Star Trek: Discovery: Desperate Hours

by David Mack

  “Understood, sir. Should I alert you as soon as I find something, or would you prefer a more complete analysis before I make my report?”

  “Notify me at once if you find anything that gives you cause for alarm or suspicion.”

  “Yes, sir.” Januzzi returned to his duty station and set himself to work with an intensity that Saru found admirable. In the months since Januzzi had transferred aboard, Saru had noticed how quickly the young officer had grown popular among his shipmates. At first Saru had chalked it up to the man’s habit of volunteering to assist fellow bridge officers with seemingly mundane tasks or to cover their duty shifts whenever they needed time off. But the more that Saru had observed Januzzi’s interactions with other Shenzhou crew, including enlisted personnel, the more he had come to admire the man’s genuine affection for others.

  It occurs to me, Saru thought, that I have never heard Januzzi speak in derision or envy of a crewmate. If that is a true representation of his inner self, he is a rare person, indeed.

  He set his mind back to work on the mound of raw data with which he had been deluged. It was not reasonable to attempt to compare such huge data sets manually. He programmed a filter to identify points of diversion in the behavior and logged results of the survey drones. As it ran, he wondered how much deviation from one scan to the next would be considered within normal parameters. Starfleet’s own survey protocols tended to be more exacting than—

  An alert warbled on Saru’s console. He paused the filter’s comparison analysis. Then he stared, dumbstruck, at the absurdly implausible result it had flagged.

  He was considering his next course of action when Januzzi stood from his own post and crossed the bridge at a quick step to stand beside him. “Sir, I think I found something.”

  “Let me guess, Ensign: an excess of data commonality—”

  “—centered on the exact location where the Juggernaut was found,” Januzzi said, simultaneously finishing and confirming Saru’s damning observation.

  Strings of telemetry from what were supposed to have been three separate drone passes were superimposed over one another on Saru’s screen. While the flight recorder data from the drone was ever so minutely different on each flyover, its sensor sweeps had somehow yielded fully identical data sets—something that, given the realities of molecular decay and shifts in water currents and temperatures, should have been impossible. But unless someone had searched for this kind of data artifact, it would likely have gone unnoticed in perpetuity.

  But there it was. As plain to see as sunlight penetrating the depths of a cave.

  Januzzi leaned in and spoke more softly. “Sir, would I be correct to say that the data strings we’ve highlighted look a lot like tampering?”

  “Yes, Ensign, I think you would be.” He turned and faced Januzzi. “How would you feel about helping me locate evidence to confirm this?”

  “Whatever you need, sir.”

  Saru liked this man more with each passing minute. “Then let’s get to work, Mister Januzzi. If I’m correct, we have a conspiracy to expose.”

  * * *

  The more time Burnham spent in Spock’s presence, the more she disliked him. The son of Sarek of Vulcan and Amanda Grayson of Earth seemed to relish contradicting Burnham and undermining her hypotheses. It was not a behavior that Burnham found endearing.

  “Much of your information appears to be speculative, at best,” Spock said. “I doubt it would be possible to draw a defensible conclusion based on such limited data.”

  Condescending and judgmental, just like his father, Burnham fumed, while at the same time struggling to maintain a neutral façade for Spock’s benefit. “We’ve analyzed the signals being sent from the Juggernaut. Though some of its output appears to be correlated to its launch of attack drones, other, repeating portions of its sonic emissions don’t seem to bear any relation to its past, current, or upcoming actions.”

  “At best, an unsupported supposition,” Spock said. “At worst, a possibly fatal error.”

  She wanted to throttle him—a reaction whose ferocity surprised her. It was rare for anyone to get under Burn-ham’s skin. Ever since her youth on Vulcan she had cultivated a patience and a reservoir of calm rarely enjoyed by Terran humans. But something about Spock—his way of speaking, his near-perfect air of detachment—drove Burnham to distraction. He seemed to embody so effortlessly all that she had so long struggled to become, and it vexed her.

  She called up a series of audio waveform images on one of the science lab’s viewscreens. “Can we agree, at least, that these signals all started subsequent to the Arcadia Explorer’s drilling accident in relation to the Juggernaut?”

  “I remain unconvinced that the incident was, in fact, an accident,” Spock said. “The odds of an encounter between the drilling platform and the Juggernaut occurring purely at random this early in the drilling rig’s operational life-span are extremely remote.”

  How many times would this ice-blooded Vulcan—half-Vulcan—make her rephrase the same question? “Will you concede that the emission of these signals from the Juggernaut was subsequent to the most recent incident with the Arcadia Explorer, regardless of its nature?”

  If the Enterprise’s science officer was aware that he was annoying Burnham, he did an excellent job of concealing his awareness. “I will so stipulate, yes.”

  “Hallelujah,” Burnham grumbled. She side-eyed Spock. “It’s a Terran expression—”

  “I am aware of its meaning, and of its apparent relevance to our exchange.”

  Even when he tried to be agreeable and forthcoming, he made Burnham furious. Determined not to let him derail her deductive process, she resorted to her long-ago Vulcan education to purge her mind of emotional undertows, so that logic could give order to her thoughts upon a serene surface composed of reason. “Mister Spock, are you aware of the work conducted over the past several decades by Doctor Egot Huln of Denobula, concerning the use of infrasonic pulses as a means of influencing behavior in sapient humanoids?”

  “I am. I found many of Doctor Huln’s theories quite provocative.”

  “As did I. Recall, please, Doctor Huln’s proposition concerning the use of infrasonic signals to attract primitive humanoids for xenoanthropological testing. Did not the signal waveform that he postulated as being potentially the most efficacious match that emitted by the Juggernaut, to within three-thousandths of a frequency?”

  “It did.”

  “And were not the period and amplitude hypothesized by Doctor Huln markedly similar to those employed by the Juggernaut?”

  “They were,” Spock said. “Though I feel compelled to note that similar frequencies, as well as other identifying factors, have been shown to occur in nature.”

  Burnham took a breath, partly to cool her ire, but also to give Spock time to register her dissent. “In nature, Mister Spock? Need I remind you this is not some pulsar, nor some quasi-aware planetoid using tectonic vibration to control its ecosphere. This is a starship of unknown alien origin and design. For a synthetic construct to emit such pulses—”

  “You are assuming it to be synthetic,” Spock cut in. “Long-range scouts have reported encountering space-faring life-forms whose physiology gives them the appearance of uncrewed starships. Pending the outcome of a more thorough investigation of the Juggernaut, it might be premature to declare it a synthetic construct rather than one of biomechanoid origin.”

  If I break his nose, will he question whether it’s really broken? “For the purpose of our discussion, let’s put aside for now the question of the Juggernaut’s true nature. Would you concur that its emission of these signals comports with the majority of the postulates put forth by Doctor Huln in his treatise on infrasonic control of humanoid psychology?”

  “I would.”

  Finally, some progress. Burnham wondered whether Spock’s resistance to her ideas, and his penchant for sandbagging her efforts to move their exploration forward, was rooted somehow in their peculiar shared history
as it concerned his parents. She was tempted to ask, but she feared that broaching the subject directly would only alienate him further, and bolster his rationale for treating her own logic as somehow suspect. Satisfied to build on what little common ground they had established so far, she asked, “If we accept Huln’s propositions as valid, what course of action would that suggest we take with regard to the Juggernaut?”

  Her question rendered Spock silent for several seconds. He considered the data displayed on the lab’s multitude of viewscreens; he pondered the equations and waveforms on the workstation screen he shared with Burnham. “A closer investigation might be warranted.”

  “To put it another way,” Burnham said, “I think we should accept their invitation. You and me, just the two of us.”

  Her proposition seemed to confound Spock. “I do not understand.”

  “We beam down to the Juggernaut, pool our experience and efforts, and find a way to gain access to the ship’s interior. I have some ideas how we might accomplish that, but—”

  Spock silenced her with a raised hand. “You said earlier that you had no plan.”

  “No, I said I might have overstated the degree to which I had one. In the brief time that you and I have been comparing notes, I feel as if I’ve made a number of breakthroughs on a subconscious level. Now I’d like for us to beam down together and put them to the test.”

  The son of Sarek raised an eyebrow at her. “Your methods are most unorthodox.”

  Burnham couldn’t help but smile. “Flattery will get you everywhere, Mister Spock.” She quick-stepped toward the door, unable to constrain her enthusiasm for a mission of exploration. “Well? C’mon!” She tapped her wrist, an ancient Terran gesture meant to signal impatience, one of the few things she remembered from early childhood on Earth. “The clock’s ticking, Mister Spock, and people are waiting for us to save the day—not to mention their lives.”

  * * *

  “Sir, I think I have something,” Januzzi said, breaking Saru’s concentration. Saru turned to face the ensign as he approached Saru’s duty station, which stood to starboard behind the captain’s chair. “Can you call up the new files I just downloaded from Earth?”

  “I should certainly think I could,” Saru said, accessing the documents from the ship’s main computer. He checked the files’ metadata and opened the ones with the most recent download and analysis timestamps. “Rather prodigious documents,” he noted.

  Januzzi tilted his head in what Saru perceived as a gesture of acquiescence. “That’s because they’re the original, uncompressed sensor data from the planetary survey.”

  His revelation transformed Saru’s enthusiasm to trepidation. “By what means did you obtain this data, Mister Januzzi?”

  A faux-humble shrug. “I might have appealed to a contact at Starfleet Intelligence to remotely access the memory cores inside the probes, which are currently undergoing refit and refueling at the Kayo Mining Consortium’s maintenance station in the Ishanee system.”

  Saru became paralyzed with indecision. This was crucial intelligence, the sort of data that might illuminate otherwise occulted facts. Alas, Januzzi’s admission that it might have been acquired by extralegal means left Saru in an ethical quandary. Illegally obtained information was the poisoned fruit of a tainted search, inadmissible in a legal proceeding—but its tactical value to the Shenzhou’s ongoing operations might serve to aid its mission and save numerous lives.

  Rules of evidence are the JAG’s problem, he decided. The mission comes first.

  “Walk me through what you’ve found, Mister Januzzi.”

  Januzzi called up a number of work files he had created, using the new sensor data and the colony’s previously submitted files as resources for comparison. “First, notice that the areas we flagged earlier yield very different results when checked against the original logs. In the master files, the data shows the expected variations on each of the three flybys.”

  “Yes, continue.”

  “But there’s more. Lots more.” Januzzi switched the data to display a wider area of the planet’s surface. “There were anomalies in other regions, too. I’ve isolated them for you.”

  Saru felt as if he were being set up to miss something. “What am I meant to see?”

  “I’m not entirely sure, to be honest. My specialty at the Academy was astrophysics.” He regarded the sensor data with a good-natured frown. “This is a bit out of my bailiwick.”

  “I understand.” Saru resumed scrutinizing the sensor imagery. “Fascinating. I had no idea that civilian sensor technology had become this sophisticated. Its depth and resolution are—”

  A detail in the image all but leaped from his screen, it was so prominent. He applied a series of filters to confirm what he had found. “Oh, my. That’s remarkable.” He keyed in a series of commands to automate a repetition of the work he had just done, on the other regions of the data that Januzzi had flagged as having been altered. As the computer worked, Saru confided to Januzzi, “If the consortium’s modifications of their sensor logs all were made for the same reason, this will be a most serious matter you’ve brought to light.”

  “That we’ve brought to light. . . . Sir.”

  Diligent, efficient, and quick to share credit—Januzzi continued to impress Saru. “Quite correct, Ensign.” His console beeped to indicate it had finished its task. “Let’s see what we—” Words abandoned Saru as he stared at truths unearthed from the original sensor logs. All his suspicions lay confirmed. “Would you like to know what we’ve found, Mister Januzzi?”

  “Very much, sir.”

  “Evidence of a primitive civilization.” Saru pointed out the pockets of data. “One that encircled the tropical latitudes of this world’s land masses more than nine million years ago.”

  “Nine million?” Januzzi concentrated. “Wasn’t that roughly the same length of time that Commander Johar said the Juggernaut had been under the seabed?”

  Saru centered the sensor imagery on the coordinates where the Juggernaut had been found. “Yes, Ensign. Those numbers do appear to correlate—though we must take care not to presume a causal relationship between them, absent any evidence of such. That said—” He magnified the image. “Nine million years ago, the Juggernaut would have been standing on dry land, in the midst of one of the densest population clusters of the planet’s previous inhabitants.”

  “That seems unlikely to be a coincidence,” Januzzi said.

  “I am inclined to concur. Now, given the limitations of the probes’ sensors, I could forgive the Kayo Mining Consortium for having mistaken the Juggernaut for an anomalous deposit of duranium and other exotic compounds considered valuable for starship hull manufacturing.” He tapped the readings related to the lost cities. “But their tampering with the logs to hide the evidence of these alien settlements . . . that I cannot and will not condone.”

  Januzzi’s affect turned somber. “So, what do we do now, sir?”

  Saru closed the documents and entered new orders into his console. “We transmit all our data and findings to Captain Georgiou and to Admiral Anderson at Starfleet Command. The rest”—he sent the damning message with a single tap—“is above our pay grade.”

  11

  * * *

  Few offenses angered Christopher Pike as profoundly as being lied to. He couldn’t help but interpret it as a slight; it was an insult to his intelligence for someone to assume he wouldn’t find out, and a show of disrespect for his authority as a starship commander. It didn’t matter whether the prevaricator was enlisted, commissioned, civilian, or—in the case of Governor Gretchen Kolova—elected. If anything, Kolova’s position as the leader of the Sirsa III colony meant that Pike expected her to uphold a higher standard.

  Kolova looked back at him from the right side of the Enterprise bridge’s main viewscreen, and Captain Georgiou’s grim expression filled the left side of the split image. In spite of the accusations Pike and Georgiou had leveled at Kolova when they told her what Saru an
d Januzzi had found in the original planetary survey data, the governor carried herself with an unrepentant air. “What do you expect me to say, Captains?”

  Pike was in the mood for a confrontation. “Why don’t we start, Governor, with why you concealed this evidence of a prior civilization?”

  “That wasn’t my call,” Kolova said. “The decision to modify the sensor data was made by the executive board of the Kayo Mining Consortium.”

  Her evasion stoked Georgiou’s wrath. “But you were more than happy to go along with it, weren’t you, Governor?”

  Kolova maintained a stoic front. “I didn’t know about it when I accepted their appointment as the colony’s governor. By the time I and the other colonists learned the sensor logs had been altered, most of us were bound by strict nondisclosure contracts with Kayo.”

  “Nondisclosure contracts?” Pike wondered for a cynical moment what century he was living in. “Governor, you withheld evidence of a serious crime. Are you really going to try to justify it by claiming you were silenced by a business agreement?”

  Before the governor could answer, Georgiou added, “Who, besides you, knew about the falsified data? Anyone who knew of this fraud and failed to report it could be criminally liable.”

  The captains’ double-barreled rhetorical assault prompted Kolova to put on a strained smile. “In the absence of a subpoena delivered by a duly appointed agent of a civilian court with appropriate jurisdiction, I will not give you names with which to expand your persecution. Second, before you start demanding access to my administration’s files and deposing my citizens, I’d suggest you obtain a warrant from the Federation’s colonial court.”

  Her challenge made all of the Enterprise’s bridge officers look up from their respective duty stations to stare at the viewscreen, as if to collectively ask, Did she really just say that?

  Pike felt the weight of his crew’s attention, and he noted also the steely quality that had manifested in Georgiou’s eyes. To her he said, “Do you want to take this, or shall I?”