Ex Machina

by Christopher L. Bennett

  “Hmm, maybe. But Will Decker was human too.”

  “Yeah, but he outgrew it.” There was an awkward moment, and Reiko realized she’d probably had another burst of inappropriate humor. “Look… even if you’re right about McCoy, I still say he’s not the right person for this job. You are. I could put up with him staying on the ship, but he should be working for you. And as long as he’s in charge, sooner or later the well-being of this crew is going to suffer. Maybe you should consider the pain he’ll feel if he lets that happen—if you let him let it happen.”

  She left Chapel to ponder her words. Reiko could see she was far from convinced, still guided by her strong loyalty to McCoy. But with any luck, Reiko had successfully planted the seeds of doubt.

  * * *

  Montgomery Scott frowned at the molecular synchronization readouts on the transporter console. “Och, it looks fine, but I’m still not convinced. There’s still a wee variance.”

  Beside him, Chief Janice Rand sighed. “It’s well within tolerances. The redundant scanners will—”

  “Aye, I know what the manuals say! But these are entirely new systems; there’s no telling what kind of unexpected interactions there can be. You know that, lassie.”

  “Yes,” she said, her tone still a bit haunted by the memory. “I know that. But we’ve rebuilt practically the whole system from the ground up, Scotty. There’s nothing more we can do.”

  “Except rebuild the rest of it. Pull the quantum phase scanners—I want to run a few more—”

  “Mr. Scott.” It was Kirk’s voice, coming from the door-way. Scott started; he’d been so intent he hadn’t heard the door’s pneumatic seal hiss open. “Are you sure that’s necessary? Chief Rand is the expert on this system, and if she says it’s good to go, it’s good to go.”

  “Aye, Captain, but I still think—”

  “Mr. Scott. You assured me this overhaul would be completed before we reached the Daran system. That’s less than twelve hours away now. And I expect you to have this system up and running by that time, is that clear?”

  “Sir, if you’d just let me try a few more things—”

  “To do what? Improve efficiency by another hundredth of a percent? Scotty, this… perfectionist jag of yours is starting to interfere with the operations of this ship.”

  Scott stared at the captain. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

  “I think that’s long overdue. Please excuse us, Chief.”

  Once Rand had left, Scott spoke his piece. “This is supposed to be a shakedown cruise, sir. These are brand-new systems, the first of their kind. They can’t be rushed. The last time you called them into use before they were ready, we almost lost the whole Enterprise to a wormhole! And we did lose two good people to a—a transporter accident. A transporter accident!” he repeated in disbelief and disgust, slapping his palm on the console as if to reassure himself of its solidity. “Aye, we’ve had a few close calls with the transporter, but only under extraordinary conditions, alien influences… and even then, even with the ship blowin’ up around us, we almost always managed to put everyone back together again. But to lose two poor souls to a routine beaming—in drydock—it’s just not right, sir!”

  Kirk studied him. “Scotty, you know there was no other choice. We had to intercept V’Ger as soon as possible.”

  “Aye, I know that.” Not that we were able to do anything about the beastie till we were back in Earth orbit, Scott thought, knowing it was unfair. “I’m just sayin’—the new girl can’t be rushed, sir. She can handle whatever’s asked o’ her, I’d stake my reputation on that—but she needs to be guided into it by a gentle hand, someone who understands her moods and how to pace her.”

  Kirk’s gaze hardened. “You mean like Will Decker?”

  Scott couldn’t find the words to respond to that, because it was exactly what he did mean. Decker had been with the Enterprise through every stage of her reconstruction, getting to know her as intimately as any captain had ever known his ship. Meanwhile, Kirk had gone nearly three years without so much as a visit, even though the whole refit process had nominally been under his purview as Chief of Fleet Operations. And then all of a sudden he’d swept in out of nowhere, taken over, and begun demanding the impossible again. Scott hadn’t questioned that at first; after all, this was still Jim Kirk.

  But then look what had happened as a result of his pushing. When Kirk had come to tell Decker he was being removed from command, the younger captain had just tracked down the faulty module which had taken the transporters offline—a simple backup sensor for error-checking the Heisenberg compensator. After Kirk had pulled Decker aside, a circuit anomaly had sent a spurious green light to the transporter room while the HC was still disengaged, and then failed to alert Rand that it had not entangled with Commander Sonak and Vice Admiral Ciana, had not encoded their quantum-level data in its Bose-Einstein condensate. The thought still made Scotty shudder—the idea of a living thing’s particles being reassembled with random errors in their positions and momenta, body parts blurred together into mush, but with just enough of their original form remaining for the victim to be alive and aware of it for the brief moments it had left…. It was a horrible thing. It shouldn’t have been allowed to happen.

  Now Kirk peered into his eyes intently. “That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it, Scotty? That maybe Decker could’ve prevented the accident if I hadn’t dragged him away.”

  “I… there’s no way of knowin’ that, sir.” Or whether I could’ve prevented it if I hadn’t been so distracted by their conversation…

  “But that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” Scott tried to look away, but Kirk moved to catch his gaze. “I know, Scotty… because I have the same thought every day.”

  When Scott saw the pain in Kirk’s eyes, he could have slapped himself. How could he have been so self-absorbed? “I’m… sorry, sir. I wasn’t thinking…. I’d heard you and Admiral Ciana were… close….”

  Kirk lowered his head. “To tell you the truth, Scotty, that… didn’t end well. We hadn’t been close for a long time. I still don’t even know why she tried to come on board…. I guess I’ll never know. But it was almost certainly because of me.” He sighed and rested his weight on the console. “She’s dead, and it’s because of me. Whatever our… history, she didn’t deserve that. And Commander Sonak, too… he was young, dedicated, on his way to becoming an exemplary officer. He deserved better.”

  There was a long silence, but finally Scott reached out and put a hand on Kirk’s arm. “Jim… whatever you or… or I may feel about it, the hard fact is, nobody could’ve predicted the malfunction. Every new system has quirks and interactions you just can’t anticipate—not even with computer simulations, since they’re only as good as the conditions you put into ’em. And Mike Cleary’s a good man. He distinguished himself on the Potemkin and the Sacajawea—if anyone could’ve seen it coming, he could. I guess…” He let out a long puff of breath, ruffling his mustache. “Maybe we’d both better stop blamin’ ourselves. And maybe,” he added with a self-deprecating smile, “I should get out o’ Janice’s hair and find some real work.”

  Kirk returned the smile, though it was faint. “You do that, Scotty. Thanks.”

  “Aye, sir.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Strange, terrible and beautiful are the Keepers of the Promise: dragons of auroral light, patrolling the heavens, they guard the Promised World, keeping it untouched and pure until the People arrive to claim it as their home. Though we may recoil at their fearsome aspect, we must recall the profound debt which the People owe to the Keepers, and show them the same reverence, respect, and neighborly affection which they have promised us, in the Creators’ name.

  —The Book of the People

  IT’S AN ANCIENT QUESTION: If you travel faster than light, will your headlights work?

  The answer is yes, and no. In warp drive, your head-lights—and the rest of your vehicle—are in a bubble of normal spacetime surfing on
a distortion wave half-submerged in subspace. A beam of light will travel forward through the bubble until it reaches the edge—but once it crosses into normal space and moves at light speed relative to that, it’s suddenly going a whole lot slower than the bubble it just left—which immediately overtakes it, of course. (This is indelicately known as the spit-into-the-wind effect.) From the ship’s point of view, the light bounces off the front of the bubble and back the way it came. From outside, it’s still moving forward, but it won’t reach an observer until long after the ship does.

  Theoretically, this means that an arriving warp ship would seem to appear out of nowhere and split off a ghost duplicate that travels backward to its starting point, as the leftover light from farther away takes longer to catch up. The reason this effect doesn’t occur (not visibly, anyway) is the navigational deflector. At the effective velocity of a warp ship, a ray of light entering the front of the warp bubble would be blueshifted to a high enough energy level to vaporize the ship. So any warp ship needs a deflector that not only slows and diverts any impinging matter, but also redshifts any incoming light. So by the time our headlight beam passes out the back of the bubble and reenters normal space, it has been reduced to a long, feeble radio wavelength, barely hotter than the cosmic microwave background itself.

  In short, without subspace-based FTL sensors, it’s impossible to detect an approaching warp ship until it enters your system. Even then, it’s not always easy. When a ship exits warp, the collapse of spacetime back to its normal geometry causes a release of energy, a sudden burst across the spectrum heralding the vessel’s arrival. But the energy released is not very great, the flash is not exceedingly bright, and it ends very quickly. So it’s easy to miss unless it happens at close range, and unless you happen to be looking in the right direction.

  These facts all made Ssherrak Ki’threetl very nervous. Like most Shesshran, she disliked the idea of anyone being able to enter her territory without advance warning. True, her own territory was a few acres of hunting ground and the airspace above it, no more than a speck against the vastness of the Daran star system. But invaders from beyond that system, if they had the technology to warp space, could put every Shesshran’s territories in danger, and Shesshran had no problem cooperating in the name of a common interest, so long as individuals respected one another’s autonomy and boundaries. So as soon as the Shesshran had developed the early stages of warp theory, they had begun a cooperative effort to observe and patrol Daran’s interplanetary space, determined to catch that brief flash of a ship dewarping. They didn’t even know for sure whether any other life existed in the universe, but they weren’t about to take any chances.

  Thus it was that Ssherrak was out here, flying through vacuum in her one-person pod, watching for phantoms, rather than soaring on her own wings through Kachissat’s warm, dense, welcoming air in pursuit of some lively, succulent prey beast. No, she reminded herself, not phantoms. Such thinking diminishes your vigilance. It had been only three of Kachissat’s years since the theories had been proven true, the watch worthwhile—since the alien ship called Intrepid had been spotted exiting from warp within the system. The creatures called Vulcans had sought to avoid detection, to do a clandestine survey and then leave, for whatever reasons of their own. But they hadn’t counted on Shesshran vigilance, and the blast from a railgun had effectively proven it to them. True, it hadn’t put a dent in the powerful fields of force around the ship, but it had gotten the point across, and served as that all-important show of strength for opening a negotiation. It would have been a moral victory, so the defense coalition had asserted, even if the Vulcans had proceeded to destroy them.

  Ssherrak hadn’t been with the coalition at the time, but even if she had, she doubted she would have seen it that way. She figured it was fortunate that the Vulcans had chosen to talk instead of fight back. They hadn’t even made the traditional response strike to demonstrate their strength—but then, they hadn’t really needed to, given the futility of the railgun attack. It was even more fortunate that the Vulcans had been a type of life form better suited to the weak gravity and thin air of the fourth planet, and thus uninterested in territorial claims on Kachissat itself.

  By initiating contact, the Shesshran had nullified the Vulcans’ rule against dealing with pre-warp cultures. Still, the Vulcans had been protective of their advantages, unwilling to trade their technologies. They had claimed to be interested in engaging the Shesshran as equals, yet had been unwilling to let the sides meet at equal altitude by sharing the FTL sensor technology which would let the Shesshran guard their territory against future incursions. So the Shesshran, quickly reaching a consensus among the population, had asked the Vulcans to leave, and the Vulcans had done so. And the Shesshran had continued to watch, more alertly than ever now that they knew there was definitely something to watch for. Ssherrak herself had signed up for the defense coalition soon after, ceding the wardenship of her hunting grounds to her sister and eldest son for the duration of her offworld tours. It drove her crazy, not being home to defend her own grounds, but her sister and son were under strict contracts, and she was fully entitled to kill them if they abused their wardenship. They knew this full well, of course, so they were likely to honor their contracts. Which was a relief, at least in her son’s case. Her sister had naturally been a rival since reaching maturity, and had enjoyed being a rival too much even before then.

  And of course, what Ssherrak did out here was important. In the years since the Intrepid had left, Daran space had been incurred upon several times more. This series of incursions had begun when a large, powered asteroid had been detected on the far edge of the system, and another Federation starship along with it—indeed, since the asteroid had been heading almost directly for Kachissat at too great a distance for easy parallax, it had not been identified as a threat until it had exchanged fire with the starship. Once it was realized the object was on a collision course with Kachissat, a fleet had been mobilized to engage it and the starship, on the assumption that it was an attack launched by the Federation. Ssherrak had been one of the volunteers for that fleet, knowing that it was probably a futile battle, but driven to defend her world and her little patch of sky or die trying. She’d begun to understand why the coalition members had been willing to die for a moral victory. But she’d been sad to think that her lovely hills, her elegantly rustic eyrie, and her tasty dushiik herd would end up destroyed—or worse, as her sister’s property.

  No sooner had the fleet been assembled, however, than the starship had contacted the Shesshran, calling itself Enterprise and announcing that the asteroid had been diverted, that it was in fact an alien colony ship intending to settle the fourth planet. The Shesshran had been stunned to discover that more than one species was adapted for such hostile conditions—although Ssherrak couldn’t tell any of those species apart and wasn’t remotely convinced of their claim to be unrelated.

  In any case, the Shesshran had objected strenuously to the idea of aliens settling one of their planets, even a useless, nearly airless one. Ssherrak hadn’t really been bothered by that per se, but having aliens so close would have required even greater vigilance, and her grounds would thus have to stay in her relatives’ hands for longer. Ssherrak could have always resigned; unlike the Federation types, Shesshran did what they chose, not what they were told by another, so nobody could have prevented her from leaving the coalition. But if people thought that way, she believed, then there would be no volunteers and no global defense. And although she was uncomfortable leaving the tending of her grounds in other hands, she couldn’t trust anyone but herself with the defense of their very existence.

  So she had argued against letting the aliens settle on Daran IV, and for telling the Federation to take them somewhere else. But then the asteroid people, the Fabrini, claimed that the world had been promised to them by the ancient Shesshran. It had seemed a ludicrous claim to most, but some archaeologists got all excited and drummed up interest in their crackpot theo
ries, and then the Federation sent a smaller ship called the Yang Liwei whose crew helped them dig up their own hunting grounds (their choice, of course, but what a waste!), and proved that the ancient civilization really had existed before the Great Die-Off, and really had invited the Fabrini. That, unfortunately, had changed everything. Contracts and promises had to be honored, or society couldn’t function.

  So Ssherrak had accepted the consensus that the Fabrini should have their world, though she wasn’t in the minority that actually wanted them there. And so she kept serving her tours in the coalition, watching space for intruders, knowing that if they came in force the defense effort wouldn’t make any difference, but was still worth dying for. But the whole thing put her in a really bad mood. She spent her long, tedious tours fantasizing alternately about blasting an invading starship into vapor and about creative ways to kill her sister if and when she broke some minor codicil of their contract. Sometimes, for variety, she even fantasized about killing her son—he was a sweet boy, but she could have more, and sons were relatively expendable, since all they ever did was go off and mate with some rival female, defend her lands, and make it harder to take them away from her. Besides, she hadn’t been hunting in weeks, and she was aching to kill something.

  Which was why it filled her with satisfaction when that familiar warp flare happened in her own sector, and a Federation starship popped forth. She had no illusions about being able to kill anyone aboard it, but at least it gave her something to shoot.

  * * *

  “Captain, we are taking fire!”

  “Easy, Mr. Chekov,” Kirk said. “As I understand it, this is just the Shesshran’s way of saying hello. Risk assessment?”

  Chekov seemed to be striving for total calm, self-conscious about his overreaction. “Minimal, Captain. Their weapons pose no significant threat to our shields.” He checked the tactical monitor. “However, four other ships have diverted to intercept us. If they combine their forces they could… still not pose a significant threat. Not unless we let them fire continuously for an hour or two.”