Holiday

“This,” I muttered quietly, “sucks.”

The Troll had been on this particular salvage job for three months. Three. Months. Ninety-three point two days, to be precise about it, which I wasn’t being because every time I was our First Officer growled at me and went down to the med-bay to toss her husband on the floor. Three months was a long time for a salvage job, but it was a big job: we were literally helping to salvage a near-ancient NX-class cruiser, one of Starfleet’s first interstellar warp ships. Its warp drive made the Troll look well-equipped. We weren’t, however, working on anything interesting like the warp drive, or the warp core, or anything. No, we were stuck helping to dismantle a portion of the main saucer hull. We’d already made eight trips to the nearest Starfleet recycling center; this particular NX-class ship was in such poor shape that it was faster to tear it apart where it lay than to even tow it to the recycling yard.

Our salvage bay was almost full, ready for the ninth of what looked to be about eleventy million trips.

First officer Smith Stevenson and I were doing the majority of the salvage work, taking shifts in turn to cut up the hull and drag the chunks into our bay. Other salvage crews were working elsewhere on the enormous hull, slowly breaking it down into pieces that could be re-engineered into a new ship. Starfleet was very environmentally conscious. Adam, our Engineer, took the first half of his shift during the last half of mine, overlapping into the first half of First Officer Wifey’s shift. That way he got to spend some time helping each of us, and got to spend “mornings” with his wife, making sure she got enough coffee to not snap at me when she got to the bridge.

Captain Ryan? Utterly useless for long-attention-span jobs like this. Ryan, as he would inform you, was a hard worker, but a man of action. A man of whim and whimsy. A man of charm, with a lady in every port. A man of… well, something, but I’d quit listening. Ryan had spent the first week on-site jetting around the inside of the ship we were salvaging, waxing eloquent about its place in history and treating it as his own personal museum. The next week, he spent visiting the various other salvage crews on the job, until they’d all, one by one, called us and asked us to stop him from doing that. Then he’d disappeared into his quarters for two weeks. He’d emerged looking haggard yet refreshed, and his quarters were littered with starship models and board games he’d invented, all made from cut-up cereal boxes.

Then he’d become annoying.

First, he’d clambered onto the bridge during Shandra’s shift, but when she was taking a brief bio-break. He’d repositioned the Troll to a different section of the NX-class ship, later claiming it to be a “more interesting” part. Shandra, bless her, had noticed and hadn’t immediately fired up the salvage phasers when she came back, thus sparing the lives of the workers crawling over that section of the saucer-shaped hull. She’d had some firm words with our Captain, moved Troll back, and ended her shift an hour early.

Then, he’d decided to play with the immensely complex pressor/tractor beam net system we used in the salvage bay to hold all the loose salvage in place during transit. As a result, the next time we’d shifted the Troll to a new vantage point, everything had slammed to one side of the bay, knocking the ship off-position and almost pushing us into the derelict hull.

We suggested he engage in some critical EVA maneuvers to ascertain the safety of the next section we were schedule to cut up.

Of particular suckage was that we were edging up to December 25th on the Earth calendar, which meant Christmas. This would be the first time I’d spent Christmas aboard the Troll, as we usually scheduled some downtime this time of year. I mean, I wasn’t a huge holiday celebrant, but I did enjoy contacting my homeward to exchange greetings, and I particularly loved getting presents.

Few presents would be in the offing.

I turned up the salvage phasers a bit, more out of spite than anything else, and watched hull material disintegrating in front of me. Sigh. I glanced at the chronometer, a flat, dull-red display that listlessly told me we were a few minutes from midnight, ship time, which is when my shift traditionally ended. I wasn’t tired, though.

“Hey.” Shandra walked into the bridge.

“Hey.”

“How is it?”

“Metal. Phasers. Blargh,” I replied. “Also, it’s officially Christmas in, like, six minutes.”

“Huh. I don’t think I’ve spent Christmas on a job before,” she said.

“I haven’t.”

“You think Buzz knows?”

“Probably,” I said. “He’s the attention span of a tribble, but he’s actually pretty good at keeping track of things. I honestly thought he’d have rigged up some kind of Christmas tree by now, but he’s still EVA-ing out there.”

She shrugged. “Oh, well. You ready to head in?”

“Yeah, I guess,” I replied. “I’m not tired and I’ve literally watched every Tom Cruise movie ever made at least twice, just on this job. If you want to take over the phaser, I can run the main tractor and speed things up a bit.”

“Might as well,” she said, sitting down at her station. “Seen Adam?”

“He was up a couple of hours ago,” I answered, “but I think he’s back in Engineering messing with the intermix regulator. Didn’t you see him this morning?”

“Yeah, we practiced for a bit in the rec area, but he said Buzz had asked him to take a look at something. The regulator, I suppose.”

“Yeah.” I toggled my console to shift passer control to hers, and focused on pulling in the chunks she began carving off the lifeless hull in front of us. That’s when the ship’s alarm system fired off. We both jumped; after weeks of absolute boredom, we hadn’t been expecting anything. “The hell?” I asked nobody in particular.

Shandra had already shut down the phaser and pulled up whatever the ship was complaining about. “Shit,” she said calmly. She toggled the ship-wide intercom. “We’ve got a bogey coming in fast. Prepare for immediate maneuvers. Prepare for possible impact. Don–”

“On it.” The ship’s midrange sensors had picked up a small mass hurtling toward us at roughly .5 light speed. Far below warp speed, but far more likely to drill a hole right through our unshielded ship. “Should I–”

“No,” she said, “we’re not supposed to have those shields and there are Starfleet people all over the place. Just move us.”

“Yeah, already on it.” Troll wouldn’t move fast with the salvage bay opened, but it took a bit of time to close it, and we didn’t need to move much to avoid the incoming things’ trajectory. I nudged us back a couple of hundred meters. As I did so, I kept an eye on the sensors. “Shandra, it’s turning to follow us.”

“Shit with espresso,” she replied. “Shields up.” She slapped the jury-rigged shield control, and I glanced to my right where the main shield controls were seriously jury-rigged into the ship’s original support console. I heard her slap the control again, and looked back at her. “They’re not activating,” she replied, finally allowing some annoyance to creep into her voice.

“Impact,” I said, glancing at the sensor display, “in about a minute.”

“Brace for impact!” she yelled into the shipwide. She and I sprang for the back of the bridge, where a set of emergency vac-suits were stored next to the bridge entrance. My record with these was 30 seconds, but we both stumbled a bit. In my head, the countdown ran out before we got the vac-safe hoods on. I stopped. Shandra saw me, and stopped sealing her own hood. “What?”

“It didn’t hit us,” I said. I let the hood fall down my back and went back to my console. “Also, it’s gone.” I toggled the near-, mid-, and long-range sensors on the display. “Like, no sign of anything.”

“You guys okay up there?” Adam’s voice came over the intercom.

“Yeah, we think so.” Shandra replied from the back of the bridge. “You’ve got nothing?” she asked me.

“No,” I said. I scanned the entire console. Phasers locked down. Shields not up, although they were showing ready. Tractor locked down. Tractor/pressor net engaged. Bay open. Little Troll docked. Life support systems optimal, energy optimal, warp engines on idle. “I’ve no idea. Everything looks fine.”

“Hey guys,” Adam’s voice came on again, “could you come down to the rec room?”

We glanced at each other. This felt weird, and I didn’t like weird. I put the bridge controls on full standby; the Troll would hold her place in space and alert us if anything else showed up on the sensors. Shandra and I clambered down to the lower hull area, where the rec room, galley, and crew quarters were. As we emerged into the rec room, Adam was standing there smiling. He was standing in front of a seven-foot tree, made from twisted shards of metal and painted an appalling fluorescent green. Arrayed around the bottom of the tree was a collection of cereal boxes, in all their bright, marshmallow-advertising colors.

“What,” I asked carefully, “the hell?”

“Well, I’ll be!” came Ryan’s voice as he emerged from his quarters into the rec room.

“I thought you were on EVA?” I said.

“Nah,” he answered. “I saw it was getting close to midnight and wrapped it up. I was taking a nap. But look at all that!” he said, pointing to the “tree.”

“What is it, exactly?” I asked.

He shrugged. “It looks like Santa Claus paid us a visit right at the stroke of midnight,” he said. “Look, he brought presents,” he added, strolling to the tree and picking up a cereal box. “This one has your name on it!”

I blinked. There were a lot of conflicting inputs going on, and I glanced at Shandra. She was grinning from ear to ear. “Open it,” she said.

More or less on autopilot, I took the box from Buzz and opened it. Inside was a media deck, like the kind of I used to store all the Tom Cruise movies that had ever been made. I pulled it out of the box. “It says ‘Hemsworth.’”

“Ah,” Buzz crowed, “Santa obviously knows you’ve run out of movies to watch, and so he brought you something new!”

I looked at him. “How in the world did you get this in here?”

He smiled. “I didn’t! Santa did.”

I glared at him, and then turned to glare at Adam. “Okay,” Adam said, “he had me disable some of the bridge controls so you wouldn’t see that the skiff wasn’t docked, and to disable the shields. He flew in at max speed, and we unloaded this tree before you guys could get down here.”

“Aw, man,” Buzz said.

“It’s not like he believes in actual Santa Claus,” Adam chided. “He was just missing Christmas.”

“You did all that,” I said, “so that I’d have Christmas.”

“We felt bad for you,” Buzz said.

“And you,” I said, turning to Shandra, “you were in on it.” She nodded happily.

I blinked again. “Thank you,” I said. “I was bummed because I wasn’t going to get to really see my family for Christmas. And get presents. But you got presents. And,” I said, putting down the media deck and drawing them all into a big hug, “I got to spend it with my family after all.”