by David Mack
No one paid much attention to Hernandez as she walked down the stairs from the catwalk and continued toward Graylock.
“Try cross-circuiting to A,” he said to Pierce as he made a minor adjustment to something inside the console. He watched Pierce make a few changes of her own. They both stared intently into the mangled workings of the console, then shook their heads in shared frustration. “Nothing,” Graylock said, his shoulders sagging in defeat.
“Karl,” Hernandez said. Normally, he snapped-to at the sound of her voice. This time he sat back against the railing opposite the control panel and looked down at the captain with a weary expression. “Ja, Captain?”
“Good news,” she said with faint optimism. “Looks like your plan worked. If the Romulans had figured it out, we’d probably all be dead by now.”
Graylock’s dour frown was steady. “Is that your idea of cheering us up, Captain? Because if it is, you suck at it.”
“I take it things aren’t going well down here?”
“You could say that,” Graylock replied. He climbed down from the platform and led Hernandez on a slow stroll down the length of the reactor. “The warp drive is irreparable,” he said. “All that’s left of the crystal matrix is dust and splinters. At least half the coils in each nacelle are ruptured, maybe more. And the ventral plasma relays were all severed in the last explosion.”
Hernandez glanced inside the reactor through a gap left by a detached pylon conduit. She could see for herself that Graylock wasn’t exaggerating. The damage was extensive.
“So what are we looking at? Do we need the Enterprise to bring us a whole new warp drive?”
The stocky chief engineer turned and folded his arms over his chest. “Ja, that would help.” He leaned back against the oblong reactor housing. “And if you can think of a way to ask them, or anyone else, I will be most impressed, Captain.”
It took her a moment to deduce his implication. “Subspace communications?”
“Kaput,” he said. “The virus corrupted our software and firmware, and the explosion that covered our escape destroyed both our shuttlepods and the transceiver array. We can send and receive light-speed signals, if you don’t mind waiting the rest of your life for a reply.”
“Wonderful,” Hernandez muttered. “Isn’t there something we can raid for parts to fix the subspace antenna?”
Graylock gestured vaguely around the compartment. “We don’t have enough working parts to keep the lights on, and you want me to reinvent subspace radio?”
Hernandez sighed. “Since you brought it up, when can we expect to have the lights back?”
“It depends.” He looked back at his engineers, who were tinkering with an assortment of broken or deformed components that looked more like scrap metal bound for reclamation than like the essential components of a starship’s warp propulsion system. “If we can all stay awake, maybe ten hours.”
“Make it six,” Hernandez said. “I want the turbolifts running before alpha shift goes to their racks.”
“Jawohl, Captain,” Graylock said with a nod. “I’ll keep Commander Fletcher informed of our efforts.”
She returned his nod. “Carry on.”
None of the engineers looked up from their tasks as she walked back to the catwalk staircase and rejoined Lieutenant Yacavino at the open portal to the turbolift shaft. “Time to head back up to A Deck,” she said to the fit, dark-haired MACO. “Let’s get ready to climb.” He picked up the safety line and started paying out slack to wrap around her. As he reached behind her back to loop the end of the tether around her thigh, she gave him a teasing scowl. “And watch your hands this time, Mister. I want to keep our relationship professional.”
* * *
Commander Veronica Fletcher waited until the door of the captain’s ready room closed before she said, “It’s worse than we thought.”
Captain Hernandez pushed her chair back from the small desk tucked into the corner of the compartment. She crossed her legs and nodded to another chair. “Have a seat.”
Fletcher pulled out the chair and sat down. She handed a small clipboard to Hernandez. “We lost more than half the crew in the attack, and most of the MACOs were killed setting off the diversionary blast.”
“Damn it,” Hernandez whispered. “Where’d the jump take us?”
“Kalil plotted our position against the known shipping lanes,” she explained as the captain looked over the second page of the brief report. “We’re well outside normal sensor range. And with the convoy gone, there probably won’t be much friendly traffic out here for a while.”
“If ever,” Hernandez said.
The captain’s downbeat manner troubled Fletcher. “Being a bit pessimistic, aren’t you?”
Worry lines deepened on Hernandez’s brow. “If yesterday’s events are any guide, this entire sector is likely to be under enemy control soon.” Her countenance darkened. “This was only the beginning—the first salvo in a war with the Romulans.”
“You don’t know that,” Fletcher said. “It might have been an isolated skirmish, or—”
“They ambushed us,” Hernandez interrupted. “They came in numbers, and they turned our own weapons on the convoy. This was planned. They’ve been preparing for a long time, and now they’re making their move—and we’re stuck out here, with no way home and no way to send a warning.” She launched herself from her chair and then halted, a coiled spring with nowhere to go. Turning away to look out the compartment’s single, small viewport, she added with simmering frustration, “The goddamn war’s actually starting, and we’re stuck on the sidelines.”
Fletcher sighed. “So, what are we supposed to do?”
Several seconds passed while Fletcher waited for the captain’s answer. The exposed overhead conduits, normally alive with a low buzzing, were silent, exacerbating Fletcher’s sense of the ship’s predicament. Finally, Hernandez turned away from the window and back toward her first officer. “We survive,” she said. “If the war has begun, Earth won’t have any ships to spare on a search-and-rescue mission this far from home. Whatever else happens, we have to assume we’re on our own now.”
Fletcher wasn’t ready yet to embrace the worst-case scenario. She asked, “What if Earth does send a rescue ship? Our best bet of being found would be to return to our original course, at any speed.”
“That’s also our best chance of being found by the enemy,” Hernandez said. “They knew our route well enough to hit us with almost no warning. Using the same route to limp home strikes me as a bad idea.” She covered her eyes and massaged her temples with one hand. “Besides, without the transceiver array, we’re mute. Even if someone came looking for us, we can’t respond to their hails. At anything less than close range, we might be mistaken for an alien ship that doesn’t want to make contact.”
The captain stepped past Fletcher and crossed the cramped room to another short desktop wedged into the opposite corner. She poked through a jumble of papers and bound volumes on the shelf above it, then pulled down and opened a large book. “Have a look at this,” she said to Fletcher, who got up and joined the captain at the other desk. Hernandez continued, “This is from our last mapping run before we met the convoy.”
Studying the dense cluster of symbols and coordinates on the map, Fletcher was unable to anticipate the captain’s plan. “What are we looking for?”
“The basics,” Hernandez said. “A nice Minshara-class planet where we can stock up on food and water. Preferably, one with enough expertise to help us make some repair parts for the warp drive.” She planted her finger on an unnamed star system that so far had merited no more than a brief footnote in the galactic catalog. “That’s what I’m talking about. Nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere, liquid water, and subspace signal emissions.”
Fletcher shook her head. “Shaky readings, sir. And at that range? They could have been caused by a sensor malfunction.”
“All right,” Hernandez countered. “How do you explain the high-energy particles flo
oding out of that system?”
“It could be anything,” Fletcher said. “That star’s pretty dense. For all we know, we might be picking up signals from a system behind it, due to gravitational lensing.”
The captain looked unconvinced. “I don’t think so,” she said. “If we were seeing a lensed signal, there’d be other distortions. These readings may be scarce, but they’re clear. There’s a planet there with the resources we need, and it’s the closest safe harbor in the sector.”
“We don’t know that it’s safe, and ‘close’ is a relative term,” Fletcher said. “It’s eleven-point-four light-years away. How are we supposed to get there without the warp drive?”
Hernandez shut the book with a heavy slap. “We still have impulse engines, and I mean to use them.”
As the captain put the book back on the shelf, Fletcher was compelled to ask, “Are you serious? Even at full impulse—”
“Forget full impulse,” Hernandez cut in. “I want the main impulse system in overdrive. We need to get as close to lightspeed as we can without hitting it.”
Fletcher was aghast. “You’re talking about time-dilation effects,” she said.
“Yes, I am,” Hernandez said. She returned to her desk in the other corner. “Don’t give me that look. Think about it for a second, and you’ll see why we have to do this.”
The captain’s urgent tone made her point clear to Fletcher. “To ration our provisions,” she said, and the captain nodded in confirmation. The Columbia had been fueled and supplied for a two-year deployment before leaving Earth. Without warp drive, interstellar travel to a world capable of restocking the ship’s stores and repairing its damaged systems might take years or even decades. “What fraction of c are we talking about?”
“Within one-ten-thousandth,” Hernandez said.
After a quick round of mental calculations, Fletcher said, “So, a time-dilation ratio of about seventy-to-one?”
“Give or take,” Hernandez replied.
“So why not just make a run for home?”
Hernandez raised her eyebrows in a gentle expression of mock surprise. “Because ‘home’ is over eighty light-years away. I’d rather not waste the better part of a century getting there. If I’m right, we can find what we need to fix the warp drive in that star system and get home while at least a few people we know are still alive.”
The prospect of twelve years being transformed by the laws of relativity into a short-lived purgatory disturbed Fletcher, but the notions of starving to death in deep space or returning home as a centenarian troubled her even more. “I’ll get Graylock to work on the impulse drive,” Fletcher said. “It’ll take a few hours to remove the safeties before we can overdrive the coils past one-quarter c.”
The captain nodded. “Tell him to beef up the main deflector, too. At the speeds we’re talking about, the mass and kinetic energy of oncoming particles’ll be pretty intense.”
“And once we hit relativistic speeds, our sensors’ll be blind to just about everything,” Fletcher said. “We’ll also become a serious X-ray source.”
Hernandez smiled. “I prefer to think of it as becoming our own interstellar emergency flare.”
Fletcher chortled. “We’d just better hope we don’t get noticed by the Romulans or the Klingons.”
“They’d probably mistake us for some kind of primitive colony ship,” Hernandez said. “Maybe we’ll get lucky and be taken prisoner aboard a ship that actually has a working warp drive. Now, if you want something to worry about, try the hard radiation from blueshifting.”
Fletcher nodded. “We’d better have Dr. Metzger start us all on radiation-treatment protocols. And I’ll have Thayer restrict access to the outer compartments.”
“Good thinking,” said Hernandez.
“Then the only things we still need are a deck of cards and some good books. If you like, I can loan you the first six Captain Proton novels.”
“Thank you, Number One,” said Hernandez, who no longer seemed to be paying attention. She sounded unusually somber.
“Are you sure you’re all right, Captain?”
A rueful grimace twisted the captain’s mouth. “I’m fine,” she said. “It just bugs me that the time when Earth needs us most is the one time we can’t be there.” She turned her gaze out the viewport. “All we can do is hope that when we finally bring our ship home, there’s still a home worth bringing it to.”
* * *
Stephen Foyle pivoted from one foot to the other while he dribbled the basketball from hand to hand, turning his body to keep his opponent at bay. Sweat dripped from above his hairline, tracing winding paths out of his gray brush cut and down his face. A thick sheen of perspiration on his arms and legs caught the glare of the overhead lights in the ship’s gymnasium.
Gage Pembleton taunted him in a tone of crisp superiority. “What are you waiting for, Major? An invitation?”
“Patience, First Sergeant,” Foyle said. He lurched forward, and Pembleton matched his stride. Then Foyle passed the ball backward between his own legs, spun, and slipped behind Pembleton’s back for a drive at the basket. By the time the younger, brown-skinned man had caught up to Foyle, the major had made a graceful layup, banking the ball off the backboard.
The orange ball hushed through the net, and Pembleton caught it off the bounce. “Not bad,” he said. He tossed the ball with a single bounce at Foyle. “But it’s still eleven-eight.”
Foyle checked the ball and passed it back. “For now.”
A musky scent of deodorant overpowered by exertion trailed Pembleton as he dribbled the ball back to the top of the key to start his possession. “What time is it?”
“Getting tired?”
“No, I want you to sing me ‘Happy Birthday’ at 1340 hours.”
“That’s not funny,” Foyle said, irked to be reminded of Captain Hernandez’s decision to send them all on a slow-time cruise into oblivion. He imagined that he could feel an hour slipping away with every minute, days vanishing into every hour.
At the center-court circle, Pembleton turned and waited for Foyle to strike a defensive pose. The lanky Canadian started dribbling and pivoted to show Foyle his back. “I’ll spot you three points if you can take the ball before I score,” he said in his drawl of a baritone. “Give you a chance to tie it up.”
Foyle grinned. “Don’t go getting—”
Pembleton was off the deck, spinning in midair, hefting the ball high over his head with his long, wiry arms and massive hands. Foyle sprang to block the shot, hands flailing, but the ball was gone, sailing on a long and poetic arc into the basket. It slapped through the net, bounced twice off the deck, and rolled behind the end line as Foyle watched with a tired frown.
“Thirteen-eight,” Pembleton said. As the major opened his mouth to protest, the sergeant pointed at their feet and added, “Behind the line, two points.”
“Now you’re just showing off,” Foyle said. They walked downcourt together to retrieve the ball. The major’s nostrils filled with the funky stench of his sweat-soaked tank top and sodden socks, and his thighs and calves felt as if they were tying themselves in knots and turning to wood. He palmed the excess perspiration from his face and dried his hands on his cotton athletic trunks. Then he squatted to pick up the ball and was unable to stop himself from exhaling a pained grunt. “I think I need a timeout,” he said.
“No time-outs in one-on-one,” Pembleton taunted. Unfazed by Foyle’s bitter glare, he added, “Your rules.”
Foyle tucked the ball under his left arm and walked toward the benches at the sideline. “Don’t make me pull rank.”
“It’s your game, Major. I just play in it.”
Pembleton followed him to the bench and sat down on the other side of a stack of soft, white towels. He kept his back straight and his head up, and his breaths were long and slow.
Foyle slumped as soon as he was seated, and he reached under the bench for his squeeze bottle of water. The major lifted the nozzle to his li
ps and clamped his hand tight, filling his mouth with a stream of cool liquid. He downed a third of the bottle in half a minute. “I can’t believe she’s doing this,” he said after catching his breath.
The sergeant maintained an attentive silence. He picked up a towel and dried his shaved head as Foyle continued.
“There has to be some way to get a signal back to Earth. We could’ve cannibalized something to fix the transceiver array and sent a Mayday to Starfleet—or even to Vulcan, if we had to.” He took another swig of water. “Instead, she’s got us sitting out the war. Didn’t even ask me before she put us all on the slow boat to nowhere.”
Pembleton chided him, “She didn’t ask you? Tell me, Major, when did the ship become a democracy? Do I get a vote, too?”
“You know what I mean, Pembleton,” Foyle said, weary and frustrated. “It’s the same old story. She thinks just because we’re MACOs, we don’t need to know. Hell, even the illusion of being consulted would be nice once in a while.”
“So, if she had let you speak your mind, and then did the same thing anyway, you’d be fine with that?”
The question forced Foyle to stop and think for a moment. “No,” he admitted, “I wouldn’t. I mean, what if this planet we’re going to can’t help us? What then? Should we just keep making these near-light trips while the galaxy changes around us at warp speed? It’s just so damned stupid. There has to be a better answer than wasting twelve years of our lives.”
“It’s not our lives she’s wasting,” Pembleton said. “It’s everyone else’s. I was supposed to be home in time to see my oldest start school. He’ll be in college by the time we drop back to normal spaceflight. I feel like I’ve missed his whole life.” He dried his arms and then tossed away the towel. “For us,” he continued, “this’ll just be a couple of boring months. But for my wife and my boys … I might as well be dead.”
That same thought haunted Foyle, as well. They were five days into their journey, and he knew that home on Earth, his wife, Valerie, was likely marking the anniversary of the last time she had seen him or heard his voice. The Columbia and its crew had been missing in action for more than a year in Earth time.