“She’s fine!” Bobbie Ray said defensively. “She was poking around in that mess, muttering about acid catalysts and oxidation. I figured it was some kind of astrophysics thing.”
“Do you see any stars in here?” Jayme demanded. “She could have been delusional. And none of you even noticed.”
“Hey, she can take care of herself,” Titus protested. “Come to think of it, I’ve never seen anyonetake better care of themselves. We better start worrying about what we’re going to show that review board tomorrow.”
“Today,” Starsa corrected, chewing on her thumbnail.
Titus glanced at the chrono. “Great, today. The day we all get put back a year.”
Jayme was shifting back and forth uneasily. “I think we should look for Moll Enor. Something could be wrong with her. It doesn’t sound like she was thinking rationally.”
“Maybe you should start looking for an explanation for all this,” Bobbie Ray pointed out. “It was your idea.”
“Myidea?” Jayme repeated incredulously. “I wanted to use an antiproton chain. Didn’t I, Titus?”
“We both did.”
Starsa rubbed her eyes sleepily. “I thought using a proton chain would be safer. I guess I was wrong.”
No one could chastise Starsa when she looked so strung‑out. Reoh was quick to assure her, “We all worked on the project. Who knows why it failed? You can’t blame yourself.”
Starsa still looked worried, an unusual sight. “Maybe we could get B’Elanna to look at it. She’s just down two floors.”
“You mean Torres?”Bobbie Ray asked incredulously. “Great! Do you want to make things worse?”
“Torres is a great engineer,” Starsa insisted. “Better than any of us.”
Jayme silently agreed, having watched, mouth hanging open along with the rest of the first‑year engineering students, as Torres argued with Professor Chapman over material stress levels and Starfleet safety protocols.
“It’s no use, even Torres couldn’t fix this,” Jayme told Starsa. “You should go to bed before you fall down.” Jayme helped her quadmate back to her room and into bed, leaving Titus and Bobbie Ray to mull over the mess they were in, with Nev Reoh hovering in the background offering useless suggestions with infinite hope, as always.
Jayme didn’t go back to her room after Starsa had lain down. First she made sure T’Rees would keep one eye on his roommate, then she went down to the transporter room to check the logs. There was no record in the short‑term memory of Moll Enor beaming out of the Quad tower. She checked the gardens around the Quad, asking other cadets if they had seen Moll, until she realized that she had been busy with Starsa and the medics for over an hour during the beta treatment. She rushed back to the transporter and found a record of Moll’s transport in the long‑term log. The Trill had gone to the Academy Database.
When Jayme reached the Database, the cadet staffing the entrance confirmed that Moll Enor had arrived a couple of hours ago, acting focused and preoccupied, as usual. Jayme felt a little better, but she searched through the mostly empty rooms of the Database, too worried to give up and go back to the Quad, but not so upset that she wanted to make the situation worse by notifying security.
Jayme placed a message on the network, but Moll didn’t respond. She checked the transporter logs of the Academy Database when she was certain Moll was no longer there, but there was no record of the Trill beaming out. She wandered along the cobblestone walkways between the Quads for a while longer before she finally gave up.
As she slipped back into their Quad, trying not to wake everyone, Titus, Bobbie Ray, and Nev Reoh were waiting in her room.
“Well?” Nev Reoh asked eagerly. “What did you find out?”
“I couldn’t find her,” Jayme admitted. “She went to the Database and then disappeared.”
“What?” Bobbie Ray exclaimed. “You’ve been looking for Moll all this time? What about our Quad project?”
“What about it?” Jayme countered. “It blew up.”
“But why?”Titus insisted, stepping closer. “We have to tell them something–”
“How am I supposed to know why it blew up? That would take weeks of reductive analysis!”
Bobbie Ray shrugged helplessly, turning away. “Well, I guess that’s it. Might as well get a few hours rest before the review board.”
“You’re going to sleep again?” Titus demanded.
“I’ll stay up,” Nev Reoh offered.
“For what?” Jayme asked. “There’s nothing we can do now. Even if I did figure out what went wrong–that the velociter malfunctioned or the gas streams were mixed at too high a temperature–what does that give us? Nothing! We’ll have to take the bits and pieces in to show the review board that we tried. Then our careers are in their hands.”
When Titus rolled out of bed the next morning, having never really gone to sleep, Bobbie Ray was briskly snoring on the other side of the room. That guy could fall asleep anywhere, anytime.
“Get up!” Titus ordered, roughly prodding the large mound beneath the blankets. “Doesn’t anything ever get to you?”
“You do,” Bobbie Ray assured him, raising his head and peering through sleep‑heavy eyes. “I’m rooming with Starsa or Jayme next year.”
“How can you lie there and act so blasй about being left back?”
Bobbie Ray sat up and stretched, seeming to isolate every muscle in his body through the most incredible contortions Titus had ever seen. Of course, after eight months of watching the Rex do exactly the same maneuvers, he could have mimicked every one. That is, if he cared to look like that.
Finally Bobbie Ray grinned down at him, still blinking sleepily. “It’s only a year. I bet I ace mechanical engineering next time around.”
Titus just stared at him. “How stupid of me. What a fantastic reason for the six of us to repeat an entireyear–so you can get a better grade. I feel so much better, now.”
Titus left his roomie laughing behind him, but it wasn’t much better when he ran into T’Rees in the hall.
“We have twenty‑four minutes before we must report to the review board,” the Vulcan told him. “We should not compound matters by being late.”
“Hey, you’re talking to the wrong guy,” Titus defended himself. “I’m here, I’m ready to face the plunge.”
T’Rees cocked one brow. “What ‘plunge’ are you referring to?”
“Never mind,” Titus told him. “I’ll get the others.”
When he went into Jayme’s room, she was stuffing the pieces of their proton chain‑maker into a carryall. “This looks carbonized,” she told him, holding up one piece of metal with a blackened edge.
“Is that all you discovered?” Titus asked.
Jayme shrugged. “If I had a week and a lab, we could probably put some of the pieces together and figure out what went wrong. Do you want to tell that to the review board? That we need another week?”
Titus grimaced as he shook his head. “Very poor planning. But we put it through all those tests a couple of weeks ago, and nothing happened then.”
“Maybe something went wrong when we were working the bugs out, those last calibrations of the velociter, maybe. Or one of the structural components failed.” At Titus’s glare, she added, “It happens! It happens all the time. That’s what engineers are for–fixing malfunctions.”
“Well, it’s time to face the review board,” Titus told her, realizing that he had to ease off. The others didn’t know how difficult it was for his family to have him away from Antaranan. Or how important it was that he succeeded, so he could send back the supplies and equipment they needed to bring life to the barren soil of the colony.