by David Mack
Pike gave her his canniest side-eye. “Easy for you to say, Number One. You aren’t the one who’ll have to answer to Admiral Anderson if this goes wrong.” He asked Spock, “Are you up for this, Lieutenant?”
“Yes, sir.” There was no hesitation in Spock’s answer. No pride, either.
“Very well. Grab whatever gear you’ll need, then get to the transporter room. As soon as we clear all this with Captain Georgiou, we’ll beam you over to the Shenzhou.”
“Understood, Captain.” Spock nodded once to Una, then headed for the turbolift.
As soon as the science officer had departed, Pike beckoned Una to lean closer so he could confide in her without the rest of the crew overhearing. “This is the last reprieve I can give to Georgiou and her crew. If this Burnham can’t knock out the Juggernaut in three hours, we have no choice but to proceed as ordered. Is that understood, Number One?”
“Absolutely, Captain. But I trust Spock to get this done.”
“I hope you’re right,” Pike said. “Your faith in him is the only reason I’m taking this risk.” He leaned away from her and straightened his posture in the center seat. “Garison, open a channel to the Shenzhou.” To himself he muttered, “Time for me to eat some humble pie.”
* * *
Through the ready room’s door panel speaker, Burnham heard Captain Georgiou say in a stern voice, “Come.” The door slid open, admitting Burnham to the captain’s sanctum.
With the Shenzhou and the Enterprise both returned to standard orbits, the aft-facing viewports of the ready room afforded an excellent head-on view of the Constitution-class starship, which now was only a few kilometers behind the Shenzhou. Below it sprawled the bluish-white orb of Sirsa III, and above it yawned an endless darkness salted with stars.
The door closed. Burnham turned to her right, toward Georgiou’s desk. There the captain sat, hands folded in front of her. Her countenance was grave. She lifted her gaze to assess Burnham as she approached, and only once the acting first officer halted in front of her desk did the captain secure their meeting from the bridge crew’s insatiable curiosity by uttering two simple words: “Computer. Privacy.” The transparent-aluminum panels of the ready room’s doors frosted an opaque white, and sound-canceling pulses resonated through it.
Not a good sign, Burnham realized.
Georgiou shook her head. “I honestly don’t know what to say to you right now. On the one hand, maybe I ought to thank you for giving us an alternative to a violent showdown with the Enterprise. On the other, I’m sorely tempted to give your job to Saru and have you court-martialed for insubordination. Can you give me any good reasons why I shouldn’t?”
“As you said, I helped prevent a potentially deadly conflict with another Starfleet vessel and crew. And if you wish to check the bridge’s security logs, I think you will find that I did try to present my plan to you first.”
The captain’s eyes narrowed. “And you think that excuses what you did? Has it occurred to you, Number One, that there might be any number of situations in which a commanding officer might not be open to your suggestions?”
The question was a rhetorical trap, one to which Burnham was obliged to submit. She masked her annoyance as she replied, “Of course.”
“And do you think having your suggestion refused entitles you to act upon it anyway? Because I’m having trouble recalling any part of Starfleet’s regulations that empowers first officers to supplant their commanding officers’ judgment with their own.”
Burnham saw that she needed to shift the narrative frame of the captain’s inquiry. “Would it improve your perception of the matter if I explained that I merely sought to employ an information-warfare tactic in order to enable your opponent to stand down without losing face?”
It was obvious Georgiou was not yet persuaded, but her interest was snared. “Explain.”
“Captain Pike is a young commanding officer,” Burnham said, “and a proud one. Given that he was acting on orders from our mutual superiors, his pride as a commanding officer was bound up in his success or failure in the execution of those orders. He could not stand down just because you opposed him; to do so would have undermined his authority. So I presented him with an alternative scenario, one that he could propose to you, and in so doing recover the proactive role in the negotiation. I enabled Pike to avoid embarrassment, by helping him offer you an alternative to combat that I knew you would find acceptable. It was, in my opinion, the most logical resolution to a most unfortunate confrontation.”
The captain weighed that argument while holding Burnham in place with her unyielding stare. It often seemed to Burnham that Georgiou would have made an excellent poker player, if not for the captain’s general aversion to games.
“That’ll work for my log,” Georgiou said. “Though if anyone ever asks, this meeting never happened. Is that clear?”
“Perfectly, Captain.”
Georgiou reclined her chair and crossed her legs. “So, was it just coincidence that the Enterprise officer you chose as your back channel was Spock, son of Sarek?”
“It was a fortunate happenstance that his console was the one linked to our systems.”
“But that doesn’t explain why you asked for him specifically to work with you, does it?”
Burnham answered with an evasive truth. “I asked for his assistance because I think he is the best qualified officer available to assist me.”
“Based on what criteria?”
Does the captain think I have ulterior motives? It was hard for Burnham not to feel as if she were on trial. “I need an investigative partner,” she said. “One whose training, mental discipline, and foundations in logic are comparable to, and compatible with, my own.”
“Why not Pike’s first officer? I hear his Number One is no slouch, in any regard.”
A polite nod of demurral. “While I have the utmost respect for Commander Una and her Illyrian mental conditioning, I think I will find it easier to build a working relationship quickly with someone of a more . . . Vulcan temperament.”
“I see.” Georgiou stood and circled her desk to stand in front of Burnham. “I’m going to take your word for this, Michael, because we don’t have a lot of time. If I approve this meeting of the minds, are you sure you can find a solution in under three hours?”
“No,” Burnham said, unwilling to lie to her captain and friend. “But I am certain that thousands of innocent lives will be lost if we do not attempt this.”
Georgiou’s grim resolve turned to a look of quiet hope in the face of impossible odds. “All right, then. Good talk, Number One.” She lifted her chin toward the door. “Get to work.”
“Aye, sir.” Burnham accepted the informal dismissal and escaped to the bridge, then to the turbolift, before Georgiou had time to reconsider.
Burnham headed for the transporter room, where her next official duty would be to welcome to the Shenzhou the one person in the galaxy she had hoped never to see again, and who would now be coming aboard at her invitation.
I get the distinct impression this constitutes a working definition of irony.
10
* * *
A golden shimmer and a mellifluous droning washed away the familiar gray confines of the Enterprise’s transporter room and delivered Spock to its counterpart inside the Shenzhou. He noticed immediately that the two compartments were laid out very differently. Whereas the Enterprise’s transporter room consisted of a dais with six energizer pads in front of the console, on the Shenzhou the energizer pads were larger and mounted on a curved bulkhead behind a semicircular dais. Also of note to Spock was the darker ambience of the Shenzhou’s transporter room and its more spacious nature.
The transporter operator left the room as soon as the materialization sequence was completed. Standing in front of the console was a sole officer, a human woman whose blue utility uniform sported piping and side panels of command gold and was adorned by a lieutenant’s rank insignia. She greeted Spock with a polite dip o
f her chin. “Lieutenant Spock. Welcome aboard the Shenzhou.”
“Thank you.” He stepped off the dais into the empty space between them.
She met him halfway and offered him her hand. “Thank you for coming.”
They shook hands for less than a second, her brown fingers contrasting with Spock’s pale digits. He had learned from a young age to minimize unnecessary physical contact with others, because it carried an elevated risk of triggering his touch-based Vulcan telepathy. Even though Spock was half-human, he had inherited powerful psionic talents from his Vulcan father, Sarek. Consequently, the danger of accidental telepathic contact was greater for Spock than it was for even some full-blooded Vulcans. It was a talent he took great care not to advertise or abuse.
He folded his hands behind his back. “How may I be of service, Lieutenant?”
“Please,” Burnham said, “you can call me Michael. Or if that’s too familiar—”
“I think it would be best if we kept our association professional,” Spock said.
His suggestion made Burnham self-conscious. Then her human mannerisms shifted, and her affect took on an almost Vulcan coldness. “As you prefer, Mister Spock.” She gestured toward the room’s exit. “Follow me, please.”
He fell in at her side as they left the transporter room and strolled the corridors of the Shenzhou. Once again Spock noted marked differences in the interior of the Walker-class ship from that of the Enterprise. Aboard the Shenzhou the grays were darker, and the bulkheads’ orientations more angular. It was clear to him that the two ships had been designed and constructed in different eras, according to very different aesthetic standards. Such drastic changes in a short span of time were not unusual among the humans of Earth, though it had proved a constant source of bemusement among their Vulcan and Andorian allies.
Awkward silence filled the spaces between Spock and Burnham while they walked. The human woman turned a wary look Spock’s way. “How is your father, Mister Spock?”
How was he to answer without prevarication? “I am told he is well.”
“You’re told? You mean by Amanda?”
“By my mother, yes.” It taxed Spock’s hard-won emotional control not to betray how deeply it bothered him to hear Burnham refer to his mother in so familiar a manner.
Burnham seemed confused by Spock’s elision. “So you’ve not spoken with Sarek?”
“Not in four years, ten months, and seventeen days.”
“Ah.” She halted and beckoned Spock toward a turbolift as she pressed the call button. They waited only a few seconds before a lift car arrived, and the doors slid apart. She motioned him inside, stepped in behind him, then said to the computer, “Science lab four.”
The doors closed, and the lift car shot into motion with hardly any sensation of movement. Spock noted the profusion of display screens that ringed the top of the lift car, and the complexity of the interface screens placed at eye level. He preferred the austerity of the Enterprise’s turbolifts, with their dearth of distractions and an optional control handle.
Burnham’s inquiry nagged at him, though it taxed his logic to ascertain why. He put aside any consideration of his motives and asked her, “When did you last speak with Sarek?”
The first officer rolled her eyes. “Not as long ago as you did . . . but it’s been a while.”
“I see. . . . And Amanda?”
“Even longer.” That was all Burnham said, and her tone made it clear that was all she intended to say on that subject. The turbolift halted, and she led him out onto another deck of the Shenzhou’s saucer, then into one of its curving outer corridors. “This way.”
Hoping to elicit some sense of what she had in store for him, he said, “May I ask, Lieutenant, why you requested my assistance specifically?”
She looked askance at Spock. “I hope you won’t misinterpret this as a boast or as racism born of a stereotype . . . but I’m reasonably sure you’re the only person on both our ships who might be able to keep up with me once I get started on this.”
Spock nodded. He required no explanation from Burnham; he knew of her family history, her youth and education on Vulcan, and the groundbreaking circumstances of her admittance to the Vulcan Science Academy. She possessed an unusual degree of mental conditioning for a human; it was unlikely that any of her shipmates truly deserved to be called her peers.
“Very well. Your message to me on the Enterprise indicated that you had developed a plan for infiltrating the Juggernaut. Is that what you’ve asked me here to evaluate?”
Suddenly, Burnham’s affect turned sheepish. “Um, not exactly.”
“I do not understand.”
“When I said I had a way inside the Juggernaut . . . I might have overstated the matter.”
Spock raised one eyebrow in subtle condemnation. “You lied?”
“I exaggerated.” She stopped and keyed in a code that opened the door to a superbly well-equipped research lab, then tried to placate Spock with a crooked smile. “What do you want me to say? I’m kind of making this up as I go.” She gestured toward the lab. “Shall we?”
He followed her inside, wondering every step of the way what his rigid taskmaster of a father had ever seen in this impetuous, irreverent human woman.
* * *
Never before in his life had Saru seen such a profusion of documentation that imparted so little information. When he considered that nearly all of his adult life had been spent in Starfleet, his dismay only deepened. Few organizations embraced the mind-numbing drudgery of bureaucracy with the zeal of a technocratic military exploration agency, but apparently the combination of Federation governmental administration and the private corporation behind the colonization of Sirsa III had put to shame the inveterate paper-pushers of Starfleet Command.
All these words for naught . . . it reads like verbal camouflage.
He began to hope he might be near the end of the colony’s application paper trail when an incoming message popped up on his console. In the scant delay between when he received the message and when he opened it, Ensign Connor appeared at his side to say, “I just sent you the next round of files on the Sirsa III planetary survey.”
Saru fixed the young human man with a weary glare. “Forgive me, Yeoman, but did you say ‘next’? Are you sure you didn’t mean to say ‘last’?”
“No, I said ‘next,’ sir. There are two more still to be sent from Earth.”
“Of course there are. Carry on, Yeoman.” Saru shook his head at his console while Connor headed aft, toward the captain’s ready room. Clearly, someone at Starfleet Command hates me and has waited until now to exact their vengeance.
The jungle of red tape and triplicate survey data proliferated across Saru’s console. There was an almost hypnotic quality to its repetitions—an effect achieved, he realized, by the use of automated survey drones to gather the legally required data about the planet. Unlike manually generated surveys, which were subject to random tiny shifts in such details as flight path or velocity, repeated scans by automated drones were often nearly perfect in their elimination of unnecessary variables. It created a uniformity to related data sets. Saru appreciated that.
His eyes snapped open and his head jerked back—a sudden waking from the soporific lull of bland sensor data. As soon as Saru realized what had just happened, he felt shame and wanted to retreat and seek cover—his species’ instinctual response. He fought against it and straightened his posture. Perhaps no one noticed.
He cast furtive glances around the bridge in search of accusatory stares. All was well to port side . . . but when he glanced to starboard, he was met by the black eyes of Lieutenant Frel glasch Negg, the ship’s lone Tellarite crew member. Negg cracked an arrogant smirk. “Something spook you, sir?”
It felt imperative to Saru to deny the implied accusation. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Only after he’d spoken did he realize his response had drawn attention to his exchange with Negg that hadn’t existed before. Damn.
/>
From the aft engineering station, Ensign Britch Weeton quipped, “Are we keeping you awake, sir? Should we work more quietly?”
His professionalism impugned, Saru turned to confront the engineering officer. “In case you have forgotten, Ensign Weeton, I am no longer just the senior science officer of this ship. I am now also third-in-command of this vessel—and, in either case, your superior officer. Facts that you and your would-be fellow jesters would be well advised to remember.”
It was a heavy-handed approach to such a minor bit of ribbing, but it achieved Saru’s desired outcome: now everyone’s focus was on Weeton and his verbal gaffe. The ensign withered quickly from the heat of the bridge crew’s collective attention and turned back toward his console to take refuge in his work. Seconds later, everyone else did the same.
Saru breathed a quiet sigh of relief. Too close. Have to drink more of that—what did they call it in the mess? He searched his memory. Ah, yes. Coffee. Definitely need more of that.
Poring over the new documents, Saru noted movement in his peripheral vision—someone coming toward him. He turned to meet the arrival of Ensign Januzzi. “Yes, Ensign?”
The shaved-headed human allayed Saru’s apprehension with a kind smile. “Sir. Everything’s five by five on the life-support station. I wanted to see if there was anything I could do to help you go through all this new intel Connor dumped on you.”
“Well, I—yes, actually.” Saru relaxed, grateful for the offer of help. “If it would be convenient, I could transfer the latest batch of files to your station for analysis.”
Januzzi nodded. “It’d be my pleasure, sir.”
“Thank you, Ensign.” As he keyed in the command to send the files to Januzzi’s duty station, he added, “We’re looking for an explanation as to how the planetary survey missed all signs of the Juggernaut’s presence under the seabed, as well as any other suspect anomalies.”