I’m leaving the da Vinci.
Luckily, it’s only a temporary assignment, to the planet Sarindar. Captain Scott gave me the assignment after we dropped the old Defiant off at Spacedock.
Sarindar’s located in a fairly remote region—it’ll take a week just to get out there from Earth—but it’s in an area of space controlled by the Nalori. That area is pretty much all that stands between the Federation and exploration of Sector 969. I remember when I was on the Enterprise, Command had considered having us map that out, but ultimately decided against it. The Nalori would not permit a Starfleet vessel safe passage through their space, and going around would add several months to the journey.
I told Captain Scott that when we met in his office on Earth. He laughed. “Aye, lassie, the Nalori are a right unpleasant bunch. There was a border clash with ’em a couple hundred years ago—that was before even my time. We gave ’em a good punch to the nose, and they went back to their space with their tails between their legs. They haven’t been too keen on the Federation ever since.”
“So what’s changed?” I asked him.
“The usual. They need our help.”
The captain called up a holographic projection of Sarindar. As he spoke, the image rotated, then went in for a close view of a section of the surface. The entire planet appeared to be made of crystal. I can’t wait to see what it looks like in person.
“Sarindar’s completely scan- and transporter-proof, thanks to an element called chimerium.”
That surprised me. “Really?”
“You know of it, then?”
I nodded. “It’s a composite of magnesite and kelbonite. They’ve found minute traces here and there, but—”
“Well, Sarindar’s loaded with it, and the Nalori are tryin’ to make use of it.”
“You’d need to refine it first, but how can they mine it? It’s much too dense to move manually. I don’t know of any ship that could achieve escape velocity with a significant amount on board. You can’t transport it—you couldn’t get a lock. I don’t think even a dimensional shifter would work.” I ran a bunch of possibilities in my head, then remembered a paper I’d done at the Academy. “Wait a minute, if you can put together a subspace accelerator to push it with a quick warp pulse—”
Captain Scott smiled that avuncular smile of his. “Congratulations, lassie—you’ve worked out in two minutes what it took those bloody Nalori a couple centuries to figure out. In fact, they already designed themselves a subspace accelerator. But they’re fallin’ behind schedule, and there’s a lotta bugs in the system. So they asked for Starfleet’s help.
“Thing is, they still dinna like the Federation very much, and they like Starfleet even less. So they’ll only let us send one person—in order, if y’can believe it, to ‘minimize cultural contamination.’ As if contamination is what they’re worried about.” He shook his head. “The good news is that the one person’ll be in charge of the whole kit and kaboodle.”
“And I’m supposed to be the one person?”
“Aye.” Scott nodded. “And ye’ll be in command. The last supervisor quit in disgust, so that’s where there’s a vacancy, an’ they figured they’d be better off with Starfleet’s help at the very top. I’ve read that paper y’wrote about subspace accelerators—that’s why I recommended you specifically.”
That threw me for a loop. I never thought that Montgomery Scott, of all people, would find some old Academy paper of mine to be of the least interest. “Really, sir?”
Laughing, he said, “Aye, really. Thought it was brilliant, actually. Why d’ye think I recommended you to David back when he was trolling for someone to head up his S.C.E. team after poor Commander Salek died in the war?”
He had not only read my Academy paper, it was what led him to recommend me to Captain Gold for the da Vinci. Wonders upon wonders. “I—I didn’t know that, sir.”
“Well, now you do.”
We went over the other details of the mission. In addition to the chimerium problem, Sarindar is also in a star system that is home to a quasar/ pulsar pair that interferes with communications and navigation. “Ye’ll only be able t’send messages from the surface once every fourteen hours or so. For that matter, ye’ll only be able to do any useful testing during those windows.”
The biggest annoyance, though, was the revelation that the Nalori are a bit—well, backward about gender roles. The engineering team consists of several civilians made up of numerous Nalori races, all male. Women don’t do this sort of work in Nalori society.
“Wonderful,” I said. “So you’re asking me to lead a team that hates Starfleet, hates the Federation, and hates women?”
For the first time, Captain Scott sounded like a captain when he asked, “Is that a problem, Commander?”
“No, sir,” I said with full confidence. “I can handle it.”
The avuncular smile came back, and he sounded like an engineer again. “That’s what I like to hear. You’ll be headin’ out with the da Vinci to Starbase 96, where you’ll meet up with a civilian ship, the Culloden. It’ll take ye the rest of the way.”
Then Captain Scott put his hand on my shoulder. “I can’t emphasize how important this mission is, lassie. The Nalori have been showin’ us their backs for almost two centuries. This is the first time they’ve extended a hand. We may finally get the chance to explore Sector 969, and this is our first chance to study chimerium up close.” The captain had that glint in his eye that Lt. Commander Duffy once described as the “new toy to play with” look. And he was right—chimerium has uncounted tactical uses, particularly against a technologically superior foe like the Borg or the Dominion.
“Don’t worry, sir. I won’t let you down.”
“Of that, Commander, I have very little doubt. Now, be off with you. I’ve got an appointment.”
We’re now en route to Starbase 96. I’ve been studying everything there is to know about the Nalori in general and Sarindar in particular—which, unfortunately, isn’t much. The latest updates on the Sarindar Project are two months old, and the information in the cultural database is sketchy at best. I’m going to have a talk with our cultural specialist, Carol Abramowitz, before we reach the starbase to go over some of this. One interesting thing—while the nation is called the Nalori Republic, the Nalori race is only one of the five members of that republic. And it looks like the work crew has representatives from all five.
The design of the SA is generally sound, but they’ve overdesigned it to an appalling degree, and some aspects of the engineering are, to be blunt, wrong and will need to be fixed posthaste.
It’s going to be a challenge to get the project up to speed, but I’m looking forward to it.
Personal log, Commander Sonya Gomez, U.S.S. da Vinci, Stardate 53271.5
I think I need to kill Kieran.
Before the mess with the Defiant and the Tholians, we had hit the latest in a series of land mines regarding our relationship.
If you can call it that.
What we had on the Enterprise was wonderful, while it lasted. When I transferred off, though, we weren’t really able to keep it up, and since we got thrown together on the da Vinci again, it’s been one awkward moment after another. When we’re on duty, everything’s fine, but the minute we see each other in the mess hall, it gets—well, messy.
But then he had command of the da Vinci against the Tholians when Captain Gold and I were on the Defiant, and he did great. I’m happy for him—it’s been a shot in the arm to his confidence, and one he really needed, to be honest.
The thing is—he’s getting more aggressive with me. Yesterday we went over the duty rosters for when I’d be gone, and he sat closer to me than usual—his hand brushed against mine more than once, too. When some minor crisis in engineering came up, he suggested finishing in his quarters later—which he’s never done before, not even when we were actually dating on the Enterprise. But then, it was easier to keep business and a personal life separate on a Galaxy-class
ship. The da Vinci is a much smaller—more intimate—ship.
I think he wants to start up what we had on the Enterprise again, and I just don’t know if I can handle that. For one thing, I’m his CO. And look at what we do. What if I’d been trapped in that dimensional rift or on Eerlik’s moon? What if the da Vinci had been destroyed by the Tholians or the Pevvni or Friend or the Androssi?
What if I had to order him to go to his death?
That’s why I just can’t give him an answer yet.
We’ll be at Starbase 96 tomorrow, so at least I can get away from him—and he’ll be in charge of the S.C.E. team while I’m gone, so he can put that newfound confidence to good use.
Sooner or later, though, I’m going to have to deal with this.
Later. Definitely later.
Personal log, Commander Sonya Gomez, S.S. Culloden, Stardate 53273.9
This may be the most beautiful sight I’ve ever seen.
We’re just starting to descend into Sarindar’s atmosphere on the Culloden. The ship is owned by Zilder, a Bolian who was hired by the Nalori to ferry people to and from the surface and perform various other technical and administrative tasks for the project. When I asked him how a Bolian contrived to get a ship named after a place on Earth, he just smiled and said, “Ho’nig will provide.”
That’s the really odd thing about Zilder. Ho’nig is the collective god of the Damiani, a humanoid three-gendered Federation species. I didn’t think that anyone off of Damiano worshipped their god. It wouldn’t bother me, except Zilder spent the first day of our trip trying to convert me. After over twenty hours of his missionary zeal, I’d convinced him that my religion was none of his business, and he let up. If he hadn’t, he’d be easy enough to avoid: the Culloden is built to transport up to three hundred people, so with just the two of us, it’s pretty roomy.
But I was talking about Sarindar.
From space, the planet looks mostly white, almost like it’s a big snowball flying through the night. As you get into orbit, it starts to look more like a jewel—at the right time of day, from the right orbit, you can see glints and reflections. According to what I’ve read, the plant and animal life is all silicon-based, and the vast majority of it is crystalline.
We’re descending now, and it’s even more amazing than I could’ve believed. When you come out of the reddish-purple layer of clouds, you look up and see an orange sky. As expected, the delicate flora is photosynthetic living crystal. What I didn’t realize is that the ground is also made up of similar substances: jagged plains of diamond spikes, quartzand-topaz mountains, and forests of amethyst. The water of the streams and rivers that I can see from the Culloden’s viewport are sparkling and crystal-clear—literally!
Now we’re flying in closer, and I can see some animals that I recognize from the file—a shii drinking from a stream; a meir gliding through the air; a pack of kliyor running into the forest.
The suns are starting to set, so the shadows and the reflections are especially spectacular, with colors bursting from all the crystalline flora.
Intellectually, I expected this to be a lovely planet, but I had no idea it was going to be this beautiful.
Ah, now we’re seeing something less beautiful: the work site for the SA. The prominent feature of the site is the perfectly circular, two-hundred-meter-diameter concave dish. In the center is an opening roughly four meters wide. The surface of the dish is incomplete, just an empty skeletal framework. Turning it into a full dish is part of what I need to accomplish here. The site’s also dotted in many places by slender metallic towers that hold sensor palettes. The long shadows cast by the suns setting make it look very eerie.
We’re about to land. I think I’m looking forward to this.
Supplemental, planet Sarindar
I’m now settled in my tent. That’s right, tent. I’m in a canvas tent. Not even a proper Starfleet shelter, but a tent.
I don’t even know where to start. The equipment that I’ve seen is old and horribly maintained. Old I can live with—since joining the S.C.E., I’ve dealt with everything ranging from three-thousand-year-old computers to hundred-year-old starships to state-of-the-art Androssi security devices—it’s the badly maintained part that’s going to cause headaches. The only weapons on the planet are sonic pistols and rifles that look like they’re about a thousand years old. Light-based directed-energy weapons would be tantamount to suicide on a planet with so much crystalline flora and fauna—the beams would refract all over the place—so I didn’t even take a phaser with me, though I did bring a Starfleet-issue sonic rifle as a backup. We’re not likely to need weapons, but it’s good to be prepared—especially given the unfortunate state of the Nalori’s armament.
They don’t have food replicators—the food is all cooked with these chemical stoves that don’t work half the time. The food is stored in freezer units that also don’t work half the time, so a lot of it is spoiled. In fact, Zilder had picked up some fresh food when he went to get me at the starbase—it got a much better reception than I did.
Which leads me to the workers themselves. As expected, they’re a mix, but most of them are either Nalori or Osina. The Nalori are humanoid, with skin tones ranging from medium ash gray to almost charcoal. Their eyes, by contrast, are uniformly black, with no apparent pupils. They practice a form of ritual scarring of the forearms and face—according to the database, this marks rites of passage like adolescence, adulthood, marriage, birth of sons, veneration of elders, and so on, which Carol confirmed. Most of the men are bald, though I have no idea if that’s biology or fashion, with long braided chin-beards of pale, violet hair.
And they hate my guts.
Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh, but when Zilder introduced me to the foreperson—a large man named Kejahna—I could feel the disdain oozing out of his pores.
The only one who wasn’t hostile was Razka. He showed me to my tent—my tent! —and said he’d be serving as liaison between me and the workers. He seems nice enough—at least he didn’t glare at me—so maybe this won’t be so bad. And, since I’m both in charge and the only woman, I get my own tent. Every other tent has four people in it. Lucky me.
I’m going to try to get some sleep, then see what I can do in the morning. But I already miss the da Vinci.
First officer’s log, Commander Sonya Gomez, planet Sarindar, Stardate 53274.1
My first day on Sarindar was spent being given a tour of the SA site by Razka, after a breakfast of cold oatmeal because the main cooking unit broke down, and I didn’t think to bring my own stove.
The design flaws that I found in the specs for the SA are exacerbated by shoddy work and a backward method of implementation. The first thing I did was order the detail assigned to construct the tubing for the delivery system to stop that and help in the digging of the hole for the antimatter reactor. The warp pulse is going to require the most testing, and it needs to be in place long before the tubing has to be finished. Kejahna wasn’t happy about this, and the workers even less so—digging is much harder work, after all—but they agreed.
Another problem are the antigrav units, which are slow and go off-line regularly, which slows the work down. After pointing this out to me, Razka said, “Welcome to Sarindar. This is the worst place in the galaxy. Nothing works here.”
“That’s going to change,” I said, and proceeded to stop the tour, sit down, and look at one of the antigravs.
“It’s pointless, you know,” Razka said cheerfully. “We’ve poked and prodded that thing for days at a time. Everything’s in working order, it just doesn’t work. This planet is cursed, you see.”
“I don’t believe in curses. I do, however, believe in faulty diagnostic routines.”
Razka frowned at that. “What?”
“The diagnostic routine’s all messed up. It’s in test mode.” I put the diagnostic program into the right mode, and it started listing all the things that were wrong with the unit. “They’re probably all like this.”
/> I called the assistant foreperson, J’Roh, over. J’Roh was a member of the Osina, an insectoid race—nothing like the Nasats, though. They have large compound eyes, tentacles instead of the more arm-like extremities that P8 Blue has, and six rather than eight of those extremities. None of them have Pattie’s sparkling personality, either. The one trait they share with Nasats, though, is the ability to stand upright on their hind legs.
“This antigrav’s diagnostic program’s in test mode. So, probably, are the others. Fix that, then you’ll know how to fix the units themselves. I want a detail assigned to take care of this.”
J’Roh’s voice sounded like a bird’s angry chirp after a predator attacked its nest. “It still won’t work.”
“Maybe not, but you’re going to do it anyway.”
“Why should I?”
Before I could reply, Razka said, “Because if you do what she says and it still doesn’t work, you’ll prove that you’re right, and that you’re the smart one.”
Amazingly enough, that seemed to work. J’Roh didn’t say anything, but did start working on the unit. He didn’t actually pull a detail together, but I decided to take what I could get.
My next task was to streamline the construction of the magnetic containment unit, which should have been completed by now. The workers assigned to that task were about as receptive to my orders as J’Roh, but they went ahead and implemented the new duty schedule.
Finally, I went to the camp hospital to meet the doctor, a Gallamite man named Dolahn. Apparently he had been hired by the Nalori government because of his work with silicon-based life forms.
This assignment is proving to be much more challenging than I thought, but I’m confident that, with Razka’s help, I can accomplish our goal.
Personal log, Commander Sonya Gomez, planet Sarindar, Stardate 53274.1
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