by David Mack
He didn’t mean to glare at her, it was just a habit. To her credit, she didn’t flinch from his withering stare. “I was only trying to improve morale,” he said, relaxing his expression.
“That’s what confused them,” she said.
That drew another glare from Worf, which, in turn, provoked a wan smile from Choudhury. She is teasing me, Worf realized with amusement. “You also did well.”
“Stop,” she joked. “You’re confusing me.”
He exhaled heavily in mock frustration. They stood together for a few moments. She stared at the image of Ramatis on the screen. Worf surveyed the bridge and was about to return to the center seat when Choudhury said, “That was home to nearly a billion people. An entire civilization. And it’s gone forever.” She looked at Worf. “If the rest of the fleet had transphasic torpedoes, we might be able to stop this from happening again.”
“Perhaps,” Worf said. “But those decisions are made by the admiralty, and we must respect the chain of command.” Choudhury clenched her jaw as if she were struggling not to say something. He found her intensity unusual; she was a tranquil person by nature, and not one to evince strong emotions. “You disagree?”
She returned his inquiring stare with a fiery gaze. “I just wonder sometimes … what if the admiralty is wrong?”
“Good question.” He left her to brood on that and returned to the center seat to monitor the repair efforts.
In fact, Worf shared Choudhury’s sentiments more than he could say. The admiralty, in Worf’s opinion, were making a grave error by not distributing the new weapon design, which had been reverse-engineered from prototypes acquired from an alternate future by the late Kathryn Janeway of the Starship Voyager. Transphasic warheads were quickly proving to be the best defense against the renewed Borg onslaught. The admiralty, however, remained concerned that the Borg would eventually adapt to this seemingly unstoppable weapon, thereby robbing Starfleet of its last effective defense. Consequently, the Enterprise was the only ship in Starfleet that was armed with the warheads. That meant it was up to its crew to find out how the Borg were bypassing the Federation’s defenses—and to do so while there was still a Federation left to defend.
With each passing week, the number of Borg attacks had been rising, and Worf had detected a pattern in their targets and frequency. The Borg’s invasion was building to what he suspected was some kind of critical mass, and when it was reached, it would be too late to stop it.
Worf glowered at the burning planet on the main viewer. For a billion people on Ramatis III, he reminded himself bitterly, it is already too late.
5
Dax entered the Aventine’s Deck One conference room to find several of her senior officers waiting for her. She took her seat at the head of the polished, synthetic black granite conference table and nodded to the others.
Bowers sat to her immediate left, and Lieutenant Leishman was seated next to him. Across the table from Leishman was the senior operations officer, Lieutenant Oliana Mirren, a pale and reed-thin woman of Slavic ancestry who wore her dark, curly hair short and closely cropped. Helkara sat between Mirren and Dax. The three humans at the table, Dax noted with quiet amusement, each had a cup of coffee in front of them.
As soon as Dax was settled, she said, “Let’s get started.”
Helkara leaned forward. “The salvage of the Columbia’s logs is under way, Captain. Ensign Riordan is helping its computer talk to ours, and they seem to be getting on splendidly.”
Leishman cut in, “I’d just like to commend Ensign Riordan for his work on this project, Captain. If it weren’t for the schematics he found in Earth’s archives, I doubt we could’ve made a successful connection to the Columbia’s memory banks.”
“I’ll note it in my log,” Dax said. She asked Helkara, “How much of their data have you translated so far?”
The Zakdorn inflated his lower lip while he pondered his answer. It gave him an unflattering resemblance to a Terran bullfrog. “About thirty-five percent, I’d say,” he responded at last. “We’re dividing our time between downloading the sensor logs and the flight records.”
Dax turned her attention toward Mirren. “Have you made any progress in analyzing their data?”
“Some,” Mirren said. “By cross-referencing the two sources, we’re developing a simulation of the Columbia’s crash landing and its approach to the planet. We’re starting from the last synchronous data points and working backward from there.”
Bowers nodded and then asked, “How far along is the sim?”
“We’ve locked down roughly the last forty seconds before the Columbia impacted the surface,” Mirren said. “It looks as if the ship had been on autopilot as it—” A dry crinkling sound stopped her in mid-sentence. She glowered across the table.
Leishman unwrapped a bite-size piece of chocolate, which Dax suspected was from the chief engineer’s jealously guarded personal stash of sweets. Years earlier, on Defiant, her colleagues had routinely raided her hidden candy cache, and Dax suspected that history would soon be repeated. Leishman popped the morsel into her mouth and started to chew. She froze as she realized that everyone else was staring at her. Through half-masticated chocolate, she asked in a defensive tone, “What?”
With the ire of an interrupted elementary-school teacher, Mirren replied, “Do you mind?”
“I get low blood sugar,” Leishman said with guileless sincerity through cocoa-colored teeth. “Makes me cranky.”
Dax quietly savored Sam Bowers’s put-upon expression, because she knew from experience that what her XO really wanted to do was laugh. He and Dax both appreciated Leishman’s knack for finding out what annoyed high-strung people and then exploiting it for her own clandestine amusement. Apparently, Leishman had decided that Mirren was going to be her latest victim.
Bowers glossed over the interruption. “Mirren, you said the Columbia’s autopilot had been engaged?”
“Aye, sir.”
“Any idea by whom?”
Mirren shook her head. “Not yet. We’re not even sure when it was activated. It might have been online for minutes, or it could’ve been flying the ship for years.”
“All right,” Dax said. “We still have twenty-one hours to work on this before we have to pull up stakes. Sam, I want all our resources focused on this. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Bowers replied.
She planted her palms on the tabletop. “Thank you, everyone. Dismissed.” The others stood half a second after Dax, and they moved in a ragged line toward the door to the aft corridor. Leishman fell into step a couple of paces behind Mirren and began whistling a soft and erratic melody. It took only a few seconds for Mirren to look back at Leishman and fume through clenched teeth, “Must you?”
“Sorry,” Leishman said. “Helps me think.”
As the group exited the conference room, Dax hoped that Mirren developed a sense of humor soon—because if she didn’t, she was going to be on the receiving end of Leishman’s subtle but deliberate irritations for a long, long time.
* * *
“This place gives me the creeps,” said engineering crewman Yott, his voice echoing down the Columbia’s empty D Deck corridor.
Chief Celia Komer looked up from the antiquated power-distribution node she was dismantling, brushed a sweaty lock of hair from her face, and scowled teasingly at the fidgety young Bolian man. “Don’t tell me you’re seeing ghosts, too?”
His eyes darted one way, then another. “Not ghosts,” he said. “But something’s been following us since we came up from E Deck.” A low, reedy moan of wind disturbed the dusting of fine-particle sand they had tracked down from the surface.
Komer sighed. She pointed her palm beacon aft, down one round-ribbed stretch of passageway. Then she turned it forward to light up another before aiming it squarely into Yott’s face. “Who’s following us? The invisible man?”
“Chief, I’m serious. There’s something here.”
“Fine.” Komer hated to
humor superstitious behavior, but it seemed to her that the only way to get Yott back to work would be to take him seriously for a few moments. She set down her coil spanner, stood up, turned, and lifted her tricorder from its holster on her hip. “This’ll just take a few seconds,” she explained. “I’m running a full-spectrum scan for life-forms and energy readings. Anything special you want me to look for?”
Yott shook his head and continued to shift his gaze every few seconds, as if he expected something to try and ambush him.
“Y’know, you ought to lay off the raktajino,” Komer said, hoping to lighten the mood. “It makes you jumpy.”
To her dismay, Yott seemed immune to humor. “I don’t drink raktajino,” he said. His eyes scanned the ceiling. “Can’t you feel it? Like a charge in the air? It smells like ozone.”
Komer wondered uncharitably, How’d this kid ever make it through basic training? “I’m not reading anything unusual,” she said, hoping her matter-of-fact tone would calm him. She pivoted as her scan continued. “No bio signs in this section but us.”
“There are things tricorders can’t read,” Yott said. “Trace elements, exotic energy patterns, extradimensional phenomena—”
“And paranoia,” she interrupted. “I can’t believe I really have to tell you there’s no such thing as—” A flicker of blue light behind a bulkhead caught her eye, and Yott’s as well.
He cried out, “You saw that! You saw it!”
Taking a breath to suppress her irritation, she focused the tricorder in the direction of the flash. “Residual energy,” she said, her tone one of mild rebuke. “Just a surge in the lines. Makes sense when you think about how much juice we’re pumping into this old wreck.”
“Not down here,” Yott replied, and he lifted his tricorder to show her a schematic on its screen. “The main power relay was severed in the crash, and both the backups are slagged. There’s no power on this deck.” He pointed at the nearby bulkhead. “So where did that come from?”
Another groan of hot, dry wind pushed through fractures in the bulkheads. Crackles of noise echoed off the metal interiors of the passageway, growing closer and sharper. Then a light fixture on the overhead stuttered momentarily to life and flared brightly enough to force Komer to shut her eyes. Its afterimage pulsed in myriad hues on her retina.
“Chief!” shouted Yott. He tugged on her sleeve. “Come on!”
Shielding her eyes with her forearm, she backed away from the glare and tapped her combadge. “Komer to—”
Twisted forks of green lightning exploded from the light, in a storm of shining phosphors and searing-hot polymer shards. The synthetic shrapnel overpowered Komer and Yott, peppering their faces with bits of burning debris as the bolts of electricity slammed into their torsos and hurled them hard to the deck.
A steady, high-pitched tone rang in Komer’s ears. Spasms wracked her body, but she barely felt them—she was numb from the chest down. Her mouth was dry, and her tongue tasted like copper. As the last of the light’s glowing debris fell to the deck and faded away, darkness settled upon her and Yott.
Then a spectral shape formed in the blackness, as pale and silent as a gathering fog. It descended like a heavy liquid sinking into the sea—spreading, dispersing, enveloping the two downed Starfleet personnel on the deck.
For a moment, Komer told herself that she was imagining it, that it was nothing more than a trauma-induced hallucination, another afterimage on her overtaxed retinas.
Then Yott screamed—and as the ghostly motes pierced Komer’s body like a million needles of fire, she did, too.
* * *
Lieutenant Lonnoc Kedair strode quickly through the sepulchral darkness of the corridor, toward the cluster of downward-pointed palm-beacon beams. A charnel odor thickened the sultry air.
Four Aventine security officers stood with their phaser rifles slung at their sides, facing one another in a circle. Kedair nudged past them and stopped as she saw the two bodies at their feet. Both corpses were contorted in poses of agony and riddled with deep, smoldering cavities. In some places, the two engineers’ wounds tunneled clear through their bodies, giving Kedair a view of the deck, which was slick with greasy pools of liquefied biomass.
Kedair turned to Lieutenant Naomi Darrow, the away team’s security supervisor. “Who were they?”
“Yott and Komer, sir,” Darrow said. “They were collecting evidence for analysis.”
Kedair squatted low next to the dead Bolian and examined his wounds more closely. “What killed them?”
“We’re not sure,” said Darrow. “We picked up some residual energy traces, but nothing that matches any known weapons.”
Pointing at a smoking divot in Komer’s abdomen, Kedair said, “These look like thermal effects.”
“Partly,” Darrow said as she pushed a handful of her flaxen hair from her face. “But we think those are secondary. The cause of death looks like molecular disruption.”
The security chief shook her head. “I’ve never seen a disruptor do this. Did you check for biochemical agents?”
“Yes, sir. No biochem signatures of any kind.”
It was a genuine mystery—exactly what Kedair hated most.
Everyone on the Columbia had heard the bloodcurdling shrieks emanate from the ship’s lower decks and echo through its open turbolift shafts, but Kedair was determined to contain and compartmentalize as much information about this incident as she could. She asked Darrow, “Who’s been down here?”
Darrow swept the beam of her palm beacon over the other security officers on the scene: Englehorn, T’Prel, and ch’Maras. “Just us,” she said.
“Keep it that way,” Kedair said. “Have these bodies beamed to sickbay on the Aventine. I want Dr. Tarses to start the autopsies immediately.”
“Aye, sir,” Darrow said.
“And not a word of this to anyone,” Kedair said, making eye contact with the four officers in succession. “If anyone asks—”
Englehorn interrupted, “If?”
Correcting herself, Kedair continued, “When you are asked about what happened, the only thing I want you to say is that there was an incident, and that it’s under investigation. Don’t mention fatalities, injuries, or anything else. Do not mention Yott or Komer by name. Is that understood?” The four junior officers nodded. “Good. I want you four to secure this deck. Move in pairs and maintain an open channel to the Aventine.” She looked down at the bodies. “If you encounter anything that might be capable of this, fall back and call for backup. Clear?” Another round of heads bobbing in unison. “Make it happen.”
Darrow pointed at the other security officers as she issued their orders. “Englehorn, sweep aft with T’Prel. ch’Maras, forward with me.” She looked at Kedair. “Sir, I suggest you beam up to Aventine and track our search from there.” To the others she added, “Move out.”
The four security officers split up and walked away in opposite directions, with one member of each pair monitoring a tricorder’s sensor readings while the other kept a phaser rifle leveled and ready. Kedair remained with the bodies as her team continued moving away. Their shadows spread and then vanished beyond circular section bulkheads in the curved corridor. In less than a minute Kedair was alone, her solitary palm beacon casting a harsh blue glow over the dead.
I was so focused on not fueling their fears that I failed to protect their lives. Bitter regrets festered in her thoughts. I should have kept an open mind, no matter what they told me.
Kedair still didn’t believe that the two-hundred-year-old wrecked starship was haunted—but the twisted, horrific corpses in front of her left her no doubt that she, and her away team, were definitely not alone on the Columbia.
2156–2157
6
Darkness pressed in on Erika Hernandez as she made her slow descent into the frigid abyss of the Columbia’s aft turbolift. Her breath misted as it passed over the plastic-sheathed chemical flare clenched in her teeth.
She had underestimated
the effort involved in climbing from the bridge portal on A Deck to the entrance of main engineering on D Deck. The blue glow of the flare was fading slowly after having burned for more than an hour. It was still bright enough to let her see the rungs under her hands, but her feet probed the cold blackness for each new, unseen foothold.
Above her, and attached to her by a safety line that was secured on the bridge, was Lieutenant Vincenzo Yacavino, the second-in-command of the ship’s MACO detachment. At the request of Commander Fletcher—who, like most first officers, was quite protective of her captain—he had climbed up from the MACOs’ berthing area on C Deck to escort Hernandez safely belowdecks. A necklace of variously colored emergency flares was strung around his neck. He called down to her, “Are you all right, signora?”
“Mm-hmm,” Hernandez mumble-hummed past the flare in her teeth. Then, a few meters below, she saw flickers of light.
She quickened her pace and reached the open turbolift portal of D Deck. Using handholds and a narrow lip of metal that protruded from the shaft bulkhead beside the opening, she eased her way off the ladder and onto the catwalk at the forward end of main engineering. As soon as Yacavino had joined her on the platform, she unfastened the safety line that he had looped in a crisscross pattern around her torso. She would rather have borrowed one of the MACOs’ tactical harnesses, which were designed and reinforced for rappelling, but most of the spares had been lost in the same blast that had crippled her ship.
Almost every available emergency light on the Columbia had been brought to bear in its engineering compartment, but because most of the lights were focused on specific areas of interest, the majority of the deck remained steeped in smoky shadows. An acrid pall of scorched metal put a sharp tang in the air.
Karl Graylock, the chief engineer, stood with warp-drive specialist Daria Pierce at a control console on the elevated platform behind the warp reactor. The surface panel of the console had been removed, exposing half-melted circuit boards and blackened wiring. On the lower deck, more than a dozen engineers removed heavy plates from the reactor housing, decoupled enormous plasma relays, and sifted through a dusty pile of crystal shards and debris.