, not through the interface, but through the contact itself. His palms pressed flat against the console housing and suddenly he could feel the ship. Not metaphorically. The plasma network mapped itself across his awareness in lines of heat and pressure—primary conduits running like arteries down the ship's spine, secondary branches splitting into thousands of capillary-thin feeds. Flow rates registered as sensation, fast currents and slow pools and one spot, junction 7-alpha on deck thirty-two, where the flow stuttered around something wrong.
A fracture. Micro-scale, invisible to standard sensors at this resolution. Hairline crack in the junction's inner lining, leaking plasma at a rate so small the automated monitors hadn't flagged it. But it was there. Growing. In six weeks, maybe eight, it would widen enough to trigger an alert. In twelve, it could blow the junction entirely—loss of secondary power to three decks, potential for cascade failure if the crew was slow on the isolinear cutoffs.
Cole ripped his hands off the console.
He staggered. Caught himself on the station's edge. The engineering bay snapped back into focus—the warp core's thrum, the murmur of technicians, the smell of ozone. His head throbbed like someone had driven a spike through his left temple.
"Coleman?" Argyle's voice, from across the bay. "Problem?"
Cole forced his breathing steady. "Headache, sir. Came on fast. I'm good."
Argyle watched him for a beat too long, then turned back to his own console.
What the hell was that?
Cole stared at his hands. They looked normal. No glow, no visible change, nothing to suggest they'd just connected him to the nervous system of a starship. But the information was still there, fading like a dream—flow rates, pressure maps, the exact location and dimensions of a crack in a junction he'd never seen with his eyes.
Technology Assimilation. That's what this was. He knew it the way he knew his own name—not the old name, not anymore, but the one on the service record. Coleman. Cole. The man who could touch a machine and understand it from the inside.
The power existed as part of him. Intrinsic. Not a mutation, not a gift from some higher being. Just a fundamental capacity of whatever he'd become when he woke up in this body. Touch-based technological perception—crude, uncontrolled, about as refined as a fire hose pointed at a teacup. The understanding came in floods, not streams, and it left his neural pathways aching from the throughput.
Nascent phase, he thought, and didn't know where the term came from. Barely controllable. Information arrives jumbled. Can't select what to learn. Fades rapidly.
And it cost. The headache pounded behind his eyes, sharp enough to make his vision swim.
He pulled up the diagnostic handbook on screen—the normal way, with his eyes—and cross-referenced what he'd just experienced. The junction's ID was right there: 7-alpha, deck thirty-two. Standard diagnostic wouldn't scan at the resolution needed to catch the micro-fracture. The automated systems would miss it for weeks.
But Cole had it. Clear as daylight.
He keyed the finding into his report, framing it carefully. Anomalous flow reading detected at junction 7-alpha. Recommend physical inspection and integrity scan at increased resolution. Possible micro-fracture in junction lining.
Then he finished the rest of the diagnostic the old-fashioned way. Slow. Methodical. Reading every value off the screen like a normal officer who hadn't just communed with the ship's circulatory system. It took him forty minutes longer than it should have, and by the end, his headache had dulled to a steady pressure behind his right eye.
Argyle reviewed the report at the shift's midpoint.
"Junction 7-alpha." He tapped the entry. "What made you look there?"
"Unusual flow variance, sir. Might be nothing, but—"
"Hmm." Argyle enlarged the reading. Compared it against baseline parameters. His eyebrows rose a fraction of an inch. "Standard sweep wouldn't have caught this for another month. Good eye, Coleman."
"Thank you, sir."
Argyle moved on. Cole exhaled through his nose and didn't let his hands shake.
The rest of the shift passed in a blur of pre-launch preparations. Calibrations. System checks. Status reports filed in triplicate through channels Cole was learning to navigate by watching the officers around him and mimicking their habits. His body helped—Coleman's muscle memory guided his hands through interface commands his conscious mind was still mapping, and the Enhanced Physicality made his reflexes sharp enough to keep up with the pace without fumbling.
That was the other thing. The body itself was better than human baseline. Not dramatically, not enough to draw stares, but the differences accumulated—faster reaction time, finer motor control, a stamina that hadn't flagged despite the adrenaline crash and the headache and the sheer cognitive overload of pretending to be someone else in a century he'd never lived in. His senses were sharper, too. He could hear conversations across the engineering bay that should have been lost in the warp core's ambient noise. The ozone smell separated into component parts if he concentrated—ionized hydrogen, trace deuterium, the faint organic scent of the bio-neural gel packs in the secondary processors.
Enhanced Physicality. Another intrinsic gift, this one passive—always on, always running. The body had been rewritten at the genetic level, augmented beyond human baseline in strength, speed, endurance, healing, and sensory acuity. Like the Augments from Earth's history—Khan's people, the ones who'd nearly conquered the planet—but without the engineered aggression and megalomania.
Which meant, if anyone ran a detailed genetic scan, Cole was going to have a very bad day. Augmentation was illegal under Federation law. The kind of illegal that ended careers and started tribunals.
One crisis at a time.
The replicator in the corner of the engineering bay produced coffee on request. Cole ordered one, took a sip, and stopped walking.
It was perfect.
Not the acrid, overbrewed tar from the gas station near his old apartment. Not the bitter office pot that everyone complained about and nobody fixed. This was perfect—temperature, strength, flavor, all calibrated to some ideal that his taste buds recognized as objectively, cosmically correct.
He stood there holding the cup. A crewman—young, Bajoran, nose ridges visible above a shy smile—glanced at him oddly. "Sir? You alright?"
"Yeah." Cole took another sip. Then another. "Yeah, I'm just—this is good coffee."
The crewman grinned. "Wait until you try the hot chocolate."
Cole laughed. Short, surprised, genuine. His first real laugh in this body.
He finished the coffee at his station while reviewing departure protocols. Six hours to Farpoint. The ship-wide announcement confirmed it—Captain Picard would address senior staff. Cole wasn't senior staff. He was a junior lieutenant whose biggest accomplishment today was finding a crack in a pipe.
But he knew what was coming. Not from the ship's computer or from Coleman's service record—from a lifetime of watching episodes, reading novels, debating canon with strangers on the internet. He knew the Enterprise was heading for Farpoint Station, where an alien creature had been enslaved to build a city. He knew the crew would figure it out, free the creature, satisfy Q's test.
And he knew Q was coming.
A being of limitless power. Omniscient. Omnipotent. Capable of rewriting reality on a whim. And in approximately six hours, Q would appear on this ship and announce that humanity was on trial.
Cole set his empty cup in the recycler. The headache had faded. The tremor in his hands had stopped.
"Computer," he said quietly. "Current ship time."
"Oh-nine-forty-seven hours."
He had six hours. Six hours to learn this ship, this role, this life. Six hours before an entity that could see through any disguise showed up at the door.
The ship-wide announcement chimed. Departure for Farpoint Station. All hands to stations.
Cole's combadge chirped. Argyle's voice: "Coleman. Your station. Pre-departure power distribution needs a final sweep."
"On my way, sir."
He moved toward station four, hands steady, mind racing. Somewhere beyond the viewport, Earth still turned. Somewhere in this ship, Jean-Luc Picard was preparing to take command of the Federation's flagship.
And somewhere out in the dark, Q was already watching.
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