by Jeffrey Lang
“Yeah. Lot of activity there recently.”
“Right, well, no one mentioned it to the captain of the Darius apparently. Or he was just rolling the dice.”
“What kind of ship is the Darius?”
“Good question. Xepolite built. I can’t pronounce the class name. H’rut? Something like that with a glottal in the middle. You know, the kind with the dense hulls?”
“Particle scattering, yeah.”
“Right.” Higgins leaned back into his chair, settling into his story. “So, the Darius’s captain decides to make a run for it.”
“Brave. Not that they had much choice.”
“No argument. No way is a Xepolite-class outrunning a Hideki.” He bounced forward, the chair back following, contouring to his spine. “Except they do. Because they have this helmsman who apparently knows everything there is to know about wringing every joule of energy out of a warp core.”
“Really?” Rodriquez was interested now. Higgins felt vindicated. “What happened?”
“The Darius managed to stay ahead of the pirates, avoided their tractor beam, and was heading like a bat out of hell for Starbase 46.”
Rodriquez squinted, drawing a star chart in his head. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah, that makes sense. If they could hail the starbase, they could get help.”
“That’s what the second-in-command said was the plan.”
“Second? What happened to the captain?”
Higgins frowned. “This would be the point where the pirates opened fire.”
“Really? Surprising. That’s not the usual modus.”
“No, it’s not. That’s why this is so interesting. The Orions, or whoever they were, must have been aggravated enough by the Darius’s moves that they stopped worrying about catching her intact and just decided, ‘What the hell.’ And they start peppering her with disruptor fire, not full power at first, judging by the sensor readings, but enough to shake her up pretty bad.”
“And the captain died.”
“Yeah, she was under a major power coupling when it came loose.”
Rodriquez made a sympathetic face. “That’s rough. Any other casualties?”
“No. But I saw the interviews with the second, and he didn’t look to me to be the sort to stay calm under fire. I figure the helmsman was calling the shots. I mean, he had the crew’s lives in his hands at this point.”
“But they’re taking fire.”
“Their aft shields collapse. And I expect the Orions—or whoever—were about to take out the engines when the helmsman decides that this would be a good time to drop out of warp . . .”
Rodriquez tipped his head to one side. “Okay.”
“And let the pirates get in front of him . . .”
“That would happen, at least until they dropped . . .”
“Then as soon as they flew past, he went back into warp.”
“Now that’s just crazy.”
“Wait, it gets better. He goes right for them. Warp six. And he’s firing his phasers, these tiny, little units that can’t do any more than melt debris when you’re in orbit.”
“No way that’s going to have any effect on a Hideki.”
“Not supposed to. Camouflage for the real attack.”
“Which is?”
“He’d had the cargo master tractor out some of the shipping containers they were carrying. Guess what’s in them?”
“On a Xepolite ship?” Rodriquez shrugged. “Something borderline illegal, I expect.”
Higgins jabbed a finger at his friend. “And we have a winner. Depleted uranium. To be used for who-knows-what? Best not to ask, perhaps. Very dense, though. And if you split open the cargo container just a few hundred meters away from the pirates and let the uranium pellets spread out in a fusillade . . .”
Rodriquez winced. “Ow.”
“Ow is right. The only thing left of the Hideki was a smear in space.”
“A highly radioactive smear in space.”
“Which is why there was an official hearing. If it had just been a pirate hit-and-miss”—Higgins shrugged—“I doubt we’d even have heard about it. We had to send out a couple SCE ships to clean up the mess. No one was happy, believe me.”
“I would imagine not,” Rodriquez conceded. He raised his hands in a gesture halfway between surrender and a shrug. “But is this such a big deal? I assume it has something to do with the helmsman.”
“Of course.” Higgins smiled in a manner that he hoped could be described as sardonic. “Check this out.” He touched a control, and the small viewscreen on his desk came to life. They were now looking at the image of a human male, late middle aged, sitting behind an anonymous table in an anonymous chair. Higgins thought the interviewee looked as if he was expending a tremendous amount of effort to keep his posture relaxed and casual.
“Where did you get the idea to use part of your cargo as a shrapnel grenade?” asked an off-image interviewer.
The man shrugged. “Something I read once. There was a time, we’re talking a couple hundred years ago, when starships used to fight that way, before phasers and disruptors. You had to just throw things at each other and then run away as fast as you could.”
“But now ships have shields. The pirates had shields. You knew that.”
“Sure,” the interviewee said. “But Hideki-class ships have a flaw: their shield generators. They’re great with energy weapons, but they can’t distribute kinetic energy. The Cardassians would never bring them into battle situations for that reason—too much debris. They would always position them at the edge of the field of battle and pick off stragglers from afar.”
Higgins heard the interviewer snort, impressed despite himself. “And you know this how?”
The man smiled self-deprecatingly. “I like military history.”
“You like military history.”
“Yes.”
“And you can make a freighter move like an attack vehicle.”
“I don’t know about that. The Darius is a good ship—tough. And, past a certain point, any kind of space battle is just luck. We were lucky. I was lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“You keep repeating what I say without asking any questions.”
“Apologies, sir. Just collecting my thoughts.”
“I understand.” The interviewee crossed his legs and sat back in the chair. He never took his eyes off the interviewer.
The interviewer was quiet for a few seconds, but then continued—rather lamely, Higgins thought—“Do you have anything else you wanted to add to your testimony?”
“No. Other than I’m sorry about the mess. Please extend my apologies to the SCE. Those poor bastards always have to deal with this sort of thing when everyone else just runs on to the next . . . well, you know.”
“Sure.”
“If you have the opportunity, please extend my condolences to Captain Selim’s family.”
“Couldn’t you do it yourself?”
The interviewee shook his head. “No, I’m leaving right after we’re finished here. That’s okay, isn’t it?”
“I think we have everything we need. Leave your contact information in case there’s any follow-up, but . . .” The interviewer paused. His tone of voice shifted, going from the professional to the purely personal. “Why are you leaving? You just saved these people, the entire crew. They owe you their lives.”
The man shrugged and, finally, looked away from the interviewer. His head dropped so that the bright, overhead lights cast long shadows down his face. He murmured a reply, but even the room’s sensitive pickups couldn’t make out his words.
“Pardon?” the interviewer asked.
“I said, ‘Not all of them,’ ” the man responded.
“You mean, not the captain?”
The interviewee shook his head and
seemed genuinely puzzled. “No,” he said. “I meant, not the pirates.”
“You think there was a way that you could have gotten away without killing the pirates?”
“Yes. Of course. There’s always a way.”
“Well, Mister Maxwell, I’ve investigated a number of incidents and, frankly, I usually don’t have the luxury of speaking to survivors, let alone an entire ship full of them. Most of the time, I just listen to the captain’s logs and look at the scans. It’s not usually this . . . well . . . this happy an outcome. You should cut yourself some slack.”
The man—Maxwell—nodded his head and seemed to smile, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Are we done here?”
“We’re done,” the interviewer said. The commander froze the image.
Higgins asked, “Do you know who that was?”
Rodriquez glanced over at Higgins, a squiggle of a question mark in his brow. “Someone named Maxwell? Should I know who that is?”
Higgins sighed extravagantly. “Did you ever study?”
“Me?” he asked. “I seem to remember being twentieth in our class and you were like, what, two hundred fifteenth?”
“Two twelve, but that’s not the point. Benjamin Maxwell. Doesn’t that name mean anything to you?”
Rodriquez shook his head slowly. “Should it?”
“The Phoenix? Killed a bunch of Cardassians back before the war with the Dominion? Years before anyone had any idea what they were up to?”
“I have a vague recollection,” Rodriquez said. Higgins was sure he was lying. “And I also recall it wasn’t as simple as that. You’re making it sound like Maxwell was prescient or something, but the way I remember it, he was just . . . angry. Or traumatized. Something like that. And the only reason you recognized him is because you’ve always collected these kinds of stories.”
“What kind of stories?”
“Sob stories.”
Higgins waved away Rodriquez’s ambivalence. “The point is that that’s him.” He pointed at the holo. “Jockeying some freighter, except he’s not anymore, because he saved a bunch of people doing a crazy stunt that not one helmsman out of a thousand could pull off, but he feels bad about it. Don’t you think that’s the sort of thing I should maybe report up the line?”
“Why?”
“Because he disappeared. I checked. The contact information he left was totally bogus. And here’s another thing: if you look up his record, a lot of it is redacted. Someone’s covering up for him.”
Rodriquez rose from his chair. “You’re crazy. No, worse—you’re bored and making up things. Stop it or you’re going to get in trouble.”
“I’m not going to get in trouble! There’s something hinky here. Maxwell has completely disappeared.”
“People are entitled to be anonymous,” Rodriquez said, leaving Higgins’s cubicle. “I think we actually fought a war about that once.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“I think we did. Look it up. Apparently you don’t have a problem wasting time not doing your job for other reasons.”
“C’mon, Javi. This might be important!”
“Believe me: it isn’t.”
Higgins stood up so he could see over the low wall between his desk and his friend’s. He felt like there was still something to say on this topic, but wasn’t sure what, so he settled for, “You want to get dinner tonight? Maybe go to the club?”
“Sure,” Rodriquez said without looking at Higgins. “As long as you promise not to talk about this all night.”
Higgins weighed his options. Decided. He filed his completed report, closing the case. “Sure,” he said. “Whatever you say.”
January 9, 2386
Ops Center
Robert Hooke
“What’s he doing?” Nog asked, pointing at the suboptimal image on the display. Finch ran his hands over the controls for what he grandiosely called “the security console,” but the resolution became neither better nor worse.
The klaxon was still blaring, though Finch had found the volume control and managed to crank it down from mind-numbingly loud to simply annoying. Nog’s sensitive inner ear canals throbbed in time with the alarm. He had been so close too, so very near the exit door, or, at least, the lift door. The pitch had been deafening. Finch was turning it down.
Then the alarms started ringing.
And the calls started coming in.
Training and instinct had kicked in. Nog sat down at the communications console and began to field questions from distraught scientists, all of whom had the same basic questions: What the hell is going on? Why was I transported to the hangar? And, really, what the hell is going on?
Nog replied, “I don’t know, but keep calm. I don’t know, but keep calm. I really don’t know, but keep calm.” Sometimes he followed up with, “We’ll get back to you as soon as we know anything.”
And now, like any good officer, Nog attempted to collect intelligence.
About a non-Starfleet research station that he was visiting for a couple of hours.
With Chief O’Brien, whose idea it had been to come here.
Who had left him forty-five minutes ago.
Why do these things always happen to me? Nog wondered. It’s not that I don’t want to have an interesting life. I just don’t want it to be so interesting.
“I don’t know what he’s doing,” Finch said. “Which is to say, I don’t know what he’s already done. This is a playback, we must speak in the past tense.”
The images flickered and scritched, footage from a low-resolution sensor. Sabih Ali had entered Finch’s lab sometime in the past ten or fifteen minutes and was carrying a hand tool of some sort in one hand and a canister or sample collection device in the other.
The Mother swam contentedly in its tank, unaware of Sabih’s proximity. It’s unaware, Nog thought as he watched, because it’s devoid of intelligence. It’s a mass of tissue and nothing more. And yet, Nog could not rid himself of the impression that there was something in the Mother’s movements. Expectant, even. She . . . it . . . seemed to float closer to Sabih as he approached its tank. He held a tool near the tank’s locking mechanism; an aubergine tentacle flicked out and tickled the tank wall.
“Look here,” Nog said, pointing at the security system readouts, which was playing back its logs as they watched the vid. “He overrode the locking mechanism. The top of the tank is open.”
“I see,” Finch said. “But Sabih missed an important . . .”
At the edge of the image’s field of view, security doors slid out of the walls and covered the two stairwells. Cracks appeared in the tank walls as the air pressure dropped. Vents opened and the atmosphere was blasted out into space.
Sabih dropped to the deck clutching his head and chest. Nog thought he saw liquid flow from the young man’s eyes, nose, and mouth, but then he dropped out of sight behind a console. Mercifully, there was no audio.
In the tank, the Mother’s writhing tentacles seemed to freeze in place, but then Nog realized that it wasn’t the Mother, but the playback. Exposure to vacuum, bafflingly, had damaged the cameras. The screen went blank.
“What happened?” Nog asked, suddenly finding that the tips of his fingers and the lobes of his ears were numb. Nog had been in battles, seen beings killed more often than he cared to think about, but he had never before witnessed anyone die in such a senseless fashion.
“Exactly what was supposed to happen,” Finch said blandly, leaning back in his chair.
A chill ran down Nog’s spine. He glanced at Finch from the corner of his eye, somehow afraid to look at him directly. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Finch said, folding his hands over his ample middle, “that the security system responded exactly as intended. Antiseptics were sprayed. Atmosphere vented.” He looked down his nose at a readout on the conso
le in front of him. “Hmm. No radiation blast, though. For some reason, it didn’t activate.”
“So, the Mother might still be . . .”
“Of course not,” Finch said. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
“So what should I tell all these people?” Nog pointed at the communications console. “And what’s happened to all of them? None of them seems to know . . .”
“They’re supposed to board the transports,” Finch said. “The Wren and the Aubrey. They were all briefed when they signed on. Or should have been.” He waved his hand dismissively, seeming to banish any thought of the researchers. Then he stroked his chin while staring fixedly at the blank screen. Nog was surprised to see that Finch’s eyes were shimmering moistly. “They’ll be fine there.” He pulled on his whiskers and repeated in a hoarse whisper, “They’ll be fine.”
Nog realized he was fundamentally alone in the room. Finch had gone away. He needed reliable intelligence. He tapped his combadge. “Nog to O’Brien”
“O’Brien here.”
Nog suppressed the desire to scream, Every time! Every damned time! Why does this happen every time I go anywhere with you? Instead, he said, “I’m in ops. Doctor Finch is . . . preoccupied. Sabih tried to break into the Mother’s tank and activated the security measures. He’s dead, I think. I’m pretty sure most of the station personnel have been beamed into the hangar bay.”
The chief did not reply, but Nog could hear a quick murmured conversation, presumably with Ben Maxwell. O’Brien’s next clear statement was, “We have two options: tell everyone to get off the transports and go back to work, or send them on to DS9. One idea appeal to you more than the other?”
“DS9,” Nog said, thinking about his cabin. “Definitely DS9.”
“Agreed,” O’Brien said. “Could you contact the transports and send them on their way? We’ll meet you up in ops after we make sure the station is cleared out. Then we’ll get back to the Amazon and call it a day.”
Nog turned to look at Finch, who was still staring at the screen and pulling on his beard. Tiny clumps of hair littered the front of his shirt. “Hurry,” Nog said.