Star Trek: The Next Generation - 119 - Armageddon's Arrow by Dayton Ward

still.”
    “Well, you just do what he says, and come back soon.” Picard reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder. “And be careful over there.”
    “I’ll have Worf and an entire security team with me,” Crusher countered. “I’ll be fine, but it could take some time to figure out how to revive the crew.”
    Recalling the latest reports offered by Worf and La Forge, which detailed the status of the alien vessel’s various onboard systems, Picard said, “Assuming you can do it without harming them. If you can’t do it there, we’ll discuss options for transporting them back here.”
    “One thing at a time,” Beverly said. Then, she gave him a playful poke in the arm. “You’re really going to read him that silly book tonight?”
    “Absolutely,” Picard said. “I can’t wait to see what happens next.”

8

    T’Ryssa Chen loved zero gravity.
    There was a unique freedom to floating and moving around in weightlessness. Even swimming, another activity she had come to love, was not a proper comparison. Though she had experienced low- or null-gravity environments on infrequent occasions during her childhood, it was not until her enrollment in Starfleet Academy that she realized it was something to be enjoyed.
    “I swear, you’re just like a kid sometimes,” said Dina Elfiki as she followed behind Chen, who at the moment was amusing herself by putting her body into a twisting roll as she drifted through the narrow, weightless tunnel.
    “I can’t help it,” Chen replied, following Cruzen as the security officer led the way up the tunnel to the cockpit, and maneuvering without effort through the null-gravity space. “I always have fun in zero- g . It’s like flying.” She and the science officer had ventured along with Lieutenant Kirsten Cruzen to investigate what appeared to be the mammoth ship’s bridge. After nearly four hours aboard the alien ship, gravity and environmental control systems now were online in several of the vessel’s habitable areas. While the atmospheric requirements of the ship’s passengers seemed largely compatible with most of the humanoids on the Enterprise crew, Elfiki had determined that the oxygen content here was more similar to Vulcan than Earth. Therefore, Commander Worf had authorized the inoculation of the entire team with tri-ox compound from the shuttlecraft’s medical kit to compensate for the disparity. This allowed the away team to dispense with their EV gear while moving about. Chen, like the rest of the away team, was dressed in the gray, single-piece form-fitting garments typically worn underneath the heavier suits, which bore no rank insignia or other accessories save their combadges as well as the phasers and tricorders they carried in holsters on their hips.
    Scans had revealed that certain areas—including most of the tunnels and passageways linking the ship’s different decks—were deliberately designed without artificial gravity systems. Chief among those, it turned out, was the bridge and most of the tunnel connecting that compartment with the main passageway running the length of the ship. For her own part, Chen was having a ball with the whole setup.
    Ahead of her, Cruzen said, “I can’t say I hate it, but I don’t love it, either. Mostly it’s just a pain in the ass.”
    Chen could not agree. Even at the Academy, where other students had dreaded those exercises, she looked forward to them and even scheduled additional after-hours training time in zero- g simulators. She also took advantage of holodeck programs that re-created early spacecraft from Earth, Vulcan, and other planets, which had been constructed and flung toward the stars long before their respective homeworlds discovered artificial gravity technology. Her favorite simulations of this type were the first flights from Earth, in which she would portray one of the astronauts journeying in small, fragile ships to make those initial, hazardous landings on Luna. It was a period of